Duane Swiercznski's Graphic Novel 'The Black Hood' Shows Philly Tough Love

Peter Rozovsky, a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I've been a contributor since 1999, looks at Philadelphia crime writer Duane Swiercznski's graphic novel The Black Hood in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Philadelphia missed out on the first wave of hard-boiled American crime writing 90 years ago. Civic corruption was a main concern in many of those stories, and Philadelphia famously did not care about such things.

By the time the city made its mark in crime fiction, such social issues had fallen by the wayside, and the individual took center stage. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, American crime stories offered up legions of small-timers, desperate men who struggled against long odds and almost always lost. Noir had arrived, and Philadelphia produced the greatest noir writer of them all, David Goodis.

That's where Duane Swierczynski comes in. Age 43, a prolific author of novels, nonfiction, comics, and interactive mysteries, Swierczynski was born within earshot of the Market-Frankford El, and his newest project focuses on the Philadelphia he knows best, viewed through the prism of the city's greatest crime writer.

The Black Hood, a four-issue graphic novel, tells the story of a police officer who is shot in the face while breaking up an armed robbery, drowns himself in painkillers, takes refuge behind the series' titular disguise, and becomes an avenging super-antihero (though without superpowers).

"David Goodis was a huge inspiration," Swierczynski says. "His doomed characters roam the dark Philly streets after a major fall from grace. That's pretty much what happens to Greg Hettinger, the man under the hood."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20150430_Duane_Swierczynski_s_graphic_novel__Black_Hood__shows_Philly_tough_love.html

 

You can also check out Peter Rozovsky's interesting and informative crime fiction blog, Detectives Beyond Borders, via the below link:

 

http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/ 

More From The Stieg Larsson School

Peter Rozovsky, a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, offers a good review of Lars Kepler's The Nightmare in today's Inquirer.

The Stieg Larsson school of Swedish crime writing doesn't go in for guilty pleasures.

Instead, it combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling, tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn't get the point - or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader gets dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20120729_More_from_the_Stieg_Larsson_school.html

You can also read Peter Rozovsky's interesting blog, Detectives Beyond Borders, via the below link:

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

A Look Back At the Rat Pack's Frank, Sammy & Dino In 'Robin And The 7 Hoods'

Over at Detectives Beyond Borders, an always interesting crime blog, Peter Rozovsky made a remark about Frank Sinatra not needing his fellow "Rat Pack" "nuchscleppers."

I thought that Peter Rozovsky, a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I've been a contributor since 1999, was a bit unfair to Sinatra's pals Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.

The late great crooners were much more than Sinatra's sidekicks.

Sammy and Dino were great singers and entertainers who more than held their own with Sinatra - and Sinatra himself would have the first to say so.

In defense of the Rat Pack I offered a link to a Youtube.com clip of Frank, Dino and Bing Crosby singing in Robin and the 7 Hoods, the 1964 musical comedy film that best showcased the Rat Pack, in my view.

You can watch the great crooners via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCYBJe0o2M

You can also listen to Dino sing I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face with Chris Botti from his wonderful CD, Italia, via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiSMSKYsWU4

And you can read the discussion at Detectives Beyond Borders via the below link:

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2011/12/rat-without-pack.html

If you're interested in international crime fiction, check out http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com

Remembering Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett, Who Died 50 Years Ago Yesterday

Peter Rozovsky's interesting blog, Detectives Beyond Borders, offers a post on the memory of the late, great crime writer Dashiell Hammett, who died 50 years ago yesterday.

The post offers some good quotes about Hammett from other crime writers. I'd like to add Raymond Chandler's view of Hammett:

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish,” Raymond Chandler wrote of his fellow Black Mask contributor.

"He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

You can read the Detectives Beyond Borders post via the below link:

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2011/01/memorial-day.html

You can also read my earlier post on Hammett, "the Bull of Baltimore," via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2010/11/dashiell-hammett-bull-of-baltimore.html