The Yellow Peril Seduces Unshaven, Middle Aged White Men
“She came from the Orient to seduce middle-aged white men who don’t shave.” Grady has a few things to say about the Zhang Ziyi and Dennis Quaid film, The Horsemen.
Alpha Bits
It kind of goes without saying that the Romance genre is full of tropes and archetypes (though just to be clear: the happy ending is not archetype, but architecture). Some come in plot form: the rags-to-riches story, for instance, a modern take on the Cinderella mythos. Sometimes they […]
The Dead Body Politic
The adage has it that truth is stranger than fiction. I swear that’s true in Mexico. One of my favourite writers, hardboiled crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II, has to struggle to keep up with the absurd plot of his beloved nation. Although Taibo is a fine writer, […]
Happy Bloody Holidays
True crime isn’t new. It wasn’t invented by Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, although Capote certainly raised the bar for many crime writers. True crime has evolved from 19th century police procedural nonfiction, popularized in weekly journals like the Police Gazette, and later in crime pulps of […]
The Cultural Gutter 