The 2013 Raymond Chandler InterviewConducted by Ben Solomon BEN SOLOMON: Mr. Chandler, I thank you for granting this interview. I'm sure readers everywhere are plenty grateful, not to mention awful surprised. RAYMOND CHANDLER: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. SOLOMON: I understand you didn't go for it at first. I mean the first time … Continue reading Heavier Than Broken Hearts
Tag: Ben Solomon
Forgotten Hammett: A Long Lost Interview
House Burglary Poor Trade By Helen Herbert Foster Fall-Winter 1929, The Brooklyn Eagle Magazine Of all the men embezzling from their employers with whom I have had contact, I can't remember a dozen who smoked, drank or had any of the vices in which bonding companies are so interested. Nor have I have ever known … Continue reading Forgotten Hammett: A Long Lost Interview
The Hard-Boiled Detective
Created by Ben Solomon Pseudonym of Jeremy Aaron Pollack (1959-2014) "I don't mean to be cute. But sometimes my line of work calls for it." Pulp? On a subscription basis? Digitally? Sure. It may have been a whole new world out there, but Ben Solomon's THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE was a delicious and unapologetic throwback to another, simpler … Continue reading The Hard-Boiled Detective
“It’s Not Supposed to Matter”
"The Conversation" Remembered You can't fit The Conversation into any neat, cinematic genre convention. It's a bleak, cynical character study within a psychological thriller. It's also an inside-out twist on the traditional hard-boiled P.I. as Round Table knight. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is no gumshoe. He's a surveillance expert. A legendary eavesdropper considered tops in … Continue reading “It’s Not Supposed to Matter”
Those ’70s Shows
It was while I was first compiling the site's chronological listing of movies that the realization came to me that the seventies were a very good decade indeed for the private eye film. You could easily argue that the "Golden Age of P.I. Flicks" was the forties and at least the first half of the … Continue reading Those ’70s Shows