Rope
Patrick Hamilton’s Rope is a subtle kind of spooky. It’s not a murder-mystery. The murder has happened and it is no mystery who did it.
Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Books that are closely related to a film. Whether they are adaptations of a film, have been adapted into a film, or are extensions of a film, they can be found here.
Patrick Hamilton’s Rope is a subtle kind of spooky. It’s not a murder-mystery. The murder has happened and it is no mystery who did it.
Dark academia has become a much-talked-about off-shoot of the spookier genres, and I would say that label fits Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Even the whitest of picket fences can hide a twisting darkness. And that very pressure could itself serve as one of the most complex themes of noir — that of dreams deferred and decisions made with extreme regret.
As the 1960s began to fade into the 1970s, noir took a fascinating and complex turn. It wasn’t enough to just be about a crime — now it was about being relevant to the current moment.
Readers begin to ask the question — what happens when your job is crime? What happens when people decide to make money ‘the easy way’?
Here we are moving away from looming dread of war and toward the disillusionment of what was waiting for those that returned from overseas.
For July, I’m going to take a deep dive into American crime noir novels from the 1930s to 1960s, give them a bit of context, and maybe mention a film or two along the way.
A collection of shorter pieces, and longer prose, all of the writing is connected by Babitz’s love for Southern California’s most famous city and its environs.
There are many reasons you should read this book, the primary one being that this novel became one of the first to successfully and comprehensively discuss systemic racism and how it affects Black youth and the Black population in general.
All Quiet on the Western Front is given from the perspective of the losing side, which is still rare when it comes to war literature, especially in translation and from this era.