brendan halpin

I’ve written before about how I love noir and horror for the same reason: they both tell uncomfortable truths about the world. For horror, it’s that awful things can happen inexplicably and out of nowhere (See the original Halloween. No, I mean, really—see it if you haven’t already! I could go on, and I will in a future post.) And the truth of noir is that most institutions are corrupt and that an utterly venal lust for money, power and sex underlies just about everything. Also that everyone has secrets.

So I’ve recently watched 2 noir series and read 2 noir books and here come my reviews!

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Netflix 2024)—absolutely top-notch noir mystery in which a quiet, teetotaling good student turns into a relentless obsessive while investigating a five-year-old murder in her town. Emma Myers, who was great in Wednesday, is great here too. Why did they cast an American actor as a small town British gal? I don’t know! Why did Tom Friggin’ Hiddleston play Hank Williams, for chrissakes? Ahem. Anyway, great performances top to bottom, one twist I saw coming three episodes away, a couple of others I did not, and a lot of great moral ambiguity as protagonist Pip is challenged about her motivations for pursuing a case whose resolution is going to harm a lot of people. Oh yeah, great queer representation too, and, like most noir, this is concerned with the abuse of power. Riveting—my highest recommendation.

The Devil’s Daughter by Gordon Greisman, 2024—Now, you might be saying to yourself, does the world need another noir PI thriller featuring a war-traumatized protagonist and written in a hard-boiled style? Surprisingly, the answer is yes! And I’ll tell you why—Greisman pulls off a fantastic trick of having protagonist Jack Coffee be a realistic man of his time while writing a novel that is devoid of the egregious misogyny and racism that mars so much noir from that period. Coffee is a little more upfront about his PTSD than the macho PIs of 20’s and 40’s noir, and his love for his girlfriend and his moral revulsion at the sexual abuse of children and the many people who enable or overlook it makes him a really winning protagonist. I really enjoyed this one. If you like noir, put this on your TBR.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan, 2024. Yes, this is a nonfiction (sort of—more on this later) book, but I’m characterizing it as noir because it’s about a group of awful people who treat other people, particularly women, as disposable objects and sow misery and death wherever they go. Regular readers know I’m pretty far to the left on most political issues, and I guess this author is some sort of right winger, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong about this. Most of the shocking information in this book is pretty well documented—it’s just been memory-holed by the Kennedys and their toadies in the media. The book is written in a chatty, gossipy style, which makes it very readable but does sort of undercut the author’s stated mission to correct the historical record. As does her lazy sourcing: there are notes on every chapter about where she got the info, but not proper citations that would allow the curious to chase down the info themselves. The book’s biggest flaw, though, is that the author reads the minds of a lot of dead women and presents her version of their thoughts as reality. She says she’s confirmed with friends, etc, that what she’s written is an accurate representation of people’s thoughts, but this is fundamentally not knowable. And this fictionalization I think undercuts the power of the undisputed facts in this book. Warning: this one is extremely grim. I mean, if you like noir, you know you’re not getting unicorns shitting rainbows, but there’s a lot of absolutely horrific treatment of women and a lot of Kennedy men who successfully avoided any consequences and this gets a bit hard to take decade after decade.

Wilderness—Amazon Prime, 2023. Great premise, uneven execution. British couple moves to NYC for the man’s job, he cheats, she finds out, and then they take a vacation out west to A Lot of Places Where You Could Fall to Your Death. Complications ensue. Look, I love a ‘descent into darkness’ arc as much as anybody, but this ultimately doesn’t work. The performances are good, but at 6 episodes, it feels overlong. They don’t really have 6 hours of story here, so there’s a fair amount of padding, especially in the last episode, where there’s an absolutely perfect ending shot….and then 20 more minutes of show. I also didn’t love the racial dynamics of the show—almost everybody is white (in New York City, probably the most diverse city in the world) except for one Black character who is there just to help an extremely fucked-up white person self actualize. It’s not quite Magical Negro territory, but nor is it a good look in this day and age. A less important quibble was that the British writers of the show kept putting Britishisms in the mouths of American characters. Now I’m not trying to be pedantic, but when you have a blue collar guy from New York say “I was excited to be on holiday,” it pulls me out of the story. Americans just don’t say that. It’s actually weird that nobody cared enough to copy edit the script for stuff like this. Maybe it was intended for a British audience who might not notice as much?

I See Red— by me, 2024. I gotta put a plug in here because A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder hit a lot of points that I also hit in this novel, which is a noir set in high school. It’s got powerful people abusing their power and a protagonist who keeps going despite the fact that he probably shouldn’t because he can’t turn a blind eye to girls being treated like disposable things instead of human beings. I started writing this during the Kavanaugh hearings while thinking about what men can and should do to stop other men from being entitled rapists.It’s a good book that I am really proud of—but don’t take my word for it. Go download a free copy!