The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on July 21, 2021

BLACK WIDOW is the first movie I've seen in a theater this year. It's not because I've been afraid to go, or wary of the experience. If the entertainment conglomerates would put out things that I actually want to see, I'd go all the time. But the pickings at the...   read more

Noirish Posted by John Grant on June 30, 2019

My first experience of a Nancy Drew novel, this is #28 in the spinoff Nancy Drew: Files series featuring a rather older Nancy (she’s 18 here). The Black Widow was published in 1988, long after the original Carolyn Keene, Mildred Wirt Benson, had ceased contributing to the saga. And, to be hon   read more

Noirish Posted by John Grant on June 27, 2019

I’ve gotta be honest. In the midst of reading this book I underwent a relatively minor surgical operation (a follow-up from the more major one I had a few weeks ago), and so I wasn’t in the best of humors at the time. Y’know: effing hospitals. That said, if ever...   read more

Noirish Posted by John Grant on June 20, 2019

Originally published in 1934 as Who Else but She?, this is I think the first S. Fowler Wright book that I’ve read, although a vague memory nags that I may have read one of his adventure novels forty or fifty years ago. I do remember that, when I was a callow...   read more

Noirish Posted by John Grant on June 16, 2019

I first read many years ago, perhaps more than once, this classic novel of paranoia, gaslighting and what John Clute, when he and I were doing The Encyclopedia of Fantasytogether, christened godgaming — the process whereby a usually malicious person or group persuades another or others that a   read more

Noirish Posted by John Grant on October 1, 2014

US / 95 minutes / color / TCF Dir & Pr & Scr: Nunnally Johnson Story: Black Widow (1952; vt Fatal Woman) by Patrick Quentin Cine: Charles G. Clarke Cast: Ginger Rogers, Van Heflin, Gene Tierney, George Raft, Peggy Ann Garner, Reginald Gardiner, Virginia Leith, Otto Kruger, Cathleen Nesbitt,   read more