John Baker’s Blog

 
Every crime has something of the dream about it. Crimes determined to take place engender all they need: victims, circumstances, pretexts, opportunities. Paul Valéry
The Page Turner - (La Tourneuse de Pages) - is a French film (2006) written and directed by Denis Dercourt.
This is a revenge and psychological thriller of the kind that has been [...]

Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Act of Murder, pays due homage to Hammett: ‘He gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons,’ he said. ‘Not just to provide a corpse.’ And in the same essay he goes on to describe the newer modernist hero:
. . . down [...]

The clue is in the title. There is a new review of Poet in the Gutter, the first Sam Turner novel, on The Grumpy Old Bookman’s Site.
I’m not sure now how and why I came to be reading John Baker’s Poet in the Gutter. But I expect it was because someone had recommended John’s Sam [...]

The first chapter sings out with the tones of a siren.
Griffiths voice, his eloquence, entices us in. He brushes aside our protestations.
We want to urge him to be more careful, we don’t want to be told, we want to be shown. But he communicates through a third-person, a character without literary aspirations, the voice of [...]