Suspects

David Thomson

$27.99

Paperback

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English

Kamera Books
01 October 2022

Films, movies & cinema; Fiction & Literature; Popular culture

Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime

these are a few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir.

He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. Then these characters start to meet each other outside the films as if they were real people with real needs and passions. The book is becoming a novel. The names and faces are familiar to us

Jake Gittes from Chinatown, Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura, Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca - but is it true that Noah Cross and Norma Desmond were lovers in the twenties, that she and Joe Gillis had a son who grew up to be Julian Kay in American Gigolo? For the narrator is not merely the author. Married to the sister of Laura Hunt, he has a mission to carry out, a lost family link to find, a thread to pull so that nearly all these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society.

Suspects is the most inspired of commentaries on film noir and the forms of Hollywood story-telling. It is in its way a biographical dictionary, but it is also a dazzlingly original work of fiction, so full of America, of an old man's dread of loss and failure, and of a simultaneous love and rage for these movies that you may find its impossible world as real and as touching as any you have ever inhabited. Ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in some ways comes to stand in for them, Suspects can be read as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives, or simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom. Either way, it's fabulous.

'Quite probably, Suspects is the most elaborate and witty piece of fan fiction ever'

Independent

'A dazzling work of narrative invention'

The Village Voice

'A work whose power is incremental, whose shadow-America is elaborated step by step'

Strange Horizons

By: David Thomson
Imprint: Kamera Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
ISBN: 9780857305107
ISBN 10: 0857305107
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 01 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin Books, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.

Reviews for Suspects

A dazzling work of narrative invention. The Village Voice A dazzling work of narrative invention. -- The Village Voice A dazzling work of narrative invention. --The Village Voice

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Suspects

David Thomson

$27.99

Paperback

Reviews for Suspects

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