In Woolrich’s crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters,...

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I’m not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa,...

That was enough dialogue for a few pages – he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren’t any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato,...

He handed me something done up in paper. ‘Your mask,’ he said. ‘Don’t put it on until we get past the city-limits.’ It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a...

And as I touch your shoulder tonight this room has become the centre of the entire universe.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer – not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi – though it is true that what...

I don’t think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

Normally, I don’t take to drinking so early in the morning, but I bend the rules when I get my ass kicked before sunrise.”–Thomas Morelli

It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of...

Kandinski looked up. ‘Do you read science fiction?’ he asked matter-of-factly.’Not as a rule,’ Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: ‘Perhaps I’m too skeptical, but I can’t take it too seriously.’Kandinski pulled...

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.

He told himself she wasn’t really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when...