The Rhetorizer

After spending a year with scoundrels, schemers and various other losers, we're wrapping up our noir season. We share some noir-themed songs and discuss some of the highlights of our reading list. Jacob's playlist: One Way or Another - Blondie Wicked Game - Chris Isaak Money Money Money - ABBA Kevin's playlist: Psycho - Jack Kittel Goodbye Earl - The Chicks The Girl on Death Row - Lee Hazlewood and Duane Eddy

When the Jackson 5 come to town, furniture salesman Ray Carney slips back into the criminal underworld to secure tickets for his daughter. We return to two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead for the follow up to Harlem Shuffle. Now, it's the 70s, the city is in turmoil, and Ray Carney and his friends are older than ever.

With the arrival of Netflix’s Ripley, we revisit Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a charming murderer’s European vacation. Hollywood can’t get enough of this scoundrel! What's the deal with that? Plus, Roxane provides the DEFINITIVE list of HOTTEST RIPLEYS. And Kevin gets a lift from Alain Delon’s alleged SECRET LOVE CHILD. TUNE IN to hear it all!!!

A furniture salesman keeps getting pulled into the criminal underworld of 50s and 60s Harlem. It's part heist, part revenge plot and part social satire, filled with characters who don't usually get the spotlight in crime books, like the fence, the ageing muscle, and the crooked banker. Note to you, dear listener: after reading this book, we decided do an episode on its sequel, Crook Manifesto. Stay tuned for that.

One of science fiction's greatest bastards, Harlan Ellison, brings us a story of a telepath's encounter with a serial killer on death row. The story is called "Mefisto in Onyx." You can find it in The Best American Noir of the Century Anthology.

Worlds collide in this fantastical police procedural that's as much Borges as CSI. A detective who lives in a city that shares physical space with a different city finds himself at the centre of a case that puts him in grave danger, at risk of crossing the shapeless secret police known only as Breach. Our hosts are divided on this one!

Four women who work the night shift at a factory in Tokyo get pulled into the criminal underworld after one of them murders her husband. The most gruesome and bleak novel we've covered this season, Out was first published in Japanese in 1997 and later became Kirino's first book translated into English.

Is it a secret prequel to The Big Lebowski? A "sunshine noir"? The last gasp of New Hollywood? Cutter's Way is a grimy adaptation of Cutter and Bone, starring Jeff Bridges (AKA The Dude) and John Heard (AKA Mr. McCallister) as two dysfunctional lowlifes who get caught up in a blackmail plot. Check out our previous episode, where we talked about the novel Cutter and Bone.

In this overlooked gem of the mid-70s, two aimless losers get involved in a blackmail plot, or maybe a murder plot, or maybe just a paranoid fantasy. A girl is murdered and pretty boy Richard Bone thinks he knows who did it. He doesn’t want to get involved, but his loudmouthed war vet friend Alex Cutter decides they’re going to take the guy down. Unfortunately, they're completely incompetent hedonists. Thank you to Perfect Books in Ottawa for sponsoring this show.

Is L.A. Confidential a neo noir masterpiece... or a total snooze? Was director Curtis Hanson a hack who got lucky? Or just a hack? Were players like Danny DeVito, Russell Crowe and Kevin Spacey well cast? Or wasted? The hosts are divided in our most contentious episode of the season. Will the pod survive?