Books I Read in 2019

For the first time since 2016, I read more books this year than last, though I still fell short of the 123 books I read in 2017 and my record of 135 the year previous. I read 103 books in 2019, short of my revised target of 136.

Here's how my year in books broke down:

Books by Women: 39
Books by Men: 64
I read more women this year than last, not quite approaching parity, but getting closer with a roughly 60/40 men to women ratio.

Nonfiction: 8
Fiction: 95

I read less nonfiction this year than last, but more than made up for the deficit by reading more fiction.

Genre
Fantasy: 10
Mainstream: 12
Science Fiction: 55
Star Trek: 18

My genre breakdown was roughly the same this year as last year.

Top Authors
James S.A. Corey: 15
Isaac Asimov: 8
Jo Walton: 6
Arthur C. Clarke: 5
Martha Wells: 5
Alan Dean Foster: 4
Vonda McIntyre: 4
John M. Ford: 3
Nancy Kress: 3
Lois McMaster Bujold: 2
Peter David: 2
Jack McDevitt: 2
Elizabeth Mitchell: 2
Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens: 2
Robert Silverberg: 2
Olaf Stapledon: 2

I wasn't much interested in the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (a pen name), but on a whim I tried out the first of the novels early this year and found myself quite caught up by the characters and their adventures. I wound up reading the entire series, or at least as much as has yet been published; there's one more novel coming out next year.

As part of my effort to clear some of my backlog of classic SF, I read a handful of Asimov and Clarke novels, ticking off a few Hugo and Nebula winners along the way. Jo Walton continues to impress; I've now read almost everything she's published, and I look forward to more. The same goes for Martha Wells and her Murderbot Diaries; Leslie tipped me off to these delightful novellas, and I look forward to reading the first novel in the series in 2020.

Other highlights this year included The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's excellent sequel to The Handmaid's Tale; Dashiell Hammett's unusual hard-boiled thriller, The Glass Key; the disturbing Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis; Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman; and Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.

Books by Decade
1860s: 1
1930s: 3
1950s: 5
1960s: 4
1970s: 7
1980s: 18
1990s: 5
2000s: 7
2010s: 52

As usual, most of the books I read in 2019 came out within the last decade; the 1980s was a distant second.

Here's the complete list of books I read in 2019:

January: 14
Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart (Steven Erikson, 2018)
The Naked Sun (Isaac Asimov, 1956)
Quantum Space (Douglas Phillips, 2018)
The Robots of Dawn (Isaac Asimov, 1983)
Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov, 1950)
Red Moon (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2018)
Knife Children (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2019)
All Systems Red (Martha Wells, 2017)
The Future of Work: Compulsory (Martha Wells, 2018)
Artificial Condition (Martha Wells, 2018)
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (Jill Twiss, 2018)
Rogue Protocol (Martha Wells, 2018)
Exit Strategy (Martha Wells, 2018)
The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov, 1950)

February: 3
Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft (Michael Piller, 2005)
The Currents of Space (Isaac Asimov, 1952)
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, 2017)

March: 5
No Short Roads to Flin Flon (Jack Frey, 2012)
Tomorrow’s Kin (Nancy Kress, 2017)
If Tomorrow Comes (Nancy Kress, 2018)
Terran Tomorrow (Nancy Kress, 2018)
Words on the Rocks: Collected Prose and Poetry of Flin Flon Writers (Alex McGilvery, 2016)

April: 4
Batmobile Cutaways (Richard Jackson, 2018)
Robots and Empire (Isaac Asimov, 1985)
Nine Tomorrows (Isaac Asimov, 1959)
A Time of Changes (Robert Silverberg, 1971)

May: 6
Nightfall and Other Stories (Isaac Asimov, 1969)
The Moon and the Sun (Vonda McIntyre, 1997)
The Healer’s War (Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, 1988)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1968)
2010: Odyssey Two (Arthur C. Clarke, 1982)
The Long Sunset (Jack McDevitt, 2018)

June: 12
2061: Odyssey Three (Arthur C. Clarke, 1987)
3001: The Final Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1997)
The Captain’s Oath (Christopher L. Bennett, 2019)
After the Flames (Elizabeth Mitchell, 1985)
The Butcher of Anderson Station (James S.A. Corey, 2011)
Octavia Gone (Jack McDevitt, 2019)
An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards (Jo Walton, 2018)
Starlings (Jo Walton, 2018)
Leviathan Wakes (James S.A. Corey, 2011)
Strange New Worlds 2016 (Various, 2016)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2015)
Drive (James S.A. Corey, 2012)

July: 11
Caliban’s War (James S.A. Corey, 2012)
Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Tom De Haven, 2010)
Odd John (Olaf Stapledon, 1935)
Deadly Waters (Theodore Judson, 2016)
The Worlds of TSR (Marlys Heeszel, 1994)
The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Mary Kirchoff, 1989)
The Art of Dragon Magazine (Jean Blashfield Black, 1988)
The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Margaret Weis, 1985)
A Fall of Moondust (Arthur C. Clarke, 1961)
Lent (Jo Walton, 2019)
Imzadi (Peter David, 1998)

August: 12
Imzadi Forever (Peter David, 2003)
The Book of Skulls (Robert Silverberg, 1972)
The Orphans of Raspay (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2019)
Spock’s World (Diane Duane, 1989)
Sand and Stars (A.C. Crispin, 2004)
Chthon (Piers Anthony, 1967)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (Vonda McIntyre, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Vonda McIntyre, 1984)
Duty, Honor, Redemption (Vonda McIntyre, 2004)
Memory Prime (Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, 1988)
Worlds in Collision (Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, 2003)
The King’s Peace (Jo Walton, 2000)

September: 10
The King’s Name (Jo Walton, 2002)
Star Trek Log One (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)
The Churn (James S.A. Corey, 2014)
Gods of Risk (James S.A. Corey, 2012)
The Prize in the Game (Jo Walton, 2003)
Abaddon’s Gate (James S.A. Corey, 2013)
The Vital Abyss (James S.A. Corey, 2015)
The Institute (Stephen King, 2019)
Cibola Burn (James S.A. Corey, 2014)
Star Trek Log Two (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)

October: 5
Nemesis Games (James S.A.  Corey, 2015)
Babylon’s Ashes (James S.A. Corey, 2016
Star Trek Log Three (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)
Strange Dogs (James S.A. Corey, 2017)
Persepolis Rising (James S.A. Corey, 2017)

November: 10
Tiamat’s Wrath (James S.A. Corey, 2019)
False Knees: An Illustrated Guide to Animal Behavior (Joshua Barkman, 2019)
Collateral Damage (David Mack, 2019)
The Final Reflection (John M. Ford, 1984)
Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis, 1985)
The Testaments (Margaret Atwood, 2019)
Star Trek Log Four (Alan Dean Foster, 1975)
The Pursuit of William Abbey (Claire North, 2019)
The Andromeda Evolution (Daniel F. Wilson, 2019)
As Big as the Ritz (Gregory Benford, 1987)

December: 11
Fugue State (John M. Ford, 1990)
Under the Wheel (Elizabeth Mitchell, 1987)
Shaft (Ernest Tidyman, 1970)
This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, 2019)
Auberon (James S.A. Corey, 2019)
Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1930)
How Much for Just the Planet? (John M. Ford, 1987)
Famous Men Who Never Lived (K Chess, 2019)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett, 1931)
Anatomy of a Metahuman (S.D. Perry and Matthew K. Manning, 2018)

Summary
While I'm glad I read more women this year, and that I read more this year than last, I'm still disappointed by my failure to approach 150 a year, something I'm sure, though I can't say for certain, I used to accomplish regularly in my teens and 20s. Did I have more time then, or am I just getting older and slower?

I also need to take on more challenging work, or at least more mainstream material. I love SF, but a steady diet of it to the exclusion of all else isn't healthy.

Maybe 2020 will be my year. Happy reading! 

Books I Read in 2016

2016 is fading into history, and while it was a hard year for many reasons, I take solace in having discovered some wonderful books, new and old. This year I managed to read 135 books, a new record since I started keeping track in 2011, but still short of the 150 I was hoping for. Maybe next year...

I've still failed to achieve gender balance in my reading, as noted below, even slipping a little since last year. But of the women I read, wow, there was some great stuff. I've mostly finished Margaret Atwood's works, save for the recently released Hag-Seed and a couple of her short story collections. The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride and Cat's Eye were my favourites. I found Surfacing, her second novel, the most puzzling - it doesn't feel at all like an Atwood novel to me, and I can't write it off to early author blues since her first novel, The Edible Woman, feels so fully formed. I was surprised to find that I didn't enjoy her MaddAddam trilogy as much as I had anticipated, and that could be because I'm deeply buried in science fiction tropes; all the speculative elements felt too familiar, and that distracted me from enjoying the character work.

This year I finished off the Harry Potter novels and started in on J.K. Rowling's other work, including The Casual Vacancy and her Robert Galbraith detective stories, worthwhile efforts all.

Finishing Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables books (at least those available in the public domain) lifted my heart early in the year - they're such delightfully innocent fun, so good-hearted and full of life. I want to visit Prince Edward Island more than ever now.

My favourite woman author of 2016, though, is my friend Leslie Vermeer, whose book The Complete Canadian Book Editor was released this fall. Not only is it packed with tons of essential advice for aspiring book editors, it's written with great warmth, crystal clarity and perhaps most importantly, unfailing conscience. I'm obviously very happy for her, and I look forward to her next book.

After many years of promising to get to them someday, I finally read the works of Raymond Chandler, who did not disappoint in the least. As I remarked in an email to my friend Jeff, who I consider something of a Chandler scholar (or at the very least, a gifted analyst of the author), "He built an incredible world full of deeply sympathetic characters - even the villains are mostly just victims of another kind. And Marlowe himself is an astounding character, full of unjustified (in my view) self-loathing and soul-crushing, weary loneliness. And the prose is gorgeous, so very bittersweet."

Because 2016 saw the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I found myself reading a bunch of Star Trek novels and behind-the-scenes books - as always of varying quality, sadly. The best of the bunch was the two-volume, roughly 1800-page Fifty-Year Mission, an oral history of the show and its spinoffs from the actors, writers, producers and crew who worked on the various series and movies. Even for a long-term Trekkie like me, these two books had a lot of interesting stories to offer. 

My friends who enjoy SF will doubtless be relieved to know that I've finally managed to read some of the seminal works of Robert Heinlein, long neglected by me: Double Star, Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I still don't think much of Heinlein's near-Randian politics, but I have to admit these were all crackling stories, and they helped me get closer to my goal of reading all of the Hugo and Nebula Best Novel nominees. 

2016 brings with it the end of Fantagraphics' excellent, 26-volume collection of Charles M. Schulz' Peanuts comic strip, some fifteen years in the making. Lovingly crafted, painstakingly indexed and featuring introductions from a wide range of celebrity fans of the strip, these are gorgeous books that I'm happy to have on my shelves for the rest of my life. And now I can say that I've read every strip. What a wonder it was, too - a real work of genius from start to finish. 

Those are the highlights of my year in reading; the gory details can be found below. Will I finally read The Lord of the Rings in 2017? Time will tell...

January: 14
Anne of the Island (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1915)
Anne’s House of Dreams (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1917)
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (Stephen King, 2015)
Rainbow Valley (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1919)
Further Chronicles of Avonlea (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1920)
The Clone (Theodore L. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm, 1965)
Rilla of Ingleside (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1921)
Phoenix in the Ashes (Joan D. Vinge, 1985)
New Maps of Hell (Kingsley Amis, 1960)
A Bird in the House (Margaret Laurence, 1970)
Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood, 1996)
Surfacing (Margaret Atwood, 1972)
Earthlight (Arthur C. Clarke, 1955)
The Lifeship (Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson, 1985)

February: 10
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Claire North, 2014)
No Enemy but Time (Michael Bishop, 1982)
Sight of Proteus (Charles Sheffield, 1978)
Brittle Innings (Michael Bishop, 1994)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling, 2007)
The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1984)
The Gold Coast (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1988)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (J. K. Rowling, 2001)
Quidditch Through the Ages (J.K. Rowling, 2001)
The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling, 2008)

March: 12
Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990)
Press Start to Play (Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, editors, 2015)
Star Trek The Next Generation: Armageddon’s Arrow (Dayton Ward, 2015)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Jesse Andrews, 2012)
Life After Life (Kate Atkinson, 2013)
A God in Ruins (Kate Atkinson, 2014)
The State of the Art (Iain M. Banks, 1991)
The Violent Century (Lavie Tidhar, 2013)
The Man Who Bridged the Mist (Kij Johnson, 2011)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Ted Chiang, 2010)
Julian: A Christmas Story (Robert Charles Wilson, 2006)
Oceanic (Greg Egan, 1998)

April: 10
The Casual Vacancy (J.K. Rowling, 2012)
Star Trek Voyager: Atonement (Kirsten Beyer, 2015)
The Cuckoo’s Calling (J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, 2013)
The Silkworm (J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, 2014)
Star Trek Voyager: A Pocket Full of Lies (Kirsten Beyer, 2016)
The Long Utopia (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, 2015)
With the Night Mail (Rudyard Kipling, 1905)
As Easy as A.B.C. (Rudyard Kipling, 1912)
The Book on the Edge of Forever (Christopher Priest, 1997)
I am Crying All Inside: The Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (Clifford D. Simak, 2015)

May: 6
Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (J.K. Rowling, 2008)
Cat’s Eye (Margaret Atwood, 1988)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Alice Sheldon writing as James Tiptree, Jr., 1990)
The Western (David Carter, 2008)
David Lynch (Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc, 2007)
Horror Films (Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc, 2007)

June: 10
Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2015)
The Dog Said Bow-Wow (Michael Swanwick, 2007)
The Ultimate Earth (Jack Williamson, 2000)
Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (Mike Resnick, 1994)
A Kill in the Morning (Graeme Shimmin, 2014)
Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein, 1959)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein, 1966)
End of Watch (Stephen King, 2016)
Central Station (Lavie Tidhar, 2016)
Stations of the Tide (Michael Swanwick, 1991)

July: 7
Good News From Outer Space (John Kessel, 1989)
Lady Oracle (Margaret Atwood, 1977)
Double Star (Robert A. Heinlein, 1956)
Who? (Algis Budrys, 1958)
Uprooted (Naomi Novik, 2015)
Hidden Universe Travel Guide: Vulcan (Dayton Ward, 2016)
Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe (Andrew Fazekas, 2016)

August: 19
Star Trek: The Art of the Film (Mark Cotta Vaz, 2009)
The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Susan Sackett, 1980)
Star Trek Enterprise Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (Christopher L. Bennett, 2016)
Bodily Harm (Margaret Atwood, 1981)
The Complete Peanuts, 1999-2000 (Charles M. Schulz with an Introduction by Barack Obama, 2016)
The Edible Woman (Margaret Atwood, 1969)
Thunderbird (Jack McDevitt, 2015)
Star Trek Legacies Book 1: Captain to Captain (Greg Cox, 2016)
Star Trek Legacies Book 2: Best Defense (David Mack, 2016)
Star Trek: Child of Two Worlds (Greg Cox, 2015)
Star Trek: The Latter Fire (James Swallow, 2016)
The King in Yellow (Robert W. Chambers, 1895)
Five Murders (Raymond Chandler, 1944)
Five Sinister Characters (Raymond Chandler, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1950)
Finding Serenity (Jane Espenson, 2004)
Serenity Found (Jane Espenson, 2007)
The Maker of Moons (Robert W. Chambers, 1896)
The Mystery of Choice (Robert W. Chambers, 1897)

September: 10
Dancing Girls (Margaret Atwood, 1977)
The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, 1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
The High Window (Raymond Chandler, 1942)
The Complete Canadian Book Editor (Leslie Vermeer, 2016)
Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way (Bruce Campbell, 2005)
Moral Disorder and Other Stories (Margaret Atwood, 2006)
Quantum Night (Robert J. Sawyer, 2016)
The Colossus and Other Poems (Sylvia Plath, 1960)
Star Trek Legacies Book 3: Purgatory’s Key (Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, 2016)

October: 10
The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years (Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman, 2016)
Emergence (David R. Palmer, 1984)
The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams, 1922)
The Adolescence of P-1 (Thomas J. Ryan, 1977)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 1: Seeds of Rage (Kevin Ryan, 2005)
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Civilization Through the Years (Sid Meier, 2016)
Life Before Man (Margaret Atwood, 1979)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 2: Demands of Honor (Kevin Ryan, 2007)
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2015)
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One (Emily Dickinson, 1890)

November: 16
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Two (Emily Dickinson, 1891)
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Three (Emily Dickinson, 1894)
A Colder War (Charles Stross, 2002)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood, 2003)
The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler, 1943)
The Little Sister (Raymond Chandler, 1949)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 3: Sacrifices of War (Kevin Ryan, 2009)
Dark Matter (Blake Crouch, 2016)
Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner, 1952)
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953)
Playback (Raymond Chandler, 1958)
Double Indemnity (Raymond Chandler, 1943)
The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood, 2009)
Selected Essays and Letters (Raymond Chandler, 1995)
MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood, 2013)
The Heart Goes Last (Margaret Atwood, 2015)

December: 11
Stone Mattress (Margaret Atwood, 2014)
Charlie the Choo-Choo (Beryl Evans, 2016)
Lifehouse (Spider Robinson, 1997)
Covergirls (Louise Simonson, 2007)
Delirium’s Party (Jill Thompson, 2011)
The Complete Peanuts: Comics & Stories 1950 to 2000 (Charles M. Schulz with an afterword by Jean Schulz, 2016)
The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains (Jon Morris, 2016)
The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years (Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross, 2016)
The Spirit Ring (Lois McMaster Bujold, 1992)
Irresistible Forces (Catherine Asaro, editor, 2006)
America Lost and Found: The BBS Story (various, 2010)

Nonfiction: 20
Fiction: 115

Genre
Science Fiction: 46
Mainstream: 39
Star Trek: 13
Fantasy: 10
Horror: 3
Peanuts collections: 2

Top Authors
Margaret Atwood: 14

Raymond Chandler: 12

J.K. Rowling: 8

Lucy Maud Montgomery: 5

Kim Stanley Robinson: 4

Robert W. Chambers: 3
Emily Dickinson: 3
Robert A. Heinlein: 3
Kevin Ryan: 3

Mark A. Altman: 2
Kate Atkinson: 2
Kirsten Beyer: 2
Michael Bishop: 2
Lois McMaster Bujold: 2
Greg Cox: 2
Jane Espenson: 2
Edward Gross: 2
Stephen King: 2
Rudyard Kipling: 2
Michelle Le Blanc: 2
Colin Odell: 2
Charles M. Schulz: 2
Michael Swanwick: 2
Lavie Tidhar: 2
Dayton Ward: 2

Books by Women: 55
Books by Men: 80

Books by Decade
1890s: 6
1900s: 1
1910s: 4
1920s: 3
1930s: 1
1940s: 7
1950s: 8
1960s: 5
1970s: 8
1980s: 10
1990s: 12
2000s: 25
2010s: 46

Surfacing: A Dramatic Reading

September 2015 Review Roundup

As part of my effort to read more women and Canadian authors, I've returned to the works of Margaret Atwood. In September that included her 1993 novel The Blind Assassin, a tale of two sisters, one who died young, one in her final years looking back on a turbulent life. The Blind Assassin itself is a novel within a novel within another novel, a soft-SF scientific romance at that; I find it interesting how Atwood users SF tropes here for her own purposes. She's clearly fond of the genre, despite some grumblings from that community about her supposed attitude to science fiction.

September's other standout reading experience was Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan, which I've reviewed here.

After a run of solid-to-sublime Philip K. Dick novels in July and August, I stumbled a little with The Unteleported Man, which is still a good book, but not quite up to the standards of his acknowledged classics. It probably doesn't help that The Unteleported Man is an incomplete version of another novel, Lies, Inc. I'll have to read that one to see how it compares.

September's reading also included the final two-thirds of Jo Walton's alternate history "spare change" trilogy, three Peanuts collections, a better-than-average Star Trek tie-in (J.J. Miller's Takedown), and The League of Regrettable Superheroes, which I thought was a little unfair to Doll Man, but still amusing.

In September I screened the rest of the films cut together from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television episodes, along with a pretty eclectic collection of film noir, musicals and Best Picture nominees. The worst was certainly Super Fuzz, about a cop with super-powers; badly shot, badly directed, painful dialogue, the works. On the other hand, I found Arch Obler's The Bubble utterly mesmerizing; it's a 3D picture about three people trapped in a town suddenly surrounded by a glass bubble (see Stephen King's Under the Dome for the same concept). Obler does a lot with a small budget; the film is creepy, with an atmosphere of slow, creepy suffocation perfectly in keeping with the given scenario. Excellent 3D effects, too. 1929's The Broadway Melody, a Best Picture nominee, is frankly pretty dull by today's standards, and even I found it a bit of a slog, despite my love of musicals and slower-paced fare. Ishirio Honda delivers dependable Japanese giant monster/space adventure fun with The H-Man and Battle in Outer Space; I never get tired of his work. Murder, My Sweet is one of the best Philip Marlowe movies, with Dick Powell as the hard-boiled private dick in a story with plenty of wonderful noir dialogue, betrayal, fear and cynicism. Great stuff. The Italian Connection serves as an interesting ancestor to Pulp Fiction, given its pairing of ice cold black and white hitmen. Plus Henry Silva gets crushed by a junkyard grappler, which I found amusingly macabre. 

Then How Does She Kill People..?