DAVID THOMSON In Person With Paul

David Thomson chats to Paul Burke about the completion of his fictional trilogy - SUSPECTS (film noir), SILVER LIGHT (Westerns) & CONNECTICUT (screwball comedy). We also chat the American dream, actors, how fiction sheds light on life and vice versa.SUSPECTS: Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime - short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. Thomson 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. All these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society. SILVER LIGHT: From 1865 to 1950, the American West, its rich, colourful characters, and its many faces - historical, mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may be Wyatt Earp's son. Silver Light artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul.CONNECTICUT: an enchanting yet haunting celebration of screwball romantic comedies. Now a trilogy is completed with Connecticut. Why Connecticut? Because that lovely, liberal state has been set aside as the resting place for every disturbed person in the nation! At first, this seems like an opportunity for meeting up with the merry ghosts of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, William Powell and Margaret Sullavan. We get glimpses of Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve. But then the wild comedy darkens as we realize that Connecticut itself is on the edge of a demented and cruel war that challenges all its inmates to keep seeing the comic side of mishap and madness.The trilogy is revealed not just as a set of dazzling stories. But a commentary on how far we have all been steered towards delightful but dangerous fantasies by the movies. Aren't we all screwball now? Is Connecticut safe to visit?Recommendations: Chinatown, The Killing, In A Lonely Place, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Red River, The Searchers, Bringing Up Baby, Sullivan's Travels, My Man Godfrey, The Lady Eve. Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.Produced by Junkyard DogCrime TimeCrime Time FM is the official podcast ofGwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023 & 2025CrimeFest 2023CWA Daggers 2023 & 2024 & National Crime Reading Month& Newcastle Noir 2023 and 20242024 Slaughterfest,

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