The Big Click

Welcome to the latest and indeed, the last issue of The Big Click. We’ve brought you many excellent stories and provocative essays over the past few years, but truth be told things have not been the same for us since the passing of Tom Piccirilli last year. He was more than our occasional columnist, or […]

When I set out to guest-edit this country noir issue, first thought I had was, “No meth. Meth is played out.” Thing is, though, meth’s not played out. Not in the country. Not by a damn sight. Meth is passe, I suppose, unless it’s killing your mother, unless your tweaker husband is raging at you with […]

The Aesthetics of Crime My first contact with noir-style in comics was Eisner’s A Contract With God, a series of related shorts set in a crumbling inner-city tenement. I was too young to understand what the stories were about, or to feel anything but vague unease at the crude stereotypes of the Jewish characters, but the […]

On July 11, we lost Tom Piccirilli, a brilliant writer who was also the first person to support The Big Click. His column was the high point of every issue in which it appeared, and it is nearly impossible to imagine contemporary noir fiction without him. Before turning to crime fiction, Pic was a well-known […]

The American vision is Europe is that of the slightly run-down social democracy: cobblestones and good food, free healthcare and high taxes, underpowered cars and low crime. The European vision of America? Basically, what they see in movies. This time around, we have the dark truth about Europe in Axel Taiari’s “Fatima”—it’s a Paris you […]

The Big Click is my favorite literary magazine. I’ve loved writing my column here for two years now, so I was very happy to step in as guest editor for this issue, devoted to Scottish noir. Really, it was high time this issue happened, because, as I explain in my column for this one, the […]

PRO WRESTLING: SELLING VIOLENT LIES SINCE 1918! Pro wrestling is crime fiction: realism and histrionics blended into a cocktail of suspense, violence, absurdity and pathos that lies to you. And that’s just in the ring. Behind the scenes. “The Business,” as pro wrestlers call their trade, is a world of backstabs, class warfare, abysmal racial and […]

Bête Noir: Darkness at the Crossroads To be human is to be animal. Ironic that we as an at least loosely distinctive subset of what is quaintly referred to as the kingdom Animalia have in our boundless egoism determined that being human distinguishes us as if not faster, stronger, kinder, or more inherently beautiful than, […]

Oaklanders have, historically, not been unwilling to take a stand against abuse and mistreatment from the so-called authorities. The Black Panther Party started here in the 1960’s, and in 2000, a civil rights lawsuit was filed that has led to the OPD being threatened with federal receivership after failing to comply with court orders to […]

Here at The Big Click, we have pretty wide tastes in noir. We’ll publish stories about criminals, about psychopaths, barely reformed lowlifes, and the like. But only rarely will we do cops or private investigators. Partially because most of what is sent to us involving the police or PIs just isn’t noir: it’s hard-boiled, or […]