APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
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Marxist turned crime writer
PAUL BUHLE introduces a black US novelist whose fiction explores the complex subculture of the mixed-race working class of Cape Cod
View at the Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, Mass.
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PAUL DONOVAN welcomes a revival of Reginald Rose’s classic play that reminds us of the fundamental need for trials with juries
SIMON PARSONS applauds an exceptional performance of Wesker’s little-known play, by the same actor for whom it was written 45 years ago
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Late Fame, The Death of Robin Hood, Leviticus, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
ANGUS REID recommends a uniquely accomplished documentary collage that contemplates our relation to the natural world
GORDON PARSONS enjoys Kant’s ‘mind-boggling’ theory of human reality: that we create the reality we experience
The Man Who Changed Colors
Bill Fletcher Jr, Hard Ball Press, £13.45
DASHIEL HAMMETT, the key writer in the 20th-century detective novel both in print and in screen adaptations of his work, had it right. “The Butler Did It,” the answer to the mystery in a 19th-century British novel, had the logic of the real-life crime upside down. It was the banker or the real estate developer or the police chief who did it and mostly got away with it.
Hammett, a militant anti-fascist and sometime lecturer at New York’s lefty Jefferson School, was blacklisted in Hollywood, although his novels could not be banned any more than audiences could be kept from watching “The Maltese Falcon.” Such is the fate of the Detective Left.
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HENRY BELL salutes a fine portrait of a revolutionary who remains a deeply significant and provocative figure
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
DENNIS BROE recommends two new series on Apple TV for their examination of inequality and skewed morals
PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention