#don carpenter

[gregorygalloway]

An essay I did at CrimeReads about the influences on Just Thieves, including Don Carpenter, George V. Higgins, Dorothy B. Hughes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jim Thompson, and Charles Williams:

https://crimereads.com/8-noir-novels-featuring-saps-and-suckers/

[thehappyscavenger]

It occurred to him after he had been in endless darkness beyond all question of time that he would die there, simply die of the immense loneliness, and that when he died no one would know about it for days, and when they finally did find out, they would unlock the door and remove his body and put it in a wooden coffin and bury it somewhere, without a marker, and that they would put into the files that his case was terminated, and that Jack Levitt was no longer an administrative problem. He would be dead, and gone, and nobody would mourn his death. They would be relieved, because they could terminate his file. They would get a sense of satisfaction from having the whole file completed, and maybe they would send to the orphanage and get all the papers on him there, and maybe they would send to Portland and get the police report on him, and write to the places he worked and get his work cards, his pay records, every piece of paper on earth with his name on it, and make a big bundle (no, not so big, a small folder, maybe a Manila envelope) of it all, and take that out of the ACTIVE file and put it into the INACTIVE file, and then in a few years when they needed the space in the big green filing cabinet, they would take his folder out of the file and burn it, and he would be gone from the earth, and not one single human being on the face of the earth would know or remember who he had been, or care that he had gone. Not one single human being on the face of the earth would mourn his death.

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

[souvenirsofthewayfarer]

“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”    ― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling    

“He felt the guilt of inaction, of simply waiting while his life went to waste. No one was worth the gift of his life, no one could possibly be worth that. It belonged to him alone, and he did not deserve it either, because he was letting it waste. It was getting away from him and he made no effort to stop it. He did not know how.”    ― Leonard Gardner, Fat City    

[danielemuzzarelli]

L'artista non viene mai capito, nemmeno quando è un artista fallito.

Don Carpenter, La sceneggiatura

[oldshowbiz]

Payday (1973) starring Rip Torn might be one of the best films of the 1970s. Directed by Daryl Duke who also made one of the other best films of the 1970s - The Silent Partner (1978). Supposedly the screenplay by Don Carpenter is loosely based on Waylon Jennings.

[jrcher]

I just finished Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter and I did what I normally do when I read a book I love and went to check tumblr to see that the depressed people think about it and saw there was only 2 real posts in the tags. That number is low for the amount of love I have for this novel. It opened emotions I didn’t know I could have, thoughts I would have never had on my own, and such a vivid story telling I felt I could see every scene before my eyes. This did not read like a book, but drank like a cold beer. Anyways, I loved it and I will tag it so if anyone reads it in the future and has the same thought process I did they’ll see this post and know that love is out there. I laughed, I cried, I was angry. Beautiful beautiful beautiful novel, it’ll stay with me for awhile.

[moonturnips]

“One night an old man was brought in for assault with a deadly weapon. They got the story from the deputies: The old man lived with his son’s family, and his granddaughter had been gotten pregnant by a boy, and there had been a conference of the two families in an attempt to fix the responsibility and decide what to do. At first it was decided that it was the boy’s fault for making the girl go all the way; then they blamed the girl for allowing the boy to take these liberties with her (they were only juniors in high school), and then both sets of parents decided to blame themselves for not raising their children properly, and finally, after much self-recrimination, it was decided that modern society itself made it impossible to raise children properly, what with the movies and television and violence, too much sex in the magazines, and the way girls dressed these days; and the old man, who had been sitting in the background listening in disgust, finally went upstairs to his room and came back down with his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun and terrified everybody by pointing the deadly weapon at the boy and telling him by God he would do the right thing by the girl or the grandfather would come looking for him and would find him no matter how far he ran and when he found him he would blow a hole through him, by God. The boy let out a scream and jumped through the picture window, and cut himself pretty badly, and the boy’s parents called the police right after they called the ambulance. It did not occur to them to blame the grandfather’s actions on society.”

Excerpt From

Hard Rain Falling

Don Carpenter

This material may be protected by copyright.

[queenofnabooty]

Hard Rain Falling written by Don Carpenter. Published in 1966.

a playlist

He tried to think whom he hated most in the world, and ended up realizing that he did not hate anybody. What he hated was ungraspable. It was not a person or persons, it was a thing. He wondered if he could stop hating the thing, and decided he could not. It had done too much to him.