Hardboiled Crime Fiction's Influence on Morphine & Mark Sandman
Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy... and Mark Sandman In this blog post I get to write about two of my favourite things; Crime Fiction and the band Morphine. The three writers above were three of Mark Sandman's pulp favourites. Morphine's bluesy, swampy low rock is the perfect accompaniment to any of these hardboiled novelists. This style of writing was a big influence on his own songwriting. They both contain a direct, vivid and often somewhat nihilistic tone. Many of Sandman's characters form his songs could have walked off the pages of say The Getaway or The Long Goodbye . Sometimes during interviews, Sandman would go off on a tangent and just want to start discussing a particular Jim Thompson novel. He loved crime fiction and shared his passion with friends and journalists alike. He appeared to find something in noir that moved him, just as his hero James Ellroy had- "I love thinking about American history, thinking ...