Lisa Lieberman's Blog

The multi-talented Linda McHenry interviewed me for her podcast, The Writer’s Voice. We talk about my nostalgia for the fabulous places I’ve visited in the course of writing my historical noir mystery series.

Come along to learn more about this charming pair.

You can listen HERE.

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Shattered by the suicide of her cousin Allen, a Vietnam veteran, Lisa Lieberman embarked on a journey of understanding, reading memoirs and historical accounts of the Vietnam war in an effort to make sense of a war she'd only experienced second hand. Drafted in 1968, Allen served with the 4th Psychological Operations Group (PSYOP) at Tan Son Nhut airport, its Saigon headquarters. The unit came under heavy fire during PSYOP missions and Allen saw many of his comrades die. He shot himself in April 2002, six months after the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Lieberman's reflections on Vietnam and on the moral injuries suffered by combatants like her cousin give all of us something to think about.

But there’s Marlene Dietrich, sultry as ever, performing in the Lorelei Club—a postwar version of the seedy nightclub where the German actress was introduced to us in The Blue Angel (1930). “Falling in Love Again,” the melancholy torch song composed for her in that film by Friedrich Hollaender, feels positively upbeat when compared to the numbers Hollaender composed for this one:

They had a touch of paradise, a spell you can’t explain. For in this crazy paradise, you are in love with Pain. — “Illusions”

Read the full review

I recently visited the Ladies of Mystery. Stop by to hear about my luxury cruise lecture series, "Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes" (otherwise known as how to fund a research trip to Vietnam -- in style!)

Historical mysteries are travel literature with a kick. You get to visit a different locale, exploring a distant place AND era. New vistas, new sensations: you want to experience it all and, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, you don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

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I'm taking part in a promo for mysteries featuring LGBT characters. Here's the link: https://books.bookfunnel.com/lgbtmyst...

THE GLASS FOREST, book 3 in my Cara Walden historical noir mystery series, is now available on NetGalley for review.

Here's the description: Saigon, 1957: Banished from the set of The Quiet American, actress Cara Walden stumbles onto a communist insurgency—and discovers her brother’s young Vietnamese lover right in the thick of it. A bittersweet story of love and betrayal set in the early years of American involvement in Southeast Asia, Lisa Lieberman’s tribute to Graham Greene shows us a Vietnam already simmering with discontent.

Go to NetGalley to download your review copy today.

I'm getting ready to release a new Cara Walden mystery and have put together a fun little collection of my noir film reviews to draw readers to the series.

Click on the link below (or copy and paste it into your browser) to download your copy of HOW TO BE A FRENCH GANGSTER: BookHip.com/TFCBAW

In the 1930s, before noir was noir (the term “film noir” was only coined—by the French—in 1946), Europeans were making gritty, downbeat films with adult subject matter, storylines involving adultery and crime that usually culminated in death. American gangster movies covered some of this territory, and there was a fair amount of cross-fertilization between this genre, the German Expressionism of the 1920s, and what the French were calling poetic realism. Renoir hung out with the poetic realist crowd and some of his early pictures were gritty, with the deep shadows we associate with the German Expressionist style, but even when they end in murder, Renoir’s films don’t leave you in despair. You come out of them smiling, your faith in humanity restored.

Read the review on my classic movie blog, Deathless Prose.

Destry Rides Again doesn’t take itself too seriously. That’s got a lot to do with the director, George Marshall, who went from making traditional Westerns during the Silent era to making comedies with Laurel and Hardy (among others) in the 1930s. Here he assembles a quirky cast, actors you wouldn’t expect to see in the same picture.

Read the rest on my blog.

You can watch this film to see naughty Marlene Dietrich and you can also watch it to see how the studio tried—and failed—to rein her in. The cabaret singer we met in The Blue Angel, the cold-hearted seductress who wears a man’s top hat, reappears here in a glittering white tuxedo. Marlene swings both ways in Blonde Venus (as the actress did in real life). Sauntering onstage in the Paris nightclub where she’s become the star attraction, she frankly admires another showgirl, giving her a fleeting caress in passing, as if to say, I’ll catch you later, sweetie. And yet she also manages to convey an aloofness. It’s part of her allure. Nobody steals her heart, but she dares you to try. (According to her biographer, Donald Spoto, French actor Jean Gabin was the only one to succeed.)

Josef von Sternberg may have been trying to rehabilitate Dietrich’s image with this film, but nobody was buying it. If the poster isn't suggestive enough, take a look at the tagline: From the lips of one man to the arms of another.

Read the full review on Deathless Prose.