mean streets

Back on our Zoom call, I ask Mosley whether he was thinking of Raymond Chandler’s seminal 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and the oft-quoted line “Down these mean streets…” when writing that passage.

It's a reinterpretation of Japanese film-maker Akira Kurosawa's 1963 crime thriller High and Low, "played out on the mean streets of modern day New York City".

And this was on the mean streets of Brixton.

That is the question of “Grand Theft Hamlet,” a guns-blazingly funny documentary about two out-of-work British actors who spent a chunk of their COVID-19 lockdown staging Shakespeare’s masterpiece on the mean streets of “Grand Theft Auto V.”

A 21st century reimagining of Raymond Chandler’s iconic Philip Marlowe, Doll pursues thugs, organ harvesters and other miscreants down the mean streets of Southern California and other points West “in search of a hidden truth,” as Chandler describes the Marlowe stories in “The Simple Art of Murder.”