In Jersey City, the cameras -- known as dome cameras -- look like sinister street lamps mounted on 30-foot-high posts.
But the setting for his spies' intrigues — the leafy boulevards, grand ballrooms, romantic cafes, lively salons and sinister back streets of a city on the cusp of catastrophe — is vividly rendered.
We are not in 1910, but 1960, in a brittle England barely out of war rations and stiff with cold war paranoia: not the flannel underwear and freedom to roam of Bobbie and Peter but the constraint, tucked jumpers and sinister empty streets of early Ladybird books.
The software of emotionally charged imagining emerged from serendipities that included, prominently, the "metaphysical" townscapes — empty streets, sinister shadows, phallic towers — that Giorgio de Chirico had started painting in 1910.
In cartoonish marker pen and tangled pencil drawings, they show us everyday life's sinister side – from street crime and shady backroom dealings to sadistic orgies.
More specters will be haunting the theaters this fall with "Hotel Transylvania," "House at the End of the Street," "Sinister" and "Paranormal Activity 4".
Its plot follows the standard gumshoe formula of zigzagging excursions through the city's mean streets and sinister interiors, where the point isn't so much the mission itself as the occasions it offers for displays of stoic heroism, erotic danger and authorial wit.
The nostalgic glow that surrounds Thorpe's regretted wainwrights, inevitably, does not extend to our modern-day mundanities: the "heedless Fords" that have replaced carriages and carts, the "reek of garage", the southern French town, run by the Front National, whose "peeling, piss-smelling // streets are sinister".
In The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal deep, sinister connections to Wall Street, the CIA and beyond, a network of corruption that makes Las Vegas seem inevitable as a product of capitalism.
In January 2015, the Prodigy released a comeback single, Nasty, which included a video depicting a cartoon fox being chased through the grimy streets of a sinister city.
