David Cranmer's Blog, page 77

And Speaking Of...

Ron Scheer and Vladimir Nabokov (in my last two posts), Ron is at The Fall Creek Review with his thoughts on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Nabokov. April 22nd is the Russian born author's birthday and a perfect time to take a look at his first American novel.

How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, 1880-1906 by Ron Scheer

This book began as a question about the origins of the cowboy western ... how it grew from Owen Wister’s bestseller, The Virginian (1902), to Zane Grey’s first novels a decade later. A reading of frontier fiction from that period, however, soon reveals that the cowboy western was only one of many different kinds of stories being set in the West.

Besides novels about ranching and the cattle industry, writers wrote stories about railroads, mining, timber, the military, politics, women’s rights, temperance, law enforcement, engineering projects, homesteaders, detectives, preachers and, of course, Indians, all of it an outpouring between the years 1880–1915. That brief 35-year period extends from the Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, to the start of the First World War.

The chapters of How the West Was Written tell a story of how the western frontier fed the imagination of writers, both men and women. It illustrates how the cowboy is only one small figure in a much larger fictional landscape. There are early frontier novels in which he is the central character, while in others he’s only a two-dimensional, tobacco-chewing caricature, or just an incidental part of the scenery.

A reading of this body of work reveals that the best-remembered novel from that period, The Virginian, is only one among many early western stories. And it was not the first. The western terrain was used to explore ideas already present in other popular fiction—ideas about character, women, romance, villainy, race, and so on. A modern reader of early western fiction discovers that Wister’s novel was part of a flood of creative output. He and, later, Zane Grey were just two of many writers using the frontier as a setting for telling the human story.  –Ron Scheer How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, 1880-1906 is available as an ebook on Amazon. A beautifully bound print version will follow in a few days.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hidden Noir: Despair

 Vladimir Nabokov’s Hidden Noir: Despair. A review by Edward A. Grainger (yours truly) is live at Criminal Element. Please stop by and leave a comment when you get a chance.

Wyatt Earp Gun

Wyatt Earp Gun Sells for $225,000 at Auction. (hat tip: Jason K)

Free ebooks!

For the next several days I'm offering two of my collections for free. Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles, Vol.II and The Education of a Pulp Writer & other stories.

Hour of the Gun (1967)

I'm working on an article about the many Wyatt Earp films and I watched Hour of the Gun (1967) for the first time. I liked James Garner's hardboiled performance as Wyatt and found the overall film quite entertaining. Though for a movie that opens with "This Picture Is Based On Fact. This Is The Way It Happened," goofs in a very big way by portraying the legendary marshal catching up with Ike Clanton (the superb Robert Ryan) in Mexico. And there are many other inaccuracies but as a Western it's quite well done. I recommend Hour of the Gun to anyone who may have missed this John Sturges classic.

A Review of Interest (To Me, Anyway) *

Check it out.

*Swiped from Bill Crider. Always steal from the best, right?

The Education of a Pulp Writer

The Education of a Pulp Writer & other stories * contains some of my earliest, darkest, and most demented characters on the fringe of society. These four shorts were selected from my crime fiction with a bonus story, "Kid Eddie," taken from the noir Western collection Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles written under my pen name, Edward A. Grainger.

“Blubber” -- A morbidly obese shut-in hires a cheeky “lady of the evening” college girl, leading to a deadly encounter.

“Clouds in a Bunker” – An old man holes up in a fallout shelter, preparing to end it all for himself and his long-gone dementia-ridden wife, but the police are there to foil his plan.

“Cold Gray Dawn” -- A rebuffed man plots revenge against his ex-wife and her new-born baby.

“The Education of a Pulp Writer” -- Neighbors in an apartment building don’t really know as much about each other as they think.

“Kid Eddie” -- While bringing a youthful criminal in for justice, US Marshal Cash Laramie begins to doubt the innocent-looking kid is guilty of any crime.

*This rebooted collection appeared in a slightly different form a couple of years back and is only, currently, available as an ebook.

On a Roll: The Drifter Detective Series

The Drifter Detective series is now up to three titles and I gotta say I'm very excited where Garnett Elliott is headed with the next two. And Hardboiled master Wayne D. Dundee will add an adventure of his own, "Wide Spot in the Road" sometime next month.

All stories, thus far, are standalones featuring detective Jack Laramie, grandson of Western legend Cash Laramie, who roves the 1950s landscape in his DeSoto and living out of the attached horse trailer. He carries Cash's old Colt and has much of his granddaddy's grit but his adventures are very much his own as he scrapes along, wandering from town to town, to eke out a living.

If you like hard-boiled noir adventures with a touch of mystery, well, here's "The Girls of Bunker Pines" to get you started that Mr. Dundee says has, ".. all the ingredients you need for some very satisfying reading entertainment."

Pierce Brosnan’s Ventures West

I'm really enjoying the heck out of writing articles on various Western books and films over at Criminal Element. I may even take a shot at some noir titles in the near future. My latest (writing as Edward A. Grainger) is called Pierce Brosnan’s Ventures West: Grey Owl and Seraphim Falls. C'mon and stop by when you get a moment.