Sarah Weinman; Tom Piccirilli

Sarah Weinman's Sunday LA Times review discusses a man few if any of us have heard of previously. A fascinating and important piece.


Rediscovering early fictional America detective James Brampton
By Sarah Weinman
October 26, 2008

It is a truth universally acknowledged that after Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious death in 1849, detective fiction did not make another splash on these shores until a pipe-smoking Englishman with remarkable powers of deduction became a transatlantic sensation...

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.. but mystery readers looking for immediate literary successors to Poe's dark tales of detection would have to resign themselves to a vacuum of time until Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins' gothic-tinged detective novels showed up on the scene.

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Acknowledged truths, however, have a funny way of being flouted. The recent reissue of a series of detective tales published more than 20 years before "A Study in Scarlet" (Doyle's first Holmes tale) appeared in 1887 adds a welcome link to the chain connecting the early masters of detective fiction. "

for the rest go here
times.com/features/books/la-caw-dark-passages26-2008oct26,0,3963325.story

-----Tom Piccirilli

Ed here: I our recent exchange of letters about Robert Ryan (previous post) Norm Partridge and I recommended that Tom watch Day of The Outlaw. Tom wrote us today:

Watched DAY OF THE OUTLAW last night and man, you guys were right. What a damn nihilistic piece of filmmaking. That opening speech Robert Ryan says about why he'll fight anyone trying to box him in is amazing. Nobody spits dialogue like RR! When you get down to it, the film was as noir, if not more so, than most film noir. Everybody's a heavy in some capacity, everybody's marching off to death whether they know it or not, some folks find redemption along the way, and in the end you've got nothing but a freezing hell waiting. The film also uses very little music, just letting that frozen wasteland do it's singing for it. Good call!