Edgar Allan & the Poe Boys Perform Nevermore

 Someone sent me a note to check this out.
It's a video by Edgar Allan and the Poe Boys.
When I Googled it, there were a whole raft of 
other videos featuring banjos, so I had a inkling 
what I was getting into. I like pickers and bluegrass
so it was easy listening. Then I had an epiphany.

And the funny thing is, until this minute
I never knew why Art Modell called his team
the Baltimore Ravens!

Related Link

Steve Martin Does it Again: Rare Bird Alert

Click to enlarge

The best to you in all things. 

Twelve Great Quotes by Ten Great Writers... On Writing

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

While looking for a quote to embellish my recent blog post on The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I came across this first quote below by Edgar Allen Poe. It was so true and so intriguing that I decided to scrounge around to find eleven siblings to accompany it. If you're a writer I'm certain you will enjoy these.

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!
--Edgar Allen Poe

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition. --Graham Greene

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.--Graham Greene

Photo by Andrew Perfetti Photography

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
--Edith Wharton

Fiction pays best of all and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.--Jack London

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.--Jack London

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.--John Steinbeck

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.--Joseph Conrad

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.--Somerset Maugham

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”--Anton Chekhov

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”--Ray Bradbury

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”--Orson Scott Card

To my writer friends....write on! 

To all the rest, make the most of your day and,,,  

Thanks for reading. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue: Poe Creates Prototype of the Modern Detective Story

I was in sixth or seventh grade when I acquired and first read Edgar Allen Poe: The Complete Stories and Poems. I had been into horror films as well as thrillers at the time and was drawn naturally to stories like The Pit & the Pendulum, The Black Cat, Tell-Tale Heart, and Masque of the Red Death. I didn't, as yet, know the extent of Poe's literary influence. I only knew that I found the stories were compelling.

A half century has passed since then and after having read recently of Poe's influence I picked up a copy of several Poe mysteries featuring C. Auguste Dupin, the first of these being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Very early in the story I recognized the first outlines of a pattern that every reader of mysteries will readily grasp, the format of our modern classic detective stories. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot parade before us, but it was Poe who invented the prototype. Each detective hero is introduced in a similar manner by means of some incident in which we observe his or her masterful powers of observation and deduction. In the case of Poe's Dupin, he deduces that the narrator, his companion, is thinking about a certain actor. "How could you have possibly known that?" his friend exclaims. Dupin outlines the steps by which he pieced together what, to him, was obvious.

I immediately thought about one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories featuring Sherlock Holmes in which the great detective deduces that Watson has just returned from Afghanistan. I do not recall the story, only that there one of the clues had to do with his shoes, and Watson was simply astonished.

Once the brilliant mind of our hero has been established the story can begin. It is nearly always a murder, one that leaves the authorities stumped. In Poe's story two women are brutally murdered shortly after receiving a sum of money (a red herring). They live on the fourth floor of  building locked from the inside and their fourth floor apartment is similarly locked from within. The younger woman has been shoved up inside a chimney with such force that it could not have been a murder suicide. The windows are such that it appears no possibility of entrance or exit there either. Several people heard the commotion, the screams and what was  clearly the sounds of the murderer, but no one could agree as to what language he spoke. The Spaniard said it was English, the Englishman said it was Dutch, the Frenchman said Spanish, etc. It was essentially a garbled mess of unrecognizable garble.

As one would expect, our brilliant detective has already solved the problems in the case long before anyone has the first inkling.

Just as Sci Fi writers aspire to win a Hugo, journalists the Pulitzer, and Hollywood actors an Oscar, the coveted prize for detective fiction is the Edgar, named after Poe and placing his achievement with this story at the pinnacle of originality and significance.

What is the pinnacle of success in your field?