No Rules: DAVID CRANMER

If you don't know who DAVID CRANMER is by now, I don't know what to do with you. You are clearly someone who doesn't pay attention. Listen this time, okay? Cranmer is the editor and publisher of one of the most consistent and entertaining crime zines around these days, BEAT TO A PULP. He's also a writer of tight and clever crime fiction that's appeared all over the webs and in print. And-- most importantly for our purposes today-- he is the alter-ego of one EDWARD A. GRAINGER, author of the best-selling ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE & GIDEON MILES, VOLUME ONE and VOLUME TWO.

I wrote reviews of both volumes when they came out, you can find them here and here, and I don't have much to add except that, having read a whole lotta Westerns since then, the stories of Laramie and Miles STILL stand up as some of the most fun short stories I've read in a long time, regardless of genre.

I'm please to have Cranmer here at Psycho-Noir today, talking about the genesis of his Grainger pseudonym.

The Original Edward A. Grainger and His Influence

This picture is of the original Edward A. Grainger. He died twenty-eight years before I was born and what little I know of him comes from fragmented stories from my mom. He owned an import/export business in Georgetown, Guyana. He wrote two religious books, Wither Are We Drifting and Messages of Love and Light. He died in Trinidad at the age of 40 from alcoholism.

He wrote two books. My grandfather, the author.

My mom has told me many times of when she was a little girl, she wrote a story, Tula of the Jungle, and my grandfather took it to work with him one day, typed it out on the typewriter, and brought it back to her. Typing out that story was probably an insignificant moment to Grandpa Grainger, but it was an act of love that made his daughter very happy one afternoon, one that paid forward through the years and down the line as she passed along her joy to me.

My mom never mentioned writing anything again, but it was all I needed to spark the fire in me. I tried my hand at it in my teen years and then again more seriously in my mid-thirties. And here I am now, writing noir westerns and crime fiction, editing and publishing a webzine, and enjoying every minute of it.

Thanks, Grandpa.

A Kindle Explosion

Hoo-boy, there’s lots of good short story collections and novellas just out at the moment, aren’t there? It seems that we’ll have a dry spell of a month or so when nothing of note comes out, and then—whammo—all the stuff we want to read hits at once and next thing you know you’ve fallen waaay behind.

Here are some superior collections that have seen the light of day just in the last few weeks. I’ve tried to be very selective here about the ones that are absolute must-reads. Let me know if I’m missing any gems, okay?

A few weeks ago, Keith Rawson released his collection THE CHAOS WE KNOW. Brilliant and brutal stuff. My review for it is here.

Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan edited the comprehensive PULP INK, which I only just reviewed a couple days ago. That’s here.

And speaking of Nigel Bird, his new one is called SMOKE. Haven’t read it yet, but looking forward to it. Nigel is one of my favorites.

Luca Veste, the fella putting together the upcoming anthology OFF THE RECORD, has just released LIVERPOOL FIVE.

The long-awaited collection from Patricia Abbott, MONKEY JUSTICE, is out as of today.

Edward Grainger (David Cramner) has just released the second volume of killer Western tales featuring Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles in, appropriately enough, THE ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES, VOLUME TWO.

The always concise and remarkable Katherine Tomlinson hits us with her new collection JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE.

The latest in Paul D. Brazill’s DRUNK ON THE MOON series comes from Richard Godwin, and it’s called GETTING HIGH ON DAISY.

And Jason Michel of PULP METAL has put together a “best of” from that twisted e-zine, called LAUGHING AT THE DEATH GRIN.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Anybody else? Regardless, I can tell you that each one of these is bound to be well worth reading. Enough good stuff to see you right through the Halloween season, at least…

Adventures of Cash Laramie & Gideon Miles, by Edward A. Grainger

We seem to be in the beginning stages of a real resurgence of interest regarding Westerns. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but I’m thankful for it. My own interest in the genre is fairly recent as well, coinciding nicely with the new spike. Something in the water, I reckon. Or in the rotgut whiskey.
Riding the first wave of the Western resurgence is a fella we’ll call Edward A. Grainger, coming full-throttle out of the stable with the insanely fun short story collection The Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles.
Cash and Gideon are Marshalls in the town of Cheyenne in the late 1800’s, a time when lawlessness ran rampant and only a few dedicated men stood tall and ready to defend law and justice—or, in the case of our heroes, at least justice. They’re great characters, these two. Throwbacks, in a way, to the sort of steady and silent heroes you might remember from your youth: Shane, The Virginian, L’Amour’s Sackett family… you get the idea. The kind of gun-totting hombres you’d want on your side with the chips are down.
So yeah, there’s something charmingly old-fashioned about these stories, but Grainger is a smart enough writer to know that the modern reader needs something more than just a nostalgia trip, or a mythologizing of an era that’s already been mythologized to hell and back. These stories do more than that; they also give us a real picture of the ugly violence and rampant racism of the time. With Gideon Miles, a black man wielding authority in a time when that was almost unheard of, we have a hero who is confident, realistic in his world view, and—often—the moral center of his world.
But the bulk of the stories in Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles focus on Cash—a decent and resourceful man with an incredibly strong sense of right and wrong. In the introduction, Grainger says the stories were inspired by Leone’s terrific “spaghetti westerns”, but the truth is he gives us characters much more fully developed than that, and in Cash we have a hero who is more obviously on the side of the angels than anyone in those morally murky films.
And I guess there’s no point in being coy about it, as it’s an open secret anyway—Grainger is the pen name of David Cranmer, editor of Beat to a Pulp. I say this just in case you had any doubts about picking this collection up. Cranmer is a guy with impeccable taste in stories, and he doesn’t go any easier on his own work.
My personal favorites in Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles: “Kid Eddie”, in which Cash must escort a charming but psychotic criminal back to Cheyenne to face justice (Cranmer predicted I’d like this one a lot, and he was right), “Melanie”, which finds Cash at odds with a loutish wife-and-child abuser who can’t be touched by the law, but—maybe—can still face justice at the hands of Cash Laramie, and “The Outlaw Marshall”, where we see at last the lengths Cash is willing to go to in order to mete out justice—as the last story in the book, it’s probably the most brutal, and shows us a side of Cash that Grainger had only hinted at before.
All in all, some great stuff. The episodic nature of the stories would lend themselves well to being a television show, a la The Rifleman, Stagecoach, Gunsmoke, etc…
Man, wouldn’t that be great?
Anyway, buy this book. It’s only .99 cents, for a good 100 bucks worth of Western high adventure.