Can we view our history - an by implications ourselves - through the movies? Is there a relationship between good history and good film-making? How does Hollywood view America's past? The challenge of making the great American historical film has attracted some of the finest talents: D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Spike Lee. From the earliest flickering images of "The Spirit of '76" (1905) through to "Nixon", this book examines Hollywood's filming of American history, including biographies.
I seem to have been writing all of my conscious life, although with gaps such as the almost four years I was in the navy, although the last year of those produced a play, PHYSICIAN FOR FOOLS, that was actually staged in the US and Britain; and the eight years I spent teaching in a couple of universities were also barren, again except for a play written in the last of those years (PAPP), also staged in NY and England.
Short fiction has escaped me since I left undergraduate college, as has 'literary' fiction; I've always written genre novels. My favorite is the first, perhaps because it was the first, OUR JO (1972), a comic historical about a 17th-century actor. I wrote some I still like, too, under the pseudonym George Bartram (names of two of my then cats), especially FAIR GAME and THE SUNSET GUN and an odd and obscure send-up of a thriller, YELLOW PERIL. And, of course, the novels I wrote with my sun, Christian Cameron (author of THE TYRANT and WASHINGTON AND CAESAR) under the pseudonym Gordon Kent (the Alan Craik novels).
I've written some non-fiction, and it's a good respite from writing fiction; research keeps one honest. AFRICA ON FILM was a good book, I think, and well received (MLA Award for Independent Scholars).
Now I enjoy writing the Denton mysteries (THE FRIGHTENED MAN, THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, THE SECOND WOMAN, more to come). The mystery novel is a kind of social comedy, a genre that seems to fit me. It would perhaps be better to write social comedy about my own time, not the turn of the twentieth century, but at the moment I'm content with Denton's world. Next year, however....
