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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: “Sanford is a supreme master at squeezing the last drop of terror and excitement out of a sordid, savage situation. However, others commended Sanford’s vivid, muscular prose. When The Old Man’s Place appeared in 1935, many reviewers were put off by the violence and depravity it depicted. Sanford tells this tale in language honed to a stark, slashing edge. When one of the group lures a naive mail-order bride to the homestead, the plot accelerates toward its bloody climax. Sanford altered the characters to a trio of World War One veterans, who return to the family farm on which one of them grew up, unleashing a wave of mayhem. He set The Old Man’s Place in the New York mountain hamlet of Warrensburg-in which he would also place his next two novels-and used as his basis a true story about a gang of poachers who had terrorized the Adirondack countryside.

In the depths of the Great Depression, after a James Joyce-influenced modernist first novel that did not sell, Sanford was determined to make his second novel a popular success. With Brash Books’ reissue of 1935’s The Old Man’s Place and 1939’s Make My Bed in Hell, crime writing devotees have an opportunity to end this unjustified neglect. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature calls Sanford “perhaps the most outstanding neglected novelist” in America.

This is largely due to these early novels’ being out of print for over sixty years. Less well-known are the crime writing origins of his craft. Sanford, who died in 2003, is best known as a writer of non-fiction-including creative interpretations of American history, two of which were hailed as “masterpieces” by the Los Angeles Times memoirs and a five-volume autobiography. But long before John Camp chose Sandford as his pen name, there was John Sanford-author of 24 books, including two hard-boiled 1930’s masterworks that combine gut-wrenching plots with a literary flair that drew favorable comparisons with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and James M.

#NEXT SANFORD PREY BOOK SERIES#

Ask readers of crime fiction whether they have heard of John Sanford, and the writer most likely to come to mind is John Sandford, the author of the Prey series of detective novels-as they commit the common mistake of overlooking the “d” hidden in the middle of the name.

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