Matt tells the story about when Dan was learning to play the guitar, when Dan was about thirteen and Matt was sixteen. Dan would play the guitar in the mornings before school and pick it up as soon as he got home, playing sometimes late into the night. Matt remembers lying in bed one night when Dan was trying to get an Eric Clapton riff down, it may have been from one of the Cream albums. Dan would play a tape of the riff and then try to play it himself. Matt said, “I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard Dan, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard Dan, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard the Clapton tape…and I knew he’d got it and we could both go to sleep.”
NEW BOOK: THE GOLDEN ERA OF SHERLOCK HOLMES AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Michael Cohen, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries (Milwaukee: Genius Book Publishing, 2024).
In 1891, a new London magazine, the Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures. An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured female and male detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and con men. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before. Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew, such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.
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