Author: Jay Ruud

The Maltese Falcon is a novel that is probably less well known than the film that was made from it—something, I suppose, like Gone With the Wind or The Godfather. In all these cases one could say that the book inspired the film, and the film still sends inspired viewers back to the book. The 1941 film noir classic (actually the third… Continue reading Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”

Graham Greene is still considered one of the major British authors of the twentieth century, and the sheer volume of his major novels seems likely to keep him there for the foreseeable future. He achieved both critical and popular success in his career, dividing his time between his serious novels and what he called his… Continue reading Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”

Robert Graves was a highly acclaimed English author generally associated with the earlier twentieth century (though in fact he lived to be 90 and died in 1985). He was a poet, a memoirist, a critic, a biographer, a classical scholar and translator, and a novelist, publishing nearly 150 significant texts in his lifetime. Among these… Continue reading Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”

While Nobel laureate William Golding wrote several other novels in his life, including the Booker-Prize winning novel Rites of Passage in 1980, it is surely on the strength of his 1954 debut novel Lord of the Flies that his reputation chiefly rests. Although reviews were generally positive when the novel came out, it struggled to sell out its original… Continue reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”

Jane Gardam, the contemporary British novelist now in her 96th year, is quite highly regarded in her home country (she is OBE after all) but is little known outside the United Kingdom, and is virtually unknown in the U.S. Yet she is the winner of several awards and has been a prolific author of both children’s… Continue reading Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth”