C. Joseph Greaves – författare

An engaging and often hilarious account of the history, impact, and legacy of Mel Brooks’s iconic Western send-up Blazing Saddles, based on original screenwriter interviews and featuring insightful modern commentary. Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles shocked and delighted audiences upon its release in 1974. An homage to the West and the Western, this riotous parody also took to task the mythological idea of the West created by Hollywood over the course of the twentieth century, especially its portrayal of whiteness, racial stereotypes, and the whitewashing of Western life. Starring Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, and Madeline Kahn, the film was a turning point in Mel Brooks’s career and for the Western film writ large. In this hilarious and insightful Reel West volume, C. Joseph Greaves offers interviews with screenwriters Andrew Bergman and Norman Steinberg, as well as original research that sheds new light on Blazing Saddles. He traces the film’s colorful backstory from the writing room where the screenplay first took shape to the film’s triumphant success and its eventual place in the comedic pantheon. Greaves will have you on the edge of your seat as he brings to life the serendipitous moment that inspired the concept for the film—and the moment when Brooks almost called the whole thing off. Greaves’s quick wit, meticulous research, and love of the Western result in a complex and engaging study of what is undeniably one of the iconic films of the twentieth century.

________________________''Now and again you discover a thriller that sweeps you off your feet. This is one'' - Daily Mail''A gritty, gripping read, and one that begs to be put on film'' - Los Angeles Times''A taut and intriguing thriller'' - Sunday Times________________________Based on a true story, Hard Twisted is a chilling tale of survival and redemption, and a young girl''s coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.Lucile Garrett is just thirteen when she meets Clint Palmer, a charismatic stranger who will forever change her life. The year is 1934, and as the windblown dust of the Great Depression rakes the Oklahoma plains, Palmer offers Lucile and her father, homeless and hungry, the irresistible promise of a better future. But when they follow Palmer to Texas, Lucile''s father mysteriously disappears, launching man and girl on an epic journey through the American Southwest: a spree of violence and murder that culminates in one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the era.________________________''For crime lovers who want a genuinely gripping read'' - Glamour

________________________'Now and again you discover a thriller that sweeps you off your feet. This is one' - Daily Mail'A gritty, gripping read, and one that begs to be put on film' - Los Angeles Times'A taut and intriguing thriller' - Sunday Times________________________Based on a true story, Hard Twisted is a chilling tale of survival and redemption, and a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.Lucile Garrett is just thirteen when she meets Clint Palmer, a charismatic stranger who will forever change her life. The year is 1934, and as the windblown dust of the Great Depression rakes the Oklahoma plains, Palmer offers Lucile and her father, homeless and hungry, the irresistible promise of a better future.But when they follow Palmer to Texas, Lucile's father mysteriously disappears, launching man and girl on an epic journey through the American Southwest: a spree of violence and murder that culminates in one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the era.________________________'For crime lovers who want a genuinely gripping read' - Glamour

FINALIST FOR THE HARPER LEE PRIZE FOR LEGAL FICTION 2016FINALIST FOR THE MACAVITY AWARD 2016The year is 1936.Charles ''Lucky'' Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America, Mob overlord and bootlegger millionaire. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown – grifter, heroin addict and sometime prostitute – is the witness who claims she can do it.Only a wily defence attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, and between Dewey and the New York Governor''s mansion.As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom. The events of this seminal Mob trial will introduce America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organised crime, and leave its culture, laws and politics for ever changed.

FINALIST FOR THE HARPER LEE PRIZE FOR LEGAL FICTION 2016FINALIST FOR THE MACAVITY AWARD 2016The year is 1936.Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America, Mob overlord and bootlegger millionaire. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown – grifter, heroin addict and sometime prostitute – is the witness who claims she can do it.Only a wily defence attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, and between Dewey and the New York Governor’s mansion.As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom. The events of this seminal Mob trial will introduce America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organised crime, and leave its culture, laws and politics for ever changed.

In May of 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, a homeless man and his thirteen-year-old daughter are befriended by a charismatic drifter, newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The drifter, Clint Palmer, lures father and daughter to Texas, where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter Lucile begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer''s captive on a crime spree-culminating in the notorious Greenville, Texas "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.C. Joseph Greaves weaves a chilling tale of survival and redemption, encompassing iconic landscapes, historic figures, America''s last Indian uprising, and one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the Public Enemy era, all rooted in the intensely personal story of a young girl''s coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.