Edwin Lanham began his writing career in Paris in 1928 when Robert McAlmon urged him to write about his sea voyages. Lanham's experiences preceding and during what he called his "Montparnasse Period" shaped much of his later work, which includes more than twenty novels and murder mysteries, as well as at least fifty short stories. In a 28 December 1978 interview Lanham said that he had always hoped to become a writer, but there was nothing literary in his upbringing. Much of his childhood was spent alternately in New York and Texas. His family had arrived in Texas as pioneers in the 1870s, and among its later members were a governor, several congressmen, and an appeals court judge. Edwin Moultrie Lanham was born in Weatherford, a town in the north central part of the state where the family had settled. His father, Edwin Moultrie Lanham, Sr., died when Lanham was four...