Welcome all to another episode of the most

notorious podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes. So happy to have you here and it is so great to have

Nathan Ward as my guest today. He was an editor for American Heritage magazine and has written

for many publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Crime Reads.

He is also the author of The Lost Detective, Becoming Dashel Hammett, which was nominated

for the Edgar and Anthony Awards and he also wrote Dark Harbor, The War for the New York

Waterfront. He's here today to talk about his brand new book which just came out on September 5th

called Sun of the Old West, The Odyssey of Charlie Saringo, Cowboy Detective Writer of the

Wild Frontier. Thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it so much.

Oh, it's my pleasure. So what is it about Charlie Saringo that inspired you to write his biography?

Well, I had read, I guess, his first book, his most famous book,

Texas Cowboy and I had not thought much more about his subsequent life until I was doing what is

now my previous book, The Lost Detective about Dashel Hammett, which took me to the Pickerton

Archives at the Library of Congress, which whether you're writing a book or not, if you have any

interest in crime history or American history, you just should go there for a day, check out some

things that sound good and they'll bring you old wanted posters, cipher code books,

op reports, forensic files, photographs of blown up trains from robberies, it's a wonderful place

and the Pickerton's originally donated it to improve their image which had become justifiably

such an image of union busting and they wanted to highlight the heroic things that they had done

chasing Jesse James or Wild Bunch or all these train robbery cases, a number of which Saringo

had been involved with. I was there to what I thought was to establish the early detective

career of Dashel Hammett, which is it's the part that's always cited in his biography but everybody's

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