Welcome friends, enemies, assorted wandering folk, to my blog, such as it is. The Salted Mine is to be a repository of sorts for all the wild and fantastical hypothesizing I plan to do in preparation for my orals examination in English and American literature (to take place with much ado in May of 2008). I cannot imagine why any of this might be of interest to others, but as my father says “if you like this sort of thing than this is precisely the sort of thing you like.” If you don’t like this sort of thing, then I suppose it’s up to you to bugger off.

Each of the entries to follow will, I hope, take up the cause of one of the 100 or so texts I’m expected to claim some familiarity with come May. Some of these texts are well known. Some are not quite so well known. And some have scarcely seen the critical light of day since their publication. What they share in common, in most cases anyway, is an authorial interest in crime, the con, and the making of the self. If my comments on these works often seem more pyrite than pure gold, then you have my apologies. It is not often that one hits pay-dirt in the well-mined field of literature.