The Best American Noir of the Century

David Morrell (1934-) was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and was still a teenager when he decided to become a writer, inspired by the Route 66 television series created by Stirling Silliphant, and encouraged by Hemingway scholar Philip Young at Penn State University, where Morrell eventually received his BA and MA. In 1970 he took a job as an English professor at the University of Iowa, and produced his initial novel, First Blood, two years later.

This book, since described as the father of the modern adventure novel, introduced the world to Rambo, who went on to become one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, largely through film adaptations starring Sylvester Stallone. John Rambo (the famous name came from a variety of apple) is a Vietnam War vet, a troubled, violent former Green Beret warrior trained in survival, hand-to-hand combat, and other special martial skills. The film series began with First Blood (1982), and has continued with Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008), and Rambo V (scheduled for release in 2011).

Morrell has enjoyed numerous other bestsellers among his twenty-eight novels, including The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), which became a popular TV miniseries starring Robert Mitchum in 1989. In addition to his ambitious international thrillers, he has written highly popular horror fiction, notably Creepers (2005), which won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. He is also the cofounder of the organization International Thriller Writers.

“The Dripping” is the author’s first published story. It was originally published in the August 1972 issue of Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine.

That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man. It is so strange a doubling, so intense, so unsettling, that I am moved to work again, to try to paint it.

So I study the hardware store, the grain barrels in front, the twin square pillars holding up the drooping balcony onto which seared wax-faced men and women from the old peoples hotel above come to sit and rock and watch. They look like the same aging people I saw as a boy, the wood of the pillars and balcony looks as splintered.

Forgetful of time while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower and forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me; I cinch the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment, and decide to run, socks spongy in my shoes, when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.