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Welcome to Mystery on Main Street.
FROM PRINT TO SCREEN
he American Film Institute has announced its Top 10 mystery movies.
 They are:
1.Vertigo
2. Chinatown
3. Rear Window
4. Laura
5. The Third Man
6. Maltese Falcon
7. North by Northwest
8. Blue Velvet
9. Dial M for Murder
10. Usual Suspects
While there will be many who will disagree with these picks and will want to substitute others (goodness knows, we do), it's not a bad list and represents 57 years of filmmaking. The nice thing about the list is that some of these films were inspired by the printed word. Vertigo was an adaptation of Sueurs froides: d'entre les morts (Cold Sweat: From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac while Rear Window comes from Cornell Woolrich's short story “It Had to be Murder.” However, neither of those two are currently in print.
Laura by Vera Caspary was reissued in 2006 by Feminist Press along with Caspary's other noir classic, Belinda. (Out of her two dozen novels, these two are the only ones currently in print.)
The Third Man by Graham Greene seems an odd entry in the American list as it is a British film: British author and British director (both of whom produced it) and in 1999 it was awarded the title of Best British Film of the 20th century by the British Film Institute.
 The movie The Maltese Falcon, on the other hand, is American through and through. First serialized in pulp magazine The Black Mask in 1929, the story has never been out of print since its publication in book form in 1930. Author Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (who only appears in this novel...and three short stories) revolutionized the way detectives were written.
Dial M for Murder, while known as a stage play, was originally written by Frederick Knott as a BBC TV show in 1952. The others on AFI's mystery list sprung from the minds of filmmakers.
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We try to update this site weekly, but every once in a while we have more to say than will comfortably fit on this webpage, hence:
www.mysteryonmain.blogspot.com
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