Review: Safari to the Lost Ages - William P. McGivern

After reading William P. McGivern’s grim and gritty crime novel SHIELD FOR MURDER a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to try one of his science fiction stories. “Safari to the Lost Ages”, a novella that appeared originally in the July 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, seemed like a good bet. It’s about a trip 30,000 years into the past, and I like a good time travel yarn now and then.

The first thing to know about this story is that there’s almost no science to it, not even any handwavium to explain how time travel exists. It just does, that’s all, and it’s so commonplace that there are companies rich people hire to take them into the past as a vacation. One such company is run by two-fisted adventurer Barry Rudd and his assistant, the burly McGregor.

Barry and McGregor are hired by beautiful Linda Carstairs to find her father, a scientist who went 30,000 years into the past but never returned to the present. Linda insists on going along on the expedition, of course, and so does her fiancé. Barry doesn’t like this, but Linda is paying for the trip, so he reluctantly agrees to her presence.

Well, naturally, things go wrong. After an encounter with a dinosaur, Barry is captured by some beautiful winged bird-girls and winds up the prisoner of some cavemen who have a village inside an extinct volcano. McGregor and the others are also taken prisoner by the cavemen. (Yes, this is one of those stories where cavemen and dinosaurs exist at the same time.) We get human sacrifice, desperate battles, treachery, noble gestures, and nick-of-time escapes. All the stuff of classic pulp adventure yarns, in other words.

And a pulp adventure yarn is really all this is, despite the minor science fiction trappings. It might as well have taken place in the Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about, where there’s a lost race around every corner. Of course, that’s fine with me. I read to be entertained, so the only question is whether or not “Safari to the Lost Ages” is entertaining.

Let me put it this way: If I had read this when I was ten years old, I would have thought it was one of the greatest stories ever written. As it is, reading it at a considerably older age, I still galloped right through it and had a very good time reading it. This is Front Porch stuff for sure. McGivern’s prose is colorful, breakneck fast, and heavy on the adverbs (I love adverbs, even though I know I’m supposed to hate them in this day and age). Barry Rudd is a stalwart hero, the villains are suitably despicable, the bird-girls are an intriguing concept I wish he had done more with, and the whole thing just raced by. If I had read this story without a by-line on it, I never would have guessed it was written by the same guy who did the bleak, low-key SHIELD FOR MURDER.

From what I’ve written about it, you ought to be able to tell whether you’re the sort of reader who would enjoy “Safari to the Lost Ages” or think it’s the stupidest thing ever. So proceed accordingly. The novella is included in THE FIRST WILLIAM P. McGIVERN SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK, which is available as an e-book on Amazon. I definitely plan to read more of McGivern’s science fiction and fantasy. By the way, McGivern also wrote the story under the house-name P.F. Costello that's featured on the cover of that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, and it's included in THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK.

Review: Jedediah Smith - Alfred Wallon

Alfred Wallon is the most prolific and popular German author of Westerns and historical novels published in the United States. His latest release is JEDEDIAH SMITH, a historical novel about the life of one of the most important figures of the Mountain Man era, and it’s excellent.

Jedediah Smith was a member of one of the first fur trapping expeditions to go all the way up the Missouri River. He helped discover the route to the northwest through South Pass, which became one of the vital parts of the great westward migration. He traveled to the Great Salt Lake and on to California, helping to open up the idea of trade with the Mexican settlements on the West Coast. And he helped scout what became the Santa Fe Trail, leading to a fateful encounter with Comanches. Wallon covers all of this in his thoroughly researched novel based primarily on journals kept by Smith and other members of his expeditions.

Along the way, there’s plenty of action: battles with Indians, clashes with Mexican soldiers, even a fight with a bear. Numerous colorful historical characters from the Mountain Man era make appearances, including Jim Bridge, John Colter, Hugh Glass, Jim Beckwourth, and the Sublette brothers.

Wallon captures not only the epic scope of these explorations that shaped the country, but he also provides a compelling insight into the mind of an explorer, as Smith is always pushing on, looking for something new, wanting to see places he hasn’t seen. The fur trapping business is what led Smith to travel throughout the West, but his own wanderlust comes through clearly as well.

JEDEDIAH SMITH is a well-written, informative, but above all entertaining chronicle of the opening of the West. Alfred Wallon has done a fine job on it, and if you’re a fan of top-notch, realistic historical fiction, I give it a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Action Stories, October 1936

This Popular Publications detective pulp was never very successful, having two short runs during the Thirties. This issue is from the second incarnation of DETECTIVE ACTION STORIES. The cover, which admittedly is pretty striking, is credited to someone named A. Nelson. This is the only listing in the Fictionmags Index for whoever that was. As for the authors inside, Ray Cummings is probably the biggest name, although Walter Ripperger was fairly prolific and popular, too. Also, one of the authors, William Moulton Marston, went on to create the iconic comic book character Wonder Woman a few years later. Other authors on hand are Victor Maxwell, Arthur V. Chester, William Corcoran, and Richard L. Hobart. Chester's story is featured on the cover despite the fact that he sold only five stories to the pulps and couldn't have been considered a big name. But the story inspired a good cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1927

Now that's an eye-catching cover by H.C. Murphy Jr.! LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE's claim of "Real Cowboy Stories by Real Cowboys" may be a bit of an exaggeration. The real name of Eli Colter, who has a story in this issue, was May Eliza Frost, so she's not a boy at all. Maybe she was a cowgirl, I don't know about that. Frederick Nebel has a story in this one, too, and I don't recall reading that he ever worked as a cowboy, but it's possible and if he did, I hope one of you will feel free to correct me. Walt Coburn, of course, was indeed the Genuine Article. The other authors in this issue are Albert William Stone and John Byrne (apparently not the editor of the same name). I have no idea if either of them ever cowboyed. Despite all that, I'm sure this is an excellent issue, and there are plenty of examples of non-cowboy authors who wrote great Westerns. It's a pretty good bit of marketing, though. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Sandhills Shootings - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING is one of Chap O'Keefe's novels featuring range detective/hired gun Joshua Dillard. In this one, Dillard gets a letter from his brother-in-law, who is serving as a deputy marshal in a small town in Nebraska, asking him to come and help prevent a range war that's brewing in the sandhills area of that state. At the same time, Dillard is summoned to Omaha by a wealthy businessman who also has connections in the sandhills. Naturally, those two cases turn out to be related, but Dillard doesn't discover that until there are several attempts on his life, in one of which he's shot and left for dead.

Chap O'Keefe (who is really friend-of-this-blog Keith Chapman) takes a traditional Western plot and as usual spins it into something more with clever plot twists, well-developed and interesting characters, and plenty of tough, hardboiled action scenes. Joshua Dillard has turned into one of my favorite Western characters. Although he's fast with a gun and can handle himself just fine in a fistfight, he's hardly a superman, but rather a flawed but determined man trying to make his way on a brutal frontier.

THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING is now available in an affordable e-book edition. If you're a Western fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on August 1, 2011. A new edition of THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING has just been released, including a bonus article on researching Western novels and a new cover. I've added a link to the new edition above. A paperback version is also in the works. My recommendation from more than 14 years ago still stands. Keith Chapman is a fine author of traditional Westerns and always worth reading.)

Review: Montana Fury - Al Cody (Archie Joscelyn)

Archie Joscelyn started his pulp career all the way back in 1921 and wrote steadily for them, mostly Westerns, until the late Fifties, after which he devoted his efforts entirely to novels and was still turning them out until the late Seventies. He wrote under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most common of which was Al Cody. He probably published more books under the Cody name than any of the others.

MONTANA FURY, as by Al Cody, is from fairly late in Joscelyn's career, published originally in hardcover by library market publisher Avalon Books in 1967 and reprinted in paperback a couple of years later by Macfadden-Bartell, which is the edition I read. That’s my copy in the scan. The protagonist is a young man named Jake Cassius, an orphan who runs away from the family he’s been living with in Kansas and joins a cattle drive headed for Montana. The reason he wants to go to Montana is that he saw a young woman in Kansas and fell in love with her at first sight, and she was on her way to her family’s ranch in Montana.

The first half of the novel follows Jake’s adventures on the cattle drive and forms a well-done coming-of-age yarn. Then there’s an abrupt plot twist and Jake takes the blame for a murder he believes was committed by his best friend. He goes on the run from the law and heads for Montana, winds up pretending to be a U.S. marshal, and finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a range war involving the family of the girl he's in love with.

MONTANA FURY is almost a kitchen-sink book like Louis L’Amour’s TO TAME A LAND (my favorite L’Amour novel), but Joscelyn doesn’t throw quite as many elements into his tale as L’Amour did. And the writing is very different. For most of his career, Joscelyn was a very traditional Western writer, telling his stories in simple prose, but as he got older, his style changed some and this book is a good example. The dialogue has an oddball, mock-Shakespearean tone to it, reminding me of DEADWOOD without all the cussin’. There’s a certain similarity to Frederick Faust’s Max Brand novels, too, although Joscelyn, who grew up on a ranch in Montana, has more realistic settings than Faust.

I’ve read some of Joscelyn’s novels from the Seventies where this tendency is really exaggerated, and they’re not very good. MONTANA FURY is odd and distinctive, but I think it still works overall and I enjoyed it. Anyone who hasn’t read Joscelyn’s work before, though, probably shouldn’t start with this one. Try one of his novels from the Forties or Fifties instead.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I actually bought this book for the Ron Lesser cover featuring model Steve Holland. Lesser did several covers for various Western novels based on reference photographs from the same photo shoot with Holland wearing that long coat. I own several of those books. There’s also a Lesser painting based on that shoot that was never used for a Western novel cover . . . yet. I’ll have more information about that at a later date.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Each Dawn I Die (1939)

I was never a big fan of James Cagney’s movies when I was a kid, which means that even though a lot of them were shown on TV, I never watched all that many. That actually worked out okay, because now that I am a fan of his movies, there are still quite a few of them I’ve never seen until now, such as 1939’s EACH DAWN I DIE.

In this one, Cagney plays a crusading newspaper reporter who has evidence that the district attorney and his assistant are crooked. So the DA frames him for manslaughter on a drunken driving rap and gets him sent to prison for 20 years. That, of course, discredits all the allegations against the corrupt politicians.

Once he’s in the big house, Cagney befriends a charming gangster played by George Raft. I was never a big George Raft fan, either, but now I like his work quite a bit. A lot of your typical prison stuff happens—clashes with the screws and fellow cons, guys getting shivved, our protagonists being thrown in the Hole, things like that—before Raft manages to escape with a promise to clear Cagney’s name once he’s on the outside. But things don’t quite play out the way you’d expect . . . until they do.

EACH DAWN I DIE, directed by William Keighly (who directed several good Cagney films) and based on a novel by Jerome Odlum, is a thoroughly entertaining movie, an old-fashioned prison picture that hits all the usual beats but hits them very skillfully. Cagney and Raft both turn in excellent performances, and the supporting cast features just about every tough he-man supporting actor from the Thirties except Ward Bond and George Tobias, plus weaselly Victor Jory as one of the bad guys. George Bancroft is especially good as the tough but sympathetic warden. The violence of the prison riot at the end is pretty graphic for the time and very effective. Some of the plot twists are a little far-fetched, maybe, but they still work and really grab the viewer.

I had a great time watching this movie. It reminded me of all the afternoons I spent sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching old movies on the local stations. I might not want to go back to those days, but I sure don’t mind revisiting them now and then. And if you’re a Cagney and/or Raft fan and haven’t seen EACH DAWN I DIE, I give it a high recommendation.

Review: Shield for Murder - William P. McGivern

A couple of weeks ago when I reran my review of William P. McGivern’s novel ROGUE COP, my friend Jim Doherty suggested that I read McGivern’s SHIELD FOR MURDER, a novel about a cop with even less of a moral compass than the protagonist of ROGUE COP. It was an excellent suggestion, and I appreciate the recommendation.

SHIELD FOR MURDER gets down to business right away. It opens with Philadelphia police detective Barny Nolan murdering bookmaker Dave Fiest and stealing $25,000 that the bookie had on him. This is considerably more than Nolan expected to get from the killing and robbery, but unfortunately for him, the 25 grand was intended to pay off a bet made by a local gangster, and the guy wants his money back.

Nolan’s life is also complicated by young newspaper reporter Mark Brewster, who senses that there’s something fishy about Nolan’s story. Then there’s Linda Wade, the beautiful nightclub singer Nolan’s in love with. His stormy relationship with her is also a constant distraction. And Nolan, like a lot of guys who get in over their heads in noir novels, isn’t the brightest fellow in the world. Combine that with his hair-trigger temper, and it’s inevitable that his troubles start to pile up.

SHIELD FOR MURDER is a slow burn of a novel, alternating between Brewster’s investigation into the bookie’s murder and Nolan’s violent background, and Nolan’s efforts to navigate through the walls that seem to be closing in around him. Not all that much actually happens until late in the book, but McGivern’s writing is so good that it doesn’t really matter. It’s hard to say who’s the protagonist in this book, Nolan or Brewster, and to be honest, neither of them is very likable. At the same time, you can’t help but sympathize with them, at least a little.

I will say that there were times when I felt McGivern’s low-key, realistic prose could have used a bit more drama, and I wasn’t that fond of the ending. However, I raced through the book and that’s always a good thing. The police procedural bits reminded me of the 87th Precinct novels, and I can’t help but wonder if Evan Hunter ever read this. Dodd, Mead published it in hardcover in 1951, several years before the first of the 87th Precinct books. Pocket Books did a paperback reprint in 1952, there was a movie version starring Edmond O’Brien, well-cast as Barny Nolan, in 1954, and Berkley did another paperback reprint in 1988, the edition I read.

SHIELD FOR MURDER is out of print, but copies of both paperback reprints are available for reasonable prices on the Internet. Despite a few misgivings, I think it’s a very good novel and well worth reading if you’re a fan of noir crime fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, November 1938

Well, that's certainly an eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it would have made me curious about the story, that's for sure. Since Donald Wandrei wrote that cover story, it's probably pretty good. The other authors in this issue are top-notch, as well: Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich, Edward S. Aarons (as Edward Ronns), and J.J. des Ormeaux, who was really Forrest Rosaire. I've never read any of Wandrei's Cyrus North stories and don't know anything about the series, but I've always found Wandrei to be a dependable author. I don't own this issue, or any other issues of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, for that matter. The Internet Archive has some of them posted (not this one). I ought to give them a try, one of these days.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, August 9, 1941

We've seen plenty of poker games interrupted by gunfights on Western pulp covers, of course, but as far as I recall, this is the first one I've run across where the same thing happens during a game of pool. This cover is by H.W. Scott, who did nearly all the covers for WESTERN STORY during this particular era. As usual, there are plenty of good authors inside including Harry Sinclair Drago, Cliff Farrell, Hugh B. Cave, Frank Richardson Pierce writing as Seth Ranger, James B. Hendryx, Lloyd Eric Reeve, and Russell A. Bankson. I don't own this issue, but it looks like a good one.