The Annual December 27th Post

49 years ago today, I opened the mailbox at my parents’ house and took out a check in the amount of $167.50 from the Ideal Publishing Company, my first sale as a professional fictioneer. I’ve written about this many times before, starting with the very first year of this blog, a post that you can read here. And if you do, you may note that one of the comments is from my long-time, much-missed friend Bill Crider, and there are others by Juri Nummelin and Todd Mason, who are stlll good friends of mine all these years later.

I’m a lot closer to the end of my writing career now, but I’m still at it and plan to be for a while yet. Many thanks to all who have gotten me this far, including all the editors who have accepted my work and all the readers who have plunked down hard-earned cash to read it. My daughters Shayna and Joanna have helped me every step of the way, and of course, none of it would be possible without Livia, who has always believed in me. 49 years is a long time in this business. I’m not sure the youngster I was back in 1976 could have even comprehended such a thing, but I’m mighty pleased and proud to be here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, December 1936

For the last Saturday Morning Western Pulp of the year, here's an issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE with a nice cover by John Drew. Walt Coburn and Eugene Cunningham are the big-name authors in this one. Homer King Gordon and Edgar L. Cooper were prolific and popular at the time but forgotten today. Bart Cassidy is remembered because that pseudonym was used often, but not always, by Harry F. Olmsted. But Cooper is known to have used it, as well, and since he has a story in this issue under his own name, I think it's at least possible that he was Bart Cassidy in this case, not Olmsted. John Starr was a widely-used house name, so there's no telling who wrote the story under that byline in this issue, and Dan Dermody has only two credits in the Fictionmags Index, this one and a story in the July 1927 issue of NORTH-WEST STORIES. Despite what the cover says, T.W. Ford is nowhere to be found in this one, but he had a story in the previous issue that might have been scheduled for this one originally but got bumped up a month for some reason. I hope to be back next week with some comments on a pulp I own and have read.

Merry Christmas!

"Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas" by Frederic Remington. I hope it's as good a day for all of you as it seems to be for these ol' boys.

A Blue Book Christmas Eve

Even though I was born eight years after this issue of BLUE BOOK was published, in a place where a White Christmas is very, very uncommon, pictures like this cause a great rush of nostalgia in me. I won't go so far as to say that the world was a better place then--in many ways, it certainly was not--but that time had some good qualities that are sorely missed today. At any rate, I really like this wraparound cover (the back half is below; Luddite that I am, I couldn't figure out how to combine them), and I wish all of you a warm and happy Christmas Eve.

Review: Night Never Ends - Frederick Lorenz (Lorenz Heller)

Lorenz Heller’s NIGHT NEVER ENDS uses the classic noir novel set-up: down on his luck photographer Luke Fogarty takes a job at a struggling photography studio run by George and Belle Buckner. George and Belle are not happily married. George drinks too much, is a terrible photographer, and is gradually running the business into the ground. Belle is his beautiful, long-suffering wife, and when Luke goes to work for them, sparks fly immediately between the two of them. Most of the time, you’d think you knew where this story was going, and most of the time you’d be right.

But not in this case. NIGHT NEVER ENDS, which was published originally as a paperback original by Lion Books in 1954 under the pseudonym Frederick Lorenz, takes a different tack. There are some lurid secrets in the background of these characters, and Heller reveals them pretty early on, which ratchets up the tension between them. Although several crimes take place in this book, it’s not really a crime novel. It’s more of a mainstream domestic drama, but it’s so well-written it kept me up later than usual, flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

Stark House has just reprinted this one as half of a double volume with Heller’s THREE MUST DIE!, which I read and reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I think I liked NIGHT NEVER ENDS even more. Heller’s characters are always well-developed and interesting, and he had a great touch with memorable lines that do a fine job of capturing the setting and the era. This latest double volume from Stark House gets a high recommendation from me. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Review: Sometime Lofty Towers - David C. Smith

I’ve known David C. Smith for about thirty years. We met in Cross Plains at the first Robert E. Howard Days get-together I ever attended. He’s been a top author of sword-and-sorcery fiction for decades, having co-authored the Red Sonja novels and pastiches featuring Bran Mak Morn and Black Terence Vulmea, as well as numerous novels set in his own created world of Attluma. The original edition of his novel SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS came out a few years ago, and the book has just been reissued in a beautiful new edition by Brackenbury Books. This is one of Smith’s novels I hadn’t read, so I was glad to be able to back the Kickstarter for the new edition and read it.

The protagonist of SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS is a retired mercenary soldier named Hanlin, who, years earlier, was part of a force that made war against the kirangee, people native to the western part of Attluma. Now, an ambitious aristocrat named Lady Sil is mounting an expedition to try once again to conquer the kirangee, and she wants Hanlin to be part of her army, along with one of his old friends Thorem. Hanlin wants nothing to do with this and refuses to sign on with Sil. Instead he starts back toward his homeland in the far northwestern reaches of the continent, wanting only to live out his life in peace, but of course, he winds up being drawn into Sil’s war anyway, only this time around, he’s fighting on the other side.

The plot of this novel bears some resemblance to both AVATAR and DANCES WITH WOLVES, but for my money, it’s considerably better written than either of those movies. All the characters are very well-developed, and Hanlin is an intriguing, compelling protagonist, very conflicted in his emotions but driven to do the right thing, if only he can figure out what that is. This is very much a shades-of-gray story with few outright heroes or villains. Also, unlike most sword-and-sorcery fiction, it’s told in a deliberate, richly detailed, literary style that delves as much into the mind as it does action.

But that doesn’t mean SOMETIMES LOFTY TOWERS skimps on the action. It definitely doesn’t, and there are some great battles and satisfying showdowns. There’s plenty of blood and thunder to be found here. Smith’s voice is a distinctive one, and I found myself swept along in my reading of this novel and thoroughly enjoying it.

Now, about that new edition . . . As a backer of the Kickstarter for this project, I received both print and e-book editions, and the digital copy arrived first. I intended to read it, but then the print book showed up in the mail. It’s the traditional mass market size (you know, the kind the regular publishers are in the process of doing away with; after all, what’s 85 years of history?), and it has purple page edges. I swear, it’s almost like holding a Lancer book from the Sixties, except this edition is sturdily made and probably won’t fall apart in five years, the way Lancers had a tendency of doing. Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing, and I had to read that edition instead of the e-book, and I give an enormous amount of credit to the folks at Brackenbury Books for doing such a great job with it.

If you want to read this—and if you’re a sword-and-sorcery fan, I give it a very high recommendation—you can order it directly from the publisher. SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and it reminds me there are other novels by David C. Smith I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. I really need to do that.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Raiders, April 1940

A recent discussion on the WesternPulps email group about author T.W. Ford prompted speculation about whether he and Eric Rober, another prolific author of air war and sports stories for the pulps, were indeed the same person. According to pulp editor Robert A. Lowndes, they were, and Rober was the real name, although there’s some confusion whether it was Eric Rober or Ford Rober. There’s an Eric Rober buried in Newhall, California, but the Find-a-Grave website doesn’t give birth or death dates and you can’t read them on the photo of his tombstone. According to Lowndes, Ford died in 1952.

With no luck on that research, I decided to at least read some of Eric Rober’s stories and compare them to those of Ford’s. As it happens (which it would if they were the same person), both of them often had stories in the same issue, the first one of which I came across on-line being the April 1940 issue of the air war pulp SKY RAIDERS, which you can find here. The excellent cover is by A. Leslie Ross, an artist I don’t really associate with air war or aviation pulps, but it’s a good one. Ross is one of my favorite cover artists on Western pulps and paperbacks.

This issue leads off with “Slave of the Sky King”, a World War I novelette under the Eric Rober name. The Sky King is a German ace, an aristocrat with crippled legs who glories in soaring through the sky even though he’s hobbled on land. But when his son, also a pilot, is killed in a dogfight, the Sky King goes insane. Fate brings him into contact with a trio of American aces known as the Horsemen, and things take an even stranger turn when one of them becomes the Sky King’s prisoner. This is a terrific yarn full of angst and psychodrama and dogfights. The characters are excellent and the aerial action is vivid and well-written. A little over-the-top, maybe, with its melodramatic plot twists, but I really enjoyed this one.

Normally I read a pulp straight through, but in this case, I skipped right to “Screwball of the Skies”, a short story under the T.W. Ford byline. This is about a Canadian pilot serving with the R.A.F., a farmer in his pre-war life who cares only about playing his fiddle and will dare any danger to protect the instrument. It starts out like it’s going to be a fairly lightweight story but then turns pretty dark halfway through. It’s well-written and entertaining, but there’s not nearly as much to it as there is to “Slave of the Sky King”. But the real question I was trying to solve is whether those two stories are the work of the same writer. I feel pretty strongly that they are. The styles match up almost perfectly, and both stories contain references to planes “sledding” through the sky during dogfights. Maybe that’s a common term in air war pulp stories; I haven’t read nearly enough of them to be anywhere close to an expert. But I don’t recall encountering it before. Even so, that’s hardly definitive proof. I need to read more by Ford and Rober to get a better idea.

Now on to the other stories, since I downloaded this issue anyway. “The Rainbow Ace” is by prolific pulpster William J. O’Sullivan and is also set in the early days of World War II. An American pilot pretends to be British so he can join the R.A.F. and get revenge for his father, who was killed by the Nazis during a vacation in Germany several years earlier. This is a good story, and it’s also a good example of how American pulp writers struggled to find ways to have Yank protagonists in their stories when America’s official entry into the war was still a couple of years away.

I don’t know anything about Metteau Miles except that he published less than two dozen stories in his career, most of them aviation yarns. His story in this issue, “Wings of Clay”, is a World War I tale about a young American pilot, the brother of a downed ace, who wants to avenge his brother’s death. Unfortunately, he suffers from crippling fear every time he goes up in his crate. Miles does a good job with this plot and comes up with a satisfying resolution. This is another enjoyable story.

Jack Straley is another obscure pulp author who published eighteen aviation and detective stories between 1932 and 1940. His story in this issue, “Bullets Fly Faster”, is about the Germans disrupting an espionage scheme to smuggle vital information across the lines. It’s reasonably entertaining, although it’s very easy to figure out what’s really going on.

“Quiet on the Maginot” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for Casey Sumfer (as he’s listed on the table of contents)/Sumter (as he’s by-lined on the story itself). Was that a pseudonym or simply a writer who sold only one story? No telling. The story itself isn’t bad. It’s another “Yank in the R.A.F.” yarn set in the early days of World War II. In this case, the Yank is actually a Southerner from Mississippi who writes letters to his pappy back home, the Cunnel, bemoaning the lack of action along the Maginot Line. Which, of course, then erupts in a huge battle. That’s all there is to it, but the writing is decent even if the story doesn’t really amount to much.

The final story in this issue is “Paper-Made Ace”, by David C. Cooke, a forgotten pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, detective, and sports yarns for various pulps. This is another R.A.F. story in which a newspaper reporter hypes up a British flyer in an attempt to encourage enlistment. The pilot doesn’t know what’s going on, though, which leads to complications when he finds out. This is a decent tale helped by the fact that the reporter has a secret Cooke doesn’t reveal until late in the story.

This is the only issue of SKY RAIDERS I’ve ever read and quite possibly the only one I ever will read, but I enjoyed it. The Eric Rober novella is definitely the best story in the issue, but all of them were entertaining. I consider this a good beginning to my efforts to figure out if Rober and T.W. Ford were the same person.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novel and Short Stories, March 1939

I really like the dramatic cover on this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES. I think it's by J.W. Scott, but as always when it comes to art, I could be wrong about that. I'm not familiar with the author of the lead novel, James Dorn, but he appears to have been very prolific over a two-year span from 1939 to 1941, turning out two dozen stories, mostly novellas and novelettes, during that period. Then nothing. Such things always make me wonder what happened to cut short what appeared to be a promising career. Or was James Dorn a house-name? Likely we'll never know. Ken Jason, definitely a house-name, also appears in this issue, as do Ed Earl Repp and Mojave Lloyd. I don't own this issue, and the copy in the scan from the Fictionmags Index has some water damage, but it looks like a mighty fine Western pulp anyway.

Half a Million Words and Counting

Some of you probably remember how I used to write a million words a year. I did that for 17 straight years, in fact, and usually posted on the blog when I reached that milestone. Then, a few years ago, for various reasons, the streak came to an end. Since then, however, I’ve never done less than half a million words a year, and since that seems like a worthwhile accomplishment, I thought I’d mention that I hit that mark yesterday.

I’ve also made noises about retiring on numerous occasions, but I came closer than ever before to doing that for next year. My age is starting to catch up to me, health-wise. It wouldn’t be actual retirement, of course. I’d still write books, but only ones that I intended to self-publish, nothing with contracts and deadlines involved. But when I mentioned that to the editor on the ghosting job I’ve been doing for many years now, she prevailed on me to do a few more books next year, and then Gary Goldstein, a good friend for more than 35 years and the editor who has bought more of my books than anybody else, became the editorial director at Dusty Saddle Publishing and asked me to write a few books for him, and I couldn't say no. So I went from the prospect of semi-retirement to having contracts and deadlines at two separate publishers next year. That adds up to, you guessed it, about half a million words. So I guess I’ll press on for a while yet. My current novel is the 432nd I’ve written, and I’d sure like to get to #450 . . .

Review: Eye Witness - George Harmon Coxe

Kent Murdock, ace news photographer for the Boston Courier-Herald, is sent on an assignment to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, supposedly to get some photos of the local university’s new head footfall coach, who is a longtime Boston sports hero. But this is just an excuse to get Murdock there, because his real mission is a personal one: he’s supposed to facilitate a reconciliation between a wealthy Boston lawyer who’s a friend of Murdock’s editor and the lawyer’s niece, who once interned at the Courier-Herald and is a friend of Murdock’s. It seems that the young woman is estranged from her uncle, who controls the trust fund she’s going to inherit, because a couple of years earlier she married a shady character the uncle disapproves of. She’s come to realize now that the marriage is a failure, and before she gets a divorce, her uncle wants her to forgive him for his meddling in her life.

Complicated enough for you? Just wait.

No sooner does Murdock get in his hotel room before a shady agent who handles nightclub entertainers barges in. That unexpected visit is followed by a beautiful blonde piano player. Murdock also gets mixed up with a seedy, down-on-his-luck private eye, a gangster who owns the nightclub where the blonde plays, a cheating wife and her gun-toting husband, and assorted other colorful characters, none of whom can be trusted. Then there’s the matter of the murder that takes place in Murdock’s hotel room. The cops are convinced at first that he’s the victim, but then when it turns out he’s not, they peg him as the killer!

EYE WITNESS was published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950, reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1956, and remains available today in an e-book edition. It falls just about in the middle of George Harmon Coxe’s long-running series about Kent Murdock, a series that’s arguably Coxe’s most successful work. I say arguably because Flashgun Casey, Coxe’s earlier, more hardboiled news photographer character, appeared not only in numerous pulp stories in BLACK MASK and a handful on novels but also was adapted into a radio series and a short-lived TV series in the early days of television. But just from the standpoint of novels, Murdock was certainly Coxe’s most popular creation.

And deservedly so. I’ve read quite a few of the Murdock novels and always enjoyed them. Coxe was a contemporary of Erle Stanley Gardner, and his books remind me of Gardner’s with their very complicated plots and tough but not overly hardboiled tone. One difference is that Kent Murdock usually isn’t two or three steps ahead of the reader the way Perry Mason and Donald Lam always were. Murdock seems to figure out the mysteries at about the same pace as the reader does. He always nabs the killer, though, and does so in a very entertaining fashion.

I had a fine time reading EYE WITNESS. It’s not the best book I’ve read in the series, that’s still THE JADE VENUS, but it’s a very good one and well worth your time if you’re a fan of well-plotted, medium-boiled mystery yarns. It’s a shame they didn’t make movies starring John Payne out of the Murdock books. I think he would have been perfect in the role.