A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Tongking! - Dan Cushman

Dan Cushman wrote extensively for the Western pulps and in fact was responsible for creating the last Western hero pulp, THE PECOS KID. Cushman wrote five Pecos Kid novellas for the magazine, all of which were reprinted by Leisure in paperback. He also wrote original paperbacks for Gold Medal and Dell and was still turning out hardback Western novels for Walker during the Eighties. But he's equally well-remembered for adventure novels set in Africa, the South Seas, and the Far East, including this one.

TONGKING! was published in 1954 as half of an Ace Double (with a great cover by Rafael deSoto) and is very much of its time. The protagonist is down-on-his-luck American soldier of fortune Rocky Forbes, who finds himself broke in Bangkok, not a good situation. He falls in with an old ally/enemy, the smuggler Fatto Kolski (who seems to be modeled pretty blatantly on Sydney Greenstreet). Kolski has a plan to smuggle some guns to anti-communist guerrillas in China, but in order to pull off the scheme, he needs Forbes to pretend to be a dead man.

This is just the beginning of a very twisty plot that involves American spies, British spies, Chinese spies, a beautiful Spanish torch singer, a beautiful American missionary, double crosses, triple crosses, murder, tramp steamers, and shootouts with Thompson submachine guns. If all those plot elements don’t perk your interest, I don’t know what would. The pace never lets up for very long, the local color is very well-done, and Rocky Forbes manages to be a likable hero while at the same time remaining an unrepentant heel. TONGKING! is an updated version of the sort of pulpish international intrigue and adventure stories that were published in BLUE BOOK during the Thirties.

In an interview with George Tuttle that was first published in PAPERBACK PARADE and recently reprinted in SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, the first collection of Cushman’s Armless O’Neil stories that originally appeared in the pulps JUNGLE STORIES and ACTION STORIES, Cushman himself offers a fairly low opinion of TONGKING! I hate to disagree with the author, but I found this novel very entertaining, definitely enough so to make me want to read more of Cushman’s adventure novels. If you have it on your shelves but have never read it, you should take it down and give it a try. If you run across a copy of the Ace Double for a reasonable price, as I did, grab it. That great cover alone is worth something.

(This post originally appeared on July 9, 2010, in a somewhat different form. TONGKING! doesn't appear to be in print, but used copies are out there on the Internet and are only moderately expensive. As for some of the other Cushman yarns mentioned above, all five of the Pecos Kid pulp novels are available on Amazon in three volumes: THE PECOS KID (e-book, paperback), THE PECOS KID RETURNS (e-book, paperback), and NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL (e-book, paperback). Altus Press published a second volume of Cushman's Armless O'Neill pulp stories, completing the series. It's called SWAMP FETISH, you can pick it up on Amazon, and the introduction is by none other than yours truly. The first Armless O'Neill collection, SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, is still available as well. Cushman continues to be one of my favorite authors, and I need to read something else by him soon.)

Review: The Face of Evil - John McPartland

John McPartland died young and wasn’t very prolific, only a dozen novels during the Fifties, a couple of them published posthumously. But his work was well-regarded and movies were made from several of his books. The fine folks at Black Gat Books have just reprinted his novel THE FACE OF EVIL, originally published by Gold Medal in 1954 with a cover by Ray Johnson, a great cover artist but not one I particularly associate with Gold Medal. I’d read and enjoyed several of McPartland’s novels, so I was eager to give this one a try.

The narrator/protagonist is Bill Oxford, a former newspaperman who works for a public relations agency in Los Angeles. However, Bill’s real job is as a fixer, a guy you can call on to get you out of a jam—or get one of your enemies into one. His specialty is framing political or business figures for some sort of crime and then blackmailing them into doing what his employers want. As this novel opens, he’s been sent to Newport Beach to stop a crusading lawyer from revealing damaging information about a candidate for public office. McPartland never delves deeply into the specifics of any of this, and he doesn’t need to. It’s enough for us to know that Bill is a pretty shady guy who’ll stoop to just about any dirty trick to accomplish his ends.

Unfortunately for Bill, he still has a tiny shred of decency in him, and it’s about to be tested when he falls in love with the widow of his target’s ex-law partner and also has to deal with the reappearance in his life of a young woman he did dirty several years earlier.

The action in this book takes place in about twenty-four hours, and it’s roughly divided between Bill wrestling with his conscience, dealing with various hitches in his plan, trying to figure out the romantic triangle in which he finds himself, getting mixed up in brutal fistfights, and going on the run from the law. It’s all very well-written, and McPartland spins his yarn at a breakneck pace that really had me flipping the pages. And I honestly didn’t know how he was going to resolve Bill’s various dilemmas, which is always nice.

Speaking of resolutions, I have to admit there are a couple of late plot developments that strike me as deus ex machina, which slightly lessens the impact of this novel. But it’s still very, very good despite that, with great characters, a vividly realized setting (Newport Beach during what’s now known as Spring Break, although McPartland never uses that term), and plenty of action and drama. I had a great time reading THE FACE OF EVIL, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction from the Fifties, I give it a high recommendation. It's available from Amazon in print and e-book editions. There’s a lot in this one I feel like I’m going to remember for a while.

TV Series I've Missed Until Now: Cranford (2007-2009)

Not gonna lie, we like us some high-class British historical drama. Yeah, they’re generally soap operas, but everybody dresses so nice and talks so fancy.

And so it is with CRANFORD, made by the BBC in 2007 and based on a series of novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. Technically, it has two seasons, but the first has only five episodes and the second consists of two movie-length episodes. So, seven episodes overall that cover a couple of years’ time in the 1840s in the small English village of Cranford, located in Cheshire. (I’d have to look that up to know where in England that is, and I’m not that ambitious.)

This is definitely a soap opera. We’ve got unrequited love, doomed love, disease, death, ambition, rotters, noble doctors, a heroine who wants to be a writer, scandal, and the inexorable changes wrought by time. It’s very well-made and well-acted, with scripts (all by Heidi Thomas, the main writer on CALL THE MIDWIFE, another show we like) that range from pretty darned funny to really sad. Everything that happens is pretty predictable, and I was extremely annoyed when the show came to an end and left a major plotline unresolved. All I can think is that they planned to address that in the next season and didn’t know the show was coming to an end.

Mostly, though, CRANFORD is a series where you spend a lot of time going, “Hey, it’s that guy from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Jim Carter, who played Carson the butler on that show and is Captain Brown, a retired military man in charge of building a railroad here. Carter is one of those guys who has a great voice and I like just listening to him talk) and “Hey, it’s Lady Mary from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Michelle Dockery, who also has a great voice) and “Hey, it’s Loki from the Marvel movies!” (Tom Hiddleston, who’s a very good guy here) and “Hey, it’s Doctor Who!” (Jodie Whittaker, whose run as the Doctor I’ve never seen and never will) and “Hey, it’s Doc Martin’s aunt!” (Eileen Atkins from one of our favorite British series, DOC MARTIN) and “Hey, it’s Judi Dench!” (too many things to list).

Despite what you might think from my sarcasm, I really enjoyed CRANFORD. I wish they had made more seasons. I’m not going to read the books, mind you, but I’d have been happy to watch more of the TV version.

Review: Crime Nest - Edwin Truett Long (Detective Dime Novels, April 1940)

I’d read a number of pulp stories over the years by Edwin Truett Long, writing under various pseudonyms and house-names, and I always enjoyed them. But I’ve become more interested in him and his work since discovering that he lived for a while on the west side of Fort Worth and is buried on the east side. One of these days, I’m going to drive over to the cemetery and find his grave. But for now, I’m trying to read more of his stories. This time, it’s “Crime Nest”, from the April 1940 issue of DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, which was published under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. This is the first of three novels featuring Dr. Thaddeus C. Harker, one of the more offbeat characters from the pulp era.

Doc Harker, as he’s often known, is a traveling medicine show huckster, tooling around the country in a bright red coupe and pulling an equally red trailer in which he concocts his cure-all, the world-famous Chickasha Remedy. However, that’s just a cover for his true activities. Doc Harker is actually a brilliant scientific criminologist, and his passion is solving murders and other crimes with the help of two assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones, who handles the strongarm stuff, and the beautiful Brenda Sloan, whose specialty is infiltrating gangs and gathering intelligence. In “Crime Nest”, our intrepid trio of detectives heads for Abbottsville, a resort town in Texas (although Long never specifies the state) famous for its hot springs. Abbottsville is loosely based on the real town of Mineral Wells.

They’re there in answer to a plea for help from one of Doc’s old friends, who sends Doc a letter explaining that a cabal of criminals from New York and New Jersey have moved in and taken over the town. Doc intends to break their hold on the place and bring them to justice, but the situation gets more complicated when there’s a grisly murder the first night after they arrive.

From there it’s mostly breakneck action with a little detective work thrown in as Long packs in a lot of plot in the span of not much more than 24 hours. More murders, a missing fortune, beautiful women, shootouts, clouts over the head, and lights that go out just as Doc is about to spring a major revelation—we get all that good stuff and more. Long wasn’t a meticulous plotter, but he usually wrestles all those colorful characters and fast-paced action into scenarios that make sense, mostly.

I really enjoyed this yarn and had a grand time reading it. It’s the kind of stuff I grew up on and I still get a kick out of it. One interesting note: the character who sends for Doc Harker is named Arthur Wallace, which just happens to be the name of a pulpster who contributed scores of stories to the Spicy pulps, as did Long. There’s been some mystery as to whether Wallace was a real name or a house-name. Based on Long using the name in this novel, I suspect he was a real guy and that he and Long were friends. That’s only a hunch, though. Maybe somebody will uncover the facts someday.

My friend Tom Johnson was a fan of the Doc Harker series and reprinted all three novels as small-press chapbooks many years ago. I owned all of them but never got around to reading any of them. More recently, Altus Press has reprinted the series in a handsome volume called DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES, with an introduction by none other than Tom Johnson, who provides more biographical information about Long than I’ve found anywhere else. This is where I read “Crime Nest”. The collection is available in paperback and e-book editions, and if you enjoy offbeat pulp detective yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 17, 1934

This is the first appearance of the Park Avenue Hunt Club on the cover of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, with only the second story in the long-running series. And to be honest, in this cover by Lejaren Hiller, an artist I hadn't heard of, the guys look more like villains than the heroes they actually were. Judson Philips, the author of that series and many others, and Edward Parrish Ware are the only authors I recognize in this issue. The others who contributed stories are Herbert O. Yardley, Augustus Muir, and Milo Ray Phelps. The Park Avenue Hunt Club stories have been reprinted in a couple of expensive hardcovers that are no longer available. I'm hoping we'll get some affordable trade paperback and/or e-book editions at some point. The ones I've read are really good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover artwork is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of the TEXAS RANGERS covers during the Fifties and always did a great job. This one illustrates, sort of, the opening scene of this issue’s novel.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s a Big Four of authors who wrote Jim Hatfield novels under the house-name Jackson Cole: A. Leslie Scott, the creator of the series; Tom Curry; Walker A. Tompkins; and Peter Germano, the author of this issue’s novel “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. Germano, who also wrote a lot of very good novels under the name Barry Cord, was the most hardboiled of the bunch. His prose is terse and fast-moving, and there’s no “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. While I love the standard Western pulp dialogue, I like this approach, too. (Roe Richmond actually wrote more Hatfields than Germano, but I don’t like his novels so I don’t count him as a major Hatfield author.)

Germano really packs a lot of plot and characters into “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. The mysterious bandit boss of the title has kidnapped the governor’s son in an attempt to keep his brother from being hanged. Hatfield has only six days and the narrowest of leads to find the boy. His search takes him to a mining town in West Texas. At the same time, a young former carnival tightrope walker shows up in town on a quest of his own. Also on hand are a shady gambler/saloonkeeper, assorted gunmen, a hotel owner who quotes classic Greek literature, and an old desert rat prospector who thinks he’s actually a sea captain. There’s so much going on that it’s actually a little hard to keep track of at times, but Germano keeps the story racing along anyway until it arrives at a twist ending that isn’t really that much of a surprise but is very effective anyway.

There’s an oddity about this one in that Hatfield dresses differently than he usually does, sporting a long black frock coat, a string tie, and a flat-crowned black hat. That just happens to be what a character is wearing in an interior illustration which also features another character who looks like Wild Bill Hickok. And Germano specifically mentions that the local marshal resembles Wild Bill Hickok. My hunch is that this illustration existed before the story was written, and Germano made the descriptions match it. No way of knowing, of course, but I’m always suspicious about such things. What’s important, though, is that “The Outlaw Nobody Knew” is a good solid Hatfield novel, not one of the top rank but well worth reading.

Robert Virgil published only four stories, according to the Fictionmags Index. “Rancher’s Woman” in this issue is the first of those. And it’s a really good one, a well-written Western noir about a middle-aged rancher, his younger, beautiful, restless wife, and the world-weary hired hand who signs on. This is the stuff of countless Gold Medal novels, but Virgil distills it down to a few pages and then gives us a surprising, very effective ending. I know I have at least one of his other stories and may go ahead and read that issue soon.

Ben Frank was the pseudonym of a writer named Frank Bennett, who wrote mostly humorous Westerns for the pulps. He had a long series about an old-timer known as Doc Swap, and another about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. I’m not a fan of either of those series. Frank’s story in this issue, “The Champ of Cottonwood County”, is a stand-alone, and while it’s a comedy, it’s not as silly as some of his that I’ve read. It’s a romantic comedy, at that, about a hapless rancher trying to woo the girl of his dreams while ignoring the fact that a female friend of his is prettier and more suitable in every way than the girl he pines after. There’s also a robbery, a fugitive outlaw, an overbearing rival rancher, and a little bit of action before things come to a predictable conclusion. It’s fairly well-written and mildly amusing, and for a Ben Frank yarn, I thought it was pretty good.

I’m a big fan of the cavalry novelettes Steuart Emery wrote for TEXAS RANGERS, and he did quite a few of them. The one featured in this issue is ”The Shooting Sawbones”. The protagonist, John Rawdon, is about to graduate from West Point when an accident leaves him with a permanent bum knee. He can’t serve as a combat officer, but he can become a medical officer, which he does. His first post is an isolated fort in Arizona Territory, and wouldn’t you know it, a series of unusual circumstances leaves Rawdon in command of the fort just as a horde of hostile Apaches show up to attack it. There’s also a girl—there’s always a girl—who, in this case, is the daughter of a bitter retired officer who hates army doctors. Sure, I knew most of what was going to happen in this one, but Emery can really write and his military stories have a definite air of authenticity. Plus his characters often don’t turn out exactly the way you think they will, and he can surprise me now and then with a plot twist. “The Shooting Sawbones” is a very entertaining story and I look forward to reading more of Emery’s work. He wrote hundreds of stories, going back to 1919, many of them aviation and air war yarns in the Twenties and Thirties. I need to sample some of those.

D.S. Halacy Jr. wrote dozens of stories for the pulps and the slicks in several different genres, including Westerns, mysteries, and sports stories. His contribution to this issue, a short-short titled “Family Affair” is about a U.S. Marshal corralling an outlaw, with a twist ending that’s pretty obvious. This is a minor but well-written story that doesn’t pack as much punch as it thinks it does.

Peter Fernandez is another author who published only a few stories, half a dozen according to the Fictionmags Index. “Apache Alibi” is about a shipment of gold on a stagecoach and the various would-be thieves plotting to get their hands on it. Like “Rancher’s Wife”, this is pure Western noir and is about as bleak as they come. It’s a good story, but it’ll leave you feeling a little grubby.

W.J. Reynolds wrote about 120 stories, most of them Westerns, in a career that covered the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and a little way into the Seventies. “The Devil Walks Loudly” is about a braggart who tries to make himself into a fast gun, an effort that seems doomed to failure from the start. This story is hurt a little by the fact that there’s not a single likable character in it, but it moves along and works fairly well. Reynolds is worth reading, but this one isn’t one of his best stories.

There’s an installment of S. Omar Barker’s “Sagebrush Savvy” column, in which he answers questions from readers (supposedly; who know whether they’re legit or not) and I always enjoy these. Barker was an entertaining writer.

This is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. While some stories are better than others, they’re all worth reading and several of them are very good. The pulp era was starting to wind down by this point, but there was still plenty of good reading to be found among the ones that survived that long.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Loser Friendly - Jake Cassidy

New Pulp Publishing is a new small press producing primarily e-books (although printed copies are available, too), in a variety of genres. As their website puts it: “New Pulp Publishing is dedicated to delivering blistering novella length fiction in the crime, suspense, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and western venues.” Their first book, LOSER FRIENDLY, has just been released and features Miami recovery agent Jake Cassidy (a name the author of the series is also using as a pseudonym). Jake seems to be a bit of a cross between Travis McGee and Mack Bolan. He lives on a boat (a yacht, not a houseboat) and for a fee, recovers things that people have lost, usually to some bad guys. But he also has a lot of heavy weapons and is very proficient in their use. Despite those influences, Jake takes on his own character and is a very likable hero and narrator, tough but not flawless, just enough of a smart-ass to be funny, and a good guy to have on your side when you’re in trouble.

In LOSER FRIENDLY, he starts out doing a favor for an old girlfriend and finds himself trying to rescue a would-be Hollywood screenwriter who has run afoul of some mobsters. They want a script the writer has written even more than they want the guy himself, and Jake winds up having to recover it, too. Occasionally the story pauses to take a breath, but for the most part it’s very fast-paced action and very effectively written, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The author behind the Jake Cassidy name is a prolific writer who has been published in a wide variety of genres (it’s not, repeat not, me; I don’t have anything to do with New Pulp Publishing except as a satisfied reader). I had a great time reading LOSER FRIENDLY and look forward to the next book in the series.

(I felt a real rush of nostalgia when I came across this post, which was first published on July 3, 2010. Everything about it is reminiscent of the early days of the Kindle boom, when e-book publishing was really the Wild West, Amazon was a boomtown, and there was plenty of money to be made. It was a far cry from the business it is today, a lot less slick maybe, but still a lot of fun. I think I knew at the time who was behind New Pulp Press and who Jake Cassidy really was, but I've slept since then, as the old saying goes. New Pulp Publishing put out one more book as far as I can tell, the sword and sorcery novel THE COLOSSUS OF MAHRASS, which was written by Mel Odom under the name R.J. Salter. Was Mel also Jake Cassidy? Maybe if he's reading this, he'll let us know. I could email him and ask him, of course, but what's the fun in that? There was another Jake Cassidy novella in the works called TWICE SHY. The cover for it is on New Pulp Publishing's website, which is still on-line although it hasn't been updated since 2011. And LOSER FRIENDLY is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. The e-book is even on Kindle Unlimited!) 

Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Cold Pursuit (2019)

Let me start by saying that I’m not a Liam Neeson fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed some of the movies he’s made (DARKMAN is a favorite), and I don’t let his presence in a film keep me from watching it. But there’s just something about the guy that rubs me the wrong way. However, I was in the mood for an action movie, and we’d never seen 2019’s COLD PURSUIT, so I figured, why not?

That turns out to have been a good choice. Neeson plays the protagonist of this movie, a snow plow driver in a small ski town in Colorado, but there are long stretches where other characters take over. Neeson’s son runs afoul of some drug smugglers and winds up dead of an apparent overdose, but he’s not convinced that’s what really happened and sets out to find the truth. When he does, he goes on a vengeance quest that gets rather convoluted with plot twists and competing gangs. And Neeson’s character has a secret in his background that makes things even more interesting.

What starts out as a pretty grim movie winds up having a lot of dry, oddball humor in it. In fact, COLD PURSUIT (which is based on a Norwegian movie) is a pretty oddball film overall. But it’s well-made, well-acted, reasonably suspenseful, and I wound up enjoying it more than I expected to. If you’re in the mood for a offbeat action movie, I recommend it.

Review: Swords of the Crags - Fred Blosser

After reading Fred Blosser’s sword and sorcery novella SWORDS OF PLUNDER recently, I was in the mood to dive back into more of his work. I picked his collection SWORDS OF THE CRAGS.

This volume collects six stories that might have been the sort of thing Robert E. Howard wrote for the Spicy pulps in the mid-Thirties. The title story, “Swords of the Crags”, is set in Peshawar, India, and in the Khyber Hills. The protagonist is Pike Braxton, an American adventurer and former gunfighter from Texas who functions as a sort of unofficial secret agent for the British. When a beautiful young American heiress gets caught up in the schemes of a sinister Russian agent, Pike has to rescue her and recover some vital information. Seems fairly straightforward, if dangerous, but then Pike and the beautiful blonde find themselves confronting an otherworldly menace. This fast-moving tale is like placing Howard’s El Borak in a SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES plot, with a dash of Lovecraft thrown in. It’s well-written, works very well, and races along to a satisfactory conclusion. I really enjoyed it. (And it puts me in mind of Howard’s comments in a letter to Lovecraft where he suggested that Lovecraft should try to crack the Spicy market. He could use a pseudonym, Howard says, and just write up a fictionalization of one of his own “sex adventures”. Just the thought of Lovecraft’s reaction when he read that suggestion always makes me chuckle.)

In “Alleys of Terror”, the scene shifts to Shanghai and the protagonist is Ridge Braxton, Pike’s younger brother who’s just as fast with his guns and fists. The beautiful Eurasian pirate and smuggler Olga Zukor is framed for murder. The victim held the key to a deadly conspiracy Ridge is investigating, so he and Olga have to team up to untangle the mess even though they dislike and distrust each other at first.

Ridge Braxton returns to his West Texas stomping grounds in “Witch of Snakebit Creek”, a creepy contemporary Western that reminds me a bit of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart” and “For the Love of Barbara Allen” although it turns out to be a very different kind of story. This is actually more of a mystery yarn with a nice late twist.

“The Girl From Hell’s Half Acre” finds another two-fisted, fast-shooting Texan adventurer, Esau Reynolds (a very Howardian name) turning detective as he tries to find a wealthy man’s missing daughter, who’s a beautiful blonde, of course. The trail leads Reynolds to the waterfront area of an unnamed city, where he clashes with—and beds—the beautiful queenpin of the area’s criminal underworld. This story, reminiscent of some of Howard’s Steve Harrison yarns, moves like the proverbial wind and is very entertaining.

“Sin’s Sanctuary” is another El Borak-like tale, with a heaping helping of Talbot Mundy influence, as an American adventurer infiltrates a hidden monastery in Tibet in search of a missing Englishman. He’s helped by a beautiful woman, of course, and they encounter unexpected danger inside the walls of the monastery. This is a really well-written and exciting story.

“Scarlet Lust” is a direct sequel to SWORDS OF PLUNDER and finds Cronn, the northern barbarian, out to steal a fabulous gem which he hopes will help him win the throne of one of the countries in his world. He gets some help, of course, from a beautiful woman. These are Conan pastiches, in a way, there’s no denying that, and they’re also better than most of the official Conan pastiches that have been published in the past few years. Like John C. Hocking, Scott Oden, and Chuck Dixon, Blosser understands the character and the setting. I don’t know if there are more of these Cronn stories, but if there are, I definitely want to read them. And if there aren’t, well, maybe Blosser will write some.

Blosser rounds out this collection with five articles about Howard’s efforts to crack the Spicy and Weird Menace markets, the spicier Conan yarns, and the influence of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy on Howard’s work. As always with Blosser’s work, these essays are informative, entertaining, and well worth a Howard fan’s time.

Overall, SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is an excellent volume and a lot of fun to read. While it’s true that the main influence on these stories is Robert E.Howard, I found them reminiscent of E. Hoffmann Price, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Talbot Mundy, as well. Also, in Blosser’s stories the spicy bits are considerably spicier than what authors could get away with in the Thirties. They’re not overly graphic, but those scenes don’t fade out as quickly as the ones in the pulps did. So while they’re definitely Howardian, don’t mistake these tales for pale imitations. They stand on their own, and they’re well worth reading. SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is available on Amazon in a paperback edition, and an e-book edition containing the first three stories and the first two articles is available as well.