Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, November 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m pretty sure the cover art is by H.W. Scott. This issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN contains only two pieces of fiction, which makes it something of an oddity.

We all know that the stories billed as novels in the pulps nearly always weren’t. They were usually novellas or even novelettes. But “The Gallows Brand”, T.W. Ford’s Silver Kid yarn in this issue actually is long enough to be called a novel. Taking up 75 pages of fairly small, double-columned print, I figure it’s at least 40,000 words. I like Ford’s writing, and I like his character, the drifting gunman/adventurer Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver trappings on his all-black attire, including a small silver skull that adorns the chin strap of his hat. So I was eager to plunge into this one.

The opening is intriguing. An outlaw and gunman known as Slow Joe Thorne is hired by the local justice of the peace to kill the Silver Kid. The judge claims that an enemy of his has hired Strant to kill him. And this is, in fact, true. Strant has accepted the job, but he doesn’t mean to carry it out. His guns aren’t actually for hire. He just wants to get to the bottom of the murder plot and isn’t aware that he’s also the target of a similar scheme.

But before any of that can really get underway, the Kid and Slow Joe wind up being thrown together as allies (neither of them being aware of the other’s true identity) and wind up fighting a gang of masked killers known as the Hangman Bunch, who always warn their impending victims with a drawing of a gallows with a body hanging from it. They always string up the men they kill, even if those unfortunate fellows wind up being shot first.

This is a complex plot, although it’s fairly easy to spot what’s really behind it. The Silver Kid is a very likable protagonist, Slow Joe is a great supporting character, and the villains are suitably despicable. There are plenty of well-written action scenes along the way.

However, if you sense a “but” coming, you’re right. This is a case where the story’s length actually works against it. There’s a lot of aimless riding around, and some of those action scenes, well-written though they are, don’t do anything to advance the plot. Don’t get me wrong: “The Gallows Brand” is a good story and I enjoyed reading it, but I have a feeling it would have been terrific as a novella.

The other piece of fiction in this issue is Roe Richmond’s novelette “Clean-Up”. This one is about a pair of U.S. Marshals, one an old veteran, the other a baby-faced kid who’s deadly fast with his guns, who are assigned to clean up a town being run by several outlaw bosses who have teamed up to take over. This story is almost non-stop action, and after a while I started to wonder if anybody was going to survive to the end, the way the bodies were falling. Richmond’s work is kind of hit-or-miss for me, but I enjoyed this one.

This is a good issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, although if you don’t like T.W. Ford or Roe Richmond, you’re out of luck. I actually prefer Western pulps that feature a wider variety of stories, even when the lead novel really is novel-length, as in the various Thrilling Group pulps like TEXAS RANGERS, THE RIO KID, THE MASKED RIDER, etc. But this was a nice change of pace.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Fright - Cornell Woolrich

I’ve been a Cornell Woolrich fan ever since I encountered reprints of some of his pulp stories in EQMM and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties. I’ve read many of his short stories and novelettes and enjoyed them all, but only a couple of his novels, the justly-famous THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and DEADLINE AT DAWN, which I also enjoyed. I’ve just read the Hard Case Crime reprint of Woolrich’s novel FRIGHT, originally published in 1950 under the pseudonym George Hopley.

FRIGHT is one of Woolrich’s historical suspense novels, set in 1915 and 1916, and he does a fine job of recreating that era without going overboard on the historical details. The very strait-laced attitudes of the time period play a part in the plot, too, helping to drive the protagonist to do the things he does. It’s difficult to go into detail about that plot without giving away too much, but let’s just say there’s blackmail, murder, paranoia, more murder, doomed love, more murder, and tragedy galore. Pretty much the essence of noir, in other words, and all told in smooth, if slightly old-fashioned prose that keeps the reader turning the pages. Yes, the coincidences and lapses in logic that Woolrich is notorious for can be found in FRIGHT, but as usual the writing and the raw emotional torment he inflicts on his characters more than make up for any flaws. There are passages in this book that I found genuinely disturbing, and I’m usually not easily disturbed by fiction. FRIGHT is one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time.

It’s also one of the best, and I have a feeling that it just might start me on a Woolrich binge. I don’t know if my heart can take it, though.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 22, 2007. At that time, the Hard Case Crime reprint of FRIGHT was fairly recent. That edition, pictured above, is out of print and used copies have gotten fairly expensive. However, the novel is available in a different e-book and paperback edition, and it's still well worth reading even though it did not, in fact, start me on a Woolrich binge.) 

Review: Woe to the Vanquished - Edwin Truett (Edwin Truett Long) (RED STAR DETECTIVE, June 1940)

“Woe to the Vanquished” is the second novel featuring Dr. Thaddeus Clay Harker, traveling medicine showman and top-notch criminologist and detective, and his assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones and the beautiful Brenda Sloan. It was published in the June 1940 issue of RED STAR DETECTIVE with a great cover by Emmett Watson. RED STAR DETECTIVE is the retitled pulp that ran for one issue as DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, where the first Doc Harker novel, “Crime Nest”, appeared. As this story begins Doc, Hercules, and Brenda aren’t involved in a case, they’re just on their way to the next stop where they’ll set up and sell the world-famous Chickasha Remedies that are Doc Harker’s stock-in-trade.

But then they run into a meeting of the Valiants of the Flaming Circle, a black-robed Ku Klux Klan sort of organization that firebombs and destroys a school run by a man they consider a Bolshevik. Doc and Hercules wind up being arrested and changed with murder. Crime and chaos ensue. Doc has his hands full sorting everything out and uncovering the truth about what’s really going on. Obviously, not everything turns out the way it appears at first.

The Doc Harker novels were written by prolific pulpster Edwin Truett Long under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. Long was born in Missouri but spent most of his life in Texas, and according to Tom Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the Altus Press volume that collects all three of the novels, “Woe to the Vanquished” takes place in and around a thinly disguised Wichita Falls, Texas. That by itself is enough to make it of interest to me.

I’ve become an Edwin Truett Long fan. He was not the most rigorous plotter in the world, but his stories are fast-moving, full of action, blessed with colorful, interesting characters, and have occasional touches of humor. He was just a good yarn-spinner, and it’s a shame that his service in World War II as a cryptographer in Burma left him with medical issues that took his life in 1945 when he was only 44 years old.

DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. I’ve read two of the three novels now and really enjoyed both of them, so I don’t hesitate to give this collection a high recommendation if you like off-beat, fast-paced pulp adventure and detective stories.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956)

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I like war movies, and I watched a lot of them on TV when I was a kid. But somehow, I never saw D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE. Now that I’ve watched it, I can kind of understand that. The title should have drawn my attention, but maybe I sensed that this film is only indirectly about D-Day and is barely a war movie at all.

What it is, in fact, is a romance movie told mainly in flashback. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. The story opens on a ship the night of June 5, 1944, as a combined special force of American, British, and Canadian troops are headed for Normandy to carry out a commando raid in the hope of knocking out a big gun overlooking the beaches where the regular troops will land a few hours later. Commanding the force is a British officer played by Richard Todd. One of the American officers is played by Robert Taylor. And there’s a connection between them because, you see, they’re both in love with the same girl they met, at separate times, a couple of years earlier in London. Cue the flashbacks.

The movie spends a lot more time on the relationship between Taylor and Dana Wynter, who plays the young English woman, than it does on Wynter’s romance with Todd. We also get a couple of subplots about Wynter’s father, a brigadier general who was wounded at Dunkirk but wants to get back into action, and Taylor’s commanding officer, who’s also gung-ho to the point of recklessness because he wants a promotion. Wynter’s father is played by the great British character actor John Williams, and Taylor’s commanding officer is played by the always top-notch Edmond O’Brien.

After a lot of well-done romance and British homefront scenes, we finally shift back to Todd, Taylor, and the rest of the commandos landing and going after the German gun emplacement, and for ten or fifteen minutes, D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE actually is a war movie, and decently done, too, although the filming is staged on a very small scale so we can’t see how few people are actually involved. This isn’t a cast of thousands, by any means. But it’s an exciting and satisfying battle.

Followed by a terrible and unsatisfying ending. No spoilers here, but I didn’t like it.

The movie looks good, in a mid-Fifties, major studio way, and the cast is also a good one. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Taylor. He’s one of the most dour-looking leading men I’ve ever seen. That works okay when he’s playing, say, a world-weary gunfighter in a Western, but it’s hard to like him in this move. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a character who’s basically a heel all the way through. I like Richard Todd and he’s plenty stalwart when he has to do something, which isn’t often enough. And Dana Wynter, good grief, she was a beautiful woman! And she turns in a decent performance, too, in a role where it would be easy to be too overwrought. The supporting cast features Jerry Paris in a fairly meaty role, and if you look quick, you can spot Dabbs Greer and Parley Baer, too.

It's probably a good thing I never tried to watch this when I was a kid. All the smooching and violin music would have had me switching the channel or heading outside to play. Watching it now, I thought D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE was a somewhat okay movie for what it is, but for war movie fans, it’s probably best for completists.

Review: Three Must Die! - Dan Gregory (Lorenz Heller)

Dinny Powell, the narrator/protagonist of Lorenz Heller’s novel THREE MUST DIE!, is a former journalist who’s living a quiet life as the publisher of a shopping guide in the small city of Rocky Hill, New Jersey. One peaceful Sunday afternoon, he’s out fishing in a creek with a couple of buddies of his, one a lawyer and the other a banker, when they hear a terrible car crash nearby and hurry to investigate. When they arrive on the scene, they find that the richest man in the county has been killed in the wreck, and the man’s lawyer is wandering around in a daze. A few minutes later, the members of a teenage motorcycle gang show up, too, and Dinny gets in a little scrap with one of them.

The wreck turns out to cause serious problems for Dinny, because a briefcase belonging to the rich guy’s lawyer should have been in the car but is missing, and in that briefcase is the brand-new will made by the tycoon. The cops think Dinny has the will, everybody affected by it thinks Dinny has the will, and so does a mysterious blackmailer who’s willing to kill to get what he wants.

THREE MUST DIE! is an excellent medium-boiled mystery that was published as a paperback original by Graphic Books in 1956 under the pseudonym Dan Gregory, the only time Heller used that name. The cover art is by Roy Lance. There are enough twists in the plot to keep things interesting, but Heller’s strong suit was his characters, and they’re all well-rounded and compelling, especially Dinny. His on-again, off-again romance with the girl who works on the shopping paper with him and wants to become a famous reporter is really well-handled. As a mystery, the clues are all there and I figured out who the killer was before I got to the end, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the very suspenseful climax.

THREE MUST DIE! has just been reprinted by Stark House in a very nice double volume with another of Heller’s novels, NIGHT NEVER ENDS. It’s available in e-book and paperback, and I give it a high recommendation. Lorenz Heller is just a thoroughly entertaining writer of crime and mystery fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 25, 1933

That's a nice evocative cover by Frederick Witton, an artist whose work I'm not familiar with, on this issue of SHORT STORIES. It's dated December 25, and Christmas Day was on Monday in 1933 (yes, I looked it up), so the unsold copies of this one were probably pulled off the stands on Tuesday that week. Although who wouldn't want a pulp with stories by H. Bedford-Jones, James B. Hendryx (a Corporal Downey yarn), William Merriam Rouse, George Allan England, Hapsburg Liebe, Clifford Knight, and Berton E. Cook? Well, it was the depths of the depression, after all, so I'm sure there were a lot of people who didn't have a quarter to spare, but enough people kept buying SHORT STORIES to keep it in business for a couple of decades and more after this.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

They played some snippets from this song on a recent episode of THE SIMPSONS. Yes, I still watch THE SIMPSONS. I liked it, didn't recognize it at all, and so I had to look it up. I'd heard of The Traveling Wilburys, of course, but I'm not sure I ever heard any of their music. But after listening to this one all the way through, I love it. Some of the lyrics speak to me, as they say. The ones about being old, of course, but how you should keep going to the end of the line. That's my plan.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

Review: The Daughter of Genghis Khan - John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien)

The narrator/protagonist of David Wright O’Brien’s novella “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is Dr. Cliff Saunders, an American physician who is part of a humanitarian mission aiding the Nationalist Chinese during their war against the Japanese. Since the January 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, the pulp in which this yarn originally appeared as the subject of H.W. MacCauley's dramatic cover, was actually on the newsstands during December 1941, that means the story was written well before the attack on Pearl Harbor during the period in which the United States was technically a neutral nation.

But neutrality doesn’t mean much during the chaos of war, so when Japanese forces overrun the field hospital in which Saunders and beautiful redheaded nurse Linda Barret are working, they’re both taken prisoner. At least they’re not executed outright. In fact, the Japanese officer in charges wants to deliver them to a neutral area where they’ll be safe. However, before that can happen, a group of Mongol bandits counterattack, and Saunders and Linda find themselves taken to an isolated village in the mountains that’s ruled by a beautiful young woman who claims to be the daughter of Genghis Khan. Not a descendant, mind you, but the actual daughter of the great Mongol conqueror.

That claim is part of the slight fantasy element in this story. It had to have some sort of off-trail bent to the plot, since this was FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, after all, but for the most part, “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is a pretty straightforward World War II yarn, as Saunders and Linda are forced to choose a side in the bloody conflict between the Japanese and the Mongol bandits. It’s pretty easy to figure out which side they’ll wind up on, of course, but that doesn’t detract from the breakneck action and the colorful characters and setting. This story reminded me a little of Milton Caniff’s immortal TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, and that’s a good thing.

David Wright O’Brien’s writing career was a short one. His first story was published early in 1940, and he was killed while serving in the Army Air Force in 1944 when the bomber he was in was shot down over Berlin. But he published dozens of stories during that handful of years, most of them in the Ziff-Davis pulps AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. I think it’s safe to say he was a rising star in the science fiction and fantasy fields. “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” was published under his pseudonym John York Cabot because there were two more stories by him in that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, one under his real name and one under his other pseudonym Duncan Farnsworth. (O’Brien was the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, the legendary editor of WEIRD TALES.) I’ve read several of his stories and really enjoyed all of them so far. His prose is clean and fast-moving with a very nice touch for action.

You can find the issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES containing this story here, and it’s available in other places on the Internet, as well. I need to read more by O’Brien, and I hope I manage to do so soon.