Avalon -- Francis Stevens

Avalon is a family name in this long-forgotten pulp novel, not a place. Originally serialized in ARGOSY in September and October of 1919, it takes place on a group of isolated islands off the coast of South Carolina. In pre-Revolutionary times, these islands were granted by the King of England to the Avalon family, who still rule them as a sort of feudal fiefdom despite the presence of a few modern items such as automobiles, gasoline launches, and wireless communication with the mainland.

The current master of Five Isles is Florence “Flurry” Avalon, who is a rugged male despite his feminine name. Avalon is seldom in residence there since he also runs a coffee plantation in South America, but his sister and younger brother live in Cliff House, the ancestral family residence which serves as this novel’s version of The Old Dark House . . . because that’s the kind of story this is, filled with secret passages, villainous Spaniards, shipwrecked survivors, mobs of torch-bearing villagers, unexpected shots in the night, and love at first sight between Avalon and one of the passengers from the wrecked schooner who show up at Cliff House.

The author of AVALON is Francis Stevens (the pseudonym of Gertrude Bennett), who also wrote some early weird thrillers such as THE LABYRINTH and THE CITADEL OF FEAR. I’ve read THE LABYRINTH and thought it was okay up to a point. AVALON lacks as many weird elements, but its plot holds together better and overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yes, it’s melodramatic, and its style is so old-fashioned that it might be off-putting to most modern readers. But if you can put yourself in the right frame of mind, the story moves along at a good clip and some of the writing holds up well. It’s due to appear in a reprint edition later this year from Beb Books, and if you enjoy early pulp thrillers, you might want to give it a try.

The Condemned

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you may remember that I thought THE MARINE, starring John Cena, was a pretty good rassler-turned-action-hero movie. Now we’ve watched THE CONDEMNED, starring Stone Cold Steve Austin (although he’s billed now as just plain Steve Austin, probably a good move on his part), another WWE superstar.

Austin plays Jack Conrad, an American locked up on Death Row in a South American prison. A sleazy millionaire rounds up violent convicts from all over the world, takes them to a remote South Pacific island, and turns them loose so they can run around and kill each other, with freedom going to the sole survivor. Outwit, outlast, outplay, indeed. And of course the millionaire plans to broadcast the whole thing live on the Internet to an audience that will equal the size of the one for the Super Bowl.

With a long-in-the-tooth set-up like that, a movie needs a smart, witty script, some unexpected plot twists, or preferably both to be very good. THE CONDEMNED doesn’t really have either of those things, so I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as THE MARINE. What it has going for it are Austin’s impressive physical presence, some nice photography, and a decent supporting performance from the dependably offbeat Rick Hoffman. It’s certainly watchable, but you’ll know everything that’s going to happen in the movie long before it gets there.

Zero Cool -- John Lange

I remember seeing the original editions of this book and others by John Lange, who was really Michael Crichton, but even though they seem like the sort of book I would have read back in the Sixties and Seventies, somehow I never got around to them. Now with Hard Case Crime bringing some of the John Lange titles back into print, I get a chance to read them without having to hunt up those pricey original editions.

ZERO COOL is more of a thriller than a mystery, although its protagonist, radiologist Peter Ross, has plenty of mystifying things to figure out during the course of the book. He’s in Spain where he’s supposed to present a paper at a medical convention, when he gets involved with a beautiful young Englishwoman, assorted Spanish and Italian and Arab villains, an American who wears buckskins like a frontiersman, and a corpse that goes missing after Ross is kidnapped and forced to perform an unorthodox surgical procedure on it. Everything is fast and breezy and a little over-the-top from the get-go, and the book becomes more bizarre as it goes along. I should have loved it.

But from all the good reviews I’ve read, I seem to be the only person who didn’t care much for this book. It’s not bad, mind you. I found it to be sort of entertaining, but I didn’t care much for the hero and despite the fast pace of the prose itself I thought the plot took ’way too long to develop. The first half of the book is a bit repetitious with the various gangs of hoodlums taking turns kidnapping and/or threatening Ross. The second half, where things actually start to move the story forward, is better. But Ross is still a dumb and not very sympathetic hero.

I enjoyed ZERO COOL enough so that I’ll certainly read Hard Case’s other John Lange reprint, GRAVE DESCEND, which I also have. I hope I like it better.

The Book You Have to Read: Seven Faces -- Max Brand

This week I’m participating in Patti Abbott’s The Books You Have to Read blog project, and the book I’ve chosen to write about is Max Brand’s SEVEN FACES. Most of you who are familiar with Max Brand’s work know him as a Western writer, but Brand, whose real name was Frederick Faust, was also a prolific mystery author. During the Thirties his work appeared regularly in the pulp magazine DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, among others, and DFW was where SEVEN FACES originally appeared as a serial in October and November of 1936.

The protagonists of this novel are a couple of New York City cops, Angus Campbell and Patrick O’Rourke, who make a formidable team despite the fact that they can’t stand each other. When a wealthy man named John Cobb appeals to the police department because he’s been receiving threats on his life, Campbell and O’Rourke are assigned to the case. Cobb has to go to Chicago on business, and the two detectives also have to travel to Chicago to present some evidence in a court case, so their superior decides they should take the train with Cobb and guard him from whoever wants to kill him.

Unfortunately, Cobb disappears on the way to Chicago, and Campbell and O’Rourke have to split up in their attempts to track him down and find out what happened to him. From there the story is a fast-paced yarn featuring torture, murder, greed, and evil coming back from the past to haunt the present. Sure, the characters are a little stereotypical – Campbell is a dour Scotsman, O’Rourke a fat, cigar-smoking, heavy-drinking Irishman – but the plot has some clever twists and Faust keeps things perking so nicely that the reader is drawn along effortlessly by the story.

I picked this book mostly because I enjoyed it, but also because while it’s obscure, it’s not that hard to lay your hands on a copy. It’s been reprinted twice in the past ten years, first by the University of Nebraska Press in their series of Max Brand reissues, and then in large print by Chivers/G.K. Hall. Faust wrote at least one more novel featuring Campbell and O’Rourke, MURDER ME!, and I intend to track it down and read it, too.

(By the way, hearty congratulations to Patti and Megan for their well-deserved awards!)

Fantastic Four: Books of Doom -- Ed Brubaker

Like it was yesterday, I remember walking into Tompkins’ Drugstore in the summer of 1964 and plunking down a quarter and a penny for a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #2. (Just don’t ask me what I actually did yesterday, because I might not remember that.) I was a big fan of Marvel Comics in general and the Fantastic Four in particular, and had been ever since a couple of my girl cousins gave me a stack of comics they didn’t want the previous Christmas.

FF ANNUAL #2 opened with a story called “The Origin of Doctor Doom”. Doom had appeared several times already in the FF’s regular title and was already the dominant villain in the Marvel universe. In twelve pages, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby filled in his back-story, giving him a layer of humanity he had lacked previously without making him any less evil or dangerous. It was a fine story featuring gypsies and witchcraft and super-science and a mysterious monastery in Tibet, along with cameo appearances by the college-age Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, the future Mr. Fantastic and The Thing. Practically every panel was etched into my eleven-year-old brain, and Lord help me, they still are.

FANTASTIC FOUR: BOOKS OF DOOM, a trade paperback reprint of a recent mini-series, takes the information from that 44-year-old origin story (and a few later stories) and expands it into a large-scale retelling of how the young gypsy Victor von Doom wound up becoming the arch-villain Doctor Doom. The script by Ed Brubaker is well-written but doesn’t add much to the story, although he does throw in a fairly nice twist ending. The art by Pablo Raimondi is pretty good and his layouts are easier to follow than those of some modern comics artists, and it doesn’t appear to have any manga influence, always a plus for reactionary curmudgeons such as myself. The reprint is maybe a little misleading in its title, since the only members of the Fantastic Four to appear are Reed and Ben, making the same sort of cameos they did in the original origin story. Overall, I enjoyed revisiting this yarn, and I’m glad that Brubaker didn’t try to update it very much. BOOKS OF DOOM is worth reading if you’re a Fantastic Four fan.

Shooting Star -- Robert Bloch

I love the old Ace Doubles. The Westerns and the science fiction doubles were fairly common in this area when I was a kid, and I read a bunch of them. But for some reason I never saw any of the mystery doubles until 1981, when I came across a couple of shelves of them in a junk store. Needless to say, I grabbed them all.

There have been efforts to revive the Ace double novel format over the years, but the Hard Case Crime release of Robert Bloch’s SHOOTING STAR and SPIDERWEB may be the most successful yet. Of course, both of these novels were actually first published as Ace Doubles, although not back to back with each other. I’ve just read SHOOTING STAR, and I’ll get to SPIDERWEB fairly soon, I hope.

The narrator of SHOOTING STAR is Mark Clayburn, a Hollywood literary agent/private eye. I don’t think I’ve ever come across that particular combination before, and it makes Clayburn different from other private eyes who specialize in cases involving the movie industry, such as W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner. Bloch’s familiarity with the pulp magazine markets gives this element of the novel a welcome touch of realism. There’s also a little tuckerizing going on, for example an undertaker named Hamilton Brackett. And the whole thing is told in an appealingly breezy, fast-moving style.

Unfortunately the plot, which involves Clayburn trying to find out who murdered a cowboy movie star so that the producer who hires him can sell the dead star’s old movies to television (shades of Hopalong Cassidy), never develops into anything more than a very generic private eye plot. I kept waiting for Bloch to come up with a twist on a par with making his hero a literary agent as well as a detective, but that never happens. The writing is smooth and Mark Clayburn is a likable character, but the other characters never came alive for me. SHOOTING STAR isn’t a bad book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it’s certainly a minor entry among Bloch’s novels.

At the Antique Mall

I’ve never had much luck finding books at antique malls, although I always look every time I happen to find myself in one. Anything I find that I’m interested in is usually priced at least twice what I think it’s worth, and often three or four times what it’s worth. Today while running some other errands, we stopped at the local antique mall to look for a small desk for one of our daughters. We found one we liked pretty quickly but of course had to wander through the rest of the mall as well. I found a cabinet full of old sheet music and magazines and started pawing through it, not really expecting to find anything. Then, suddenly, on the spine of a magazine, I saw the magic word.

Spicy.

Naturally, I pounced and started digging harder through all the stuff clogging the shelves. I was rewarded with not one but two issues of the pulp SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES, from November 1937 and April 1939. The ’37 issue is actually in very nice shape except the top two inches of the front cover is gone, telling me that it’s a copy that was stripped by the distributor ‘way back when. It includes at least two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, one under his own name and one under the pseudonym Jerome Severs Perry, as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Lew Merrill (Victor Rousseau). The issue from ’39 is also a stripped copy but is more beat up. The scan accompanying this post is from the Fictionmags Index, not the actual issue I found. Still, it appears to be complete and perfectly readable. Bellem is in this one, too, along with Lew Merrill. They were priced at a dollar each. I wish the whole cabinet had been full of them at that price. I’d have bought ’em all. As it is, I came home with these two and was very happy about it.

I found some other good stuff, too, including several Whitman juvenile novels featuring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. They were ridiculously overpriced, so they stayed right where they were and didn’t come home with me. I probably already read them when I was a kid, anyway.