Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, December 1944

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather ragged copy in the scan. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, not one of his best, in my opinion, but still a decent cover.

Despite being called a novel on the cover, the lead story in this issue is more of a novelette. It’s “The Dude Wrangler” by William Polk. This is a contemporary Western, set on a dude ranch in West Texas during World War II. Young cowboy Tom Glenning rides in looking for a job. Tom’s family once owned the spread when it was a working cattle ranch, but when he inherited it, he lost the place because he was such a wastrel. Now he’s reformed and just looking for a job, with no hard feelings. Or so he says. It won’t take readers very long to realize that this is one of those stories where nothing is what it appears to be. And the author does a good job of spinning a highly entertaining yarn.

William Polk has ten stories listed in the Fictionmags Index. The first nine of them appeared in the Twenties and Thirties in various slick and literary magazines. “The Dude Wrangler” is the tenth story in that list, and it’s the only Western and the only pulp story. Which leads me to suspect that “William Polk” is a pseudonym, probably slapped on by a Thrilling Group editor who was unaware of the previous stories published under that byline. However, that’s pure speculation on my part. Maybe the other William Polk actually did have a pulp Western story in him. Chances are we’ll never know, and it’s a good story no matter who wrote it.

Bascom Sturgill appears to have been the real name of an author who published a dozen stories in various Western pulps during the Forties. His short-short in this issue, “Snake-Bite Justice”, is about an old prospector seeking to avenge his partner’s murder. It’s well-written, has a nice little twist in the end, and is a pretty good story.

I’ve always found the series about Alamo Paige, Pony Express rider, to be okay, some stories better than others (which is to be expected in a house-name series) but always readable. The novelette in this issue, “The Pony Express Pays Off”, finds Paige and another Pony Express rider trying to save a fortune in diamonds that will rescue the company from debt. There’s a considerable amount of action, but at the same time the story seems to meander around a lot, filling pages but not in a very compelling fashion. I’d say this is a below average entry in the series. I don’t have any idea who wrote it under the name Reeve Walker, but I did notice a couple of oddities in style that might help me identify him someday: characters have a habit of exclaiming “What in time!” and they carry their guns in “skin-holsters”.

I’ve come to be fond of the work of Archie Joscelyn, who was a prolific pulpster but wrote even more novels under his own name and several pseudonyms, most notable among them Al Cody and Lynn Westland. His story in this issue, “Out of the Horse’s Mouth”, is an entertaining tale about a circus performer who’s framed for a robbery and murder. It’s well-written, moves right along, and has just enough of a clever plot to be interesting. Joscelyn was a consistently good author.

I don’t know anything about Hal White except that he published about fifty stories in the pulps, a mixture of Westerns, air war stories, and detective yarns. His short-short in this issue, “Man on a Horse”, about an outlaw seeking revenge on a lawman, isn’t very good. I had to read the ending twice just to figure out what happened, and I wasn’t impressed when I did understand it.

Donald Bayne Hobart is another writer, like Archie Joscelyn, who was both prolific and consistently good. “Job for the Boss”, his story in this issue, is about a young cowboy trying to bring about peace between a couple of feuding old-timers, one of whom is the owner of the spread the cowboy rides for. It’s okay, reasonably entertaining but nothing more than that, and not one of the better efforts I’ve read from Hobart.

I’ve become quite a fan of the Navajo Tom Raine series, especially the novelettes written by C. William Harrison under the Jackson Cole house-name. I’m pretty sure that “Not By a Dam Site” is by Harrison, and it’s another in a run of top-notch stories that includes “Boothill Beller Box” in the previous issue and “Passport to Perdition” in the issue after this. “Not By a Dam Site”, as you’d probably guess, centers around government efforts to build a dam and flood a valley in Arizona, and the resistance to that plan from the townspeople, ranchers, and homesteaders who live in that valley. A couple of government surveyors have died under mysterious circumstances, and Arizona Ranger Tom Raine is sent in to get to the bottom of things. He does, of course, after some suitable action. However, the plot’s not quite as complex in this one and the action a bit more sparse than usual, so I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Navajo Raine stories, but it’s still entertaining and well worth reading. Raine is an excellent character.

I’d say this is a pretty average issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN. It begins and ends very well with “The Dude Wrangler” and “Not By a Dam Site”. The stories in between are okay with the one exception, but none of them are outstanding. If you have a copy on hand, it’s worth reading, but I wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to rustle one up.

Dark Dream - Robert Martin

When I was binging on private eye fiction in the late Seventies, one of the authors I discovered thanks to the great fanzine THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE was Robert Martin with his series featuring Jim Bennett, an operative for the National Detective Agency who worked out of Cleveland. I read several of the later books in the series and recall enjoying them very much. Now Stark House Press is bringing back the Jim Bennett series and has just reprinted the first two novels, DARK DREAM and SLEEP, MY LOVE. Today I’m going to take a look at DARK DREAM, the novel-length debut of Jim Bennett, although he had appeared in pulp stories before this book was first published in hardcover by Dodd, Mead in 1951 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1952.

Bennett is sent to the northern Ohio town of Wheatville to take on a case for a local lawyer who has hired the agency. It seems that somebody has been taking potshots at the lawyer as he plays on the local golf course. Bennett hasn’t been in town long, though, before he picks up another client: the owner of a beauty salon whose business is being sabotaged. Could it be that these apparently unrelated cases will wind up being connected?

That seems to be a foregone conclusion, especially if you know that DARK DREAM is based on two pulp novellas, “Death Under Par” (DIME DETECTIVE, May 1947) and “Death Gives a Permanent Wave” (DIME DETECTIVE, October 1947. I’ll give Martin full credit, though: the combining of these two stories may not be seamless, but it’s pretty darned good. If I hadn’t known about the pulp origins already, I might not have suspected it. Multiple murders crop up, a proverbial whirlwind of action takes place over the course of the few days Bennett spends in Wheatville, he kisses a number of beautiful women (some of whom are suspects), and gets hit over the head, knocked out, poisoned, and suffers a minor bullet wound. The guy stays busy!

In addition to the mystery angle, parts of this book read almost like a mainstream novel about small-town Americana, and northern Ohio towns in the early Fifties must have been a lot like Texas towns in the early Sixties because I felt some powerful nostalgia reading this book. The businesses and the people sound very similar to what I grew up with.

I, of course, had a wonderful time reading this book. It’s pure hardboiled private eye, one of my favorite subgenres in all of fiction. I’m glad Stark House is reprinting this series. It’s a really good one and well worth being back in print. It’s available on Amazon in a nice trade paperbackdouble volume.

The pulp stories featuring Jim Bennett are also being reprinted, by the way, by Steeger Books, and I intend to check those out, as well.

BONUS RAMBLING: To clarify what I said in the first paragraph of this post, I don’t mean to make it sound as if I discovered private eye fiction in the late Seventies. The first private eye novel I ever read was either THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE or SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS, one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books, both of which I checked out from the bookmobile around 1964. Yeah, sixty years ago. Where does the time go? By the late Seventies, I had read all of Dashiell Hammett available at the time, all of Raymond Chandler, most of the Mike Shayne, Shell Scott, and Ed Noon novels, and assorted other private eye books. I’ve talked before about how I started reading THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE and how it introduced me to a number of PI writers I hadn’t been aware of, as well as allowing me to make the acquaintance of Bill Crider, Joe Lansdale, and Tom Johnson. Glory days, as they say.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Becky (2020)

Well, this movie is just about the polar opposite of the one I wrote about last week. Instead of a heart-warming, inspirational sports movie like THE BASKET, BECKY is a bloody, extremely violent thriller about a family caught in an isolated cabin by four vicious escaped convicts on a mission.

The title character, Becky, is a 13-year-old girl who’s still mourning the death of her mother a year earlier. She’s the broody, angsty sort who’s angry with her father because he’s going to get married again. The last thing she wants to do is spend a weekend at the family cabin with him and her new stepmother and stepbrother to be. Maybe not the last thing, because then the escaped convicts show up and make the situation even worse. And Becky gets a perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how mean a 13-year-old girl can be as she escapes and MacGyvers the bad guys into one deadly situation after another.

A movie like this with some plot holes in the script and a bunch of stuff that really stretches credibility relies on its cast to carry things through. Lulu Wilson, who I’d never heard of, plays Becky and does a great job of being both vulnerable and unexpectedly bad-ass. Kevin James, who I’ve liked in all his comedic roles, is cast against type as the leader of the convicts, and he’s even better as a thoroughly despicable villain. He surprised me and probably enjoyed playing evil for a change. Towering former wrestler Robert Maillet is the most sympathetic of the convicts and is also good. Joel McHale, who I usually like, plays Becky’s dad and isn’t given much of anything to do except be a jerk.

I’m not a big fan of movies that are overly violent and gory, and BECKY certainly fits that description. But it generates some genuine suspense and made me want to find out what was going to happen despite my reservations. I wound up kind of liking it and can recommend it if you don’t mind a lot of blood and if some lapses of logic don’t bother you too much. As I said about THE BASKET, I wouldn’t want a steady diet of movies like this, but BECKY is basically okay.

The Stock Tank Mystery

“The Stock Tank Mystery”. Sounds like the title of a Hardy Boys book, doesn’t it? But in reality, it’s an on-going mystery I’ve been meaning to do a post about for a while now, and it’s finally deepened to the point that I have to.

For those of you unfamiliar with stock tanks, they’re ponds that are usually created by bulldozing up shallow walls of dirt on three sides of some gently sloping ground to form a reservoir in which rainwater collects. There was one in the field on the other side of the creek from where I grew up. I nicknamed it The Volcano. They’re used for watering livestock, hence the name, but this being Texas, more often than not they’re dry. You can tell how much rain we’ve gotten by whether or not there’s any water in the stock tanks.

There’s one about a mile and a half up the road from where we live. The image above isn't the actual tank, it's just one I found online, but the one I'm talking about looks similar. A few years ago, I was driving past it when I noticed a small boat sitting in the middle of it. I’m not a boat guy so I can’t go into details, but it looked to me like the kind of boat you’d take out fishing on a lake. It sat there, and the next time it rained and the tank got enough water in it, the boat floated and drifted around a little. But then the water dried up, and the boat sat there on the dry, cracked dirt.

Time passed.

And then, out of the blue, a second boat appeared, very similar to the first. Now there were two of them sitting in the dry stock tank, floating a little when there was water in it, and then sitting some more.

More time passed.

Then, about a year ago, something else appeared in the stock tank, but it wasn’t another boat. No, it was the tail assembly of a small airplane. Just sitting there with the boats, but it doesn’t move when water collects. I guess because it’s built to fly, not to float.

Now we come to today. I was driving by this morning and I noticed something new had been added to the collection. Sitting in the middle of the dry stock tank is a four-or-five-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, uplifted torch and all. I just kind of shook my head and drove on because I had places to be, but when I went back by later I checked again, and my eyes hadn’t played tricks on me. The Statue of Liberty was still there, beckoning the huddled masses to the other side of the stock tank.

I have no explanation for any of this, but never mind what I said about the Hardy Boys. This is starting to feel more like I’m living in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, for those of you familiar with his work. Maybe someday I’ll find out the connection between two fishing boats, a small airplane tail assembly, and the Statue of Liberty. But for now, I’ll just have to remain puzzled.

Review: Weasels Ripped My Flesh!: The Illustrated Men's Adventure Anthology - Robert Deis, Wyatt Doyle, and Josh Alan Friedman, eds.

When Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle published the original edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! TWO-FISTED STORIES FROM MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES back in 2013, it was the first book reprinting such stories in decades. There were paperback collections of stories from the men’s adventure magazines back in the Fifties and Sixties, but nothing since then as far as I know. The original edition of this book was successful enough that it launched an entire line of such reprints known as the Men’s Adventure Library, as well as the fantastic MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY.

Now, Deis and Doyle have published an updated deluxe edition of this landmark volume that started it all. It’s one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve ever seen, with more cover reproductions and interior illustrations, better printing, full color, and updated and expanded articles and story introductions.

In addition to that, you have the stories themselves, of course, which are hugely entertaining. I’ll be honest with you, I was just going to skim through this new edition and read the updated material, but time and again, I found myself stopping to reread and enjoy all over again some of the stories. It was great fun revisiting these wild yarns by such authors as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, Walter Wager, and Harlan Ellison. I found myself appreciating even more the talents of the legendary Walter Kaylin, who has two stories in this book. And it brought back fond memories of another author with a pair of stories included, Robert F. Dorr, who I was fortunate enough to correspond with, talk to on the phone, and consider a friend before he passed away.

If I had to pick one story that knocked me out even more this time, it would be “I Was a Slave of the Savage Blonde” by Emile C. Schurmacher, from the Summer 1956 issue of HUNTING ADVENTURES. This tale of a two-fisted botanist lost in the jungles of Paraguay, captured by fierce natives, and enslaved by the beautiful blond Spanish anthropologist who has become the tribe’s queen is well-written and moves at a breakneck pace. I remember enjoying it the first time I read it, but I really got swept up in it this time, to the point that I ordered several paperback collections of Schurmacher’s stories from the men’s adventure magazines.

As I’ve mentioned before, I would see these magazines on the stands when I was a kid and really wanted to buy some of them, but I never did. Now, thanks to the efforts of Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, I can read some of the best stories from them, and I really appreciate that. The new edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN’S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY is available in hardback and trade paperback editions from Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here. If you’re a fan of great art and wild, over-the-top storytelling like I am, I give it my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men, November 1935

As some of you know, I’m a long-time fan of the Dan Fowler series. Fowler, ace agent of the F.B.I., had his adventures chronicled in the pages of the pulp G-MEN (later G-MEN DETECTIVE) for many years, first under the house-name C.K.M. Scanlon and then later under the real names of the various authors who contributed novels to the series. The November 1935 issue of G-MEN, sporting a cover possibly by Richard Lyon, contains the second Dan Fowler novel, which has a great title: “Bring ’Em Back Dead”.

I don’t own this issue, but I do have a copy of BRING ’EM BACK DEAD, a great collection from Black Dog Books that reprints the first three Dan Fowler novels. I read and reviewed the first one, “Snatch!”, a while back, and now I’ve moved on to the second novel in the series. In this one, Fowler and his friend and fellow agent Larry Kendal are after a gang responsible for multiple thefts of silk shipments once they’ve arrived from the Orient and are on their way to wholesalers in the United States. There’s a great sequence on board a train that takes up the first part of the story, with shootouts, chases, and the grisly murder of a young agent. The crooks get away, but with Dan Fowler on their trail, you know they’ll run out of luck sooner or later.

The Fowler novels are a very appealing blend of well-done procedural drama and terrific action scenes. That’s the case in this one as Fowler and Kendal prove to be dogged investigators, as usual, but can also throw a punch or handle a tommy gun with great skill. Beautiful blond Sally Vane, the love of Dan’s life, joins the Bureau after helping out as an amateur in the previous novel and comes in for her own share of the action.

Like “Snatch!”, “Bring ’Em Back Dead” was written by the creator of the series, George Fielding Eliot, under the C.K.M. Scanlon name. Most of the Fowler novels I’ve read have been from later in the series, but I really like these early ones. I give a high recommendation to the Black Dog Books reprint volume, which is available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Since I don’t own the actual pulp issue, I haven’t read the two backup stories, but they’re by Tom Curry, whose Westerns I enjoy, and Joe Archibald, whose work is kind of hit-and-miss for me, but many of his stories are good. I suspect I’ll be reading another Dan Fowler story relatively soon. It’s a great series. And it occurred to me while I was reading this one that it’s a shame Republic Pictures never made a Dan Fowler serial directed by William Witney and John English and starring Clayton Moore as Dan. Well, I can imagine it, can’t I?

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, May 24, 1941

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The cover is by H.W. Scott, and while I normally like Scott’s work quite a bit, this cover strikes me as being pretty drab. It wouldn’t have caught my eye on a newsstand in 1941, I don’t think. However, I read it now because I was in the mood for an issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY, the most venerable of Western pulps. Also, I was curious about the work of Ney N. Geer, an odd name I’d seen before, and he wrote the lead novella in this issue, “Gun Packer By Proxy”.

Geer published 34 stories in a short career that ran from 1936 to 1943. All but two of them were published in STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY, so obviously he found a receptive market there. The two stories published elsewhere were in WESTERN ADVENTURES, also a Street & Smith pulp, and WESTERN TRAILS from Ace. His only series character (13 stories) was someone named Potluck Jones. I haven’t read any of them so I don’t know anything about ol’ Potluck, but I’ll admit, the name doesn’t make me optimistic. Geer had only four books published, Western novels in 1936, ’37, and ’39 and then a Potluck Jones novel (probably a fix-up from some of the pulp stories) published only in England in the early Forties. I found a Ney Napolean Geer, born in Ohio in 1895 and died in Washington in 1974, and feel confident this must be the Western pulpster. But that’s all I was able to come up with about him. Why he stopped writing in 1943 remains a mystery, although it’s possible he could have continued under another name.

His story in this issue starts with gunman Jim Westover in Nevada looking for his twin brother Bob. Bob, who is also a hired gun, has signed on with one side in a range war, but Jim doesn’t know any more details than that. On his way to the town of Silver Butte, he makes a tragic discovery: the body of his brother, bushwhacked and murdered. There are several clues to the killer’s identity. Since they were twins, Jim decides to masquerade as his brother and try to find out what happened. This puts him in the middle of the range war, of course, where he clashes with gunnies on both sides and tangles with some rustlers.

The twin gimmick put me off a little at first, but I stuck with the story and soon got caught up in it. Geer’s writing is smooth and relatively fast-paced. This novella reminded me of the work of the Glidden brothers, better known as Luke Short and Peter Dawson. I thought that maybe I’d found another author well worth looking for . . . and then I got to the ending, which is one of the worst I’ve ever come across in a Western pulp, totally undramatic, an anticlimax that left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d read another story by Geer, but I’d be a little bit leery going into it.

When I was a kid, I loved Jim Kjelgaard’s juvenile novels about dogs but had no idea he was a pulp writer starting out. He specialized in animal stories, and despite my fondness for such when I was young, I have a hard time reading stories like that now. However, I stuck with “Sled Dog Savvy”, Kjelgaard’s short story in this issue and was glad I did. It’s a Northern about a Husky who’s stolen from his master by an unscrupulous trapper and the dog’s struggle to survive and be reunited with the human he loves. It’s a moving, well-written yarn. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of such stories, but I enjoyed this one.

Cherry Wilson was one of the few female authors who contributed prolifically to the Western pulps. A couple of others who come to mind are Eli Colter and C.K. Shaw. The protagonist of Wilson’s story in this issue, “Range of Hate”, has his hands full trying to prevent a war between cattlemen and nesters while at the same time trying to prevent a young man he regards as his surrogate son from turning outlaw. To complicate things, the youngster is the actual son of a woman he once loved, who chose another man over him. The domestic drama is even more complex than that, but that’s enough about it. Wilson does a good job of balancing all those elements and providing a satisfying story, although the ending is pretty bittersweet. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Wilson before, but I certainly would again.

Mojave Lloyd is known to be a pseudonym, but as far as I’m aware, nobody had ever figured out the author’s real identity. I’ve read one or two by him and haven’t cared much for them. So I wasn’t expecting much when I read “Bottle-Neck Boomerang”, his story in this issue. I was very pleasantly surprised by this tale of a Chinese cowboy trying to start his own ranch and being caught between a couple of range hogs. The protagonist is known as Shanghai Sam. He came to the United States to study religion but decided to take off for the tall and uncut and become a cowboy instead. He’s big, burly, and very intelligent, as the clever plot of this story demonstrates. I don’t know if there are any more Shanghai Sam stories, but I’d be happy to read there if there were. It should be noted that some modern readers might be offended by this story, but they really shouldn’t be. Shanghai Sam is a great protagonist and this is a very entertaining story.

Russell A. Bankson is one of those vaguely familiar names to me. And it should be familiar since he wrote hundreds of stories, mostly Westerns, in a career that stretched from 1915 to 1957. But if I’ve ever read anything by him before, I don’t remember it. His story in this issue, “Lawman’s Jackpot”, is about a lawman’s desperate plan to keep from being killed by an outlaw whose younger brother was killed in a shootout with the protagonist. It’s a well-written story and generates a decent amount of suspense.

There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE STAGLINE FEUD by Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden). I normally don’t read serial installments in pulps unless I have all of them, and I read the novel version of this one some twenty years ago, so I skipped this one and the usual columns and features on guns, travel, and penpals.

I don’t really know how to rate this issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY. The short stories are all good but not great. I thought the lead novel by Ney N. Geer was excellent until I got to the final two pages that just about ruined it for me. So, was it worth reading? Sure, it’s a Western pulp. I consider reading them time well spent even when an issue isn’t top-notch. But as I’ve said before, don’t rush to your shelves to look for this one.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Love Me--and Die! - Day Keene and Gil Brewer

The origins of Day Keene’s 1951 novel LOVE ME--AND DIE! are a little murky. According to Gil Brewer’s stepdaughter, Brewer ghosted this novel for Keene, expanding one of Keene’s pulp stories to book length. One website identifies the source novella as “Marry the Sixth for Murder”, from the May 1948 issue of DETECTIVE TALES. This seems pretty feasible to me. Keene and Brewer were friends, and since Keene was already an established writer as the Fifties began, with more than ten years as a popular pulp author under his belt, I can easily see him farming out this expansion to Brewer. Whether LOVE ME--AND DIE! was written before or after the first two novels Brewer sold to Gold Medal, SATAN IS A WOMAN and SO RICH, SO DEAD (both of which also came out in 1951), I have no idea. But since Brewer probably used quite a bit of Keene’s original novella, I think the book-length version can be regarded as a true collaboration between two of the top suspense novelists of the Fifties. But the question remains, is it any good?

Well, yeah. What did you expect?

The narrator/protagonist of LOVE ME--AND DIE! is Johnny Slagle (not a great name for the hero of a book like this). Like W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner before him and Carter Brown’s Rick Holman after him, Slagle is a Hollywood troubleshooter, a private eye who’s on retainer to the movie studios to keep their big stars out of trouble. As such, he gets a call in the middle of the night from an aging, many-times-married screen idol who thinks he has just run over a woman while driving drunk in the middle of a rainstorm. He’s not sure, though, because he didn’t stop to check. That job falls to Slagle, who has to find out if his client is really a hit-and-run killer, and if so, figure out a way to cover it up.

Of course, things don’t stay that simple. Gamblers and starlets and thugs are involved, as well as a gun-toting cowboy from Oklahoma, and wouldn’t you know it, not only does Johnny get hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, but there’s another murder and he’s framed for it, which means he has to dodge the cops while trying to find the real killer. Yes, it’s a standard plot, but Keene and Brewer throw in some nice twists on it, holding back two of them until very late in the book.

The key to a book like this is the writing, and the pace never slows down for very long in this one, which is all to the good. For the most part, it lacks the intensity of some of Brewer’s other books, but there are a few scenes that vividly capture the sweaty desperation that threatens to overwhelm most of his protagonists. I got the feeling that maybe Brewer was holding back a little on his natural voice as he expanded Keene’s novella, perhaps in an effort to make the book sound more like Keene’s work. I don’t know the details of their arrangement, so I can only speculate. As it is, the blend is a good one. LOVE ME--AND DIE! is no lost classic or anything – it’s just a shade too generic for that – but if you’re like me and grew up reading and loving books like this, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy it.

Originally published as a digest-sized novel by Phantom Books, it was reprinted by Harlequin in the Fifties, Paperback Library in the Sixties, and Manor Books in the Seventies (the edition I stumbled across and read). A few copies of the earlier editions are available on-line, but they’re pricey. The Manor edition doesn’t show up at all. (A few years ago it was reprinted by Armchair Fiction in a double volume with YOU'LL GET YOURS by Thomas Wills (actually William Ard). I've seen claims that some of the Armchair Fiction books are abridged, but I don't know one way or the other. Just sayin'.) If you happen to have a copy of any of these editions on your shelves but have never read it, I think LOVE ME--AND DIE! is well worth the time.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 31, 2009.)

Review: The Sargasso of Space - Edmond Hamilton

I was in the mood for some classic, old-style science fiction, so I read “The Sargasso of Space”, a novelette by Edmond Hamilton first published in the September 1931 issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES, when it was still a Clayton pulp. The cover of that issue is by H.W. Wessolowski. I’ve never been a big fan of Wesso’s work, but I like this cover quite a bit. It’s taken right from Hamilton’s story, which is available on Amazon in an inexpensive e-book edition.

This is a near-space story, set entirely in our solar system, and it’s small in scope for a Hamilton yarn. No galaxy-busting epic here. The crew of the space freighter Pallas find themselves in dire straits indeed: due to a leak that wasn’t discovered until it was too late, the ship has lost its fuel and is adrift. It’s headed into the so-called Sargasso of Space, where the gravitational pull of all the bodies in the solar system is exactly equal, so powerless ships are stuck there. In fact, as our intrepid spacemen soon discover, thousands of dead ships have clumped together there, and the Pallas is soon added to this grim monument to gravitational forces.

But they also soon discover they’re not the only ones alive in this graveyard of spaceships. The stalwart second officer has come up with a plan that might save all of them, especially if they team up with the survivors of previously trapped ships. The question on which all their lives ride is—can those survivors be trusted?

I don’t think you’ll have much trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in this story. What matters is how much entertainment value Hamilton generates from it. Some of the reviews I’ve read online complain about the science. Hamilton makes it sound plausible, and it works for the story he wants to tell, and the story was published nearly a hundred years ago, so what do I care if the science is accurate? As Neal Barrett once said to me, “Who do I look like? Mr. Wizard?” (Those of you of a certain age will understand that reference.) Other reviewers point out the lack of characterization. Yeah, there’s not much, but I doubt if the readers of ASTOUNDING STORIES in 1931 cared about that. The wooden dialogue probably didn’t bother them much, either.

But what you get instead is a graveyard of wrecked spaceships! And guys in spacesuits fighting! And a beautiful girl to be saved! Did I want anything else when I sat down to read this story? No. No, I did not. I wanted action, adventure, and a sense of wonder, and that’s exactly whe I got. If you’re ever in the mood for the same things, you could do a lot worse than “The Sargasso of Space”.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Basket (1999)

As you know if you’ve read this blog for very long, I’m a sucker for inspirational sports movies. THE BASKET, from 1999, has the added appeal of being a historical movie about an era and setting that haven’t been done to death. The time is shortly after World War I, the place the wheat-farming country of eastern Washington state where a small community is still feeling the effects of the war. The son of one of the local families who lost a leg during the war returns home. A new teacher takes over the local school, bringing with him some opera records and a game that’s new to most of these farming families: basketball. And two youngsters, brother and sister, who are German refugees, come to live with the local doctor.

THE BASKET is pure fiction, not based on or inspired by true events, but that won’t stop you from being able to predict everything that’s going to happen in it. Tragedy strikes, people learn and grow, and it all comes down to a big game at the end as a team of local amateurs takes on an undefeated team from the big city, Spokane. The appeal of a movie like this with a script that doesn’t contain any surprises is how well it’s executed.

In that respect, THE BASKET is pretty good. The cast is led by Peter Coyote as the new teacher and Karen Allen as the mother of the boy who loses a leg in the war. Eric Dane, who went on to star in GREY’S ANATOMY and THE LAST SHIP, looks impossibly young as one of the students. Ellen and Joey Travolta, John’s sister and brother, show up in minor roles. Nobody else is anybody you’ve ever heard of, but the whole cast does a good job. And the movie looks great, really capturing the agricultural landscape and the feel of the times.

THE BASKET isn’t a lost gem. But it’s a pleasant, relatively heartwarming way to spend a couple of hours. The older I get, the more I feel that sometimes that’s plenty for me.