A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Twice Murdered - Laurence Donovan

TWICE MURDERED is another in the outstanding series of pulp reprint collections coming out from Black Dog Books. Laurence Donovan is probably best known for the house-name novels he wrote starring Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective, The Skipper, and The Whisperer, but he also had a long and prolific career producing detective and Western yarns for a variety of pulps. This volume collects a dozen stories published in the Thirties and Forties in the pulps PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SPICY DETECTIVE, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, and SUPER DETECTIVE, under Donovan’s name and his pseudonym Larry Dunn.

Donovan had three main strengths as a writer: he was able to come up with complex plots, he used interesting settings, and he wrote fast-moving, effective action scenes. Most of the protagonists in these stories are private eyes, and like Roger Torrey’s private eye characters, they share a lot of similarities despite having different names. I think Donovan’s shamuses come across a little more as individuals, though.

All of the stories included here are good solid pulp tales, consistently entertaining. Some of them are stand-outs, though. “Death Dances on Dimes” is set in a dime-a-dance joint, and it’s unusual in that it has a female narrator. There’s something else about her that’s unusual for the pulps, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is. “The Man Who Came to Die” is about an insurance racket and manages to be pretty creepy while at the same time packing enough plot and action for a full-length novel into a novelette. “The Greyhound Murders” is another complicated murder mystery with an interesting setting (a dog racing track) and a high body count. “Footprint of Destiny” is about the movie business and features the sort of plot that Dan Turner is usually untangling. I guess Dan was out of town that week.

In addition to the stories, editor/publisher Tom Roberts provides a fine introduction that includes more biographical information about Donovan than I’ve seen anywhere else, as well as an extensive bibliography of Donovan’s work. TWICE MURDERED is an excellent addition to the Black Dog Books line, and if you’re a pulp fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on June 14, 2010. And even though more than 15 years have passed since then, TWICE MURDERED is still available in both e-book and paperback editions, and my high recommendation of it stands.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Golden Goshawk - H. Bedford-Jones

H. Bedford-Jones remains one of my favorite pulp authors (favorite authors, period, in fact), and THE GOLDEN GOSHAWK is a prime example of why. This is an excellent collection from Black Dog Books. As usual, publisher Tom Roberts has put together a nice-looking volume, and he also provides an informative introduction about the origins of the four stories reprinted here.

The title story first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the rare and sought-after pulp, THE DANGER TRAIL, one of the Clayton pulps. By the time the second story, “The Jest of the Jade Joss”, appeared a year later in August 1929, the name of the magazine had been changed to WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES. Bedford-Jones wrote two more stories in this short-lived series featuring Captain Dan Marguard, but they went unpublished when WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES folded. A couple of years later, those stories were published in a different pulp, FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES. All four of them appeared under the pseudonym Captain L.B. Williams.

What about the stories themselves? Well, they’re great fun. Dan Marguard is a free-lance trader, adventurer, and mercenary in the South Seas, skippering an old schooner called the Gadfly. In the course of these yarns, he retrieves a stolen idol, rescues some kidnap victims, walks calmly into the stronghold of a headhunter tribe to retrieve the dried head of an old friend, and prevents a bloody native uprising. In the process, he usually finds a way to latch on to a decent payoff for himself and his two Chinese “elder brothers” who raised him. The stories are smartly plotted and told in Bedford-Jones’s usual clean, terse, exciting prose. I don’t know how authentic they are in terms of history and geography, but HB-J had the knack of making everything in his stories sound absolutely accurate and believable. He even goes to the trouble in one case of having the supposed author, Captain L.B. Williams, provide an afterword detailing the inspiration for the story, adding another layer to the fiction.

Bedford-Jones was good at this. During the Thirties, he brought back the good captain to serve as half of a joint by-line on his “Ships and Men” series that ran in BLUE BOOK. Those stories all appeared as by H. Bedford-Jones and Captain L.B. Williams. BLUE BOOK, like numerous other pulps, sometimes ran biographical features on the authors who wrote for them, and on the inside front cover of one issue was a biography and an artist’s portrait of the wholly fictional Captain L.B. Williams. The editors had to be in on the joke, but the readers at the time weren’t.

For fans of pulp adventure fiction, I can’t recommend THE GOLDEN GOSHAWK highly enough. Great yarns, a great author, and a little-known character who appeared in hard-to-find pulps adds up to a must-have as far as I’m concerned.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 4, 2010. Even though 15 years have passed, this great collection is still available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. And my recommendation of it remains as high as ever.)

Hell on the Bottom - Carl Jacobi

Carl Jacobi is best remembered as an author of weird fiction, of course, but he also wrote a lot of straight adventure yarns for the pulps. HELL ON THE BOTTOM is a 2001 chapbook from Black Dog Books that reprints two of those adventure stories and features the first-ever publication of another one that went unsold when Jacobi wrote it in the late Thirties.

The first of these, a novelette called “Captain Jinx”, appeared in the August 1940 issue of RED STAR ADVENTURES. It was bought by the Frank Munsey Company for ARGOSY but wound up in another Munsey pulp, as sometimes happens. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck sea captain (the South Seas and the Far East were just full of down-on-their-luck sea captains during the pulp era) who is hired to take command of a ship owned by a rather disreputable line, and in addition to the regular cargo, he's supposed to deliver six bottles of heliotrope perfume to a certain lady. (Jacobi’s original title for the story was “Heliotrope Cruise”.) Could there possibly be something shady about this deal? Our hero thinks so, especially when somebody tries to kill him and a beautiful blonde shows up on a Chinese junk . . . and she wants the perfume, even though she’s not the lady for which it was intended. This is a well-written, really enjoyable story. The plot twists are pretty predictable, but that doesn’t take away from its entertainment value.

“The Caves of Malo-Oa” is the never-before-published story, sent by Jacobi’s agent Lurton Blassingame to the pulp SOUTH SEAS STORIES, which promptly lost it for several months before finding the manuscript, only to reject it. A great treasure is hidden on an uncharted island in the caves of the title, and after it are a beautiful girl, a ship’s captain who can’t be trusted, and a down-on-his-luck wireless operator (this during a time when being a ship’s wireless operator was still a romantic, two-fisted occupation). Honestly, I don’t know why this story didn’t sell to some adventure pulp. It’s well-written, moves right along, has interesting characters, and I had a good time reading it.

The third story, “Hell on the Bottom”, appeared originally as “Drowned Destiny” in the May 1939 issue of the Ace pulp 12 ADVENTURE STORIES. This is a deep sea diving yarn set in the Caribbean, as the protagonist attempts to recover from a sunken ship half a million dollars in gold that was intended to finance a Central American revolution. But since Jacobi wrote this intending to sell it to THRILLING MYSTERY, it’s actually a Weird Menace story and the treasure is supposed to be protected by monsters and evil spirits. The explanation for all the apparently supernatural menaces is rushed and pretty lame (as often happened in Weird Menace stories), which may explain why Margulies rejected it and it wound up over at Ace. But the actual deep sea diving scenes are excellent and the story is still fun.

I don’t know how many of these Black Dog Books chapbooks there were, but I bought most of them directly from the publisher, Tom Roberts, and really enjoyed them. Tom went on to do many beautiful trade paperback pulp collections under the Black Dog Books imprint, but I have a special fondness for these early chapbooks. They have a lot of charm and reprinted some great material. I’m glad I've finally gotten around to reading this one. I have EAST OF SAMARINDA, the other collection of Jacobi’s pulp adventure stories, and plan to get around to it fairly soon. It would be all right with me if someone reprinted even more of them.

Forgotten Books: The Python Pit - George F. Worts

I wouldn’t have guessed that it’s been more than ten years since I read, enjoyed, and blogged about SOUTH OF SULU, the first collection of George F. Worts’ Singapore Sammy stories from Black Dog Books. It seems more recent than that, and the stories are still pretty fresh in my memory, which means they were good ones, I guess. Now I’ve read THE PYTHON PIT, the second Singapore Sammy collection, also published by Black Dog Books, and thoroughly enjoyed it as well.

Singapore Sammy is really Samuel Larkin Shay, red-headed American adventurer in southeast Asia during the 1930s. The character first appeared in 1931 in a series of adventure yarns published in the pulp SHORT STORIES (the ones collected in SOUTH OF SULU). Sammy is searching for his father, a conman named Bill Shay, looking for vengeance because the old man deserted Sammy’s mother, and also because Bill Shay has possession of a will that means Sammy will inherit a fortune if he can get his hands on it.

Later that same year, Worts moved the series over to ARGOSY. The first four stories to appear there are the tales collected in THE PYTHON PIT, starting with “Sapphires and Suckers”, a novella which was serialized in two parts under the title “Singapore Sammy” in the December 12 and December 19, 1931 issues of ARGOSY. It serves as an adequate introduction to the character for anybody who hadn’t read the earlier stories in SHORT STORIES, explaining about Sammy’s quest to find his father. He gets mixed up with a beautiful young woman whose father is a dangerous criminal and who, in partnership with Bill Shay, has sold the young woman’s fiancee a worthless sapphire mine. Or is it worthless? That becomes the question, leading to intrigue, double-dealing, and considerable danger for Sammy. He’s good at staying a couple of steps ahead of everybody else, though . . . except for his father, who always seems to give him the slip.

More than a year passed before Sammy reappeared in the three-part serial “The Python Pit”, in the May 6, 13, and 20, 1933 issues of ARGOSY. At 30,000 words, this is almost a novel. Sammy and his sidekick, Lucifer “Lucky” Jones, reluctantly agree to take a beautiful young woman to the remote island where her father has been mauled by a tiger. The problem is, the island, called Konga, is rumored to be inhabited by a race of gigantic cannibals and haunted by the ghosts of all their victims. They set sail on their schooner, the Blue Goose, anyway. Sammy expects to run into trouble, and that’s what happens, since nothing about the situation is exactly what it appears to be at first. There’s a ton of action in this one, and Sammy comes face to face with Bill Shay again. Worts massages the back-story in this one, revealing that the villainous Shay is actually Sammy’s stepfather (whether that was the intention all along, I don’t know, but I sort of doubt it). He also introduces another recurring character to be a thorn in Sammy’s side, the lovely but treacherous Shanghai Sally. Worts manages to get all this in without ever letting up on the breakneck pace and the vivid writing, which makes “The Python Pit” one of the best pure pulp adventure yarns I’ve read in a long time.

Singapore Sammy next appears in “Isle of the Meteor”, a complete novelette published in the August 19, 1933 issue of ARGOSY. Lucky Jones is off on another adventure when this yarn takes place, so Sammy has to handle all the danger himself when he agrees to help out a dying sea captain and deliver a cargo of supplies to an isolated island where a group of communist-leaning, anti-war Americans established a colony during the Great War (World War I, to us). Of course, when Sammy gets there, surprises are waiting for him, most of them quite perilous, including another encounter with Shanghai Sally. Bill Shay is mentioned in this one but doesn’t appear. It’s a good, fast-moving tale with some particularly brutal scenes near the end.

The final story in this volume is “A Whisker of Buddha”, originally published as “Buddha’s Whisker” in the May 26, 1934 issue of ARGOSY. Sammy is in bad shape when this one opens, having had ownership of the Blue Goose stolen out from under him and Lucky Jones while he was drugged, by none other than Shanghai Sally, of course. He wakes up in Rangoon, in a fog from the mickey Sally slipped him, but then some of the local criminals start approaching him, wanting to hire him for a big job. This tells Sammy something big is up, so he finds Lucky and before you know it, they’re up to their necks in an adventure that involves infiltrating a secret ceremony that can get them killed and stealing a small, jewel-encrusted chest that’s supposed to contain an authentic hair from Buddha’s beard. This is the weakest story in the collection because it takes a while to get going, but once it does it’s pretty darned good, with lots of exciting scenes.

It also lays the groundwork for the next story, the only full-length novel in the series, THE MONSTER OF THE LAGOON, which I also happen to have in reprint. As much as I enjoyed THE PYTHON PIT, I’ll probably get to it fairly soon.

Forgotten Books: Terror, Inc. - Lester Dent

I’ve been a fan of Lester Dent’s work for more than 50 years, ever since I picked up the Bantam Books reprint of his Doc Savage novel METEOR MENACE from the paperback spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore and plunked down my 45 cents for it. Since then I’ve read nearly all of the Doc Savages (I’m still saving a few for the proverbial rainy day) and a lot of Dent’s other work.

This collection, from the always excellent Black Dog Books, features six non-series novellas by Dent that were published in the pulps DETECTIVE-DRAGNET and TEN DETECTIVE ACES (a retitling of the same magazine) in 1932 and ’33, just before and after he started writing the Doc Savage series. Weird Menace stories were just becoming a sub-genre about that time, so these aren’t quite Weird Menace, but they’re in the same neighborhood. One of the main differences, as Will Murray points out in his introduction, is that the protagonists are two-fisted professional detectives, rather than the civilians who take the lead in Weird Menace stories. But the atmosphere in these yarns often borders on the sinister and creepy.

Such as the opening of the title story, “Terror, Inc.”, from the May 1932 issue of DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, in which Kerrigan, a private eye from New York who has been summoned to Los Angeles for a job, opens the door of a car where he’s supposed to meet his mysterious client, and a skeleton topples out, with a lightning bolt mark on the skull that’s the trademark of the killer who calls himself The Spark. Now, if you can read an opening like that and not want to keep going, you’re definitely made of different stuff than me.

The second story, “The Devil’s Cargo” (DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, July 1932), doesn’t have any of the macabre stuff, but it’s still a good detective action yarn, with private eye Steve Harden negotiating his way through a maze of violence involving three rival groups who are after some sort of secret. Each of the groups believes that Harden is working for one of the others, and Harden has no idea what’s going on and just wants to find out the truth and stay alive. This one moves like a rocket until the end, which admittedly isn’t quite as compelling as I hoped it would be.

“The Invisible Horde” (DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, September 1932) seems like a dry run of sorts for THE SPOOK LEGION, a Doc Savage novel Dent wrote a few years later. The plots aren’t really similar, but both involve a gang of crooks who discover the secret of invisibility. The protagonist of this one is a scientist who happens to be a former Secret Service agent. Not the most believable of characters, maybe, but there’s plenty of wild action, as you’d expect, so in this case I don’t really care.

 “The Whistling Death”, from the March 1933 issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, like so many of Dent’s Doc Savage novels, revolves around a mysterious, grisly murder method that causes its victims to sweat blood. New York private eye Cleve Dane is summoned to Tampa for a case involving a shady financier who disappeared with five million dollars worth of gold certificates. The case turns into a wild chase through a rainy night after an embalmed corpse that keeps getting stolen. Dent really packs both action and plot into this one; it’s like a condensed novel. And maybe it’s the Florida setting and the fact that Dane seems to be two or three steps ahead of everybody else, but this story really reminded me of a Mike Shayne yarn. Which is a good thing indeed.

“The Cavern of Heads” (TEN DETECTIVE ACES, April 1933) has a great title and a headlong plot that kicks off with a box containing what appears to be a human head to the detective agency where Dave Lacy works. It’s not actually a head (not really a spoiler, since that’s established almost right away), but rest assured, heads will roll before this yarn is over. Lacy is described more like Monk Mayfair, almost as wide as he is tall, and at one point he takes off his shoes and climbs a wall using fingers and toes like Doc Savage. Dent was writing these stories at the same time as he was getting Doc’s series off the ground, and it’s fun to spot these cross-pollinations. There’s a beautiful platinum blonde, a beautiful redhead, a mysterious anthropologist who collects, yes, human heads, and a seemingly impossible murder method. The thing that’s behind it all has a Doc Savage connection, but I’ll remain mum on that since it might give too much away. This story is atmospheric and creepy as well as action-packed, and it’s just a whole lot of fun.

The book wraps up with “Murder Street”, from the May/June 1933 issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, and Dent’s love of both gadgets and bizarre murder methods shows up strong in this one. Detective Wes Kaine needs the gadgets to do his job and survive, because he’s undersized (although he can handle himself in a fight). He reminded me a little of Donald Lam as he investigates a case of bodies buried under recently repaired streets. Of course, there’s a connection between the murder victims which leads Kaine into a case where he finds himself in deadly danger more than once.

All six of these stories are great fun, with “The Cavern of Heads” being my favorite of the bunch. Nobody did headlong action better than Dent. This would be a decent introduction to his work if you haven’t read it before, although there are probably other things that would be better for that. But if you’re already a Dent fan, I guarantee you’ll have a good time with TERROR, INC.

Now Available From Black Dog Books

Black Dog Books has six new titles now available for order, and it's a pulp bonanza!

The Garden of TNT by William J. Makin—The compete adventures of the Red Wolf of Arabia. With an introduction by Mike Ashley.

Dying Comes Hard by James P. Olsen—Two-fisted investigator "Hard Guy" Dallas Duane knocks the crime out of these oil field mysteries. With an introduction by James Reasoner.

The Voice of the Night by Hugh Pendexter—Jeff Faschon, Inquirer, is called in to solve a string of baffling mysteries. With an introduction by Evan Lewis.

Tarrano the Conqueror by Ray Cummings—A war between worlds as Tarrano the Conqueror attempts to take over the Earth. With an introduction by Tom Roberts.

Death Has An Escort by Roger Torrey—Crime comes in many forms, great and small—but no crime compares to murder! With an introduction by Richard A. Moore.

and

Windy City Pulp Stories No. 15—celebrating H.P Lovecraft and the Street & Smith comics.

As noted above, I wrote the intro for DYING COMES HARD, and it's a really good book, as purely entertaining as anything I've read recently. I'm sure the others are all great as well and I look forward to reading them. I've read some of the Red Wolf of Arabia stories in BLUE BOOK and really enjoyed them. Roger Torrey is another long-time favorite of mine. Tom Roberts does a beautiful job with these books, and if you're a pulp fan you can't go wrong with anything he publishes.

Forbidden River: Gold! - Frederick Nebel

The great Frederick Nebel collection FORBIDDEN RIVER concludes with the simply-titled novella "Gold!", from the May 1931 issue of NORTH-WEST STORIES. This one is something of a departure from the other stories in this volume. It takes place in Alaska during the spring, so there are no shoeshoes or dog teams or frozen rivers. It also has a little more of an epic scope than the others, as mining tycoon Brant Winters takes on a syndicate that wants to move in and take over Brant's mine as well as the town he's founded. The first move made by the villain and his henchmen is to ruin the bank that Brant owns. That launches an explosive series of avalanches, ambushes, and murder that finally leads to a pitched battle for the town.

This would have made a great late Forties bigger budget Republic Pictures movie with John Wayne playing Brant and maybe Forrest Tucker as the villainous Dirk Rood. That's really how it came across to me. Nebel piles the troubles on Brant until you don't see how he's possibly going to come out on top (even though you know he will), and there's action galore, a little humor with a sidekick named Banjo (a good part for Gabby Hayes or Fuzzy St. John), a few poignant moments, and only a touch of that mushy stuff. As good as the other stories are—and they're top-notch, no doubt about that—this is probably my favorite.

And FORBIDDEN RIVER is one of the best books I've read this year. If you like pulp adventure fiction at its peak, this collection from Black Dog Books gets my highest recommendation.

Forbidden River: The Roaring Horde - Frederick Nebel

"The Roaring Horde", from the March 1932 issue of FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, finds former lawmen-turned-prospectors Clint Edwards and John Sabbath heading north into the wilds of Alaska when they run across a group of travelers in trouble. These pilgrims are all relatives from California, and they're on their way to the settlement of Hardluck Flat to claim some land they're going to inherit from a dying uncle. But out of the three guides they've hired, two have already been murdered, shot down from ambush, and the third is so spooked that he quits and abandons the immigrants. Edwards and Sabbath have no choice but to take over the chore of getting the group to Hardluck Flat. The fact that one of the travelers is a beautiful young woman plays a part in that decision, since Edwards falls for her the moment he lays eyes on her.

Getting their new-found charges to the settlement is no easy task, but even once that's accomplished, Edwards and Sabbath find themselves neck-deep in murder, lynch mobs, and more trouble. Both of them will have to risk their lives to find out what's behind the affair and set things right.

Frederick Nebel was just about perfect for the sort of short novel collected in FORBIDDEN RIVER. He packs plenty of plot into the stories, and there's room for character development, too. Although Clint Edwards is a stalwart, likable hero in "The Roaring Horde", his sidekick, the dour and deadly John Sabbath, is a fascinating character, too. I don't know if Nebel ever wrote any more about him, but he certainly could have if he wanted to.

All in all, this is another fine story in one of the best books I've read this year. You can head over to the Black Dog Books website to check it out if you haven't already.

Forbidden River - Frederick Nebel

The title story of this great collection from Black Dog Books originally appeared in the June 1930 issue of FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY. Instead of a trapper or a prospector or a gambler, the protagonist of Frederick Nebel's novella "Forbidden River" is a Chicago lawyer. Dick Berens is on his way to a friend's hunting lodge in Canada for a vacation when he encounters a beautiful and mysterious young woman on the train. When she disappears, Berens wants to find out what happened to her, which results in a tumble from the train and being stranded in the north woods. And when he does succeed in finding the girl, he also finds himself deeper in trouble involving a murder, a sinister stranger, and a couple of dogged Mounties.

This story has more of a mystery element than the first two stories in the collection, and more romance, too. Nebel keeps things perking along nicely, as usual, although I wish Berens had used his background as a lawyer more in trying to untangle the dangerous mess in which he finds himself. Overall, "Forbidden River" is a very entertaining yarn and maintains the high quality of this volume.

Forbidden River: A Gambler Passes - Frederick Nebel

Moving on the second tale in the collection FORBIDDEN RIVER from Black Dog Books, "A Gambler Passes", from the January 1930 issue of FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, is an important story among Frederick Nebel's work, because it may be an unacknowledged prequel to his most famous series, the hardboiled tales of a private eye named Cardigan that ran in DIME DETECTIVE. The protagonist of "A Gambler Passes" is one Jack Cardigan, a former prospector who abruptly turns gambler, much to the disgust of his partner. (Nebel would use a similar plot point two years later in "Wolves of the Wild", which I wrote about last week.) Cardigan has a good reason for his decision, although he keeps it to himself.

However, this is only a subplot of the story, which revolves around Cardigan being convicted of murder by a shady miners' court, over a killing that he carried out in self-defense. Faced with hanging, he escapes and sets out on an odyssey across the frozen North that winds up with plenty of action and plot twists.

Nebel's description of the frigid landscape is extremely vivid in this yarn. To say that the reader is able to feel the cold in the words is a cliché, but it's also true. There's some fine, naturalistic writing in this story. Cardigan's romance with a miner's beautiful daughter is a bit more on the melodramatic side, but it's still effective. The ending is particularly satisfying.

If the Cardigan in this story is the same one who shows up later in DIME DETECTIVE, then clearly a lot happened to him between those two points in his life. Nebel either chose not to fill in that gap, or more likely just never thought of it. But even if it's not the same character, "A Gambler Passes" is still a fine, stirring tale, and it's one more good reason to head over to the Black Dog Books website and order a copy of FORBIDDEN RIVER.

Forbidden River: Wolves of the Wild - Frederick Nebel

I've read plenty of Frederick Nebel's hardboiled detective yarns in my time, beginning nearly 50 years ago with "Winter Kill", a Kennedy and MacBride story in THE HARDBOILED DICKS, the iconic anthology edited by Ron Goulart. I'd never read much of his pure adventure fiction, though, until recently. Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books is publishing several volumes of Nebel's adventure stories, and the first one I've read is FORBIDDEN RIVER.

The collection begins with an excellent introduction by Roberts that provides more information about Nebel's life and career than I've encountered before and concludes with a biographical sketch of Nebel's life by Evan Lewis and a comprehensive bibliography of his fiction compiled by both men. In between are five top-notch novellas that appeared in ACE-HIGH NOVELS, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, and NORTH-WEST STORIES.

The first is "Wolves of the Wild", from the April 1932 issue of ACE-HIGH NOVELS, an action-packed Northern that finds old sourdough Shorty McWhirtle showing up in the mining town of Mushroom City with some gold dust from a legendary lost lode. An all-or-nothing bet with gambler Jim Cameron forms an unlikely alliance between the two men, but Shorty has an ulterior motive: Jim's father was an old friend of his, and he wants to get the young man away from the decadent life in Mushroom City.

This situation leads to a fast-paced blend of murder, mistaken identities, double-crosses, and shootouts in the snow. Nebel never lets the action slow down for very long, but he also keeps a firm hand on the plot and everything ties up neatly.

Every story in this collection is substantial enough to deserve a post of its own, so I'll stop there and just say that FORBIDDEN RIVER is a fine collection of adventure fiction and well worth reading. You can order it directly from the Black Dog Books website.

News From Black Dog Books

The Black Dog Books website is temporarily offline do to ye olde publisher
overlooking to pay his hosting renewal by the appropriate deadline.

I expect the website to be back online in 24 to 48 hours.

Thank you for all the emails of inquiry. Your shared concern is appreciated.

Tom Roberts
Publisher
Black Dog Books

Forgotten Books: Raider of the Seas - Warren Hastings Miller

Despite all the pulps I've read over the past 45 years or so, there are still a lot of pulp authors whose work I've never sampled. Until recently, Warren Hastings Miller fell into that category. I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of him until Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books published a volume of Miller's South Seas adventure yarns called RAIDER OF THE SEAS, which is now available in an e-book edition as well as its original print edition. Roberts provides an excellent introduction about Miller's life and work.

The stories in RAIDER OF THE SEAS feature Jim Colvin, the big, two-fisted captain of a tramp steamer, and his small but smart and scrappy chief engineer Johnny Pedlow. They encounter a dangerous array of pirates, wreckers, feuding sultans, and murderous natives but survive by a combination of courage, cunning, and fighting prowess.

A pair of unusual women also play important roles in these tales. Miss Jessie, who by her description sounds a lot like Aunt Bee from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, is an American expatriate who can clean out a table full of tough sailors at poker or use a rifle to gun down a marauding pirate with equal coolness and skill. Lai Choi San is based on an actual female Malay pirate who also served as the model for Milton Caniff's classic character The Dragon Lady a few years after these stories of Miller's were published originally in the pulps FRONTIER STORIES and ALL-FICTION. (One side note: FRONTIER STORIES, which later became a Western pulp, started out as a magazine featuring stories in exotic settings all over the world, not just the Old West.)

Miller's style isn't fancy, nor are his plots complicated. But the stories race ahead with the sort of driving urgency that the pulps did so well, and they have an undeniable air of authenticity. Miller was personally familiar with these settings and was an expert on boats and sailing, including so much detail that sometimes a non-sailor like me doesn't really know what he's talking about. It's all clear enough from context, though, and anyway, the action doesn't slow down long enough to worry about things like that.

I don't know if any more collections of Miller's stories are in the works, but I'll certainly read them if they are. I really enjoyed RAIDER OF THE SEAS and give it a high recommendation.

New This Week

No new print books this week, but I did pick up three more e-books from Black Dog Books: THE SILVER MENACE/A THOUSAND DEGREES BELOW ZERO, a pair of early science fiction novellas by Murray Leinster; THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER, a collection of Middle Eastern adventure yarns by G.G. Pendarves; and DEAD MEN TELL TALES, a collection of Craig Kennedy scientific mysteries by Arthur B. Reeve. I've read a lot of Leinster's work over the years and enjoyed all of it. I've heard of Reeve's Craig Kennedy stories but never read any of them. Pendarves is a new author for me. I expect to enjoy all three books. (These are all available as print editions directly from Black Dog Books, too, of course.)

New E-Books from Black Dog Books

Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books has announced that three more e-books are now available: KILLER'S CARESS by Cary Moran, PETER THE BRAZEN by George F. Worts, and RAIDER OF THE SEAS by Warren Hastings Miller. Check 'em out!     

Black Dog Books Flood Sale

(I know you've heard about this already. So go buy some books!)

From Tom Roberts:

Over the holiday weekend I went into the BDB storage facility—namely the basement of our home—to find standing water. Storms from the hurricane effect.

For anyone that reads, collects or appreciates books, further description is pointless.

The water damaged not only parts of the home, but a portion of BDB stock as well as personal effects and some of the book collection.

While the water has now been removed the cleanup and salvaging goes on while the drying out continues.

In an attempt to aid in the financial recovery from our disaster, the following new releases are now marked down with flood sale prices.

---

 

 Bring 'Em Back Dead by George Fielding Eliot
The first three exciting cases of Dan Fowler, G-Man. With an introduction by Matt Hilton.
Trade paperback/290 pages. Published at $29.95. Now $20.95!
http://www.blackdogbooks.net/index.php?Itemid=11&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=6&item_id=118




In the Name of Honor by Albert Payson Terhune
A Civil War-set historical drama of a wrongly accused man attempting to clear his name and regain the hand of the women he loves.
Trade paperback/289 pages. Published at $16.95. Now $11.95!
http://www.blackdogbooks.net/index.php?Itemid=13&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=7&item_id=141




The Rajah From Hell by H. Bedford-Jones
A Hindu prince seeks retribution for an ancient offense. Now four men have been marked for murder! Does the prince carry out his threat? Or can his revenge be thwarted? With an introduction by James Reasoner.
Trade paperback/100 pages. Published at $10.00. Now $7.00!
http://www.blackdogbooks.net/index.php?Itemid=11&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=6&item_id=143




Dusty Ayres—Invasion of the Black Lightning by Robert Sidney Bowen
An evil foreign powers threatens the safely of the United States. Can Dusty rally the troops in time to stop their advance?
For the first time, the initial three novel-length adventures of Dusty Ayres are brought together in one unparalleled volume.
Trade paperback / 266 pages. Published at $24.95. Now $17.50!
http://www.blackdogbooks.net/index.php?Itemid=13&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=7&item_id=127

Additional backlist titles will be marked down with flood sale prices later this week. Shop early and often to take advantage of the savings.

Now Available: The Rajah From Hell - H. Bedford-Jones

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of author H. Bedford-Jones. Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books has just published a collection of three short stories and a novelette by Bedford-Jones that appeared in BLUE BOOK in 1946 and 1947, and taken together these stories form a short novel of murder and revenge set in Los Angeles and San Francisco shortly after World War II. I was privileged to write the introduction for this volume, and if you're looking for a suspenseful, well-written thriller, it gets a high recommendation from me. You can check it out here.

Dead Man's Brand - Norbert Davis

I first encountered the work of Norbert Davis in Ron Goulart's anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS (one of the most important and influential anthologies of the past fifty years, if you ask me), which included a story featuring Davis's private eye character Max Latin, "Don't Give Your Right Name". Great stuff, and since then I've read many other pulp mystery stories by Davis. He's probably best known for his trio of novels featuring a PI named Doan and a Great Dane known as Carstairs. I have these but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

I knew Davis had written other things besides mysteries, but I wasn't really aware he had done Westerns until Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books published DEAD MAN'S BRAND, a collection of eight of Davis's stories from various Western pulps. (And that's Tom's artwork on the cover, by the way.) As you might expect if you're familiar with Davis's work, they're all top-notch yarns.

"A Gunsmoke Case for Major Cain" (DIME WESTERN, October 1940) is a frontier legal thriller with an exciting courtroom scene and a neat twist. It was also Davis's lone film sale, serving as the basis for the Wild Bill Elliott vehicle HANDS ACROSS THE ROCKIES, as detailed by Bill Pronzini in his introduction and Ed Hulse in his afterword. "Their Guardian From Hell" (STAR WESTERN, March 1937) is a hardboiled tale featuring a self-loathing gunman who protects a family of settlers from the villains out to steal their land. In "Leetown's One-Man Army" (STAR WESTERN, October 1941), a drifter named California Tracy with a score of his own to settle finds himself in the middle of a war between a cattle baron and some sodbusters, a traditional plot that Davis enlivens with some fine writing and a nice twist. The title story, "Dead Man's Brand", is from the November 1942 issue of STAR WESTERN. In it, drifting cowboy Dave Tully tries to claim an inheritance and finds himself framed for a murder: his own. "The Gunsmoke Banker Rides In" (STAR WESTERN, July 1942) is another well-plotted Western mystery about a banker who's surprisingly fast with a pair of .41 caliber derringers.

This volume also includes three stories from earlier in Davis's career. "Death Creeps" (ACTION STORIES, December 1935) finds troubleshooter Dave Silver being hired to find the Creeper, a mysterious murderer who kills from the darkness. In "Sign of the Sidewinder" (WESTERN ACES, June 1935), Tom Band, an American cowboy framed for a murder he didn't commit, is broken out of a Mexican prison to carry out a mission of vengeance for his benefactor. This is my favorite story in the collection, a great noir adventure yarn. Tom Band returns in the almost as good "Boot-Hill Bait" (WESTERN ACES, November 1935), which finds him on the trail of a fortune in outlaw loot. If there are any more Tom Band stories, I'd love to read them.

In all of these stories, Davis's smooth prose is a joy to read, and he handles humor, emotional torment, and lightning-paced action all with equal ease and effectiveness. These are simply some of the best-written Western tales you'll ever read, and DEAD MAN'S BRAND is a great collection. It gets my highest recommendation.

Free E-Book Friday from Black Dog Books

Due to a technical glitch at Amazon our free eBook offering last week of Horse Money was only made available to Kindle Prime users instead of the general public.

We are offering Horse Money again today as a free eBook download through Amazon. Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity and get this great collection of  four hard-boiled novellas of crime and intrigue around the Sport of Kings.

Horse Money—The Cases of Chief Van Eyck, Race Track Detective. With an introduction by Robert J. Randisi.

Known from Saratoga to Belmont and throughout the racing circuit, Chief Van Eyck keeps the bookies and fix games in check—whether using a little strong-arm, or the nickel-platted death securely tucked in his shoulder holster.

And Van Eyck is never above picking up a few greenbacks on the side himself, thanks to an inside tip or two from the jockey club.

Grab a stool, order a strong one and slid to the edge of your seat as the ponies and Van Eyck both give a thrill ride from wire to wire!