Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Golden Dawn - Carlos Dengler

 

Sometimes on a dark night of the soul, you need music that's soothing. Or at least I do.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: The Last Pale Light in the West - Ben Nichols

 

I love raspy-voiced singers and world-weary songs like this. They resonate pretty strongly with me.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Oooh-Ahh (Catalina) - Mindi Abair

 

I really like Mindi Abair's music, and this one is perfect for the middle of the night when a guy's spirits need a little lift.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

That’s right. Somehow, I’ve managed to spend more than 70 years on this planet, and I’ve never seen CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON—until now.

This is another movie where there’s no need at all for me to talk about the plot. You’ve all seen it. So here are some things that struck me about this one.

This is a really well-made movie. The photography, the music, the Gillman suit, even the acting (which is sometimes not stellar in movies like this) are all top-notch. Those underwater scenes with Ricou Browning as the Gillman are just beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, Julie Adams in a seemingly endless assortment of skimpy outfits, including that iconic white one-piece swimsuit, is just breathtaking. What a lovely woman. And she turns in a decent performance, too.

Richard Denning is a good villain, although he’s not terribly villainous, just opposed to the other characters’ ideas. I like Denning. He played Mike Shayne in a one-season TV show based on Davis Dresser’s novels, and from what little I’ve seen of it, he was pretty good in the role.

One of the natives who’s killed early on by the Creature is played by Perry Lopez, who, many years later, was one of the two cops who harassed Jack Nicholson’s character in CHINATOWN. He was the less sympathetic of those two, not the one who says, “Forget it, Jake, it’s . . . Chinatown.”

Is this considered a horror movie? I always thought it was, but to me it seems to have more in common with Fifties science fiction movies like THEM! and TARANTULA.

Those are some of the things that occurred to me while I was watching this one. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the heck out of it and wondered how in the world I managed not to see it all these years. I’m glad I finally did, because CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is just a terrific movie.

Review: Celtic Adventures - D.M. Ritzlin, ed.

My ancestry is mostly British (which I assume includes some Scots, too) and Irish, so I’ve always had a fondness for Celtic heroes. The latest collection from DMR Books, CELTIC ADVENTURES, offers a fine assortment of such heroes, too.

After an informative and entertaining introduction by Deuce Richardson, the book opens with the poem “The Druids” by Kenneth Morris, an author whose name is familiar to me, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything by him until now. It’s an atmospheric poem that does a good job of setting the stage.

“The Devil’s Dagger” by the well-regarded writing team of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur and Farnham Bishop is set in 13^th Century Scotland and finds a young soldier trying to solve the seemingly impossible murder of one of the King’s officials. If he doesn’t, the father of the girl he’s fallen in love with will be executed for the crime. There’s some great action in this one including a lengthy swordfight that covers a lot of ground in the castle where the majority of the story takes place. I really like the way Brodeur and Bishop wrote. This is the first thing I’ve read by them, although I have a copy of their acclaimed novel IN THE GRIP OF THE MINOTAUR and need to get around to reading it. “The Devil’s Dagger” first appeared in the September 3, 1918 issue of ADVENTURE.

One of Robert E. Howard’s many Celtic heroes was Conan the Reaver, an Irish pirate who shared the same name as a certain Cimmerian. “People of the Dark”, from the June 1932 issue of STRANGE TALES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR, is actually one of Howard’s “past lives” yarns, in which a modern-day man bent on murder takes a fall in a cave, knocks himself out, and winds up reliving a break-neck adventure that happened to one of his ancestors (the above-mentioned Conan the Reaver). It’s a great story, too, full of action as Conan and a couple of companions battle a genuinely creepy race of little people who live underground (another common element in Howard’s work). I had read this one several times before, but it had been a while so I thoroughly enjoyed it all over again.

“The Harping of Cravetheen” is by-lined Fiona MacLeod, which was actually a pseudonym for William Sharp, another author unfamiliar to me. It appeared originally in a collection called THE SIN-EATER, published in 1895. It’s a very well-written tale about romance, a young woman forced to marry a man she doesn’t want to, feuding families, infidelity, and violent death, along with a supernatural element and some harp music. I think. To be honest, half the time I wasn’t sure what was going on in this one. It’s worth reading for the sheer beauty of the language, but it wasn’t really to my taste, either.

“A Claymore for the Clan” is by Donald Barr Chidsey, one of my favorite pulp authors, and appeared originally in the July 1948 issue of ADVENTURE. Told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, it’s another tale of blood feuds and desperate sword battles. Chidsey, equally at home with hardboiled contemporary crime yarns and fast-paced swashbucklers like this one, is always worth reading, and this story barrels along in very entertaining fashion.

Clyde Irvine’s story “The Horror in the Glen” first appeared in the April 1940 issue of WEIRD TALES. A Scottish warrior avenges the murder of his family by a rival clan, but not before being banished for seven years to a supernatural realm and acquiring eldritch powers. This is another well-written story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Irvine’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up and found that he published 18 stories during the early Forties, most of them adventure yarns in JUNGLE STORIES. I’ll have to keep an eye out for his work.

The highlight of this collection (other than REH) is “Grana, Queen of Battle” by John Barnett. This was published as a complete novel in the October 11, 1913 issue of THE CAVALIER, but it’s actually a series of six linked short stories about a beautiful female pirate in Ireland during the Elizabethan era. Grana can handle a sword when she needs to, but she usually outwits her opponents. After inheriting a castle and ships from her father, a famous pirate, she deals with mutinies, English tax collectors, treacherous Spaniards, and rival pirates. Finally, she’s captured by the English and sentenced to hang. This leads to a smashing climax that manages to be very satisfying while still hitting a slightly bittersweet note. I don’t know anything about John Barnett, but this is a terrific yarn.

This volume concludes with a poem by Robert E. Howard, “Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhi Mar Or”. I don’t know what that translates to, but the poem itself is dramatic and strikes an excellent ending note to this collection.

CELTIC ADVENTURES is available in paperback and e-book editions on Amazon, with an excellent cover by Jim FitzPatrick, and I give it a high recommendation if you’re a fan of fine adventure stories. Up above, I mentioned that my ancestry is mostly British, but the part that’s not? That’s Scandinavian, so naturally, I like Viking tales, too! And DMR Books just happens to have published a book called VIKING ADVENTURES, as well as a four-volume collection of Arthur D. Howden-Smith’s famous pulp series about Swain the Viking, so I have a pretty good idea about some of the books I’m going to be reading in the reasonably near future . . .

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Winged Hussars - Sabaton

You know it's a weird night when I'm listening to Sabaton at two in the morning, but hey, sometimes that's the way it goes.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: I'll Love You - Joe Sample

Man, this is really a restful, relaxing song. Just what I need on a night like this. 

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Come As You Are - Mindi Abair

Mindi Abair is one of my favorite musicians, and I really like the easy-going vibe of this song. Sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, you want to wallow in melancholy, but sometimes you want something to lift your spirits. This song does that for me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 27, 1938

I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive, though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.

That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street & Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.

Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues, approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!

Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice story.

And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it and this story is no exception.  Plenty of tough action makes this one a winner.

I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect. Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling. As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.

I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.

But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course, and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway, although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that because I really enjoyed this one.

I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another really good story.

One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole, but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.

Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think. If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Under the Canopy - David Arkenstone

I don't think I'd ever heard of David Arkenstone, but I heard this song on the radio the other day (the Spa channel on SiriusXM) and immediately liked it. It sounds to me like it ought to be the theme song from a two-fisted, pulpish, jungle adventure movie from the Fifties starring, say, John Payne and Rhonda Fleming. PIRATES OF THE CONGO! I'd watch that.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Rainy Day Song - David Garfield and Herb Alpert

I've been a Herb Alpert fan for close to 60 years now, and it's great to hear the instantly recognizable sound of his trumpet on this new song. I had all of Alpert's albums with the Tijuana Brass during the Sixties and played them constantly. In more recent times (the past 20 years), I've been a frequent listener to his album SECOND WIND, which includes my all-time favorite song of his, "Fandango". I don't believe I've ever posted that one. Maybe I will the next time I can't sleep. For now, enjoy this one.

Review: Sara and the Mad Dog - Stephen Mertz

Music was very important to Steve Mertz. Along with writing, it was really one of his passions. He was an accomplished musician, too, and it showed in his work. His novels that feature a music industry background have a real sense of authenticity to them.

So it’s fitting that his final novel is a thriller based on the music business. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a wonderful amalgam of music history, gangster history, and fiction as the Carter Family, the First Family of Country Music, travels to New York City for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1932, arriving just in time for Sara Carter, the group’s vocalist and wife of A.P. Carter, to get involved with Vince “Mad Dog” Coll, a ruthless Irish mobster who’s engaged in a gang war with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. That’s a great concept for a novel!

Mertz does it justice, too, with a fast-paced narrative in which the action takes place in less than 24 hours. The story moves back and forth between Sara, A.P., Maybelle Carter (the third member of the group), Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) assorted gangsters, and a fictional police detective named Tom Devlin. Mertz weaves all their storylines together very skillfully and creates a real sense of momentum and suspense. Great storyteller that he was, he really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

The historical elements of the plot are well-researched and accurate, too, as Mertz explains in an afterword detailing what was fact and what was fiction. All of it comes together in a superb novel that’s the best thing I’ve read so far this year and maybe my favorite of all the Mertz novels I’ve read. I’d hate to have to pick between this one and HANK AND MUDDY, a fantastic yarn about Hank Williams and Muddy Waters. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a fitting conclusion to a legendary career, and it gets my highest recommendation. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions from Wolfpack Publishing.

And on a personal note, damn, I hate to think the phone’s never going to ring again with Steve on the other end, eager to tell me about some book or writer or the project he was planning to work on next. There was nobody else in this business like him. Nobody. He was, as they say, the Genuine Article, and I expect I’ll miss him from now on.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Lujon - Dan Fontaine and His Orchestra

I've posted the original Henry Mancini version of this song before, but it was quite a few years ago. And this is one of those cases where I think the cover is better than the original. Dan Fontaine and His Orchestra do a great job with older music like this. When I'm having trouble sleeping, like tonight, and battling one of those dark nights of the soul as I often do, I find music like this really soothing. If there are any songs those of you reading this find particularly soul-soothing, I can always use some recommendations in the comments.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Shaker Song - Manhattan Transfer

I love this performance beyond all reason. A while back I posted the original instrumental version of "Shaker Song" by Spyro Gyra and said that I'd post the vocal version by Manhattan Transfer, but I never got around to it. Let's remedy that.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Bird (1988)

I’ve seen most of Clint Eastwood’s movies, both as star and director, over the years, but one I missed until now is BIRD, a biopic about the famous jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, who died young in the Fifties after abusing his body with drugs for many years.

Now, I’m a sucker for a good biopic, I love jazz, and Eastwood’s movies are very watchable. As a director, he reminds me of Howard Hawks: he does his job, tells his story, and gets out of the way. An Eastwood movie will never dazzle you with visual pyrotechnics.

Forest Whitaker plays Parker and does a great job. Most of the music is actual recordings of Parker and other musicians playing, but when Whitaker is on-stage, I never failed to believe it was him blowing those notes. The rest of the cast, all journeymen actors, no real stars, is also very good. The script, which jumps around quite a bit in time as it covers Parker’s life, is a little hard to follow at times, but not distractingly so. And the movie looks great. It really captures the look and feel of the Forties and Fifties and I didn’t spot any anachronisms, although that doesn’t guarantee there weren’t some I missed. And the music, oh, man, the music is great.

The problem with BIRD is that at more than two and a half hours long, and with relentlessly bleak subject matter, it’s just too much. There are a few touches of humor, but mostly it’s grim, grim, grim. Eastwood, being a noted lover of jazz and composer and musician himself, would surely disagree with me. This was clearly a passion project for him, and he did a good job and can be proud of it. But for a regular viewer like me, even though I’m a jazz fan, I’m glad I finally saw BIRD but would never watch it again. I will, however, continue listening to the music from that era because it’s pure greatness.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Something For Cat - Henry Mancini

I came across this video a few months ago and must have played it a hundred times since then. The animation is cute and appeals to my fondness for the Sixties, but I usually just listen to the music, which really resonates with me. It's from the soundtrack of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, and I've seen that movie so I must have heard the song in it, but I don't recall it from that at all. Instead, to me it sounds like it should have been the theme song from an early Sixties private eye TV series, and I can almost see the opening montage in my head as I listen to the music. I was a huge fan of PETER GUNN and 77 SUNSET STRIP and all the others from that era, and this would have fit right in. One of these days I might just write something like that. It would be a pretty limited market, but it sure would be fun.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Outlaws, December 1929

Walter Baumhofer is one of my favorite pulp cover artists, and I like this whimsical depiction of a harmonica-playing cowboy fending off an empty tomato can hurled at him by some listener, but I'm not sure how appropriate the scene is for a pulp subtitled "A Magazine of Hair-Trigger Hombres". But maybe that description refers to the music critic instead of the fella with the harmonica. I'd expect something more hard-bitten from a magazine called WESTERN OUTLAWS, but hey, owlhoots can enjoy a tune now and then, too. The best-known author in this issue is William Colt MacDonald, one of the big names of the pulp era and all the way through the Sixties, really. Chart Pitt and Thomas Thursday are on hand, too. Other than that, the writers are all unknown to me: Wolf Wilson, Willard E. Hawkins, Albert Wm. Stone, J.R. Johnson, Al H. Martin, R.T. Barkley, L. Simpson Turner, Charles P. Gordon, and Ludwig Stanley Landmichl. I may have heard, vaguely, of one or two of those, but I don't know anything about them. Still, I like the cover, a little odd though it may be, and MacDonald was always worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Odds Against Linda - Steve Ward (Norman Rosenthal)

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on January 16, 2009.)

Steve Ward’s ODDS AGAINST LINDA seems to be the only book Ward ever published, at least under that name. The writing is good enough, and the name so generic, that I have to wonder if Ward is a pseudonym.

The narrator of this novel is Peter Conrad, a Korean War vet who lost a leg in that conflict. Following the war, he moved to Mexico to make a living as a commercial artist, but as the book opens, he’s returning to San Francisco with his new wife Linda. Before he even gets out of the airport, though, he gets knocked out, kidnapped, and Linda disappears. From there on, Things Get Worse. Soon enough, Pete’s on the run, charged with a murder he didn’t commit, and as he himself notes, a guy with one leg can’t do much running.

This is a short novel (107 pages), but the author packs in a lot of stuff: a piano-playing dwarf, beautiful strippers, double identities, gunplay, brutal fistfights, torture, truth serum . . . You get the idea. Halfway through, there are two big twists, one of which you’ll see coming. But the other you might not. I didn’t. The whole plot is familiar enough that you’ll probably have a pretty good idea where the author is going, but he throws in enough oddball notes along the way and the writing is smooth enough so that I found reading the novel a fast, very entertaining experience. Highly recommended if you run across a copy of it.

But I’d still like to know if Steve Ward was really somebody else.

(In the comments on the original post, Bill Crider clued me in that Steve Ward was really Norman Rosenthal, who wrote another Ace Double novel, SILENCED WITNESS, under his own name. Below is more information about him that I got from an email exchange with his son.)

 “I found your blog, posted January, 2009, about the ACE paperback book title, "Odds Against Linda." I was very pleased to read what you had to say. Steve Ward was a pseudonym for Norman Rosenthal, who also wrote "Silenced Witness." They are the same person and that I know because it is my dad. He loved to write and wrote on the side while holding down a regular job. Unfortunately he had no other books published. He was working on several, but died before any could be completed.”

“If you would like, here's some biographical information on my father. During WWII my dad was a bombardier on a B-24. He flew out of Italy and while on a mission over Vienna was shot down and became a POW. He spent his time in the famous Stalag Luft III until General Patton liberated the camp at the end of the war.

In 1947, he graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He and my mother lived in California for almost 20 years where he worked as a general manager for an established newspaper publisher. While in California he belonged to the Northern California Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and at one time held an officers position in the chapter. Such people as Lenore Glen Offord and Anthony Boucher also belonged at that time.

My parents then moved to Ohio where he became Advertising and Marketing Director for Jacobs, Visconsi & Jacobs, a shopping center developer. (Yes, the same Jacobs that owned the Cleveland Indians, but not until several years after my dad retired).

My dad not only loved to write, but to read and listen to music. He had a very extensive library and record collection. Writing was a passion of his, but it's hard to support a family on writing alone. "Silenced Witness" was published in 1955. He then wrote "Odds Against Linda" under the name of Steve Ward which was published in 1960. Both were written while living in California. Over the years he had worked on several novels but because of work, was never ever able to finish any of them to his satisfaction. However, after his retirement, he did have two short stories published in the Sunday magazine section of the "Cleveland Plain Dealer." He retired in the late 1980s and really started to delve into his writing. Unfortunately shortly afterwards he became ill with Alzheimer's and it progressed rather rapidly before he could finish any other books. He died in November, 1998.”

(Thanks to Norman Rosenthal's son for this information. I'm glad I was able to pull it all together into one post. I have a copy of Rosenthal's other novel SILENCED WITNESS somewhere, but I've never read it.)