Review: The Blonde and Johnny Malloy - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

A couple of weeks ago, I read and enjoyed William Ard’s SHAKEDOWN, a breezy, fast-moving private eye yarn recently reprinted by Stark House in a double volume with THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. I’ve read that one now, too, and as a grim, gritty hardboiled crime novel, it’s quite a contrast to SHAKEDOWN. But it’s every bit as good, if not better.

Johnny Malloy is a young convict working on a prison road gang in Florida, serving a ten-year sentence for driving drunk and causing an accident in which two people were killed. He’s five years into that sentence when a couple of unexpected things happen. A beautiful blonde in a red car starts driving by the place where the prisoners are working every day, giving them an eyeful. And then, without any warning, Johnny is paroled, an arrangement set up by his brother-in-law, a gambler and nightclub owner who has considerable political influence.

Johnny is grateful for being released, of course, but he soon discovers that his brother-in-law didn’t act out of the goodness of his heart. Far from it, in fact, since the guy has a plan that involves Johnny winding up dead. Oh, and that beautiful blonde? She works for the brother-in-law, of course, and before you know it, Johnny realizes he might be safer back on the road gang.

Ard makes the wise decision to spin this tough yarn in a relatively compressed time frame of five days, Monday through Friday, and he packs a lot of action and plot twists into those days, too. There’s a heavyweight prize fight with a fortune bet on it, a coalition of gangsters, cops, beautiful women, kidnapping, and a whole pile of trouble for Johnny Malloy. He handles it well. He’s not incredibly tough, or smart, for that matter, but he gets by. He’s a good protagonist, the villains are suitably despicable,  and the blonde is a better developed character than most beautiful babes in books like these.

I really enjoyed THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. Ard was a fine storyteller, no doubt about that. This one was published originally as a paperback by Popular Library in 1958 and is one of Ard’s later novels. He died much too young in 1960 at the age of 37 and no doubt would have given us many more fine novels if he had lived longer. You can read this one in that top-notch double volume from Stark House, available in paperback and e-book editions. If  you’re a fan of hardboiled novels, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Spring 1949

This is actually a fairly sedate cover by Allen Anderson on this issue of PLANET STORIES. There's a good group of writers inside, too, including Ray Bradbury (with a reprint from MACLEAN'S), Damon Knight, Alfred Coppel, Henry Hasse, Basil Wells, Stanley Mullen, and the less well-known (at least to me) Robert Abernathy and George Whitley. I don't own this issue, but it's available on-line here if any of you want to check it out. (With all the pulps that I own and all the ones that are on-line, I swear I could sit and read pulps all day, every day, and never even come close to reading all the ones I'd like to. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but what're you gonna do?) 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Sweethearts, October 1940

RANGELAND SWEETHEARTS was a short-lived (three issues) Western romance pulp from Popular Publications. This is the first issue. I don't know who painted the cover. As usual with the Western romance pulps, most of the authors are men who wrote traditional Western pulp yarns, too: Art Lawson, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Lee Floren, Rolland Lynch, and John Paul Jones. Not familiar with that last one other than the historical figure of the same name, but this one wrote quite a bit for the Western pulps from the Twenties to the Fifties. Of course, there are some female authors on hand, too: the very prolific Isobel Stewart Way, Leta Zoe Adams, and Myrtle Juliette Corey. I don't own this issue, but with those authors, I imagine it's pretty good. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Rogue Cop - William P. McGivern

William P. McGivern is one of those authors whose work I’ve been aware of for decades without ever reading much of it. I read his World War II novel, SOLDIERS OF ’44, which is part war novel (which works pretty well) and part military/legal thriller (which didn’t work, as far as I’m concerned). A few years ago I read his private eye novel BLONDES DIE HARD, written under the pseudonym Bill Peters, which I liked. You can read my comments on it here.

Now I’ve read his novel ROGUE COP, and it’s easily the best McGivern I’ve read so far. Philadelphia police detective Mike Carmody is the rogue cop of the title, up to his neck in graft and corruption. His younger brother Eddie is also a cop, but of the honest variety, and when Eddie winds up with the local mob after him, Mike has to take sides and choose whether to protect himself or his brother.

There’s probably not a lot in this book that will surprise the veteran reader of hardboiled thrillers, but boy, the pace really rockets along. McGivern’s prose is just as smooth as it can be, and he does a great job of creating rounded, morally conflicted characters, chief among them Mike Carmody himself. There are plenty of tough action scenes, and a great line near the end. I’ll definitely be seeking out more McGivern novels, and if you haven’t read ROGUE COP, it gets a high recommendation from me.

(I've actually managed to read something else by William P. McGivern since this post originally appeared on October 31, 2008, but it was one of his science fiction novels rather than one of his crime novels. You can find my review of THE GALAXY RAIDERS here. But I still intend to read more of his crime yarns.)

Review: Longhorn Stampede - Philip Ketchum

A couple of weeks ago, I read the issue of RANCH ROMANCES that contained the first installment of Philip Ketchum’s serialized novel “Longhorn Stampede”. I didn’t read that installment in the pulp because I thought I had the novel version and would probably read it one of these days. Well, it turns out that I didn’t have a copy, but then I discovered that it was published by Popular Library with an A. Leslie Ross cover, and temptation got the better of me. I found an affordable copy, ordered it, and read it as soon as it arrived. That turned out to be a good choice all around!

Llano Smith is a Texas cowboy helping drive a trail herd to the railhead in Kansas. When the owner of the herd falls sick, Llano heads for a nearby town to see if he can find a doctor. This turns out to be a mistake, because the settlement is actually run by an owlhoot who is in league with a rustling kingpin. Llano winds up in all sorts of trouble, including being framed for murder and thrown in jail to await trial and hanging.

Ah, but Llano has a secret, you see. He’s actually a reformed outlaw from Texas named Sam Todd who hit the vengeance trail when a gang of carpetbaggers wiped out his family after the war. He’s settled the score with all of them except one, and he’s lost the thirst for revenge on that one, figuring it’s better to take a new name and start a new life. (None of this is a spoiler. Ketchum lays out all the background pretty early in the book.)

Anybody who’s read many traditional Western novels and/or watched many Western movies will be able to foresee most of what happens in this novel. Coincidence plays a rather large part in Ketchum’s plot, but that doesn’t really bother me. What’s important is that he was a writer with an excellent hardboiled style who really knew how to keep a story moving along. And there are a few minor surprises as everything doesn’t work out exactly like you might expect it to.

Llano Smith is a fine protagonist, plenty tough and not always likable but still sympathetic enough for the reader to root for him. Ketchum does a very good job with the inevitable romantic triangle involving Llano, a rancher’s beautiful daughter, and a beautiful saloonkeeper in the outlaw town. At times these scenes are actually pretty racy for the time period. The action scenes are gritty and effective and build up to a smashing climax.

My copy of LONGHORN STAMPEDE has some damage to the front cover, which is probably why it was fairly affordable, but that’s it in the scan anyway. The cover isn’t really a wraparound illustration, but the back cover has more Ross art, so I’m including it as well. I love those Popular Library editions from the Fifties. Consistently good books with good covers. I’m glad I was prompted to pick this one up and read it.

Review: The Bullet Garden - Stephen Hunter

Years ago, I read Stephen Hunter’s novel HOT SPRINGS, the first book in his Earl Swagger series. I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I read the sequel PALE HORSE COMING, and loved it, too, although I thought it wasn’t quite as good as HOT SPRINGS. When the third book in the series, HAVANA, came out, I read it, of course, and it was okay, but not nearly as good as the first two. And after that, I never read anything else by Hunter, although I’ve always intended to and I actually own most of his books.

But then I noticed that there’s a fourth Earl Swagger novel called THE BULLET GARDEN, and it’s a prequel to the others, taking place during World War II, so I had to give it a try. THE BULLET GARDEN is set during summer 1944, after D-Day but well before the Battle of the Bulge. The American forces have gotten bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy because a mysterious German sniper—or snipers—seems to be able to see in the dark and is eliminating American officers and NCOs, destroying morale and making it impossible for the Americans to advance. Gererals Eisenhower and Bradley want somebody to figure out what’s going on with the sniper and put a stop to it, and who better to do that than Earl Swagger, a Marine sergeant who has already made quite a reputation for himself fighting in the Pacific.

All this is established fairly quickly, and the rest of the novel follows Earl as he’s flown to England, made a major in the relatively new OSS, and launches an investigation into the sniper problem while trying to navigate the tricky back channels of politics and espionage, an area which is not one of Earl’s natural talents.

Hunter’s reputation is that of a guy who writes really well about guns and shooting. This is absolutely correct. His action scenes are very realistic and have an undeniable air of authenticity. THE BULLET GARDEN is full of great characters and scenes and bits of dialogue.

But the plot is incredibly slow to develop and muddled by page after page of description and background that’s well-written but doesn’t really do anything except show off Hunter’s prose. I’m no fan of stripped-down modern writing. I don’t mind some telling instead of showing. A lot of modern thrillers devoid of description and oh-so-careful never to mention the weather or use a speech tag other than “said”—and as few of those as possible—strike me as bland and all sounding alike. But dang, Hunter really goes overboard in the other direction in this book. It’s just too blasted wordy. Then he adds an unpleasant subplot that may be necessary for the overall story arc but really comes across as anticlimactic. There are also several cameos by real-life writers that skirt right up to the edge of being too cutesy but don't quite go over it.

Despite all that, as I said above there are some great scenes, some thrilling, some heartbreaking, that I suspect will stay with me. I still love Earl Swagger as a character and he’s in fine form in this novel. There’s enough real suspense that at times I was flipping the pages, in a hurry to find out what was going to happen. If you’ve read the first three books in this series, by all means you should read THE BULLET GARDEN, too. It’s available on Amazon in e-book, audio, hardcover, and paperback editions. But like HAVANA, it’s just okay.

Also, this novel isn’t just a prequel to the other Earl Swagger books, but it's also a prequel to Hunter’s first novel, THE MASTER SNIPER, published more than forty years ago. I happen to have a copy of that one. I think I’ll have to read it soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, July 1935

Nobody could accuse TERROR TALES, or any of the other Weird Menace pulps, for that matter, of being subtle and restrained. That's certainly true of this cover by John Howitt, which is one of the more lurid that I recall. The lineup of authors inside this issue is pretty much an all-star one for this genre: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst, Nat Schachner, and James A. Goldthwaite writing as Francis James. All those guys wrote other things, too, of course, but they were prolific and well-regarded contributors to the Weird Menace pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

Since LEADING WESTERN was published by Trojan, making it a Spicy Pulp at least by association, you'd expect the covers to have attractive women on them, and the March 1946 issue is no exception. I don't know who painted this cover, but if I had to guess, I'd say H.W. Scott. The big galoot with the dangling quirly looks like his work. Inside this issue, the only author you've likely heard of is Giff Cheshire, whose story made the cover. The other writers on hand are Adolph Regli, Frank D. Compagnon, Henry Norton, and Mark Lish. Norton and Lish sound vaguely familiar to me, the other two not at all. I don't own this issue and wouldn't want to venture a guess as to its quality, but the cover is okay.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: West on 66 - James H. Cobb

Take a Korean War vet who’s an LA county sheriff’s deputy in 1957, have him leave Chicago after visiting relatives and head back to California along Route 66 in a souped-up hot rod, drop him down in the middle of a mystery involving several murders, vengeful gangsters, a fortune in missing loot, and a beautiful young woman on the run, and what do you have? The ingredients of a vintage Gold Medal novel, right?

Nope. WEST ON 66 by James H. Cobb was published by St. Martin’s in 1999. The plot is fairly complex, the pace races right along (as you’d expect in a book that features several fast cars), and Kevin Pulaski, the narrator/hero, is extremely likable. The action scenes are very good; there’s a long, explosive scene near the end that’s just wonderful, so much so that it overshadows the rest of the book a little. While WEST ON 66 isn’t quite the pitch-perfect recreation of an era and a writing style, it’s darned close to that level. My biggest complaint is that in a few places the author gets a shade too cute for my taste, such as when the hero is searching for a pay phone to make an important call and thinks that it sure would be handy if somebody invented a phone you could carry around in your pocket. I’m sure I do that myself sometimes, too.

I’m not a big reader of near-future techno-thrillers, but Cobb’s debut novel, CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN, is great, probably the best novel I’ve ever read in that genre. It’s pretty easy to find and well worth looking for. So is the sequel, SEA STRIKE, which is almost as good. I imagine the other two or three books in the series are, too; I just haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m glad I came across WEST ON 66, though. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on October 17, 2008. Looking at Amazon, I was a little surprised to see that WEST ON 66 is still available as an e-book, and it's even on Kindle Unlimited. So are all five of the books in the series that begins with CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN. I read the first two in that series but never got around to the others. I'm tempted to read them now, but I'm afraid too much time has passed. I really recommend WEST ON 66, though, as well as CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN and SEA STRIKE. Great books. There were six short stories featuring Kevin Pulaski published in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE between 2004 and 2009. I thought they had been collected in a book, but apparently not. I'm sure they're worth reading, too. Cobb passed away in 2014.)

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

Johnny Stevens is a private detective working for an agency in New York. His boss sends him to Miami Beach on what seems like a simple assignment: Johnny is supposed to keep tabs on a doctor who may be blackmailing a young wastrel/playboy who happens to be the son-in-law of a canned food tycoon. The client is actually the public relations firm that represents the father-in-law. Johnny doesn’t know what the outcome is supposed to be and doesn’t really care. His assignment is just to keep track of where the doctor goes at night and who he sees. Just a simple shadowing job, right?

Well, you know it’s not going to stay simple, and sure enough, there’s a murder attempt the first night Johnny is on the job. On the second night, the killer succeeds, and even though the murder takes place in front of 300 witnesses, Johnny finds himself on the spot for it and has to figure out who the real killer is in order to clear his name. That’s not the only murder before this case is wrapped up, either. Throw in several beautiful young women for Johnny to juggle, some gangsters, gambling dens, and nightclubs, and you have all the elements for a highly entertaining private eye novel of the sort that I grew up reading.

SHAKEDOWN was published originally in hardcover by Henry Holt in 1952 and reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in 1954. The by-line on the book is Ben Kerr, but the actual author was William Ard, the popular Fifties writer who passed away in 1960 at the much too young age of 37. In addition to the stand-alone mystery and suspense novels and a two-book series featuring PI Barney Glines that he authored as Ben Kerr, he wrote a well-regarded series under his own name featuring PI Timothy Dane and a couple of books starring ex-con Danny Fontaine. He started a series starring private eye Lou Largo but wrote only part of the first book before dying. Lawrence Block completed that book, and John Jakes wrote several more under Ard’s name featuring Lou Largo. Ard’s most successful work during his lifetime may well have been the Western series he wrote in the late Fifties starring adventurer Tom Buchanan, published under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Ard wrote five of those and started the sixth one, which was completed by Robert Silverberg. Used copies of the Buchanan novels were easily found in used bookstores when I was a kid, and I eagerly bought and read all of them, without having any idea who actually wrote them, of course. Nor did I care, at that point.

The fine folks at Stark House Press are about to reprint SHAKEDOWN and another of Ard’s Ben Kerr novels, THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY, in a double volume with an excellent introduction by Nicholas Litchfield. I’ll be getting to THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY soon, but for now I can give this book a high recommendation based on SHAKEDOWN. It’s very fast-paced, written in a breezy, entertaining style, and Johnny Stevens is a likable protagonist, tough but not overly so, smart but not brilliant, quick with a quip and charming with the ladies. I’m a little surprised that this is his only appearance, but hey, Ard was busy with other things. I love this kind of book and always will. I had a really good time reading SHAKEDOWN.