Review: Buccaneer Blood - H. Bedford-Jones

I was in the mood to read something by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones, and this excellent volume from Altus Press happened to be handy. BUCCANEER BLOOD collects five novelettes and novellas originally published in ARGOSY about Denis Burke, an 18th Century Irish mercenary, soldier of fortune, and pirate.

The first story, “Escape!”, appeared in the November 7, 1931 issue of ARGOSY. It’s 1703, and Denis Burke is serving in the army of French king Louis XIV along with some other Irish mercenaries. A falling out with the king and some other members of the royal court means Burke has to go on the run to save his life. His efforts to get out of France comprise the whole plot of this story, which includes plenty of swordplay, daring schemes, and banter, all of which plays out in Bedford-Jones’ usual clean, fast-moving prose. Does Burke get away? Well, there wouldn’t be any more stories in the series if he didn’t, would there?

Burke returns in “Luck of the Sea Burkes”, a novella that appeared as a two-part serial in the January 9 and January 16, 1932 issues of ARGOSY. He’s made it to the Spanish Main, along with a crew comprised mostly of Irish mercenaries who fled France with him. Once they reach the Caribbean, they become pirates, capture a Spanish ship, and are captured in turn by an evil Spanish aristocrat with a secret. Burke makes a daring escape, rescues a beautiful señorita, pulls off an audacious masquerade, and triumphs in the end, but in a way that leaves the door open for future adventures. This one is almost non-stop action, and of course, Bedford-Jones does it well.

By the time of “Spanish Gold”, a novelette from the March 19, 1932 issue of ARGOSY, Denis Burke is well established as a buccaneer, operating under the piratical alias Captain Mayo (he’s from County Mayo in Ireland, you see). When he gets a lead on a sunken Spanish ship full of treasure, he intends to retrieve it with his crew, but before the quest even gets underway, he’s kidnapped by a couple of rival pirate captains who hate him. Will Burke prove clever enough to escape them and grab the loot for himself? Bedford-Jones introduces a female pirate in this one, and she’s a great supporting character.

“Buccaneer Blood”, the title story of this collection, comes from the September 10, 1932 issue of ARGOSY. In this one, Burke’s masquerade as Captain Mayo is exposed, so he has to adopt a new identity to escape being caught and hanged by the French. In the process, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Spanish señorita, and once again, his fate comes down to his skill with a sword as he has to battle five opponents at once.

The final story in this volume is “Spanish Blood is Proud Blood” from the March 25, 1933 issue of ARGOSY. Burke and his señorita are on their way to be married, but before they can reach their destination, a hurricane blows their ship all the way to the coast of Central America. There they find more danger, as well as more treasure. This novelette is a fitting end to this series of yarns, which form a somewhat cohesive story. Cohesive enough, anyway, that I’m a little surprised Bedford-Jones never cobbled it together into a fix-up novel.

According to the Fictionmags Index, Bedford-Jones wrote other Denis Burke stories that were published in THE POPULAR MAGAZINE before these, and more published afterward in SHORT STORIES. Not having read them, I don’t know how they’re related, nor do I know right offhand if they’ve ever been reprinted. But I do know BUCCANEER BLOOD is a fine collection, and if you’re a Bedford-Jones fan or just enjoy pirate yarns in general, I give it a high recommendation. It's available in e-book and paperback editions from Amazon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Entrapment (1999)

I always enjoy movies with Sean Connery in them, so I’m not sure how we missed ENTRAPMENT when it came out in 1999. It’s a heist movie, with Connery playing a world-class thief and Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the insurance investigator who’s out to catch him. Through a series of plot twists, they wind up working together on a series of heists that become more complicated and dangerous as they go along. Then we get a bunch more plot twists before things wrap up in a satisfying manner.

Connery is, well, Connery, and you either enjoy that or you don’t. (I do.) Zeta-Jones is incredibly beautiful, and you either enjoy that or you don’t. (Again, I do.) Top-notch character actors Ving Rhames and Will Patton are on hand, but the movie really belongs to the two leads. There are plenty of “Sure, why not?” moments in this one, and in the end, the plot is the kind that works only if you squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right, but I found ENTRAPMENT to be a really entertaining two hours. One good thing about missing movies when they come out is that you’ve got some good stuff to watch later when you finally catch up to them.

Review: Never An Even Break - Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s softcore novel NEVER AN EVEN BREAK was published originally under the title PASSION PATSY and the Don Elliott byline in 1963 as an entry in the Midnight Reader line published by William Hamling. It’s been reprinted recently by Stark House, under what I’m guessing is Silverberg’s title for the manuscript, as part of a double volume with another softcore novel of his, STRIPPER. I read and enjoyed STRIPPER a while back and have now read NEVER AN EVEN BREAK.

The protagonist, if you can call him that, of this novel is Harry Fletcher, a mousy little accountant who has a gold-digging mistress, a bored wife, and a teenage son and daughter who are beginning to explore sex. This is a setup that’s bound to get worse, and so it does. Harry resorts to blackmail to finance his affair. His wife, already a drinker, starts hitting the booze even more and rekindles an affair with a lesbian girlfriend from far in her past. The kids get up to all sorts of things that are destined to end badly.

And boy, do they! NEVER AN EVEN BREAK is one of the bleakest novels I’ve ever read. As always with Silverberg’s work, though, it’s really well-written, and the prose just races along effortlessly to the story’s grim but inevitable conclusion.

Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get, the more I think I prefer the somewhat optimistic endings of Orrie Hitt’s softcore novels, contrived and far-fetched though they usually may be. But an occasional gut-punch like Silverberg’s books provide is worthwhile, too. The story in NEVER AN EVEN BREAK may not leave you with a smile on your face, but Silverberg’s skill as a yarn-spinner will. This latest double volume from Stark House is available in e-book and paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

A classic cover by J. Allen St. John graces this issue of the legendary adventure pulp ORIENTAL STORIES. And speaking of classics, this issue contains the story "The Sowers of the Thunder" by Robert E. Howard, a poem by REH, a collaboration between Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price, and stories by Warren Hastings Miller, S.B.H. Hurst, G.G. Pendarves, and the lesser known James W. Bennett, H.E.W. Gay, Grace Keon, and Lt. Edgar Gardiner. I have some reprinted issues of ORIENTAL STORIES, and of course I've read quite a few stories, by REH and others, that appeared there originally, but I don't think I've ever seen a copy of an actual issue, or of its successor, THE MAGIC CARPET. But that's okay. This whole issue is available on the Internet Archive if I ever decide to read it. I know I ought to, but there are just so many pulps and so little time . . .

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, September 1938

J.W. Scott liked to use blondes on his Western pulp covers instead of redheads, but he teams them with the usual Stalwart, Red-Shirted Cowboy and Wounded Old Geezer, as on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES. Ed Earl Repp is the author with the biggest name in this one, and he's on hand twice, once as himself and once as Brad Buckner. Other authors include the distinctively named Carmony Gove, Jack Sterrett, Rolland Lynch, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank, Luke Tyler (who sounds like a house-name but apparently wasn't), and Ken Jason and John Cannon, who were house-names. I don't own this issue or any other issues of this pulp, as far as I remember, but it looks pretty good. For a lower-rung Western pulp, WESTERN SHORT STORIES ran a long time, from December 1936 to January 1957.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Elvis and Anabelle (2007)

Quirky little indie films often leave me cold, but sometimes they work and I enjoy them. ELVIS AND ANABELLE is definitely quirky. Max Minghella plays Elvis, a young man who has secretly taken over his father’s undertaking business when his dad (played by the great Joe Mantegna) suffers a brain injury that leaves him unable to work. Blake Lively is Anabelle, a local beauty queen who collapses on stage right after winning a pageant and dies. Or does she? Elvis is about to embalm her when she suddenly comes back to life on the table. A predictably oddball romance between them is the result. Although they try to keep it a secret, eventually it comes out and causes much hoopla, most of it generated by Anabelle’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) and her stepfather (Keith Carradine).

As you can see, for an indie film this movie has a pretty darned good cast, and they all do excellent jobs. The script by Will Geiger, who also directed, is humorous, poignant, heartbreaking, and heartwarming. Some pretty dark stuff is hinted at, but it never quite goes there, and the ending is more satisfying than I expected it to be.

ELVIS AND ANABELLE was filmed in Texas, mostly around Austin and in the town of Lockhart, with a few scenes on South Padre Island. As soon as I saw the courthouse square in Lockhart, I knew it had to be in Texas, although I didn’t recognize it. My father and a friend of his owned the radio station in Lockhart 50-some-odd years ago when it first went on the air. KHRB, it was called, for Heath/Reasoner Broadcasting. I spent quite a bit of time there and was even an unpaid helper around the station for a while, but I haven’t been back to Lockhart since 1972, so I’m not surprised I didn’t recognize it. But Texas courthouses have a distinctive look.

Now that I’ve digressed, let me say that ELVIS AND ANABELLE is definitely worth watching, in my opinion. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Review: The Rider From Hell - Robert Ormond Case

I’ve seen the name Robert Ormond Case many, many times on the covers of Western pulps and on their Table of Contents pages. He wrote the lead novella in the August 1934 issue of STAR WESTERN, which I featured recently in a Saturday Morning Western Pulp post. Thinking I really ought to read something by him, I checked to see if anything was available in e-book editions, and to my surprise, the very novella I’d just mentioned was not only available as an e-book reprint, I already owned it and had completely forgotten that I did.

Well, I’m not one to ignore an omen like that, so I promptly read “The Rider From Hell”, which is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel, as it’s billed in its STAR WESTERN appearance.

If I had to guess, I’d say this yarn is set somewhere around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Two adventurers from Texas, seasoned frontiersman John Thurston and his young friend Dal Givens, are captured south of the border while smuggling ammunition to Mexican revolutionaries. They’re put on trial and thrown into a Mexican prison from which no gringo has ever come out alive, let alone escaped. The commandant of the prison has an idea, though: he knows the prisoners have stashed $5000 in gold somewhere north of the Rio Grande in Texas, so he’ll set up an “escape” for one of them, who will retrieve the gold and then return to the prison to ransom his friend. Dal Givens is the one who will go, leaving John Thurston locked up in the hellhole for the time being.

Of course, things don’t work out that way. Givens never returns with the ransom, and a spy for the commandant brings back the news that the young man has rejoined the outlaw gang with which he and Thurston used to run. Filled with hate at being double-crossed and abandoned like this, Thurston vows to escape for real, track down Givens, and have his revenge on his former partner.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that Thurston does get away and try to carry out his plan, but since this is one of those stories where very little is what it first appears to be, Case throws in plot twist after plot twist on the way to an inevitable showdown. Do some of these twists stretch credibility just a tad too much and verge on melodrama? Well, yeah, they do. Did I care? Not at all. Case makes the reader want to believe these things are possible, and so they do.

“The Rider From Hell” reminds me very much of the work of Case’s contemporary Frederick Faust, especially the physical and psychological torment through which he puts his characters. In fact, if I hadn’t known who wrote this one, I might well have believed it’s a previously unknown Max Brand yarn. This really makes me want to read more by Case. I didn’t know anything about him, so here’s some biographical info I found on-line.

Robert Ormond Case was a well-known Oregon author and a prominent, long-time resident of Portland. He was born in Dallas, Texas in 1895 and moved to Portland as a boy. He graduated from Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove, Oregon and went on to attend the University of Oregon.

In 1917, while a sophomore at the University, Case enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served 22 months with the 65th Artillery, CAC, including 52 consecutive days at the front. Case returned to U.O. and received a B.A. in 1920. During his years at the university he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi honorary journalistic society, and Sigma Upsilon honorary fiction society. In addition he was a member of the Cross-Roads philosophical society and founder of a campus humor magazine.

After his graduation from the University of Oregon. Case went to work as a reporter for the Portland Morning Oregonian. In 1921 he served as financial editor. From 1922 to 1925 he was involved in the Oregon State Chamber of Commerce. His career as a free-lance writer began in 1926 and soon thereafter published his first western, historically-inspired stories. He is best remembered as a writer of western stories, his most well-known dating from the 1930s through the 1950s. He wrote fourteen books and over 200 novelettes. In 1944 he received a Peabody award for the radio scripts of Song of Columbia. Most of Case's serials and short stories were written for national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and Country Gentleman.

Case spent most of his mature life in Portland, Oregon with periods of residency in New York and California. In Portland he was a member of the school board as well as the City Club and the Rotarians. He was a prominent member of the state Republican Party, particularly as a leader of the Conservative wing during the time of Wayne Morse. He spent the final years of his life in Oakland, California, where he died on 27 March 1964.

“The Rider From Hell” appears to be Case’s only fiction available in an e-book edition, but used copies of some of his novels are readily available and fairly inexpensive, and there are quite a few pulps containing his stories to be found on the Internet Archive. Like a lot of other Western fiction from that era, his work may not resonate with some modern readers, but I flat-out loved this story and give it a very high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, March 1939

Pith helmet alert! I think the cover on this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES may be by Richard Lyon, who did a lot of them for various Thrilling Group pulps in the Thirties. It's a striking cover, that's for sure. An oddity about this issue is that all the authors except one are best remembered for their Westerns: Philip Ketchum, Edward Parrish Ware, Rolland Lynch, Ben Conlon, and Harold F. Cruickshank. The one author who wasn't a prolific contributor to the Western pulps, Ray Millholland, is the only one who appears to have written a traditional Western yarn in this issue. I say "appears to" because I'm just basing that on the story titles. I don't have this issue and haven't read it. The Cruickshank story is kind of a Western, since it's an animal story and part of a series about a white wolf. I really ought to read more stories from THRILLING ADVENTURES. Most of the issues look great!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1948

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with an exciting and dramatic cover by Sam Cherry, who always delivered the goods. And I’ll have more to say about this cover later.

This issue leads off with another Tombstone and Speedy novelette by W.C. Tuttle, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones”. In this one, our intrepid range detective duo aren’t on the trail of rustlers for a change. As a favor to their boss at the Cattlemen’s Association, they set out to investigate a case of high-grading at a gold mine. But when they arrive on the scene, they find the mine owner and his lawyer both dead. Is it murder? What does it have to do with the kidnapping of an inept young drummer from back east who sells ladies’ ready-to-wear goods? Why’s everybody so interested in a beautiful young woman and her son? Tombstone and Speedy will untangle all those threads, of course, with a lot of banter and gunplay along the way. After being a little disappointed in the last yarn I read in this series, “The Hunches of Tombstone Jones” really hits the mark. The dialogue is funny, the action is good, the detective work, mostly by Tombstone, is canny, and the plot hangs together nicely. This is a top-notch Tombstone and Speedy story.

“Catch Rope” is the third and final story in Chuck Martin’s short-lived series about crippled range detective Jim Bowen. It’s a good hardboiled Western yarn in which Bowen goes after a gang of rustlers who have kidnapped a rancher. Martin is nearly always worth reading, and this is an enjoyable story. I hoped it would bring some resolution to Jim Bowen’s continuing storyline, but it doesn’t, which is a shame.

Nels Leroy Jorgensen started out as a hardboiled crime and mystery writer in BLACK MASK before concentrating on Westerns later in his career, and I’ve enjoyed a number of his stories in the past. “Bullet Trail to Bexar”, his novelette in this issue, gets off to a promising start. It’s set in Texas in the spring of 1836, during the Texas revolution, and is about a young Texan on a mission to San Antonio. He gets saddled with a beautiful young woman along the way, and she has an agenda of her own. This should be a good story, but it’s riddled with anachronisms and blatant historical errors, as well as continuity glitches such as the young woman’s stepfather suddenly becoming her half-brother for the rest of the story. I wound up abandoning this one halfway through. It just has too many problems for it to be entertaining to me.

“Killer, Here I Come” is by Robert J. Hogan, best-known for the G-8 series, of course, but he wrote quite a few Westerns as well. This is the second story in this issue where the protagonist has a crippled leg. In this case, he’s not a range detective but rather a saddlemaker and veterinarian. He’s a very likable character, and you can’t help but root for him as he has to deal with an old enemy turned bank robber. I didn’t like this one whole-heartedly—there’s some cruelty to animals in it, and I have a hard time with that—but it’s a pretty good story overall.

Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name. The story under that by-line in this issue, “Born to Hang”, is the one illustrated by Cherry’s cover. Actually, I strongly suspect this is another case of a story being written to match an existing cover painting, because the scene lines up perfectly with the story. I also think there’s a very good chance the story was written by editor Charles S. Strong, who was also Western writer Chuck Stanley, author of a regular non-fiction column in EXCITING WESTERN. It’s a good yarn about a drifter framed for murder, and its only real drawback is that the ending isn’t as dramatic as it might have been. Still an enjoyable story, though.

Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine has become one of my favorite Western pulp characters. In “Ride the Ghost Down, Ranger!”, he’s sent to find out who’s been attacking and burning out some homesteaders, which leads him to a mystery involving the inheritance of a valuable ranch. It’s a good story, and I’m convinced it’s the work of Lee Bond writing under the house-name Jackson Cole. Bond created the Navajo Tom Raine series and wrote more of the stories than anyone else, although C. William Harrison contributed quite a few, as well. This one ends with a big shootout between Raine and multiple bad guys, one of the trademarks of his stories.

The issue wraps up with “Reba Rides Alone” by D.B. Newton, one of my favorite Western authors. Of course, I can’t see that title without thinking about the country singer, but in this case, Reba is Mike Reba, a veteran outlaw who’s wounded and on the run when he encounters a young man determined to take up the owlhoot trail. This story is kind of predictable, but it’s very well written, and like all of Newton’s work, it’s worth reading.

This is a good issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN with a strong Tombstone and Speedy entry, a solid Navajo Tom Raine story, and the other stories are all okay with the exception of Jorgensen’s. If you have a copy, it’s certainly worth taking down from the shelves. If you don’t, the whole issue is also available on the Internet Archive.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Dancing Aztecs - Donald E. Westlake

I’ve read a lot of Donald E. Westlake’s novels over the years, but he was prolific enough that there are still a lot of them I haven’t read. Being in the mood to sample his work again, the one that came easiest to hand was DANCING AZTECS, a stand-alone comic thriller.

The set-up is fairly complicated. A corrupt businessman and a low-level crook are trying to smuggle into the country an ancient Aztec statue in the shape of a dancing priest. The statue is about a foot tall, made of gold, and has emeralds for eyes. It’s hidden among a shipment of copies that are intended as awards to be given out at a luncheon to the members of a club in New York City. Of course, there’s a foul-up, and the statue that’s worth a million dollars is given out in the place of one of the copies. Various people find out about this and start trying to find the valuable statue. Chaos of a humorous nature ensues, along with a considerable amount of action and romance.

What’s left to say about Westlake that hasn’t been said? You already know his style is smooth and very readable (although he does some things in this book with the timeline and POV shifts that most writers wouldn’t attempt – and makes them work). He weaves together a complex plot and a huge number of characters and somehow keeps everything straight so that it all makes sense. Not an easy task. DANCING AZTECS is very funny in places, and you can’t help but root for the characters, even the ones who are crooked. Overall, I prefer Westlake’s serious books to his comedies, but just about everything he wrote is worth reading and DANCING AZTECS is no exception. Reading it is a highly entertaining way to spend some time.

(This post first appeared in a somewhat different form on January 18, 2009, not long after Donald E. Westlake died. It was his passing that prompted me to read something by him. And it's still true there are quite a few of his books I haven't read. I probably ought to do something about that.)