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.

Review: Hero Stuff - Frederick C. Davis (WINGS, February 1928)

The Age of Aces website recently posted the short story “Hero Stuff” by Frederick C. Davis. Since Davis is one of my favorite pulp authors, I went ahead and read it. This is from the February 1928 issue of the aviation pulp WINGS. According to the Fictionmags Index, it’s the first of 20 stories featuring high-flying, two-fisted newsreel cameraman/pilot Nick Royce. In reading the story, it seemed to me like there might have been another one that came before it, and since this was in the second issue of WINGS, I suspect that Davis may have created Nick Royce specifically for the magazine’s debut issue and continued with him for a while. But lacking a copy of the January 1928 issue, there’s no way for me to confirm that, of course. Pure speculation on my part.

At any rate, “Hero Stuff” is narrated by Art Buckley, the head of the aerial unit for the World News Reel Company, an outfit that flies out of an airfield located on Long Island. As this story opens, the head of the company arrives with an unexpected guest: a matinee idol from Hollywood who’s starring in a new flying picture set during the Great War. The movie is all in the can except for one stunt, and the World News Reel’s pilots are going to help the star and the picture’s director pull it off. It involves the plane being flown by the star going into a tailspin, causing him to have to bail out over No Man’s Land. There’s considerable risk to the parachute stunt, which the star is going to perform himself. But he needs somebody to actually fly the plane, and that’s the job Nick Royce gets.

Unfortunately, Nick’s vixenish girlfriend is also on hand, and the Hollywood star makes a play for her. This leads to considerable friction and even some fisticuffs between the two men whose lives will be entwined once they’re thousands of feet in the air in a canvas-and-wood crate.

“Hero Stuff” is well-written, as you’d expect from Davis, and he keeps things moving along briskly with touches of humor and action and danger. I really enjoyed this yarn. It’s no lost classic, but I found it very entertaining, enough so that I’d love to see somebody do a complete collection of the Nick Royce stories. I’d be happy to read more of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, August 1935

This issue of DETECTIVE TALES starts off with a good, dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer and has a strong line-up of authors inside: top pulpsters Frederick C. Davis, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, Wyatt Blassingame, Franklin H. Martin, J. Lane Linklater, R.T.M. Scott, and George Armin Shaftel (once as himself and once under the pseudonym George Rosenberg), plus lesser-known George Edson and Wilton Hazzard along with house-name Emerson Graves. Davis, Page, Blassingame, and Ernst would make this pulp well worth reading for me if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fighting Western, October 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my beat-up copy in the scan. You can’t see it, but the upper third or so of the rear cover is gone, having been ripped off in an obviously haphazard manner. But the contents are complete. The cover is by H.W. Scott, I think.

FIGHTING WESTERN was part of the same line as SPICY/SPEED WESTERN, but unlike the Spicies, there weren’t a lot of house-names used in it. The authors tend to use their real names or regular pseudonyms. This issue, in fact, starts out with a novella by a very well-known author (well-known to pulp fans, anyway), E. Hoffmann Price. “Six-Gun Survey” has as its protagonist a young cowboy-turned-surveyor who inadvertently becomes mixed up in an irrigation/land development swindle and tries to set things right, even though it means a lot of bullets coming his way and some bogus criminal charges that land him behind bars. This is an excellent yarn, fast-moving and very well-written, with a likable hero and a good supporting cast (including an Arab camel driver and camel left over from the army’s experiments with them in Arizona). I really enjoyed this one, which isn’t surprising considering how reliable a pulpster Price was.

The next story is a novelette by an author who wrote even more than Price, Victor Rousseau. He was a big name in early science fiction and then later on became a stalwart in the Spicy line, often under his pseudonym Lew Merrill and assorted other names. He’s writing under his own name in “Buffalo Trail”, which finds six mountain men in New Mexico giving up fur trapping to become cowboys. They run into plenty of trouble on a cattle drive to the railhead in Kansas. This is a pretty good story. Rousseau wasn’t as skilled a writer as Price, but he moves things along well and the action is very good. The only problems are that there are so many characters we don’t get to know them very well, and the “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue is really thick. Still, I enjoyed it, as I usually do with Rousseau’s work.

Laurence Donovan is another well-known pulp author. I’ve read quite a bit by him over the years and nearly always enjoyed the stories. His story in this issue, “Brand of a Thief”, is a convoluted tale in which a ranch foreman frames himself for a theft in order to save the girl he works for from the attentions of a lowdown skunk. Only things don’t work out that way at all. This one reads like it could have been intended for RANCH ROMANCES or one of the other Western romance pulps, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s an entertaining, well-written story.

John Jo Carpenter was the regular pseudonym of John Reese, which he used on dozens of stories in various Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties and on at least one Western novel that I know of. His story in this issue, “Gun-Wise and Trail-Shy”, is a hardboiled tale about a young outlaw’s fateful encounter with a slightly older but more experienced owlhoot. Reese was a fine writer, so it’s not surprising that this is a good story.

The issue wraps up with “Beast of Pueblo” by “Paul Hanna”, the only use of a house-name in this issue. I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s a good yarn about a young man who runs a Wells Fargo station. He’s big and brawny, good with his fists and a gun, but a crippling psychological fear keeps him from engaging in violence. It’s a fairly offbeat angle for a Western pulp story, even though we know from the start that before the story is over, our protagonist will have been forced to overcome his fear and burn some powder and throw some punches. That’s exactly what happens, but the author handles it very well and turns in an excellent yarn to end this issue on a high note.

Now, here’s an interesting (I hope) sidelight: this issue was edited by Kenneth Hutchinson and Wilton Matthews, the editors for Trojan Publications who got in trouble with the law for fraud by taking stories from old issues, slapping some phony author’s name on them, or using the name of a real author who had nothing to do with the story, then reprinting them as new and collecting the checks themselves. Which means it’s possible some of the stories in this issue were actually unacknowledged reprints that Hutchinson and Matthews used in their scheme. The Paul Hanna story seems to be the most likely candidate for that. For one thing, the story has an illustration with it that I really feel like I’ve seen somewhere else before. However, all this should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. It’s certainly possible that all the stories in here are on the up-and-up.

What’s important for our purposes as readers is that every story is a good one. If you’d told me that the best Western pulp I’d read recently was an issue of FIGHTING WESTERN, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s the case. This is a really good one, and if you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Conquerors From the Darkness - Robert Silverberg

As author Robert Silverberg explains in his introduction to the 1979 Ace reprint of CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, the story first saw life as a novella, “Spawn of the Deadly Sea”, in the April 1957 issue of the SF digest SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. (I’d be willing to bet that at least one reader of this blog owns a copy of that particular digest magazine.) A few years later he expanded the story into a full-length novel that was published by Holt, reprinted in paperback by Dell, and then finally reprinted again by Ace in a double volume with Silverberg’s 1957 novel MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. That’s the edition I read. [It's back in print. Details below.]

CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS is exactly the sort of vivid, galloping action yarn that made me a science fiction fan in the first place. At first it seems like a heroic fantasy novel, set in some totally different universe than ours. The oceans cover the entire planet except for a few floating cities. The only commerce is between those cities, and keeping the seas safe for the merchant vessels is a Viking-like group known as the Sea-Lords. The hero of the novel, a young man named Dovirr, lives in one of the cities but wants to be a Sea-Lord and take to the oceans. He gets his wish and rapidly rises in the ranks, and along the way the reader learns that this is indeed Earth, a thousand years after alien invaders flooded the planet for reasons known only to them, preserving a little of humanity in those floating cities. After a while, the aliens abandoned Earth, also for reasons unknown, leaving it in a vaguely medieval state except for a few remnants of the alien technology that still work.

You’d think that that background, along with Dovirr’s life among the Sea-Lords and his ascent to a position of power among them, might be enough material for a novel, but if you’ve read many books like this, the twist about halfway through won’t come as any surprise: the alien Star Beasts return to take over the planet again, and Dovirr and his comrades have to find some way to stop them with swords and sailing ships.

I really enjoyed this book. In his introduction, Silverberg mentions reading the work of Robert E. Howard, and I can see some Howardian influence in CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, most notably in the way Dovirr manages to seize command of every situation in which he finds himself, much like Conan, and in a very Howard-like final line. The pace is fast, the writing colorful, and the inner 14-year-old in me just loved it. The adult reader in me thought some parts of the story could have been developed a little more and a little better, but hey, adult readers weren’t the target audience for this yarn in the first place. I really like a lot of Silverberg’s early SF (as well as the sort-core novels he wrote as Don Elliott), and if you want to settle back and have a fine time, I highly recommend CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 24, 2009. Bill Crider provided the cover scan from the issue of SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS is currently available in both paperback and e-book editions.)

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Beaver (2011)

Some movies, you read the description of them and think to yourself, “There’s no way in hell that’s going to work.” For example, 2011’s THE BEAVER, in which Mel Gibson plays the deeply depressed owner of a toy company who begins to talk through a beaver hand puppet and so reconnects with his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed) and their two sons. Also, there’s a romance of sorts between the nerdy high school age son (Anton Yelchin) and a beautiful cheerleader (a very young Jennifer Lawrence). I fully expected that we’d watch maybe 30 minutes of this, tops, and then say “Nope.”

Instead, it’s kind of, well, not bad. It’s funny in places, the cast is good, and while things could have moved along a little faster, Foster’s direction holds it all together well. No matter what Mel Gibson is like in real life, I enjoy his work on-screen, and I’ve liked Foster since she was a kid in various Disney movies. THE BEAVER isn’t a great movie, but I enjoyed it enough to keep watching and wound up liking it.

Review: Silver River Ranch - Leslie Scott

In addition to several hundred novels featuring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, A. Leslie Scott wrote dozens of stand-alone novels, although some of these were rewritten and expanded from either Hatfield or Slade novels with the protagonist changed. But quite a few of them appear to be original stories not based on any of Scott’s pulp work. One such novel is SILVER RIVER RANCH, published by Arcadia House under the name Leslie Scott in 1961 and reprinted a couple of times in large print editions since then. I read the original Arcadia House edition. That’s my copy in the scan.

This novel opens with a vicious and bloody knife fight between the protagonist, stalwart young rancher Val Dixon, and brutal Blount Roberts, part of a trouble-making family that owns a rival ranch. Neither man dies in this encounter, but the fight solidifies the position that Dixon and the Roberts family are bitter enemies.

Except for Rosalee Roberts, a beautiful redheaded cousin of Blount and his brothers. Dixon is in love with her and hopes that someday she may return that feeling, but it seems unlikely given the rivalry between the ranches.

Complicating things is that everybody in the West Texas valley where this novel takes place has been losing stock to rustlers. Dixon hires a gunslinging young cowboy named Billy Flint, who may or may not actually be Billy the Kid, rumored to have survived his shooting by Pat Garrett over in New Mexico a while earlier. Together, Dixon and Flint set out to track down the rustlers, who they figure will turn out to be the Blount brothers.

SILVER RIVER RANCH will seem very familiar to anyone who’s read very many novels by Leslie Scott. There’s plenty of action with assorted bushwhackings and clashes with the rustlers, plus some tentative romance between Val Dixon and Rosalee Roberts and a lot of riding back and forth, sleeping, and eating. However, there’s nothing about mining or railroading, two of Scott’s favorite themes, and the descriptions of the landscape are a lot less detailed. This is Scott in pared-down mode, which makes for a very fast-moving book. The action scenes are consistently good, although the great knife fight that opens the book is the high point in that respect.

If you’re already a fan of Leslie Scott’s work, you’ll certainly enjoy this novel. It’s not fully representative of his usual yarn-spinning but close enough that if you’ve never sampled any of his stories before, you could start with this one just fine. I’ve enjoyed every one of Scott’s stand-alone novels I’ve read over the years, and this one is no exception.  

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, July 1950

Nothing like a beautiful blonde with a Tommy gun, as Rudolph Belarski demonstrates on this cover. There are some good authors in this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, including Stewart Sterling with a Gil Vine novelette (Gil Vine was a private detective in the pulps who became a house dick in a hotel when Sterling moved him to novels). Also on hand are Philip Ketchum (best known for his Westerns), O.B. Myers (best known for aviation yarns), Ray Cummings (best known for his science fiction), and detective pulp stalwarts J. Lane Linklater and Will Oursler, plus little-known, at least to me, Lew Talian and B.J. Benson.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, December 1944

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Dream - Robert Martin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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