Review: The Tigress (Payoff for Paula) - Jeff Bogar (Ronald Wills Thomas)

Jeff Bogar was the pseudonym British author Ronald Wills Thomas used for a couple of dozen mysteries and thrillers between 1950 and 1955, most of them published in England by Hamilton & Company. Several of them made their way to the United States for American editions, including two published by Lion Books. Thomas’s novel PAYOFF FOR PAULA was published in paperback by Lion in 1951 under the title THE TIGRESS, and I recently read my copy of that edition. That’s it in the scan. I don’t know who did the art.

The narrator/protagonist of THE TIGRESS is Hollywood talent agent Greg Farley, who represents a number of up-and-coming young starlets. Greg is a real rarity in the movie business, a nice guy who doesn’t try to take advantage of his young female clients. But one of them suddenly turns on him unexpectedly, attacking him verbally in a nightclub where they run into each other, and when she turns up dead later that same night, stabbed to death, Greg is the only real suspect. Which means, of course, that he has to dodge the cops and uncover the real killer in order to clear his name.

This murder launches several days of whirlwind action that involves mobsters, gamblers, nightclub owners, a fortune in missing gems, and several beautiful women, including the stunning redhead Paula of the original British title. Greg, a former vaudevillian, uses the skills he learned on that circuit and his Hollywood connections to navigate this dangerous investigation, which finds him getting hit on the head and knocked out more than once in classic hardboiled fashion. Eventually, he untangles everything and solves the starlet’s murder, along with another killing later on.

This is the sort of yarn I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of times, but I always enjoy it if it’s well-written, and THE TIGRESS mostly is. The plot gets a little muddled now and then, and there are occasional reminders that the author is British and not American. But Thomas does a good job overall. The plot, the beautiful babes, the fast-paced banter, and the breezy style all remind me very much of the Carter Brown books. Not done as well as Alan G. Yates did, mind you, but still, that’s the sort of book this is, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have the other Jeff Bogar novel published by Lion Books and probably will get around to reading it in the relatively near future.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Variety Detective Magazine, August 1938

VARIETY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE was a short-lived detective pulp from Ace that changed its name to LONE WOLF DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and ran for several more years. This is the first issue under the VARIETY DETECTIVE name and sports a Norman Saunders cover, always a good selling point. Inside were assorted house-name reprints from TEN DETECTIVE ACES, DETECTIVE-DRAGNET MAGAZINE, and SECRET AGENT X, along with stories by Lester Dent and Paul Chadwick, certainly the only authors in this issue you've ever heard of, at least that we know about. There's no telling who was hiding behind those house-names. This is probably more of an interesting oddity than anything else, but Dent and Chadwick are always worth reading. In fact, if you want to check it out, the entire issue can be found here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, January 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my well-worn copy in the scan, featuring a fine dramatic cover by Sam Cherry.

I bought this issue mostly for the Leslie Scott novel, of course. It’s a bit unusual that he’s billed under his real name here and not Bradford Scott, A. Leslie, or even A. Leslie Scott. “The City of Silver”, which is long enough to be considered a novel even in this pulp version, was rewritten and expanded into the hardcover novel SILVER CITY, published by Arcadia House in 1953 and also appeared in paperback from Harlequin. The protagonist is Jim Vane, who is working as a stagecoach station agent in Nevada when the story opens but soon finds himself in the mining boomtown of Virginia City working for Adolph Sutro, one of several historical characters who figure in this novel, much like a Rio Kid yarn. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve read a Rio Kid novel that takes place in Virginia City and features some of the same characters and historical developments.

In this one by Scott, we get ambushes and stagecoach robberies, Jim Vane and some other men are trapped underground by a disaster, and there’s a big shootout at the end in which Vane uncovers the identities of the men who are behind all the villainy in this story. Those are all standard plot elements for a Scott novel, but he mixes them together with such skill that I always enjoy the story he tells. In addition, the ending of this one is a little different from most I’ve encountered in his work, which is a nice bonus. “The City of Silver” is a good novel and a fine example of Scott writing at the top of his game, with plenty of action and some nice turns of phrase.

“Cow Country Jury” is one of ten Western and detective stories that John Di Silvestro wrote for various pulps in the late Forties. That’s all I know about the author. This short-short is about a young cowboy who decides to become an outlaw, only to encounter several unexpected obstacles to his plan. It’s a fairly light-hearted yarn and has a definite oddball quality to it. For one thing, all the characters have unusual names. The young cowboy is Sorne Dangler, the stagecoach driver he tried to hold up is Brad Nunoon, and the local lawman is Sheriff Lork. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. This is a story with some promise, but it doesn’t really deliver.

Steuart Emery started writing romance and mainstream stories for the general fiction pulps in the early 1920s and then wrote hundreds of air war stories (with a few detective yarns mixed in) from the late Twenties to the late Forties. In the late Forties he began writing for the Western pulps and was a fairly prolific contributor to them throughout the Fifties. Most of his Westerns were cavalry yarns, but his novelette “Wall of Silence” in this issue doesn’t feature the cavalry, although it does have some Indian fighting in it. Instead of some young officer, Emery’s protagonist is a stagecoach driver in Arizona who used to drive a fire wagon in New York. He had to go on the run after killing a man in a barroom brawl, but a police detective from New York has tracked him down and offers him a choice: go to prison for the killing—or go back to New York testify against an Irish mobster. Unusual characters, an offbeat plot, and plenty of excellent action make this a terrific story with a very satisfying ending. I really enjoyed this one, and it made me even more of a Steuart Emery fan than I already was.

Larry A. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the Western pulps. I’ve read a number of them and always enjoyed them, finding them competently written and dependably entertaining. That’s a good description of his short story “Killer Bait” in this issue. An old rancher sets a trap for the outlaws responsible for his son’s death. The writing has a nice hardboiled tone and the story moves right along. Maybe nothing special overall, but I had a good time reading it.

The same can’t be said for “No Decisions” by Francis H. Ames. I’d read several stories by Ames before and liked them okay, but this one is just awful. It’s a present-tense, burlesque comedy with characters named Highpockets and Knothole, and it’s about a boxing match between the champions of the settlements of Sandstone and Gumbo Flats. I made it through three pages before saying nope, not for me.

Johnston McCulley wrote more than 50 stories featuring his iconic creation Zorro for WEST between 1944 and 1949. These short adventures play much like episodes of the famous Zorro TV series, although that series was still some years in the future when these stories were written and published. “Zorro Starts the New Year” in this issue has Don Diego Vega and his famous alter-ego clashing with another aristocrat during a New Year’s party at the Vega rancho. The plot is pretty thin, but McCulley’s writing is so smooth and entertaining that the story is quite enjoyable anyway. All of McCulley’s Zorro stories, from his debut in the novel THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO to his final pulp yarns, are available in six beautiful reprint volumes from Bold Venture Press.

Despite the presence of the one story I disliked, this is a very good issue of WEST. The Steuart Emery novelette is my favorite, but Scott’s novel “The City of Silver” is very solid and entertaining, too. The presence of McCulley and Harris is just a bonus. If you have this one, or happen to stumble across a copy, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Lone Ranger - Gaylord Dubois

I’m a big fan of the Lone Ranger and have been since childhood. I always watched the TV show and read many of the novels by Fran Striker that were published by Grosset & Dunlap. In fact, I remember visiting some relatives one summer when I was about ten years old and going with my cousins to the local public library, where I was thrilled to discover about half a dozen of the Lone Ranger novels that I hadn’t read. My cousins checked them out for me using their library cards, and I was able to read all of them before we had to go home. Along about the same time, I began listening to syndicated reruns of the Lone Ranger radio show (along with The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and Gangbusters) and enjoyed those, too.

Later on, when I was in high school and college, I started watching reruns of the TV series and discovered that I still liked it, maybe even more than when I was younger. I even sat down one summer and wrote more than 25,000 words of a Lone Ranger novel that I never finished. (Yes, I know, fanfic. That’s not the only one I wrote, either. I actually finished my Tarzan novel.) Sure, I can see some of the cheesiness in the show (like the giant plastic rock and the fake trees that are in so many of the supposedly exterior scenes that were really shot on a soundstage), but the series as a whole just works for me, for whatever reason. I can still sit down, watch an episode I’ve seen many times before, and thoroughly enjoy it.

I hadn’t revisited the novels in quite a while, though. For my birthday, Livia bought the entire set of novels from a collector friend of mine who was selling them and gave them to me for my birthday. That prompted me to reread the first one after more than forty years.

First of all, despite what the cover says, this book wasn’t written by Fran Striker, who was the primary scripter of the radio show. It’s actually by Gaylord Dubois, as the title page admits, adding that it’s “based on the famous radio adventures by Fran Striker”. Later printings attribute the book itself to Striker, “based on the famous Lone Ranger adventures created by Geo. W. Trendle”. Trendle was the radio executive who came up with the idea, but I think most of the actual creation of the character came from Striker. Regardless of all that, Dubois is the real author of this one.

So how does it hold up? Well . . . I’m not going to lie and pretend it’s a great book by modern standards. Dubois’s prose is long-winded and just plain slow in many places. The plot, which involves sabotaging the building of the transcontinental railroad, has more whiskers than Gabby Hayes. And the Lone Ranger himself is off-screen for long stretches of the book that concentrate on the rather vapid and not-too-bright proxy hero and heroine.

But there are moments . . . moments like the one where the Ranger is racing to catch a runaway train to prevent a head-on collision with another train . . . or when he breaks up a lynch mob about to hang an innocent man . . . or when he has a showdown with a gang of outlaws that involves dynamite, railroad flares, and a bow and arrows . . . well, let’s just say that at those moments, I can hear the William Tell Overture playing faintly in the back of my head. If you’ve ever had that experience, you know what I mean.

A couple more interesting things about this book. It was originally published in 1936, which means it’s based solely on the radio series. Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels, and the TV version were still more than a dozen years in the future. So the characterization and descriptions of the two main characters are a little off from what you might expect if you grew up on the TV series, as I did. Even though this is the first novel in the series, it’s not an origin story at all, and there’s no mention of how the Lone Ranger came to be. It does, however, begin with a lengthy sequence about how the Ranger found his horse Silver, which is at odds with the TV continuity. Then it goes on to the main story about the railroad sabotage.

I remember that even when I read these books as a kid, I thought there was something not quite the same about the first one. The edition I read then was credited to Striker, but it just didn’t seem as good as the other books in the series, which I liked better. Later on, of course, I found out why. Gaylord Dubois was actually one of my favorite writers when I was a kid, although I never knew anything about him at the time. But he was the writer on long runs of the TARZAN comic book (with the Jesse Marsh art), and also wrote the back-up feature in TARZAN, “Brothers of the Spear”. In addition, he created and wrote the comic book TUROK, SON OF STONE, which I also read every time I could find an issue. Dubois wrote a bunch of other stuff, too: more than 3000 comic book stories, Big Little Books, juvenile novels based on other radio shows and comic strips, like DON WINSLOW OF THE NAVY, which Dubois ghosted for series creator Frank V. Martinek, and probably a lot of other things I’m not aware of. I have to wonder if he really wrote that TERRY AND THE PIRATES novel I read a couple of years ago. There’s even a blog devoted to him and his work that’s maintained by his granddaughter, and it’s well worth checking out if you’re a fan of Twentieth Century pop culture.

So, should you run right out and find a copy of this book? If you’re not already a Lone Ranger fan, probably not. But if you are and you’ve never read it, I think it’s worthwhile, as a piece of history if nothing else. I enjoyed it, and I’m sure some of you would, too.

Meanwhile, I have all the other books in the series, the ones actually written by Fran Striker, sitting right here on the shelf beside me, just waiting for me to get to them. The next one is THE LONE RANGER AND THE MYSTERY RANCH. All I have to do is look at it, and I hear the William Tell Overture again, playing its siren song . . .

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 5, 2010. I'm still a big fan of The Lone Ranger but have read only one of those other books since then. I know right where they all are, though, and one of these days . . . I've also written two Lone Ranger novellas since then that were published by Moonstone Books, and getting the chance to write stories featuring one of my childhood heroes is one of the best things that's happened to me as a writer.)

Coming Soon: Silverado Press Presents, Volume 1

I'm pleased and proud to be included in this anthology with some of the best Western writers in the business today. Livia and I collaborated on a story for this book, the first-ever team-up between Judge Earl Stark and Lucas Hallam. It's a Fort Worth-set adventure called "The Cowtown Inferno", and it worked so well I hope we can team up Hallam and Big Earl again sometime. This book will be out soon, and I'll let you know when it's available. In the meantime, you can pre-order it on Amazon and get the best price guarantee. 

Review: The Hanuvar Chronicles, Book 2: The City of Marble and Blood - Howard Andrew Jones

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A while back, I read Howard Andrew Jones’ novel LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND, the first book in his Hanuvar Chronicles, and thought it was one of the best novels I’d read in years. I bought the sequel, THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, as soon as it came out. And there it sat, unread, for some reason that I can’t fathom.

But no longer. I’ve read it now, and there’s no second-book-in-a-series slump in this one. Not hardly. THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD is absolutely fantastic.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hanuvar, he’s the former military commander of the nation of Volanus, which has fought a series of disastrous wars against the Dervan Empire. This conflict finally ends with the destruction of Volanus and the dispersion of the surviving Volani, most of them as slaves, across the empire. Hanuvar is thought to be dead—but he’s not. He’s still alive, and he has a plan. He’s going to find all of his countrymen who still live, free them one way or another, and take them to the colony he’s established called New Volanus. This campaign of freedom, waged mostly by stealth and subterfuge, gets underway in LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND and continues in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD.

That name refers to Derva itself, the center of the empire, and Hanuvar will be in more danger there than ever as he tries to carry out his epic plan.

As you may have figured out, this is all based very loosely on the wars between Rome and Carthage, and Hanuvar is inspired by (you can’t even say based on because they’re too different) Hannibal. And the scope of the story Jones is telling is so vast that he employs a brilliant strategy: each “chapter” in these books is actually a novella, telling a separate story with a beginning, middle, and end, but they all fit together to form a continuing narrative that builds momentum as it goes along. This also allows Jones to tell different kinds of stories as the overall tale progresses. One of the chapters in the first book, for example, was a pure heist story—Donald E. Westlake or Lionel White in a sword-and-sorcery milieu—and in one point in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, Hanuvar is called upon to function as a detective and solve a murder. In another chapter, Hanuvar and some of his friends and allies pull a very neat con job. Jones doesn’t neglect the sorcery, though, as there are plenty of ghosts and demons and zombies and assorted otherworldly threats for Hanuvar to deal with.

All this is told in clean, compelling, fast-moving prose. Hanuvar is a great character, as is his part-time sidekick, a young actor and writer named Antires. The world-building of this alternate Mediterranean world is extensive but handled so skillfully that the storytelling never gets bogged down in it.

If you’re a fan of sword and sorcery, alternate history, epic fantasy, or anything like that, you just can’t do any better than this series by Howard Andrew Jones. This one is available on Amazon in e-book, hardcover, paperback, and audio editions. I've already bought the third book, SHADOW OF THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN, and I promise it won’t take me as long to get around to reading it.

Now, on a personal note, most if not all of you know that Howard Andrew Jones passed away earlier this year, another one taken much too young by cancer. Howard and I weren’t close and never met in person, but I considered us friends. We interacted on Facebook and traded occasional emails, brought together by our shared fondness for Ki-Gor pulp novels and John Benteen Westerns. I can only echo what everyone else who knew him has said: he was a great guy. It’s selfish of me, but I’m glad I have quite a few of his books left to read, including the third Hanuvar novel. I only wish there were going to be a lot more.

Review: Storyteller: Helpful Hints and Tall Tales From the Writing Life - Carlton Stowers

I first met Carlton Stowers many years ago at one of the mass autograph parties TCU Press used to sponsor every December. The idea was that they would gather twenty or thirty local authors in one place, and people could come and buy signed books to give as Christmas presents. The events were usually held at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens in those days. It seemed like they sold quite a few books, but for me, the real appeal was the chance to see old friends I didn’t run into in person that often—Elmer Kelton, Jory Sherman, Kerry Newcomb, G. Clifton Wisler—and to make new friends such as, well, Carlton Stowers.

I knew who Carlton Stowers was before that. I’d seen the name many times and knew he was an Edgar Award-winning author of true crime books. I believe he was acquainted with Bill Crider, too, and I’d heard Bill speak of him. But I didn’t read true crime books so I’d never sampled his work. However, when we were introduced and I spent some time talking to the guy, we were friends right away. His interests ranged ‘way beyond true crime, and I remember telling him one time, after he’d spun a great yarn about a distant relative of his who’d ridden with Pancho Villa, “You really need to be writing fiction. You’d be great at it.”

Eventually he did, but we’ll get to that.

For several years, Stowers attended the annual Howard Days get-together in Cross Plains with his friend and literary agent Jim Donovan (a fine writer his own self), and we had lengthy, hugely enjoyable conversations about everything under the sun, as they say. I haven’t been able to make it to Cross Plains for several years now, and those conversations with Carlton are among the things I really miss. Maybe one of these days.

So, to the point of this review, last year TCU Press published STORYTELLER: HELPFUL HINTS AND TALL TALES FROM THE WRITING LIFE. It’s part memoir, part how-to book, and it’s full of entertaining stories about Stowers’ life and his varied careers as a sports reporter, columnist, feature writer, ghostwriter for sports and entertainment figures, and of course, his award-winning years as an author of true crime books. I said above that I didn’t read true crime, and I still don’t, but I swear, I really need to read Carlton’s books because I know they must be well-written and compelling. Mixed in with these reminiscences are plenty of useful, practical tips about writing non-fiction of all sorts.

There’s also a section about Stowers’ career as a Western novelist. He’s written six novels so far, and they’re all excellent. I hope he does more. In the meantime, and until I get around to reading some of those true crime books, I’m very glad to have read STORYTELLER. It’s a superb book about the writing life, and if that interests you, I give it my highest recommendation. You can find it in trade paperback on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, January 1940

I don't have any issues of SKY FIGHTERS. Maybe I should try to get my hands on some. They have good covers, well-respected authors, and hey, it's a Thrilling Publication, right? Says so right on the cover. I generally like all the other Thrilling Group pulps I've read. I don't know who did the cover on this issue, but I like it. Inside are stories by top aviation/air war pulpsters Robert Sidney Bowen, Arch Whitehouse, and Harold F. Cruickshank, plus Captain J. Winchcombe-Taylor, David Brandt, and house-name Lt. Scott Morgan. I have plenty of other things to read, of course, but one of these days . . .

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, October 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know why the front cover is missing that strip at the bottom. That’s the way I got it. Luckily, the loss doesn’t detract too much from the cover by A. Leslie Ross. Not in the top rank of Ross’s work, to my mind, but his covers are always worthwhile. I’ll put a scan of the whole cover from the Fictionmags Index at the end of this post.

This issue opens with a novelette (probably closer to a novella, really) by Seven Anderton, a distinctly named author who’s mostly forgotten but who produced consistently good work for the Western and detective pulps. “Cactus Basin Showdown” features a pair of protagonists who fit the mold of many other Western pulp yarns: Brick Gordon is a handsome, two-fisted, fast-shooting cowboy, while his sidekick Galena Jones is a much older and grizzled old codger. If you’re thinking Buster Crabbe and Al “Fuzzy” St. John, well, so was I while reading this story. Anderton adds a nice variation to the story, though. Brick handles most of the action, but Galena is really the thinking half of the duo as they pitch in to help some homesteaders who are being run out of Cactus Basin by the local cattle baron/range hog. Yes, it’s a cattleman vs. sodbusters yarn, a very standard plot, but Anderton makes it fresh with his solid writing and characterizations. Even the main villain has a little depth to him. I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

The line at the top of the cover says “15 Action-Packed Stories”, but what it doesn’t tell you is that six of them are historical articles and features. I have nothing against such things and when I come across them in pulps, I usually skim them and read the more interesting ones, but really, I’m there for the fiction, so I’m not going to delve into the non-fiction. The next actual story in this issue is “The Haunted Town” by Lon Williams, an entry in his series of Weird Westerns about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. In this one, Winters encounters a werewolf—or does he? I’ve been aware of this series for years and always figured it would be right in my wheelhouse, but I’ve read several of them now, including this one, and for some reason I just don’t really like them very much. Something about the writing in them doesn’t resonate with me, and I don’t find Winters to be a very likable protagonist. Maybe I’m wrong about them. I’d be willing to try a few more before giving up on the series, but at this point, I’m not optimistic.

I’ve read several stories by Richard Brister and enjoyed them. “The Ioway Upstart” in this issue is about a tenderfoot from Des Moines who’s stranded in a rough, lawless mining camp. Either picked on or looked down upon by nearly everybody in the camp, he comes up with a clever way to win their respect, and also the heart of the best-looking girl in town. This is an entertaining, well-written story and makes me think I need to try one of Brister’s novels.

I read another story in the Able Cain series by A.A. Baker not long ago and enjoyed it, but his entry in this issue, “Able Cain’s Arena”, left me kind of cold. The title character is a judge in a mining boomtown and comes up with the idea of building a boxing arena so the miners can settle their disputes without shooting each other. It’s not a bad idea, but the story never generated much excitement or interest in me. My fault, maybe. Too soon to pass judgment on this series, but I’ve definitely had mixed reactions to it so far.

Gene Austin wrote a lot of stories for the Western pulps, but he seems to have been on autopilot in “Whistling in Boothill”. This story about the clash between two ranchers has some nice action at the end that almost redeems it, but the plot is really thin.

“The Hombre That Hell Wouldn’t Have” is a good title. The story is by Humphrey Jones, who wrote several dozen stories for assorted Western, detective, and sports pulps. It’s a decent yarn about a prospector who’s robbed and left to die in the desert. The resolution is pretty far-fetched, but overall, not a bad story.

Ralph Berard was the pseudonym of the very prolific pulpster Victor H. White. His story in this issue, “Gold Country Boothill”, is a very suspenseful tale about a young prospector framed for murder and the trial-by-vigilante that results. This is well-written, well-plotted, and has a very nice final twist that I didn’t see coming. I liked this one.

J.J. Mathews was another very prolific pulpster who turned out scores of Western, detective, and sports stories. His story in this issue is “Devil’s Homemaker”, which isn’t a very good title for this yarn about a young man’s quest for vengeance on the man who gunned down his father. But it’s got a decent plot and some emotional complexity, and the writing has a nice hardboiled tone to it. This is another good one from a forgotten but reliable pro.

Rex Whitechurch was a pseudonym that appeared on dozens of Western, detective, and sports stories, all of them published in various Columbia pulps edited by Robert Lowndes. Was it a house-name? That’s possible, I suppose, but I honestly have no idea. The Whitechurch story in this issue, “The Bronc Riders”, is a modern-day rodeo story and more of a romance than an action story. In fact, much of it reads more like mainstream fiction than genre Western. And it’s really, really good, too—until it runs smack into an ending that left me staring at the page in disbelief. Talk about a story falling apart at the last minute! This one is promising but very disappointing.

So what we have here is an issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES that’s a very mixed bag. Several of the stories are very good to excellent, and others I didn’t like at all. I’m glad I read it and will be on the lookout for more stories by Seven Anderton and Richard Brister. Heck, I’d even give Rex Whitechurch another try, and he made me want to throw the pulp across the room! But don’t race to your shelves to look for this one.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Bottom of Every Bottle - Robert J. Randisi

Jake Gilmartin is a veteran New York City cop who finds himself in trouble when evidence of corruption surfaces against him. He’s suspended from the force, and things get even worse when an intruder shows up at his apartment one night and tries to kill him. Jake fights back and the would-be assassin winds up dead. That’s when Jake discovers that the man lying dead on his kitchen floor is another cop, a man Jake had considered a friend.

And this is just the prologue.

Most of the book is narrated by Jake’s son Rob, a gunnery instructor in the army who was also an investigator in the Military Police for a while. With no one left to trust, Jake calls on Rob for help finding out who framed him and wants him dead, even though Rob hates his father for cheating on Rob’s mother and breaking up their marriage years earlier. Reluctantly, Rob comes to New York to help Jake and finds himself mixed up in a complex and dangerous tangle involving organized crime, cops who may or may not be trustworthy, a beautiful female cab driver, and a number of colorful denizens of New York City. The scope of the plot eventually expands to cover decades of time and thousands of miles as Rob and Jake wind up facing almost overwhelming odds.

As always with a book by Bob Randisi, the pace really rockets along in this one with plenty of good dialogue and action. There’s a little humor, some very nice character bits, and an intriguing back-story that’s ripe for further exploration in a sequel, although this novel stands alone just fine. Although it’s thoroughly contemporary, I got a sense of some Gold Medal influence in the book, including the great title. It’s no secret that Bob and I have been friends for thirty years, but I try very hard not to let that influence my opinion when it comes to books by my friends. You can take my word for it: THE BOTTOM OF EVERY BOTTLE is a very good, tough cop thriller, and I recommend it highly.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 27, 2010. In the comments on that post, Bob confirmed that this novel was indeed influenced by the Gold Medals he'd read. It appears to be out of print now, but used copies can be found for reasonable prices.)