Review: Ride the Wild Country - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

I read most of Keith Chapman’s Joshua Dillard novels when they were reissued some years ago, but RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY is one that I missed back then. Which is a good thing, because I was able to read it now.

For those of you who don’t know, Joshua is a former Pinkerton operative turned freelance range detective and gun-for-hire in the Old West. In this novel, originally published in hardcover by Robert Hale in 2005 and now available in e-book and paperback editions, he’s hired to accompany a New Yorker who’s paying a visit to Colorado. Instead of the man he’s expecting, his employer turns out to be a beautiful woman with a plan to turn a high country valley into a fancy hunting resort. I don’t recall ever encountering this plot in a Western before, so I was impressed by that.

Ah, but is that what’s really going on? In his usual skillful fashion, Chapman peels back more layers of the plot, adding a shady gambler, assorted ruffians, some religious fanatics, and a young woman Joshua tries to help, leading to all sorts of trouble.

RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY is a thoroughly entertaining Western yarn with plenty of action and plot twists and a very likable protagonist in Joshua Dillard. He’s fast on the draw and can be plenty hardboiled when he needs to be but is also a genuinely decent guy who seems to have hard luck following him around the West. But that’s good luck for us, who get to read about his adventures. If you’re a Western fan, RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY gets an enthusiastic recommendation from me.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Feds, October 1936

THE FEDS was a G-Man pulp published by Street & Smith, a company that usually was very successful with anything they put out there. Not so with THE FEDS, which lasted for only 15 issues in 1936 and '37. But its lack of longevity can't be attributed to the generally pretty good covers, including this one on the second issue which is probably collectable because of the presence of all those Ku Klux Klansmen on it. I don't know who painted it. Nor were the writers any slouches. This issue features stories by Steve Fisher, Wyatt Blassingame, W.T. Ballard, Arthur J. Burks, William G. Bogart, Laurence Donovan, Jean Francis Webb, George Allan Moffatt (Edwin V. Burkholder), James Duncan (Arthur Pincus), and house-name Bruce Harley. Probably some good reading there. I don't own this issue and it doesn't appear to be available on-line, but if I did have a copy of it, I wouldn't hesitate to give it a try. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Speed Western Stories, December 1945, Plus Blog Update

This issue of SPEED WESTERN STORIES features two stories by Edwin Truett Long, one under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett and one as by Wallace Kayton. Long died earlier in 1945, apparently from an illness he contracted while serving in Burma during World War II, so these may have been some of the last stories he wrote. Or they could be unacknowledged reprints. With a Trojan pulp, one never knows. Elsewhere in this issue are stories by William R. Cox, Laurence Donovan, James P. Olsen, William J. Glynn, and house-name Max Neilson. The cover is probably by H.W. Scott. This issue can be found on-line at the Internet Archive. With a line-up of authors like that, I may have to read it one of these days.

Speaking of issues, I've been dealing with some health-related ones recently. Nothing serious, the blog's not going anywhere and neither am I, but it's left me without the time and energy to get everything done that I wanted to, including updating the blog. However, I'm hoping that normal posting will resume next week, although it may get sporadic now and then. 

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Dillinger (1973)

Given my fondness for gangster movies, and for Ben Johnson, I’m surprised I never watched 1973’s DILLINGER until now. It’s also an American International Picture, and AIP turned out some mighty entertaining movies over the years. I watched many of them at the Eagle Drive-In, but not this one. By the time DILLINGER came out, the Eagle had already switched over to showing X-rated movies.

But now I’ve seen DILLINGER. Warren Oates plays the title character, and Ben Johnson is Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who doggedly pursues not only John Dillinger but most of the other famous criminals who roamed the Midwest during the Depression, robbing banks and mowing down cops and anybody else who got in their way. Most of them show up in this movie, too, including Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. Bonnie and Clyde are mentioned numerous times, but their paths never cross that of Dillinger, which is probably a good thing because he looks down on them as non-professionals. For him, on the other hand, it’s just his job, and he’s the very best at it, at least according to him.

The script by John Milius, who also directed, has only a nodding acquaintance with historical accuracy, starting with the fact that the FBI didn’t exist when Dillinger was active. It was still the Bureau of Investigation. The various gangster characters are killed off out of historical order, often in ways that didn’t happen. But take it for what it is, a piece of entertainment, and DILLINGER is pretty darned good, with interesting characters, good dialogue, excellent photography, and a bunch of bloody shootouts. It’s a loud movie most of the time.

Oates does a fine job as Dillinger, playing him with a real zest for life and fondness for excitement. Ben Johnson, one of my favorite actors, is great as Melvin Purvis. Johnson is one of those actors I could listen to all day, no matter what he was saying. Just a great voice. Michelle Phillips is okay as Dillinger’s girlfriend, and a young Richard Dreyfuss shows up as Baby Face Nelson. The top-notch Seventies character actor Geoffrey Lewis is also a member of the gang. It seemed like Lewis was in just about every movie made for a while back then.

I had a fine time watching DILLINGER. It’s probably not a great movie, but it’s a very good one. I’m still a little flabbergasted that I didn’t see it back when it was new, but on the other hand, that gave me something good to watch now.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, October 1946

The cover on this issue of LEADING WESTERN is by H.W. Scott, an artist I generally like. This one is okay, but I'm not all that fond of the sketchy, unfinished look which was common on Western pulps in the late Forties and Fifties on covers by Scott and other artists. Inside are stories by some pretty good writers, including Philip Ketchum, Laurence Donovan, Giff Cheshire, Paul Craig (who was also Giff Cheshire), Norrell Gregory, and Harold R. Stoakes. The Trojan Western pulps, like those from Columbia, were low-budget, hit-or-miss affairs, but there are good stories to be found in them if you look. I don't own a copy of this one, but with those authors, I'd be willing to give it a try if I did.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Power of Positive Loving - William Johnston

When I was a kid, I read all the tie-in novels by William Johnston based on the TV series GET SMART. I think I liked them even more than the TV show. I also recall reading and enjoying the novelization of the movie LT. ROBIN CRUSOE, USN, which Johnston wrote under the pseudonym Bill Ford. Johnston’s books were all over the spinner racks back in those days, since he wrote dozens of excellent movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. 

However, a friend mentioned to me that Johnston’s early, non-tie-in novels are very good, too, so I decided to try a few of them. First up is THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING, published by Monarch Books in 1964. I don’t mind admitting that one reason I bought this book is because of the cover. That’s one of the cutest redheads I’ve seen on a paperback cover, and the wink really sells the book.

As for the novel itself, well, that’s pretty good, too. The protagonist is Harry Ash, a down-on-his-luck public relations guy who comes up with a scheme to promote a sleepy little coastal town in California as a hotbed of sin and sensationalism. He plans to do this by teaming up with sexpot movie starlet Babe O’Flynn (that’s a great name), who has a habit of losing her clothes and winding up in the slick magazines like LIFE and LOOK. Harry comes up with a wild story for the gossip columnists about Babe going to this little town to recover from a broken heart after a top-secret love affair with the Secretary of State. He’s going to have a photographer get pictures of her on the beach in a bikini – or less – and figures that tourists, scandal-seekers, and sensation-mongers will converge on the motel and bar that he buys in partnership with a hamburger magnate. Naturally, things don’t work out quite like Harry plans.

Monarch Books lasted only a few years, but the company published quite a few books including some Westerns and mysteries. However, it’s best known for the abundance of slightly less graphic sleaze novels it put out. Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert Silverberg all wrote pseudonymous books for Monarch, including a number of so-called non-fiction studies of various sexual subjects that were really fiction, under imposing sounding names like L.T. Woodward, M.D., and Dr. Benjamin Morse.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is risqué enough to fall into the sleaze category, but just barely. Unlike most books in that genre from that era, this one is a comedy, a racy, romantic, screwball farce that takes satiric shots at morality, the advertising business, politics, show business, the military, the media, and just about anything else you can think of. The title itself is a pun on the self-help bestseller THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. If it had been made into a movie in 1964, it probably would have starred Jack Lemmon as Harry and Ann-Margret as Babe. As usual with such a scattershot yarn, not all the jokes work all the time, but enough of them do that this is a pretty funny book. It reminds me a little of the work of Max Shulman, for those of you old enough to remember his books. (Probably the same ones who remember Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret.)

Johnston was nothing if not a versatile writer, though. I have several more of his non-tie-in novels on hand, and it looks like every one of them is considerably different from the others. I’ll be getting to them in due time and reporting on them here. For now, if you want a nice entertaining slice of mid-Sixties comedy, THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on August 27, 2010. Despite the good intentions expressed in the final paragraph, I haven't read any more of William Johnston's novels, tie-in or otherwise, since then. But I still might. I know where they are on my shelves--I think. And I stand by my comment about the redhead on the cover. She's really cute. The cover art is by Tom Miller.)

Review: Marihuana - William Irish (Cornell Woolrich)

For collectors, MARIHUANA by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish is one of the most sought-after of the legendary Dell 10-Cent editions. I’ve owned several copies over the years, but despite being a Woolrich fan ever since discovering his work in stories reprinted in ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties, I’d never read it until now.

MARIHUANA was first published as a novelette under Woolrich's name in the May 3, 1941 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, which was a large-format pulp at the time but still a pulp. Ten years later it was reprinted as a Dell 10-Cent book. Like many of the protagonists in Woolrich’s stories, King Turner, the main character in this yarn, is kind of a sad sack, an average guy who’s depressed over the break-up of his marriage. So a couple of his so-called friends (they aren’t, really) show up at his apartment with a girl he doesn’t know, and they drag him off to a marihuana den (I’m just going to use the spelling the story does) where he smokes a couple of reefers and goes a little crazy from the drug.

When he accidentally kills somebody, he takes it on the lam and his marihuana-induced paranoia results in several more murders. It doesn’t take long for the cops to get on his trail, and Woolrich skillfully goes back and forth between Turner’s descent into violent madness and the law’s efforts to catch him.

Granted, from our perspective today, this is a pretty silly plot, but when were Woolrich’s plots not a little far-fetched? What makes MARIHUANA work is its relentless pace and Woolrich’s ability to make us sympathize with a protagonist who’s caught up in things he can’t control, even though he’s a killer and an all-around unlikable guy. (Is it just me, or does the description of King Turner—the slight build, the sandy hair, the sunken cheeks—sound suspiciously like Woolrich himself?)

There are a couple of late twists that work pretty well. And even though it's pure coincidence, I can’t help but like the fact that the cop who leads the effort to find Turner is named Spillane.

I’m glad I finally read MARIHUANA. It’s a suspenseful yarn that really had me flipping the pages. Whether you’re a Woolrich fan or have never read any of his work, I give it a high recommendation. If you want to read it but don’t have the Dell 10-Cent edition, there’s a very affordable e-book edition available on Amazon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Daylight (1996)

Back in the Seventies, we watched all the big disaster movies: AIRPORT, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, etc. I even read Arthur Hailey’s novel AIRPORT that was the source of the movie. It was hardly my favorite genre, but I found those movies to be reliable, if forgettable, entertainment.

So when I came across DAYLIGHT, a 1996 Sylvester Stallone movie I’d never seen, I didn’t hesitate. The description made it sound very much like one of those earlier disaster movies: some thieves fleeing through a tunnel under the Hudson River in New York City cause a wreck with a truck carrying toxic waste, and the resulting explosion and fire close off both ends of the tunnel, sealing a dozen or so survivors in there to look for a way out.

It's lucky for them that a taxi driver up on the surface is really the disgraced former chief of Emergency Services (Stallone, of course), who’s the only one who can figure out a way to get into the tunnel and lead the survivors out.

Naturally, before that we get a number of scenes introducing us to the characters who will make it through the explosion (and some who won’t). There are no real villains in this movie except the thieves who cause the disaster with their attempted getaway, and they’re not around long. Most of the movie is Stallone vs. the tunnel. The other characters are stereotypes: the would-be writer, the bickering couple and their teenage daughter, the old couple and their dog that used to belong to their dead son, the heroic cop, a few convicts from a transport van. But even though we’ve seen them all before, they’re still handled pretty effectively.

DAYLIGHT really plays a lot like CLIFFHANGER, another Stallone movie from a few years earlier in which he also plays a guy who’s the best at what he does but has personal demons from past failures haunting him. And like that earlier film, DAYLIGHT is well-made, well-acted, decently written (Stallone isn’t credited as one of the writers but contributed to the script, as usual), and an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. That’s plenty for me.

Review: John Standon of Texas - Johnston McCulley

Johnston McCulley is mostly remembered, and rightly so, as the creator of Zorro, but he wrote all sorts of pulp yarns, including a five-part serial called “John Standon of Texas” which appeared in WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE in September and October 1920. It was reprinted in a hardcover of the same title by Chelsea House, Street & Smith’s book publishing arm, in 1924. There was also a British edition from Hutchison in 1934. I have the Chelsea House edition and read it recently. Since my copy is coverless and is just a very plain-looking brown hardcover, I’ve used images I’ve found on-line of both covers.

John Standon, the hero of this one, is an American adventurer who has been prospecting in the mountains of Mexico for several years. As the story opens, he’s on his way back to Texas, having given up on finding gold. Before he can cross the border, though, he finds himself caught up in a revolution as he helps rescue some aristocrats from a gang of bandits led by a self-styled revolutionary who’s really just after loot and power.

Standon’s efforts to help these people escape from the bandits is really all this books amounts to. The plot is very simple. But there’s a ton of action, the characters are colorful and interesting, the bandit leader and his second-in-command, an American gunslinger, are suitably villainous, and McCulley plays out the whole thing in exciting, fast-paced prose. While the style is slightly old-fashioned now and then, for the most part you wouldn’t guess that this novel was written and published more than a hundred years ago.

Also, while it was published originally in WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE and the hardcover edition even says “A Western Story” on the title page, it’s not a traditional Western but rather is set in the early 20th Century. Standon packs an automatic pistol and there are mentions of airplanes. I like this setting and am always glad to come across a story that makes use of it.

My copy also has the names of a couple of previous owners written in it. So I have to thank Howard D. Lindamood of Atkins, Virginia, and Slaylin M. Kittredge, address unknown, for passing along this book until it finally wound up in my hands. Because I really enjoyed JOHN STANDON OF TEXAS. If you’re a Johnston McCulley fan or just enjoy good adventure novels, it’s worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, December 1935

This issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE sports a gruesome but eye-catching and dramatic cover by Rafael DeSoto. Nothing good ever comes from a suit of armor on a pulp cover! Inside this issue are stories by Barry Perowne (a Raffles yarn), Arthur J. Burks, Steve Fisher, Dwight V. Babcock, John Scott Douglas, Paul Hawk, Edmond Du Perrier, and the oddly named Tom Erwin Geris, who, if you rearrange the letters, turns out to be none other than Mort Weisinger, who wrote quite a few pulp stories but is best remembered as the long-time editor of the Superman titles at DC Comics during the Silver Age. He had a reputation as quite a curmudgeon as far as the writers and artists were concerned, but I didn't know any of that at the time. I just read the comic books and enjoyed them. I don't believe I've ever read any of his pulp stories, though.