Movies I've Missed Until Now: Colette (2018)

It’ll come as no surprise to any of you that I haven’t read anything by the famous French author Colette, and I knew very little about her life. But I enjoy period dramas and I like Keira Knightley okay, so we watched COLETTE, a biopic with Knightley playing the title role. I was a little surprised by it, too, and wound up enjoying it more than I expected for one reason: it’s about ghostwriting.

You see, I had no idea that Colette’s first novels were actually ghost jobs published under her husband’s name, or rather, his pen-name Willy. As the character (played by Dominic West) says several times during the film, Willy is a brand, and it doesn’t matter who actually writes the books as long as they get written. That line really resonates with me, of course, as do the bits about trying to wrestle money that’s due out of publishers and obsessing over the number of pages and the time spent writing. I’m here to tell you, all that stuff really rings true in this movie. I’ve been in those positions many times.

Over and above that, COLETTE is a well-made, well-acted movie that’s long and leisurely but never seemed to drag much. I have no idea how historically accurate it is. I was curious enough after watching it to look up the real Colette and was surprised to find that she didn’t die until 1954, which means I was alive at the same time as her. Things like that always interest me, like knowing that when my parents were born, both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were still alive. In some ways, history is more recent than we think.

Review: Run of the Brush - William MacLeod Raine

Young cowboy Jim Delaney finds himself falling in with some bad company in the brush country between San Antonio and the Rio Grande. He’s not exactly an owlhoot and a rustler yet, but he’s drifting in that direction. Then he rides into San Antonio to see the elephant (a cowboy term for having some new experiences, for those of you unfamiliar with the term) and winds up rescuing a beautiful girl from the clutches of an evil gambler and saloonkeeper. This lands Jim right in the middle of a deadly feud between the Gliddens, an outlaw family, and upstanding cattleman Pike Corcoran and his family and friends. Jim will have to figure out which side of the trail he’s going to ride.

That pretty much sums up the plot of RUN OF THE BRUSH, a 1936 Western novel by William MacLeod Raine, one of the early stars in the genre who continued writing Westerns until his death in 1954. This novel was serialized in SHORT STORIES in January and February 1936 before being published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin. That's my copy of the Seventies paperback and the edition I read in the scan above.

Born in England but raised from the age of 10 in the western United States, Raine published more than 80 novels, most of them Westerns with a few historical and contemporary novels mixed in. I’ve read maybe half a dozen of his books and enjoyed them, although with some reservations. RUN OF THE BRUSH, from just past the halfway point in his career, continues that streak.

Raine’s novels often contain characters and incidents loosely based on history. The reformed outlaw King Cooper in this novel is pretty clearly based on the historical character King Fisher, but Cooper’s involvement in the plot is strictly fictional. The notion of a feud with numerous deaths on both sides is common in Texas history, of course. I don’t know if the conflict between the Gliddens and Corcorans in this book is based on a specific feud, but it certainly has an air of authenticity about it, as do the ways Raine’s characters speak and act. The man knew the West, there’s no doubt about that.

However, despite the fact that there are some great action scenes in this book (the final battle verges on epic but doesn’t quite get there), there are long stretches that are very leisurely paced. Well-written, amusing at times, with good characters, but slow to get through. There’s also a romantic triangle, and I’ll just go ahead and say it, Jim Delaney picks the wrong girl. Another thing that bothered me is that Jim is also known as Slim, and one of the main villains is named Sim. That’s not very good character-naming.

So overall, there’s enough to like about this novel that I’m glad I read it, and if you don’t mind a Western yarn that takes its time about getting where it’s going, I’d recommend it and anything else written by William MacLeod Raine. I’ll probably continue reading one of his books every now and then. I don’t think he’ll ever be one of my favorite Western authors, though.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1941

Of course it's a clown causing trouble on the cover of this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. You can't trust those guys! Or maybe he's actually the hero, although I wouldn't bet on that. But you can bet that any cover by Norman Saunders will be dramatic and/or action-packed, and this one certainly is. You've got knives, bullets, and blackjacks! (Hmm, "Knives, Bullets, and Blackjacks!" That wouldn't be a bad title.) Anyway, I don't own this issue, but I'm sure that inside its pages, a reader could find plenty of action. Authors include Emile C. Tepperman (twice, with a Marty Quade story under his own name and a story as by Anthony Clemens), Harold Q. Masur (also twice, once as himself and once as Hal Quincy), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Cyril Plunkett, Joe Archibald, and several authors unfamiliar to me, James A. Kirch, Arthur T. Harris, Clark Frost, and H.F. Sorensen. I really should have read more from TEN DETECTIVE ACES over the years. It looks like a really good detective pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, November 1931

Although not as common as the iconic trio of stalwart cowboy, gun-totin' redhead, and wounded geezer, or the poker game that erupts in gunplay, or the shootout that takes place inside or in front of a barber shop, there's a scene that shows up on Western pulp covers from time to time featuring some gun-hung hombre standing in front of a wanted poster bearing his name and likeness. The November 1931 issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE features one such cover. I don't know who did the artwork. I tend to prefer the later issues of LARIAT STORY, but these early issues have some good authors in their pages, too. This issue includes stories by Harry F. Olmsted, Stephen Payne, John G. Pearsol, Ray Humphreys, Dabney Otis Collins, and Frank Carl Young. Miles Overholt is mentioned on the cover, but isn't actually in this one, according to the Fictionmags Index. I don't own this issue, but Olmsted, Pearsol, and Payne are always worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Twice Murdered - Laurence Donovan

TWICE MURDERED is another in the outstanding series of pulp reprint collections coming out from Black Dog Books. Laurence Donovan is probably best known for the house-name novels he wrote starring Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective, The Skipper, and The Whisperer, but he also had a long and prolific career producing detective and Western yarns for a variety of pulps. This volume collects a dozen stories published in the Thirties and Forties in the pulps PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SPICY DETECTIVE, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, and SUPER DETECTIVE, under Donovan’s name and his pseudonym Larry Dunn.

Donovan had three main strengths as a writer: he was able to come up with complex plots, he used interesting settings, and he wrote fast-moving, effective action scenes. Most of the protagonists in these stories are private eyes, and like Roger Torrey’s private eye characters, they share a lot of similarities despite having different names. I think Donovan’s shamuses come across a little more as individuals, though.

All of the stories included here are good solid pulp tales, consistently entertaining. Some of them are stand-outs, though. “Death Dances on Dimes” is set in a dime-a-dance joint, and it’s unusual in that it has a female narrator. There’s something else about her that’s unusual for the pulps, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is. “The Man Who Came to Die” is about an insurance racket and manages to be pretty creepy while at the same time packing enough plot and action for a full-length novel into a novelette. “The Greyhound Murders” is another complicated murder mystery with an interesting setting (a dog racing track) and a high body count. “Footprint of Destiny” is about the movie business and features the sort of plot that Dan Turner is usually untangling. I guess Dan was out of town that week.

In addition to the stories, editor/publisher Tom Roberts provides a fine introduction that includes more biographical information about Donovan than I’ve seen anywhere else, as well as an extensive bibliography of Donovan’s work. TWICE MURDERED is an excellent addition to the Black Dog Books line, and if you’re a pulp fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on June 14, 2010. And even though more than 15 years have passed since then, TWICE MURDERED is still available in both e-book and paperback editions, and my high recommendation of it stands.)

Review: Swords of Plunder - Fred Blosser

Fred Blosser is one of my favorite scholars of Robert E. Howard’s life and work. I’ve been enjoying his informative and entertaining articles about REH for decades. As it turns out, when it comes to writing fiction, he’s pretty darned good at spinning yarns himself. The latest thing I’ve read by him is a sword and sorcery novella called SWORDS OF PLUNDER, which is available on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions.

This story finds a barbarian warrior from the north, who’s in command of a pirate ship, coming across two old rivals, a beautiful blond female pirate and a red-bearded brigand who has come close to crossing swords with our hero several times in the past. The barbarian pulls the two of them from the sea, where they’re clinging to some wreckage from a sunken ship. They have an intriguing tale to tell, too, about a fabulous treasure hidden on a lost island, and only the blonde knows how to get there. So the three of them form an uneasy partnership to go after the loot, but of course, when they reach their destination they find more danger waiting for them than they expected.

The barbarian’s name is Cronn, by the way, and I know what you’re thinking. I would have been, too, if I hadn’t happened to know that SWORDS OF PLUNDER is based on unused parts of an outline Blosser wrote for THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN many years ago, during the era in which I first encountered his work. As he explains in a very entertaining and informative afterword to this story, he was writing articles about Robert E. Howard for SSOC when editor Roy Thomas asked him to plot some of the new stories featuring the Cimmerian. This story grew out of one of those outlines, with the serial numbers filed off, as they say.

And it’s a really good yarn, too, no matter what the protagonist is called. Well-written, fast-moving, with plenty of action and some genuinely creepy scenes where our heroes have to face deadly perils in a cave on a lost island. This is pure pulp done the way I like it. I give SWORDS OF PLUNDER a high recommendation and plan to read more by Fred Blosser very soon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Cocktail (1988)

There’s no point in talking too much about the plot in this movie since all of you probably saw it more than 35 years ago. But I never did until now, so to sum up very briefly: Tom Cruise plays an ambitious young man who wants to make a million dollars in business but instead winds up a hotshot bartender in New York City. Romance and drama ensue.

A few things struck me about this one. Looking at Tom Cruise in 1988 and looking at him now, it’s obvious he ages at about one-third the rate of a normal human being. Elizabeth Shue sure was cute, even with that big Eighties hair. There’s not a cell phone in sight nor a mention of the Internet, and other than a little nudity and language, this movie could have been made in 1938 instead of 1988. All it would take is a little tweaking of Heywood Gould’s screenplay. And speaking of that screenplay, it has a great line spoken by Bryan Brown, who plays Cruise’s bartending mentor: “All things end badly, otherwise they wouldn’t end.” That’s a pretty noirish line.

Overall, I enjoyed COCKTAIL quite a bit. It’s old-fashioned, just a story meant to entertain and hold your interest without much, if any, message. And I was entertained.

Review: Death in a Lighthouse - Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons)

Back in the Sixties, I was a big fan of the Sam Durrell/Assignment series of espionage novels by Edward S. Aarons. I read most of them until the series ended with Aarons’ death in the mid-Seventies. (There were some ghosted books after Aarons passed away, but I never read any of them as far as I recall.) Over the years I’ve also read stand-alone mystery and suspense novels of his published by Gold Medal and other publishers. He was a very solid author, always entertaining.

I didn’t figure I’d ever read his earliest novels, though, since they were fairly obscure. Published by lending library publisher Phoenix Press under the pseudonym Edward Ronns, they’re fairly hard to come by. But then wouldn’t you know it, the fine folks at Stark House have reprinted Aarons’ first two novels, DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE and MURDER MONEY. I’ve just read DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE and found it something of a surprise.

The Sam Durrell novels and Aarons’ later stand-alones aren’t exactly humorless, but they’re pretty straightforward and not exactly a laugh a minute. DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE, though, has a frantic, almost screwball quality to it, especially in the first half. Journalist Peter Willard wakes up after having amnesia for three years. He quickly discovers that during those years, he lived a dangerous life as a gangster and gunman known as The Deuce. He was part of Aces Spinelli’s mob, a gang that’s actually bossed by a masked criminal mastermind known as The Cowl. Now, with his memory back, Willard is a danger to The Cowl and his men, so they’re out to get him. There are also a couple of beautiful women involved, Willard’s former fiancée who is now engaged to his ne’er-do-well brother, and a redhead who’s a stranger to him but who seems to have been involved with The Deuce. Aarons piles on the shootouts, double-crosses, captures, and escapes in a breakneck fashion that’s very reminiscent of the pulps. The first half of this novel easily could be mistaken for a “Book-Length Novel” by, say, Norman A. Daniels that was published in THRILLING DETECTIVE.

Then, so fast it’ll give you whiplash, the scene shifts and DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE becomes an Impossible Crime/English Country House novel, only instead of an English Country House, a seemingly impossible murder takes place at an estate on the New Jersey coast that has an abandoned lighthouse on it. And darned if Aarons doesn’t do a good job with a very different second half of this book, too. The Cowl is still around, by the way, but by the end of the novel he reminds me more of an Edgar Wallace villain than a pulp mastermind.

So, basically, what you’ve got here is a bit of a kitchen sink book as Aarons throws in plenty of colorful characters and bizarre twists and tone shifts and somehow makes the whole thing work as a coherent whole. If you’ve never read Aarons before, don’t think this novel is typical of his later career, but you can still read it with great enjoyment. If you’re already an Aarons fan, DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE may make you scratch your head a little in surprise, but that won’t keep you from having a fine time reading it. I certainly did, and I’ve been reading the guy’s books for 60 years now. The DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE/MURDER MONEY double volume is available from Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions. I hope to get to the other half of it in the near future.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Railroad Stories, May 1935

Emmett Watson provides a dramatic cover for this issue of RAILROAD STORIES. Inside are stories by E.S. Dellinger, the star author of RAILROAD STORIES, as well as John A. Thompson (who wrote as The Engine Picture Kid), Earle Davis, and Searle B. Faires, who got the cover story. Faires is a mystery to me. He published half a dozen stories in 1933-35, all of them in RAILROAD STORIES, and that's the extent of his career. I'm always curious about writers like that who appear to be on the verge of success but then disappear. It's possible that he died, of course, or just stopped writing for some other reason. But the mystery always intrigues me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, December 12, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with tape around the edges applied by some previous owner. The cover art is by Albin Henning, who appears to have done more interior illustrations for the pulps and the slicks than he did covers. I think this one is okay, but I don’t like it as well as the covers by R.G. Harris and H.W. Scott, who did most of the WILD WEST WEEKLY covers during the Thirties and Forties.

The lead novelette in this issue is “Long-rider’s Loot” by William A. Todd, a house-name used on the Risky McKee series by Norman W. Hay. Hay wrote hundreds of stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY under half a dozen pseudonyms and house-names, including approximately three dozen about a young rancher in Arizona named Risky McKee, who raises and trains horses. This is the first Risky McKee story I’ve read. In it, a drug-addicted outlaw named Hypo Crawley (great name) escapes from prison and tries to recover the loot from a bank robbery he hid several years earlier. Crawley double-crossed his gang and stole the money from them, so they’re after it, too, and hope he’ll lead them to it. Risky finds himself in the middle of all this, assisted by his sidekick Sufferin’ Joe, a hypochondriac old codger always complaining about one ailment or another acting like he has one foot in the grave. This is a pretty decent, if standard plot, and Hay throws in a couple of nice twists in before the end. There’s a great line that put a smile on my face: “He’s so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew.” Sufferin’ Joe is a good character, too, definitely comedy relief but also tough and competent when he needs to be. The only real problem about this story is Risky himself, who is such a bland and shallow character that he’s barely there on the page. I don’t know if he comes off better in the other stories—I’d certainly read more of them because I like Hay’s writing overall—but he keeps this yarn from being anything more than average.

Hay is also the author of the second story in this issue, a stand-alone called “Six-gun Wages” published under the house-name Philip F. Deere. This is a much better story about a young cowboy who discovers a rustling operation along the border between Arizona and Mexico. It’s a well-written tale and one of the characters who seems like a villain turns out not to be, which is always a nice twist. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. As I said, I like Norman W. Hay’s work. As far as I can tell, he published only a handful of stories under his own name, and maybe that’s the way he wanted it, but I think that’s kind of a shame. I wish he’d written some Western novels.

J. Allan Dunn wrote more than 150 stories about Texas Ranger Bud Jones for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’ve read only one other one before now, and I liked it fairly well with a few reservations. The Bud Jones yarn in this issue is called “Hide-out” and opens with a gang of desperate outlaws fleeing with the loot from a bank robbery they’ve pulled. Bud is the Ranger who sets out to track them down, but he seems stymied when their trail mysteriously disappears, until he figures out the clever trick they’ve pulled. No reservations on this one. It’s a solid, well-plotted yarn with a great showdown at the end.  By the way, has anyone ever tried to figure out how much Dunn wrote? His total wordage has to be right up there with Frederick Faust, H. Bedford-Jones, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Lee Bond wrote two long-running series about good guy outlaws and the lawmen who dogged pursue them, the Long Sam Littlejohn series that ran for some 50 stories in TEXAS RANGERS and the Oklahoma Kid series in WILD WEST WEEKLY which was even more popular, lasting for approximately 70 stories. “Boot Hill Gamble” is the Oklahoma Kid novelette in this issue, and it finds the Kid (whose real name is Jack Reese, but that’s hardly ever used) on the trail of some outlaws who held up a stage, murdered the driver and guard, and got away with $30,000 in gold bars. The Kid is blamed for this crime, and the only way to clear his name is to round up the real culprits. This is a very standard plot, as usual for Bond, but he does a good job with it and includes plenty of well-written action, which is his strong suit. I like the Long Sam yarns considerably more than the ones featuring the Oklahoma Kid, but Bond’s work is nearly always worth reading although it seldom rises to the top rank of Western pulp fiction.

Claude Rister wrote more than a hundred stories for the pulps, mostly Westerns but with some detective, adventure, and aviation yarns mixed in. He also wrote a number of Western novels under the pseudonym Buck Billings. His story in this issue, “Outlaw Option”, is about a cowboy who’s had a bit of a shady past coming to the aid of an old-timer who’s about to be finagled out of his ranch by a slick gambler. In order to do that, the protagonist enlists the help of several other former owlhoots. There’s nothing special about the plot in this one, but Rister writes well and isn’t as heavy-handed with the dialect as some Western pulpsters can be. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him and need to read more.

There’s also a Texas Triggers novelette by Walker A. Tompkins to round out this issue, but that series was fixed up into a novel called TEXAS TRIGGERS, and since I happen to own that book, I didn’t read the novelette. I’ll get to it when I read the book.

Overall, this isn’t a bad issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. All the stories are readable and fairly entertaining. But it’s not an outstanding issue, either. It's about as average as you can get with a Western pulp. Fortunately, with WILD WEST WEEKLY, that means it’s enjoyable enough to be worth reading if you have a copy.