Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Air Stories, January 1930

I really need to read more by George Bruce. The one novella I read by him was excellent. He's the headliner in this issue of AIR STORIES, but there are plenty of other good authors in this one as well, such as Frederick C. Davis, Arthur J. Burks, James P. Olsen, Andrew A. Caffrey, Jack Smalley, and Gil Brewer (not the hardboiled crime author, but rather his father, the author of the immortal "Gorilla of the Gasbags"). I've developed a fondness for aviation pulp, but sadly, there's just not enough time in the day to work in everything that interests me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, November 1948

The Popular Publications Western pulps usually had the roughest, toughest-lookin' hombres on their covers, in contrast to the clean-cut, stalwart types who showed up on most of the competition's covers. This varmint is a prime example of that. Picking your teeth with a knife while wearing a hat with a bullet hole in it (Injury to a Hat alert!) and blood drips from your forehead where a slug grazed it, all while looking completely nonchalant . . . He may be a bad guy, but you can't help but admire how cool he is! The lineup of authors in this issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE is pretty admirable, too. Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden), Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, Talmage Powell, and Ray Townsend are the biggest names, solid, dependable pulpsters, all of them. Also on hand are Max Kesler, Kenneth Fowler, Clint Young, and James Propp. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Hell to Pay - J. Lee Butts

I’ve known Jimmy Butts for several years and have read and enjoyed some of his house-name Westerns, but I’d never read one of the novels under his own name until now. The subtitle of HELL TO PAY is “The Life and Violent Times of Eli Gault”, and that’s a pretty good description of the book. It’s a first-person account of a Texas badman, the son of a crazed itinerant preacher who winds up killing his father in self-defense. Eli doesn’t necessarily set out to become an outlaw and a murderer, but circumstances continue forcing him in that direction.

Then he meets up with a gunfighter named Cutter Sharpe, who becomes a sort of surrogate father to him, teaching him how to handle a gun (for which Eli has a natural talent) and also how to play poker, which becomes Eli’s principal means of support. Eventually Eli and Sharpe go their separate ways, and Eli continues drifting. He even tries to settle down and lead a law-abiding life at times, going so far as to become a deputy marshal at one point, as well as joining a cattle drive to the railhead in Kansas, but sooner or later trouble crops up again and Eli’s natural tendency is to shoot his way out of it.

Butts really delivers the goods in this novel: colorful characters, headlong narrative drive, and plenty of gritty action, all told in a stripped down, distinctive style that reminded me of the hardboiled crime writer Paul Cain (FAST ONE, SEVEN SLAYERS). Eli Gault is a great character, reminiscent of Jim Thompson’s Lou Ford. He’s as friendly and likable as he can be, until it comes time for him to gun down somebody else in cold blood. His story builds up to a powerful ending, and after finishing it, I can say definitely that I’ll be reading more by J. Lee Butts. If you enjoy hardboiled Westerns, HELL TO PAY comes highly recommended by me.

(As often happens, despite my good intentions I haven't read any more novels by J. Lee Butts since this post originally appeared on August 23, 2009. I own copies of most of them, mind you, and I still plan to get around to reading at least some of them. One thing I didn't elaborate on in this review is that Jimmy's style really was distinctive, to the point you couldn't mistake his work for that of anybody else. This caused him a problem because after he had written a number of Longarms, the series got a new editor who didn't understand or like the way Jimmy wrote and tried to get him to change it. This effort was not successful. All it succeeded in doing was running Jimmy off from the series, which was a shame. Jimmy passed away, rather unexpectedly, as I recall, in 2022, having written several volumes of Western non-fiction in addition to his novels. HELL TO PAY is no longer in print, but affordable used copies are easy to come by. It's still one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read.)

Review: Bronze Star: The Damnation of Harley Brogden - Mike Baron

Mike Baron is one of those writers whose work I read and enjoyed long before we became friends on-line. His work as a comic book scripter in the Eighties, Nineties, and beyond is legendary. In the past decade he’s turned to writing novels, producing the great private eye series Biker, the hilarious Florida Man novels, and some top-notch horror thrillers. He’s also turned his hand to Westerns, and I’ve just read the first in his new series Bronze Star, THE DAMNATION OF HARLEY BROGDEN.

Not surprisingly, the protagonist of this novel is Harley Brogden, a former Confederate soldier who turned irregular and rode with Quantrell’s Raiders. The war is over now, and Harley earns his living providing meat to the army. He also likes to gamble, though, and a poker game goes wrong when the son of the richest man in the territory takes offense at losing and goes for his gun. Harley beats him to the draw and kills him, but even though he survives this shootout, he knows the man’s father and an army of hired guns will be after him, seeking vengeance.

Having no choice but to take off for the tall and uncut, Harley rides across the border into the western reaches of Canada, where he winds up in a town full of eccentric characters, many of them immigrants from Croatia. Some of them possess odd powers. There’s a silver mine nearby, but it’s not being worked anymore because something evil lives inside it and has claimed numerous lives. Harley makes friends and starts a romance with the widow who runs the local boarding house, but before he can settle down to any sort of life, he has to deal with the supernatural menace hanging over the town. Oh, and the vengeful cattle baron and his hired gun-wolves show up, too, of course.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of most Weird Westerns. In too many of them, the author knows how to write horror or knows how to write Westerns, but not both. That’s not the case in THE DAMNATION OF HARLEY BROGDEN, which is excellent in both respects. Not that I expected anything less from Mike Baron. He brings his own unique touch to everything he writes, and nobody in the business today comes up with better protagonists. Harley Brogden is a complex character, deadly proficient when it comes to violence but at the same time possessing a likable, gentle touch with those he befriends, especially animals and children. Haunted by some of his past actions, he’s genuinely trying to become a better man, and most of the time he succeeds. You still don’t want to make an enemy out of him, though.

I had a very good time reading this novel and give it a high recommendation for Weird Western fans. I think most traditional Western fans would enjoy it, too. I’m pretty sure there are sequels on the way, but for now, you can pick this up in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon. It’s another winner from Mike Baron.

Review: Twenty Plus Two - Frank Gruber

I’m a long-time fan of Frank Gruber’s work, but I’d only read some of his Western novels, a couple of his early mystery novels, some of his pulp mystery stories—most notably, the Oliver Quade stories collected in BRASS KNUCKLES—and his memoir THE PULP JUNGLE, which grew out of his introduction to the Quade collection. I hadn’t read any of his later mystery novels. This seemed like a good time to remedy that since Black Gat Books is about to reprint his 1961 novel TWENTY PLUS TWO, published originally in hardcover by E.P. Dutton and then reprinted in paperback that same year by Bantam. It was even made into a movie that year, starring David Janssen and with a screenplay by Gruber, which I haven't seen.

The protagonist of TWENTY PLUS TWO is Tom Alder, who’s not a private detective, although he functions pretty much like one and has contacts with detective agencies all over the country. Instead, he tracks down missing heirs and takes a cut of whatever they inherit. But as this book opens, he’s not looking for an heir. He’s taking an interest (for reasons that will be explained later in the book) in the murder of a woman who works for various movie stars answering their fan mail, running their fan clubs, etc.

That murder investigation isn’t all Alder has on his plate. A swindler and ex-con wants to hire Alder to find his younger brother. A beautiful woman who’s a friend of one of Alder’s old flames goes missing. In some odd way, all these cases seem to connect to the disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a young mobster more than twenty years earlier.

As experienced readers of these kind of novels, we’re all going to expect those plot elements to tie together eventually, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that they do. However, Gruber piles on enough complications and coincidences that eventually the reader has to do some pretty serious willing suspending of disbelief. “Sure, why not?”, if you will. Despite that, is the plot of TWENTY PLUS TWO too far-fetched? Well, no, I don’t think so. The resolution is logical and holds together, and who’s to say it couldn’t have happened that way? I don’t think Gruber cheats and conceals things from the reader, either. It’s all there to be figured out, as Tom Alder does.

The book races along, too. I was flipping the pages pretty quickly in the second half, eager to see what was going to happen. Gruber’s prose isn’t fancy, but it’s very effective when it comes to telling a story.

Gruber moved in pulp writing circles in New York and movie and TV circles in Hollywood (he created several Western series I watched as a kid), and I’ve read that he wasn’t very well-liked by some of his contemporaries, although he remained good friends with a few such as fellow pulpster Steve Fisher. He was a really good yarn-spinner and turned out top-notch stories and novels for a long time. I think I need to read more of them. In the meantime, the Black Gat paperback of TWENTY PLUS TWO will be out in early October. It’s one of the best mystery novels I’ve read this year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Blue Book Magazine, May 1931

Yikes! This great cover by Laurence Herndon illustrates the first installment of the serialized novel "The Land of Hidden Men" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which just happens to be one of the Burroughs novels I've never read. I have to get busy and catch up on some of this stuff. This issue isn't top-heavy with big-name authors, but there are still some very good pulpsters on hand including Seven Anderton, Clarence Herbert New (with a Freelances of Diplomacy story), Rollin Brown, Armand Brigaud (a JUNGLE STORIES stalwart later in his career), and Conrad Richter, whose work appeared in the pulps occasionally even though he was better known for his stories in the slicks and, later on, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Also on hand were some writers unknown to me: Ewing Walker, William F. Sturm, Henry LaCossitt, Albert Dorrington, Wilbur Hall, and Arthur K. Akers. What's this, an issue of BLUE BOOK without a single H. Bedford-Jones story, let alone two or three under his various pseudonyms? I thought that was against the law! 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Fall 1942

A common scene on Western pulp covers was to have an owlhoot standing in front of a wall on which was tacked a wanted poster bearing his likeness. The cover by Mat Kauten on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN is a good example of that. I like this cover a lot. The contents look pretty interesting, too. After appearing exclusively in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to early 1941, T.W. Ford's character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid, began appearing in Columbia Western pulps in May of '41. Except for a couple more stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY that were probably already in inventory there, from that point on Strant only showed up in various Columbia pulps, including this one. I don't know the circumstances of the move. It could be that Columbia offered more money (highly unlikely!) or the editors at Street & Smith told Ford, "Please don't send us any more of those Silver Kid stories" (the more likely explanation). Whatever the reason, I've read Silver Kid yarns from both eras of his career and always enjoyed them. Also on hand in this issue are Archie Joscelyn, Ed Earl Repp, Lee Floren, A. Kenneth Brent, Kenneth P. Wood, G.C. Ogle, and house-name Cliff Campbell.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Nothing Personal - Jason Starr

Until this book, the only thing I’d read by Jason Starr was BUST, his Hard Case Crime novel written in collaboration with Ken Bruen, which I liked quite a bit. NOTHING PERSONAL is one of Starr’s earlier novels, and it’s good enough to convince me that I need to read more of his work.

This book is about two couples in New York, the white-collar David and Leslie Sussman and the blue-collar Joey and Maureen DePino, and the way all their lives intersect in unexpected and tragic fashion. Leslie and Maureen are best friends from childhood. David is being stalked by a woman from his office with whom he’s been having an affair. Joey is a compulsive gambler up to his eyeballs in debt who has a loan shark’s goons after him. You know when things start out this bad, they’re only going to get worse . . . but the trick is in how they get worse.

I don’t mind admitting I thought I had this book figured out. I knew what was going to happen. Only I didn’t. Starr kept coming up with different but perfectly logical ways to take his story, so that every time I started to nod knowingly to myself, he yanked the rug out from under me again. That’s good stuff and kept me flipping the pages even as the events unfolding grew darker and darker. I love it when a book takes me by surprise. NOTHING PERSONAL is a fine novel, and now I have to go find more of Jason Starr’s books.

(I did read a couple more Jason Starr novels after this post appeared on July 14, 2007, and I'll probably rerun the reviews of them, too, in time. This novel is still in print in e-book and paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands.)

Review: Too Like the Lightning - Dana Chambers (Albert Fear Leffingwell)

A while back I read and very much enjoyed SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU, the first novel in the Jim Steele series by Dana Chambers, whose real name was Albert Fear Leffingwell. In the same double volume with that book, the fine folks at Stark House Press have also reprinted the second Jim Steele novel, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, and as it turns out, it’s even faster-paced than the first one.

You may recall that at the end of the previous book, our radio-scriptwriter-turned-detective narrator/protagonist was going to be married to his old flame, the beautiful bronze-haired Lisa. Well, as TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING opens, Lisa is dead, or at least presumed dead, in the crash of a missing airplane. Instead of being in bed with his wife, Steele wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. He has holes in his memory, and oh, yeah, there’s a dead guy in the bathtub.

The author explains all this pretty quickly. Or does he? It seems that Steele, in the middle of mourning for Lisa, has been recruited as an intelligence agent by the U.S. government to help get to the bottom of an evil plan by German and Japanese spies to sabotage American bombers. This book was first published in 1939, so there’s a lot of worried speculation about how there are going to be bombing raids along the East Coast and a German army will invade from Mexico. The blonde and the dead guy are tied in with Steele’s assignment, of course.

But in short order, things get more complicated than that. One of the agents Steele is working with gets blown up by a bomb. He gets sapped, shot at, captured by bad guys—or are they?—escapes, finds vital information, hides vital information, calls in the FBI—or are they?—and makes several startling discoveries, each of which changes everything. Leffingwell doesn’t help clarify things by constantly skipping scenes in order to drop us back down in the middle of the action.

All of that makes it difficult to keep up with what’s going on in TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING. However, in the end everything does come together and make sense, and getting to that point is a lot of fun. This book is packed to the gills with witty banter, and Steele’s narration is so swift and breezy, you can’t help but be entertained by it. The ending is quite satisfying, too.

I don’t think I liked this one quite as much as the first one in the series, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to fans of offbeat wartime espionage thrillers. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions. Stark House has already reprinted the next two books in the series, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Now Available: The Legend of Johnny Colt #3: Staked Plains Slaughter

The railroad has finally reached the Texas Panhandle, but not everyone is happy about it—in fact, there are some very bad people willing to slaughter a lot of folks to keep the railroad from advancing. Johnny Colt has faced down many killers before, but this mission might be his most dangerous--and last--assignment yet. When he crosses paths with a kill-crazy gang led by the murdering devil Billy Six-Ears, his undercover mission turns into a violent and blood-soaked fight for his life. With deadly gunfire erupting from all sides, Johnny Colt must rely on all his courage and sharpshooting skills to escape with his head still intact and bring these outlaws to justice…the kind of justice that swings from the end of a rope.

On the Staked Plains, death can come from anywhere. In this unrelenting, brutally violent fast-paced Western, Johnny Colt must once again put his life on the line to bring law and order to a terrifyingly violent American frontier, where bullets are cheap…and life is cheaper.

Bestselling western veteran author James Reasoner once more brings his gritty, take-no-prisoners depictions of the West in STAKED PLAINS SLAUGHTER.

PRAISE FOR JAMES REASONER:

"James Reasoner is a master of the Western. You can always depend on his work to excite and entertain." —Joe Lansdale

(This is one of the fastest-paced books I've ever written, and that's saying something. Johnny Colt's uncle, Texas Ranger Captain Esau "Brimstone" Parker, also known as the Hellfire Ranger, gets to play a pretty big part in this book. I love these characters and have really enjoyed writing the three books so far. I hope some of you wlll pick it up and enjoy it as well. The e-book edition is here, and it's available in a paperback edition, as well. Spread the word, and I'll greatly appreciate it!)