Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Magazine, First May, 1931

Yep, just polin' down the river on a raft with a machine gun. Think what a different book THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN might have been if Huck and Jim had had themselves a machine gun. They might have had some real adventures then. But not to get too far afield here . . . TOP-NOTCH had some good authors, as you'd expect from a Street & Smith pulp. In this issue are stories by James P. Olsen, George Allan England, house-name Valentine Wood (with a Kroom, Son of the Sea yarn), and Warren Elliott Carleton, among others. Not big names, but Olsen was always dependable no matter what the genre and quite a bit of England's work has been reprinted. Despite its name, I've never considered TOP-NOTCH to be in the upper rank of pulps, but I'm not sure why I feel that way, since I've read very little of what was published in it, mostly just the few stories that Robert E. Howard had there and the Ozar the Aztec stories written by Walker A. Tompkins under that Valentine Wood pen-name. (Speaking of that, the final Longarm novel I wrote, LONGARM AND THE BLOODY RELIC, was inspired by those Ozar stories and has a character in it, a ship's captain, named Valentine Wood. For whatever that's worth.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, April 1953

It's not often you see the Old Geezer on a Western pulp cover without his pards, the Stalwart Cowboy and the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead, but here he is on this 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE cover by Norman Saunders. I like the way he can shoot it out with the bad guys and continue smoking his pipe. He's a tough old bird. This is probably a pretty tough-minded issue, too, with stories by H.A. DeRosso and Jonathan Craig, along with Lee Floren, Robert Trimnell, Will Cook, Bill Burchardt, and some lesser-known Western pulpsters including Doc Winchester, a by-line that has to be a pseudonym or house-name, although it hasn't been identified as such.

Forgotten Books: Sage Tower - Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on April 25, 2007.)

The title of this short novel isn’t a geographical reference, as I thought it might be when I first picked it up. Instead it’s the name of the hero. Published as half of an Ace Double Western (with Ray Hogan’s KILLER ON THE WARBUCKET on the other side), it has some of the best blurb page copy I’ve read.

There were three things that brought Sage Tower out of Texas:
an eight-sided goldpiece;
a dying Mexican woman;
a message reading: there are no flowers on Emilio’s grave.

If you can read that and not want to read the book, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, compadres. As usual with a Dean Owen novel, the plot is complex, there’s a lot of back-story, and the characters are well-drawn. He packs a lot into a short (in this case, 118 pages) novel. Here we’ve got lust, revenge, buried loot, murder, gun battles, and several brutal, well-written fistfights, all in tough, lean, hardboiled Western style. This is a fine novel and only makes me want to read more of McGaughey’s books.

The Wild Adventures of the Spider: Fury in Steel - Will Murray

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my introduction to The Spider was in 1969, when Berkley Medallion reprinted the first two books in the series, THE SPIDER STRIKES and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott. They released these in an odd, “buy one, get one free” scheme which saw the two paperbacks bound together with a paper band around them. I bought them off the spinner rack in a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas. My mother and I were on our way to my aunt’s house in Blanket, Texas, and I usually talked her into stopping at that store in Stephenville because they had good paperback and comic book spinners, as well as a big magazine rack where I saw some of the late issues of RANCH ROMANCES but didn’t buy any because I was spending my money on paperbacks like those two Spider novels.

Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand . . . Berkley reprinted a couple more Spider novels, these by Norvell Page writing under the house-name Grant Stockbridge. Page was far and away the most prolific Spider author and really defined the series’ tone with his wild, over-the-top plots and almost non-stop action. The problem is, I never saw those paperbacks. They just didn’t show up in any my usual book-buying haunts. It was more than a decade before I read any more of the Spider series, although by then I had read quite a bit about it. A few more reprints started trickling out in the early Eighties, a trio of trade paperbacks published by an outfit called Dimedia, and I found an issue of the actual pulp in a thrift store, and I picked up used copies of several novels published by Pocket Books that had been rewritten and “updated” but still retained some of the pulp feel. More actual reprints followed, some in mass market paperback, some in facsimile editions from small press publishers, and I read most of them. I’m not a Spider expert—I’ve read maybe half of the series in one format or another—but I always enjoy the character and his wild exploits.

Which brings us to The Wild Adventures of the Spider, a series of brand-new novels by pulp expert and fine writer Will Murray. The first one, THE DOOM LEGION, guest-starred two other characters from Popular Publications pulps, G-8 (the Flying Spy) and Operator 5, Jimmy Christopher his own self. I loved it. Murray’s latest Spider novel, the recently released FURY IN STEEL, also has some guest stars, in this case Emile C. Tepperman’s intrepid trio of fast-shooting FBI agents, the Suicide Squad: Johnny Kerrigan, Dan Murdoch, and Stephen Klaw. I’ve read half a dozen of Tepperman’s Suicide Squad stories, and they’re great. So seeing them in the same book with The Spider was a big draw for me. They don’t exactly team up—in fact, for most of the book the FBI agents are trying to arrest Richard Wentworth and in fact succeed in doing so at one point—but their efforts against an invasion of New York by giant killer robots makes for some great reading.

That’s right, giant killer robots that can bite off a man’s head, tear him limb from limb, and, like steel termites, gnaw away the foundations of skyscrapers to bring them crashing down. Another week, another apocalypse in the Big Apple, a crazed scheme by another villain to wreak havoc, panic the nation, and cause the deaths of thousands. And the only one who can stop it, of course, is The Spider.

FURY IN STEEL is just pure fun from start to finish. The plot is well-structured, flowing smoothly from great action scene to great action scene, Murray’s prose captures the frantic tone perfectly, and he has a keen sense of the absurd, pushing the boundaries but always stopping short of letting things get silly. I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and if you’re a fan of The Spider, or just a fan of wild pulp adventures in general, I give it my highest recommendation. 

Overlooked TV: Gravity Falls (2012-2016)

I was vaguely aware of the animated TV series GRAVITY FALLS but didn't really know anything about it until Livia bought the whole series (there are only 40 half-hour episodes) on DVD and we watched it recently. It's the story of two 12-year-old twins, Dipper and Mabel Pines, who are sent to the small town of Gravity Falls, Oregon, to spend the summer with their Great-uncle Stan (or as he's known to the kids, Grunkle Stan).

Once they get there, they discover that all sorts of weird things happen in Gravity Falls. Grunkle Stan takes advantage of this to run a hokey tourist attraction called the Mystery Shack that consists of fake "oddities". Only some of them aren't so fake. Dipper finds a mysterious journal detailing some of the actual paranormal creatures and occurrences. Before you know it, the kids are battling bizarre menaces and also trying to navigate the pitfalls of adolescence, including making friends, Dipper's crush on 15-year-old Wendy, who works at the Mystery Shack, and Mabel's crush on practically every boy in sight. Meanwhile, the mysteries are deepening.

GRAVITY FALLS is a monster-of-the-week show, but like THE X-FILES and LOST, a couple of series it actually resembles, it has an overarching mythology, a little more of which is revealed episode by episode. Only unlike THE X-FILES and LOST, creator and writer or co-writer of every episode Alex Hirsch knew what he was doing and where he was going from the start, instead of just making it up as he went along. A lot of plot points and clues are planted early and don't really come to fruition until much later in the series, but when they do, the results are epic and apocalyptic.

This is one of the best TV series I've seen in a long time. It's smart, funny, well-written, and very good-hearted. The animation style took me a little while to get used to but never actually bothered me. The characters are great, including Soos, the lovable handyman who also works at the Mystery Shack, Old Man McGucket, the local hillbilly/eccentric who may be more than he seems, Mabel's friends Candy and Grenda, and Wendy, who, as a lumberjack's daughter, is something of a bad-ass. The voice cast is excellent: Jason Ritter as Dipper, Kristen Schaal as Mabel, Linda Cardellini as Wendy, and creator Alex Hirsch as dozens of the other characters, including Grunkle Stan, Soos, and Old Man McGucket.

I was really sad to see this one end. It's just a wonderful show, and if you haven't seen it, I give it my highest recommendation.

Gun Runner - Larry Correia and John D. Brown

Years ago, I read several novels in the long-running BattleTech science fiction series, tales about a galaxy-spanning conflict between rival clans, fought mostly by giant robots piloted by humans who controlled them from a cockpit within the robot’s body. Kind of like giant tanks that could run around and punch each other in addition to firing all sorts of futuristic weaponry. I even wrote a BattleTech novella when the publisher had an open call for an anthology, but it didn’t sell and has since been lost.

This was my first real exposure to the concept of mechs, which has become a popular element in science fiction. I don’t know where the idea originated. Anime, maybe? Was that the idea behind Robotech? All that’s too long ago; I can’t remember anymore.

But I digress. Folks love them some giant robots. I just read GUN RUNNER, a recent novel by Larry Correia and John Brown, and it’s a fine example of the genre, plus plenty more to boot. It takes place in a future where humanity has spread out from Earth, using artificially constructed gates in space to travel faster than light and colonize hundreds of planets in distant solar systems. The protagonist is Jackson Rook, a young man who pilots a battle mech in a civil war on his home planet. Jackson is one of those rare individuals whose brain is suited to being directly hooked up to the mech he pilots, so the giant battle machine responds directly to his mental commands instead of him having to use physical controls like most mech pilots. This backfires on his him when the enemy takes control of his brain and uses him as a weapon against his own allies.

This is back-story established in a prologue in which the captain of a smuggling spaceship rescues Jackson from his tragic fate. Jackson goes to work for this captain, who supplies weapons and other supplies to various planets where they’re otherwise unavailable. Jackson can still pilot mechs manually, although he won’t allow himself to be hooked up mentally to one anymore for fear that his brain will be taken over again. Of course, when the ship delivers a state-of-the-art mech known as a Citadel to a backwater planet ruled by a dictator and Jackson happens to fall into the hands of the outnumbered rebel faction, most readers are going to have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen sooner or later.

As with traditional Westerns, though, the appeal of a book like this is not so much the plot but the skill with which the author, or in this case, authors execute it. And Correia and Brown do an excellent job of making GUN RUNNER a fast-paced science fiction adventure yarn. In addition to the mech angle, there are cyberpunk elements, several shadowy conspiracies that will no doubt bear fruit in sequels, lots of very likable characters and despicable villains, and giant, non-mechanical monsters roaming a planet where, as they say about Australia, everything wants to kill you.

With all that going on, it’s not surprising that it takes a while to get to the “giant robots whaling the tar out of each other” point, but when that epic conflict finally breaks out, it’s great stuff. I read this on my Kindle and couldn’t turn the digital pages fast enough during the last 25% of the book. GUN RUNNER is a very good book, one of the best I’ve read so far this year, and I’m looking forward to the next in the series. If you’re a fan of adventure SF with terrific action scenes and some fine worldbuilding and characters, I give it a very high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Short Stories, April 1941

Are there people who collect covers with hook hands on them? Seems like there must be. I think this cover might be by J.W. Scott, but I'm not really familiar enough with his style to be sure. I'm sure there's a good bunch of authors in this issue of DETECTIVE SHORT STORIES, though: E. Hoffmann Price, Roger Torrey, W.T. Ballard, Edward S. Aarons (under his pseudonym Edward S. Ronns), J. Lane Linklater, Eric Howard, Dale Clark, Cyril Plunkett, and even legendary BLACK MASK editor Joseph T. Shaw under the pseudonym Mark Harper. Hard to go wrong with writers like that.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, June 1947

We can add another category to the things we see on Western pulp covers: Injury to a Saddle. This is a really nice, dynamic cover on this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES. And as was common with the Popular Publications Western pulps, a strong group of authors with stories inside, as well. In this case, Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden), William Heuman, Walker A. Tompkins, William R. Cox (twice, once as himself and once as house-name David Crewe), Joe Archibald, Barry Cord (Peter Germano), T.C. McClary, the mysterious Frank Morris, Wallace Umphrey, James Shaffer, and house-name Lance Kermit. A very entertaining issue, I suspect.

Forgotten Books: Hill Girl - Charles Williams

(This post was originally published on March 16, 2005. I started to rewrite it some because so much has changed since then, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I decided to leave it as it was. There'll be some more reruns from the early days of the blog in the coming weeks that I hope will be new to many of you.)

Every time I get a new issue of Steve Lewis's excellent fanzine MYSTERY*FILE in the mail, one of the first things I read is Bill Crider's column "The Gold Medal Corner". And no matter what author Bill is writing about, I think to myself, "I gotta get some of this guy's books off the shelf and read them." But usually I get sidetracked before I get around to it.

Not this time. Bill's latest column is about Charles Williams, and after reading it I actually went to the shelves and pulled down my Charles Williams books. Now, for years I've heard Bill, Ed Gorman, and other people talk about how good Williams' books are. A few years ago, I read one of his Dell First Edition novels, GIRL OUT BACK, and liked it quite a bit. But I never got back to his other books. (That easily sidetracked business I mentioned above.) Until now. I just finished Williams' first novel, HILL GIRL, published by Gold Medal in 1951. Even knowing how people whose opinions I respect feel about his work, I was still surprised by how very, very good it was. Williams wrote very well, mixing vivid, almost lyrical descriptive passages with dialogue that rings absolutely true. Prose that doesn't want to let the reader's eyes stray away from the page. Like the Silverberg book I read a couple of days ago, HILL GIRL is more domestic drama than crime novel, but that doesn't mean there's no suspense in it. The plot unfolds leisurely but builds to a very suspenseful climax. This is a fine novel, and I suspect it's not even one of Williams' best. I hope I'll get around to another of his books soon, instead of waiting several years again.

Available Now: Rattler's Law, Volume 1 - James Reasoner

I don't do a lot of Blatant Self-Promotion (does anybody even use that term anymore?), but here's an e-book omnibus of eight full-length Western novels by me, more than half a million words of fiction, for less than a buck. It's available on Amazon, and if you're a fan of traditional Westerns, I think you'll enjoy it.