Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #15: Science Fiction in the Men's Adventure Magazines - Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, eds.

By now we all know what to expect from MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY: a great-looking volume featuring beautiful reproductions of covers and interior art from classic men’s adventure magazines, top-notch stories and articles from those same magazines, and entertaining, informative, and well-researched essays about the magazines and what they published. So no one should be surprised when MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY #15: SCIENCE FICTION IN MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES turns out to be superb.

MAQ has ventured into the science fiction realm before, but not to the extent you’ll find in this issue. The non-fiction part leads off with a fine introduction from co-editor Robert Deis telling the reader about this issue’s contributors. Veteran writer, editor, and publisher Gary Lovisi explores vintage science fiction magazines in Australia, the fertile field in which prolific mystery novelist Alan G. Yates (better known as Carter Brown) found his first success as a writer. Sean C.W. Korsgaard delves into the stories some famous SF authors wrote for the men’s adventure magazines. I’m a longtime science fiction fan and consider myself at least moderately educated in the field, but honestly, I had no idea so much SF was published in those magazines. Co-editor Bill Cunningham gets into the evolution of science fiction artwork over the decades, an article lavishly illustrated, as they say, by some of SF’s best artists. Finally, Mike Chomko gives us an article about the pulp convention Pulpfest honoring the centennial of the first science fiction pulp, AMAZING STORIES. All of these are great fun to read, and I learned a few things, too.

Moving on to the fiction, Deis provides fine introductions to these stories:

“Spacemen in the Dark” by Robert Sheckley, from the April 1953 issue of CLIMAX. I haven’t read a lot by Sheckley, but everything I’ve read was good, including this story about a spaceship suffering damage that leaves it with power but no lights. Psychological suspense, and very well done.

“Interplanetary Agent” by Milton Lesser, from the February 1953 issue of MAN TO MAN. Lesser, of course, later became much better known as Stephen Marlowe, author of a very popular series about hardboiled, globetrotting private detective Chester Drum. This is a nice little science fiction espionage yarn with an effective sting in its tail.

“The Lieutenant Must Die” by Martin Caidin, from the March 1956 issue of MALE. In his introduction, Deis calls this story “The Caine Mutiny in Space”, and that’s a very accurate description. Caidin always delivered the goods and does so here.

“The Monster” by Dan Tyler Moore, from ADVENTURE, June 1957. A very suspenseful story about an inventor and his wife pursued by a machine gone haywire that’s trying to kill them. Did James Cameron come across an old issue of ADVENTURE when he was a kid and read this story? I don’t know, of course, but it certainly seems plausible. Superb all the way around.

“Get the Convoy Through” by Bob Lichello and “The Beach-heads of Space” by Bill Becker are both from the October 1958 issue of REAL WAR, and they’re both military science fiction, the same sort of war stories the men’s adventure magazines published all the time, only effectively transferred into space settings. They’re also both gritty and well-written.

This is another fine issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, and I didn’t even mention there’s a photo gallery of iconic cover model Eva Lynd! All of the stories hold up very well as both science fiction and men’s adventure fiction. If you’re a fan of either, or both, I give it a very high recommendation. As usual, you can get it on Amazon or directly from the publisher.

Review: American Treasure Hunters #4: The Missing U-Boat Enigma - Andrew M. Dare (Travis J.I. Corcoran)

One of the real pleasures of my reading this year has been discovering the American Treasure Hunters series. These young adult mystery/adventure novels are very much influenced by the Rick Brant, Hardy Boys, and Three Investigators series, and while their aim may be to help get boys reading again, they’re perfect for older readers like me with fond memories of those earlier books.

In the latest entry, THE MISSING U-BOAT ENIGMA, our three heroes, Ben Prescott, Porter Rockwell, and Latch McRae, discover a sunken German U-boat from World War II along the shore of North Carolina. The one-two punch of a tropical storm followed by a hurricane has uncovered the vessel, and of course Ben, Porter, and Latch have to explore it. In doing so, they discover a badly damaged Enigma code machine, and that plunges them into an effort to decode some German radio messages in which the code has never been cracked. Naturally, the shadowy, sinister organization with which the guys have clashed before wants to stop them before they uncover a secret that’s been hidden since 1942.

Well, I tell you, this stuff is right up my alley. I raced through this book and loved it. Ben, Porter, and Latch are great protagonists. Ben is supposedly the brain, Porter is the athlete and handles the heavy action, Latch is the gadget and gizmo guy. But they’re all very smart and use that intelligence as much as they use any of their other abilities.

There isn’t as much action in this novel as in the previous books of the series. Most of the focus is on the historical mystery, which is fine with me because it’s a really fascinating one. When they do have to face off with the bad guys, those scenes are handled very well.

Travis J.I. Corcoran is the author behind the Andrew M. Dare house-name on this novel, and he does a superb job with it. He’s written some well-regarded science fiction novels, some of which I already own. I need to get around to reading them. In the meantime, I give THE MISSING U-BOAT ENIGMA a high recommendation. It's available in e-book and hardcover editions from Amazon, or better yet, you can buy it directly from the publisher. I’ll be looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, July 1947

It's still morning where I am, so rather than skip it this week, here's a dramatic cover by Peter Stevens on the July 1947 issue of ADVENTURE. This appears to be a pretty good issue. It features Steve Frazee's first published story, a Caradosso story by F.R. Buckley (I've got to try this series sometime), and stories by George C. Appell, James Norman, Duane Decker, and lesser-known authors Fred Lane and Henry Norton. ADVENTURE may have been past its prime by the late Forties, but it was still a pretty darned good pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, October 1947

It's been a while since I featured an A. Leslie Ross cover. This is a pretty good one. This issue of WESTERN TRAILS has an excellent bunch of authors inside, too, starting with J. Edward Leithead, who has two stories (as usual), a novelette under his name and a short story as Wilson L. Covert, his most common pseudonym. Other authors include Wayne D. Overholser, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Glenn Low, the ubiquitous Joe Archibald, Theodore J. Roemer, and one unknown to me, Spencer Frost. Leithead, Overholser, and Gardner are always worth reading, Low usually is, and Archibald has grown on me, goofy though he can be. If I owned this one, I wouldn't hesitate to read it.

Review: A Game of Flesh - John Trinian

Nick Pascal is a gigolo. He may call himself a male escort, but his real business is romancing and bedding rich, lonely women, usually older. He lives in San Francisco and is doing very well for himself, but he hasn’t forgotten his childhood as a poor Polish boy and the son of a drunk in a small Northern California town. Despite those memories, he’s put all that behind him and life looks pretty good . . . until a rich, powerful gangster decides that Nick is just the guy to carry out a crooked, dangerous job for him.

A GAME OF FLESH was John Trinian’s first novel, published as a paperback original in 1958 by Bedside Books, a middle-of-the-pack hardboiled sleaze publisher. I don’t know who did the cover on that edition, but Black Gat Books is reprinting it with a nifty George Gross cover. That edition will be out tomorrow.

I’ve been aware of John Trinian’s books for many years, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of them until now. I’ll have to do something about that, because A GAME OF FLESH is pretty darned good. Over the first half of the book, as Nick Pascal gets enmeshed deeper and deeper into a web of criminals, Trinian also gives the reader several flashbacks that fill in the backstory of Nick’s younger years and how he drifts into his current profession. Then the narrative picks up momentum as layer after layer of the plot gets revealed, and it’s a well-constructed, fairly clued puzzle, at that, more so than you sometimes get in books like this.

Like most noir novel protagonists, Nick is out for the big score, and he’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is. The question is whether his ambition and his recklessness will catch up to him in the end. Trinian creates a considerable amount of genuine suspense as we keep flipping the pages to find out.

Trinian, which was not the author’s real name, also adopted the name Zekial Marko, which he used to write scripts for various TV detective series after publishing seven novels in just a few years in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I believe now that this one has been reprinted, all seven are available again, the others in Stark House Press double editions. I have those around here somewhere. Time to dig them out. For now, I give A GAME OF FLESH a high recommendation for noir fans. I raced through it and had a really good time reading it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective, April 1939

This is a pretty eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it's a reminder that every adventurer should have a top hat as well as a pith helmet. Look at the authors inside this issue of DIME DETECTIVE, though: Raymond Chandler, T.T. Flynn, John Lawrence, Fred MacIsaac, and Dale Clark. That's almost an all-star lineup. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second October Number, 1957

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, one of the few I’ve seen by him that’s signed. The colors on my copy are kind of washed out and there’s a chunk out of the cover, but I’m glad to have it anyway.

I’ve written before about how RANCH ROMANCES during the Fifties is one of my favorite Western pulps, and this issue is a good example of why that is. It starts off with the novella “Hired Killer” by Ray Gaulden, one of the most dependable hardboiled Western writers of the Fifties and Sixties. Hired gun Blain Damaron returns to his hometown on a job. He’s supposed to find and kill a man who murdered a rich man’s son. Damaron carries out this assignment right away, but for some reason, he finds that he can’t leave his old stomping grounds. There are too many people he knows, too many old enemies who are out to take over the whole area. A range war is brewing, and the sheriff asks Damaron to stay on and wear a deputy’s badge. He’s very reluctant to do so, but really, it’s pretty obvious what he’s going to wind up doing.

The plot may be pretty standard stuff, but as usual, Gaulden elevates it with good characters and terse, top-notch prose. He expanded this story into the novel DAMARON’S GUN, published as a paperback original by Signet in 1958 under the pseudonym Wesley Ray. I’m pretty sure I have a copy of that book, but I’ve never read it. I may have to do that, once this version has settled a little in my brain.

Ben Frank’s work is hit-or-miss with me, mostly miss, to be honest, because I just don’t find his comedy Westerns very funny. But his story “The Man Who Came Back” in this issue isn’t a comedy, and it’s excellent. A young rancher is badly injured in a tornado and is laid up in the hospital for a long time. He’s lost everything, and he’s not in great shape physically. Can he start over again, despite the fact that a neighboring rancher is trying to crowd him off his range? Maybe he can, with the help of a pretty young schoolteacher who has some trouble of her own in her past. Frank, whose real name was Frank Bennett, does a fine job with this one and I really enjoyed it.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Walker A. Tompkins’ Westerns for almost sixty years, starting with the paperback reprints of some of his Jim Hatfield novels when I was in high school. His novelette “Blizzard Pass” in this issue is a very solid tale about the sheriff of a settlement high in the Rocky Mountains that gets cut off from the outside world for four or five months every winter when the pass that’s the only in or out is blocked by snow. In this story, just as the blizzard that will cut the town off is moving in, the lawman gets word that an escaped outlaw is headed that way. He’s faced with the prospect of having a vicious killer on the loose with no way for potential victims to escape from him. Tompkins does a fine job with the claustrophobic aspects of this story. The twist ending is pretty easy to see coming but is well-handled. This story probably would have been better at a longe length so Tompkins would have had the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense even more, but as is, I still found it very entertaining.

“Wagontrain Woman” by Barbara Bonham is an actual romance story about a woman whose husband is killed in an Indian attack while they’re heading west as part of a wagon train. One of the men traveling with the train loses his wife in childbirth. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen, but even so, this is a gentle, well-written, poignant story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Bonham published a couple of dozen stories during the Fifties, mostly Western romances, and I found this one to be a very nice change of pace from the usual leather-slappin’ and powder burnin’. (Don’t get me wrong. As a general rule, the more gunplay, the better when it comes to Western pulp yarns.)

Norman Wells wrote half a dozen stories published in RANCH ROMANCES during the late Fifties. That’s all I know about him. His story “Border Hunt” is in first person, something of a rarity in the Western pulps, and he does a good job with it. It’s about a young man trying to track down the Apache renegade who killed his brother. His search is complicated when his widowed sister-in-law shows up. This is a pretty well-written, reasonably entertaining story that ultimately doesn’t have much to it.

“Vengeance Station” is an early story by T.V. Olsen, who really didn’t write that much short fiction compared to his career as a prolific Western novelist. This one opens with the young protagonist set afoot in the desert in West Texas, pursued by twin brothers from a family that has a long-standing feud with his. He manages to reach a stagecoach station where the man who runs the station has a beautiful daughter. But the young man’s enemies catch up to him, and gritty action ensues. Olsen was a really fine author of hardboiled Westerns, and I kind of regret that I spent a long time avoiding his work because I didn’t care for the first novel of his I read, many years ago. But on the other hand, that gives me a lot of good books to read now. “Vengeance Station” is a very good story, although I think Olsen’s stuff works better at longer lengths.

There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE WAITING GUN by John S. Daniels, who was really Wayne D. Overholser. This was published under Overholser’s name, but not until after he had passed away. I have a copy of the novel version and might get around to reading it one of these days.

This is a really good issue of RANCH ROMANCES, which means it’s a top-notch Western pulp. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

Review: Pickman's Model - H.P. Lovecraft

It seemed like reading a story by the old gentleman himself would be the best way to cap off this week, and since a commenter on one of the earlier posts mentioned “Pickman’s Model”, I thought that might be a good choice. WEIRD TALES published this story by H.P. Lovecraft in the October 1927 issue, and it’s been reprinted many, many times since then.

The narrator of “Pickman’s Model” is a man named Thurber, who seems to be a well-to-do gentleman of Boston. He’s having drinks with a young friend of his named Eliot, and during the course of the evening, he explains why he no longer associates with the well-known artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman, it seems, is a hugely talented artist, but the subjects of his paintings are so grotesque and bizarre that he’s become increasingly shunned in Boston society.

The highlight of Thurber’s story is a recounting of the time Pickman took him to a rented house in a poorer section of town that he uses as a private gallery and studio. Pickman takes Thurber into the basement, and what they encounter there leads Thurber to believe that Pickman isn’t just painting his pictures from imagination. He’s actually witnessed some of the terrible things he’s captured on canvas.

That’s really all there is to “Pickman’s Model”. Like most of Lovecraft’s work, it’s all atmosphere and creepiness and vague but horrifying concepts. It’s well-written and draws the reader in. I just can’t help but wish that something actually happened in it.

I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be as big a fan of Lovecraft’s work as many are. I suspect I came to it too late. Bill Crider once told me that the best time to discover Lovecraft is the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was close to fifty years past that.

By the way, I can certainly see how this story might have been the inspiration for Robert Barbour Johnson’s story “Far Below”, which I wrote about a few days ago, and that makes me glad I read it.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the stories I’ve read this week. Look for more reviews of Mythos-inspired fiction in the days to come. Now that I’ve started those anthologies, I’d like to read more of them.

Review: The Faceless God - Robert Bloch

Mentioning Robert Bloch put me in the mood to read something by him, and “The Faceless God”, originally published in the May 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES and also available in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, was handy.

There are SPOILERS BELOW, so beware.

This starts out with a very graphic and disturbing torture scene, as a smuggler and criminal tries to extract the location of a potentially valuable find in the Egyptian desert from an old man. The thing is the head of a statue that was buried in the sand sometime in ages past, but the constantly shifting dunes have uncovered it. Getting wind of the discovery, the crook wants the statue for himself, figuring that it’s bound to be worth a lot of money. The old man can’t hold up under the torture and finally reveals the statue’s location before dying.

This is basically the story’s prologue, and in the hands of, say, Robert E. Howard, “The Faceless God” would have been a corking yarn, as one of REH’s adventurer heroes would have gone after the statue, too, and clashed violently with the bad guy before the statue—which turns out to be that of an ancient Egyptian elder god—enters the fray in bloody and dramatic fashion.

But that’s not what happens. The bad guy goes after the statue, finds it, and terrible things ensue. Needless to say, it’s all very well-written. Bloch was a great storyteller. It’s just that he chooses not to tell much of a story here.

I’m a firm believer in reviewing the story the author wrote, not the one I wish he had written, so I feel bad saying I found “The Faceless God” to be a disappointment. As I said, the writing is excellent, and on that basis alone, I’m glad I read it, and it certainly won’t keep me from reading other stories by Bloch in the future. This one is a bit of a misfire for me, but it might not be for you. If you haven’t read it and want to give it a try, it’s been reprinted numerous times, most notably in the Bloch collections YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER, THE OPENER OF THE WAY, and MYSTERIES OF THE WORM.

Review: The Salem Horror - Henry Kuttner

Say you’re a writer, an author of very popular light romances, and your publisher is pressuring you to finish the new book, and you’re having trouble with it, so you need a nice quiet, peaceful place to work. What do you do?

You rent a house in Salem, Massachusetts, that once belonged to an evil witch who was hanged several hundred years earlier when the mob discovered that her body wouldn’t burn at the stake, and before she died she cursed the town and nobody’s been able to live in the house for very long ever since. Of course that’s what you do. Sure, why not?

That’s the set-up of Henry Kuttner’s story “The Salem Witch”, which appeared originally in the May 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which has a striking cover by Margaret Brundage, by the way. Kuttner is a long-time favorite of mine. He was one of those authors who could write in several different genres and handle them all extremely well. The stories of his from WEIRD TALES that I’ve read have all been excellent, and “The Salem Horror” is no exception. The protagonist of this yarn pursues a rat into the basement of the old house, where he proceeds to find a hidden room that has to be the old witch’s sanctum where she invoked dark rituals. Naturally, the guy decides this would be a fine place to write and finish his novel at last. Who cares if he starts having bizarre, disturbing dreams about a giant black blob rampaging through the town and slaughtering people?

This story also introduces occult detective Michael Leigh, who returns in the next issue of WEIRD TALES in a story that’s a collaboration between Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Unfortunately for him, that’s the end of his series. I may have to find that one and read it, too, since Bloch is another favorite of mine. In the meantime, I read “The Salem Horror” in the aptly named THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK from Wildside Press, which you can find in an e-book edition on Amazon. I really enjoyed this one, and I suspect I’ll be reading more from that collection very soon.