A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Loser Friendly - Jake Cassidy

New Pulp Publishing is a new small press producing primarily e-books (although printed copies are available, too), in a variety of genres. As their website puts it: “New Pulp Publishing is dedicated to delivering blistering novella length fiction in the crime, suspense, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and western venues.” Their first book, LOSER FRIENDLY, has just been released and features Miami recovery agent Jake Cassidy (a name the author of the series is also using as a pseudonym). Jake seems to be a bit of a cross between Travis McGee and Mack Bolan. He lives on a boat (a yacht, not a houseboat) and for a fee, recovers things that people have lost, usually to some bad guys. But he also has a lot of heavy weapons and is very proficient in their use. Despite those influences, Jake takes on his own character and is a very likable hero and narrator, tough but not flawless, just enough of a smart-ass to be funny, and a good guy to have on your side when you’re in trouble.

In LOSER FRIENDLY, he starts out doing a favor for an old girlfriend and finds himself trying to rescue a would-be Hollywood screenwriter who has run afoul of some mobsters. They want a script the writer has written even more than they want the guy himself, and Jake winds up having to recover it, too. Occasionally the story pauses to take a breath, but for the most part it’s very fast-paced action and very effectively written, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The author behind the Jake Cassidy name is a prolific writer who has been published in a wide variety of genres (it’s not, repeat not, me; I don’t have anything to do with New Pulp Publishing except as a satisfied reader). I had a great time reading LOSER FRIENDLY and look forward to the next book in the series.

(I felt a real rush of nostalgia when I came across this post, which was first published on July 3, 2010. Everything about it is reminiscent of the early days of the Kindle boom, when e-book publishing was really the Wild West, Amazon was a boomtown, and there was plenty of money to be made. It was a far cry from the business it is today, a lot less slick maybe, but still a lot of fun. I think I knew at the time who was behind New Pulp Press and who Jake Cassidy really was, but I've slept since then, as the old saying goes. New Pulp Publishing put out one more book as far as I can tell, the sword and sorcery novel THE COLOSSUS OF MAHRASS, which was written by Mel Odom under the name R.J. Salter. Was Mel also Jake Cassidy? Maybe if he's reading this, he'll let us know. I could email him and ask him, of course, but what's the fun in that? There was another Jake Cassidy novella in the works called TWICE SHY. The cover for it is on New Pulp Publishing's website, which is still on-line although it hasn't been updated since 2011. And LOSER FRIENDLY is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. The e-book is even on Kindle Unlimited!) 

Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Cold Pursuit (2019)

Let me start by saying that I’m not a Liam Neeson fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed some of the movies he’s made (DARKMAN is a favorite), and I don’t let his presence in a film keep me from watching it. But there’s just something about the guy that rubs me the wrong way. However, I was in the mood for an action movie, and we’d never seen 2019’s COLD PURSUIT, so I figured, why not?

That turns out to have been a good choice. Neeson plays the protagonist of this movie, a snow plow driver in a small ski town in Colorado, but there are long stretches where other characters take over. Neeson’s son runs afoul of some drug smugglers and winds up dead of an apparent overdose, but he’s not convinced that’s what really happened and sets out to find the truth. When he does, he goes on a vengeance quest that gets rather convoluted with plot twists and competing gangs. And Neeson’s character has a secret in his background that makes things even more interesting.

What starts out as a pretty grim movie winds up having a lot of dry, oddball humor in it. In fact, COLD PURSUIT (which is based on a Norwegian movie) is a pretty oddball film overall. But it’s well-made, well-acted, reasonably suspenseful, and I wound up enjoying it more than I expected to. If you’re in the mood for a offbeat action movie, I recommend it.

Review: Swords of the Crags - Fred Blosser

After reading Fred Blosser’s sword and sorcery novella SWORDS OF PLUNDER recently, I was in the mood to dive back into more of his work. I picked his collection SWORDS OF THE CRAGS.

This volume collects six stories that might have been the sort of thing Robert E. Howard wrote for the Spicy pulps in the mid-Thirties. The title story, “Swords of the Crags”, is set in Peshawar, India, and in the Khyber Hills. The protagonist is Pike Braxton, an American adventurer and former gunfighter from Texas who functions as a sort of unofficial secret agent for the British. When a beautiful young American heiress gets caught up in the schemes of a sinister Russian agent, Pike has to rescue her and recover some vital information. Seems fairly straightforward, if dangerous, but then Pike and the beautiful blonde find themselves confronting an otherworldly menace. This fast-moving tale is like placing Howard’s El Borak in a SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES plot, with a dash of Lovecraft thrown in. It’s well-written, works very well, and races along to a satisfactory conclusion. I really enjoyed it. (And it puts me in mind of Howard’s comments in a letter to Lovecraft where he suggested that Lovecraft should try to crack the Spicy market. He could use a pseudonym, Howard says, and just write up a fictionalization of one of his own “sex adventures”. Just the thought of Lovecraft’s reaction when he read that suggestion always makes me chuckle.)

In “Alleys of Terror”, the scene shifts to Shanghai and the protagonist is Ridge Braxton, Pike’s younger brother who’s just as fast with his guns and fists. The beautiful Eurasian pirate and smuggler Olga Zukor is framed for murder. The victim held the key to a deadly conspiracy Ridge is investigating, so he and Olga have to team up to untangle the mess even though they dislike and distrust each other at first.

Ridge Braxton returns to his West Texas stomping grounds in “Witch of Snakebit Creek”, a creepy contemporary Western that reminds me a bit of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart” and “For the Love of Barbara Allen” although it turns out to be a very different kind of story. This is actually more of a mystery yarn with a nice late twist.

“The Girl From Hell’s Half Acre” finds another two-fisted, fast-shooting Texan adventurer, Esau Reynolds (a very Howardian name) turning detective as he tries to find a wealthy man’s missing daughter, who’s a beautiful blonde, of course. The trail leads Reynolds to the waterfront area of an unnamed city, where he clashes with—and beds—the beautiful queenpin of the area’s criminal underworld. This story, reminiscent of some of Howard’s Steve Harrison yarns, moves like the proverbial wind and is very entertaining.

“Sin’s Sanctuary” is another El Borak-like tale, with a heaping helping of Talbot Mundy influence, as an American adventurer infiltrates a hidden monastery in Tibet in search of a missing Englishman. He’s helped by a beautiful woman, of course, and they encounter unexpected danger inside the walls of the monastery. This is a really well-written and exciting story.

“Scarlet Lust” is a direct sequel to SWORDS OF PLUNDER and finds Cronn, the northern barbarian, out to steal a fabulous gem which he hopes will help him win the throne of one of the countries in his world. He gets some help, of course, from a beautiful woman. These are Conan pastiches, in a way, there’s no denying that, and they’re also better than most of the official Conan pastiches that have been published in the past few years. Like John C. Hocking, Scott Oden, and Chuck Dixon, Blosser understands the character and the setting. I don’t know if there are more of these Cronn stories, but if there are, I definitely want to read them. And if there aren’t, well, maybe Blosser will write some.

Blosser rounds out this collection with five articles about Howard’s efforts to crack the Spicy and Weird Menace markets, the spicier Conan yarns, and the influence of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy on Howard’s work. As always with Blosser’s work, these essays are informative, entertaining, and well worth a Howard fan’s time.

Overall, SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is an excellent volume and a lot of fun to read. While it’s true that the main influence on these stories is Robert E.Howard, I found them reminiscent of E. Hoffmann Price, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Talbot Mundy, as well. Also, in Blosser’s stories the spicy bits are considerably spicier than what authors could get away with in the Thirties. They’re not overly graphic, but those scenes don’t fade out as quickly as the ones in the pulps did. So while they’re definitely Howardian, don’t mistake these tales for pale imitations. They stand on their own, and they’re well worth reading. SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is available on Amazon in a paperback edition, and an e-book edition containing the first three stories and the first two articles is available as well.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, December 1932

Pith helmet alert! Seeing bullets whizzing through Stetsons was common on Western pulp covers, but I don't recall ever seeing any Injury to a Hat covers involving pith helmets. Surely, there must have been some. Allan K. Echols, author of the cover story in this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES, was best known for his Westerns, but obviously he wrote some jungle yarns, too. Something about this one seems to me like the cover painting might have existed first and Echols wrote the story to fit it, but that's pure speculation on my part and could be entirely wrong. The other authors in this issue make it a pretty strong lineup: Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Arthur J. Burks, Anthony M. Rud, Wayne Rogers, Perley Poore Sheehan (with a Captain Trouble story--I have a collection of those and need to get around to reading them!), and Thomson Burtis. Those guys were all popular, prolific pulpsters who knew how to spin a yarn.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, First October Number 1940

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That's my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover artwork, but I like it. You don’t see too many dogs on Western pulp covers. I’m always glad when one shows up. Most of the issues of RANCH ROMANCES I’ve read have been from later in the run when it was part of the Thrilling Group. I’ve read only a few from the era when it was published by Warner Publications, but they were good issues. The editor on this one was the legendary Fanny Ellsworth.

After all these decades as an avid reader, it’s still nice to discover authors who are new to me that I enjoy. The lead novella in this issue (and it’s almost long enough to be an actual novel) is “Kirby of the Flying K” by Amos Moore. You’d expect that Kirby would be the owner of the Flying K Ranch, wouldn’t you? I did. But I was wrong. The Flying K Ranch was owned by Peter Kilgour, who died recently under somewhat mysterious circumstances and left the spread to his niece, Peg Hampden. Lane Kirby, who the story hints has spent the past few years as a town-taming lawman, has some equally vague connection to the ranch. As far as I could tell, he was friends with the late Peter Kilgour. When he drifts back into the area, the first thing he comes across is an attempted lynching, with Kilgour’s former foreman as the intended victim. Well, Kirby puts a halt to that, of course, befriends the beautiful and plucky Peg Hampden, clashes with some old enemies, and generally stirs things up in a Save The Ranch yarn with plenty of action. This is a fairly standard plot, but the characters are excellent and it doesn’t end exactly how I thought it would, which is always a bonus.

“Amos Moore” contributed a lot of stories to RANCH ROMANCES, but I didn’t know until I read this one and looked “him” up that the name is a pseudonym for the writing team of Lillian Bennet-Thompson and George Hubbard, whose careers go all the way back to the early 1900s. Several silent movies were based on novels they wrote. They did mostly romance and mystery stories until they started publishing Westerns as Amos Moore in 1928. They turned out more than 50 Westerns including a dozen or so novels between then and 1942, when Bennet-Thompson died. Hubbard lived until 1958 but didn’t publish anything after Bennet-Thompson’s death. I don’t know a thing in the world about their personal lives. Were they a couple or just collaborators? Did Bennet-Thompson do most of the writing and Hubbard was the primary plotter? That would explain why he didn’t publish anything else. But I just don’t know. What I’m sure of is that “Kirby of the Flying K” is a really good story, well-written and fast-moving, and I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for the Amos Moore byline. I may even order some of their Western novels, most of which were serialized in RANCH ROMANCES before being published as books.

Elsa Barker was a prolific contributor to RANCH ROMANCES, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by her. Her story “Kitchen Courage” in this issue starts out as a fairly standard romance with the heroine in love with a young rancher. She decides to make him some jams and jellies and can some fruit for him while he’s away at the roundup, but while she’s at his ranch, somebody else rides up and the story takes an unexpected turn. This is another very good yarn.

“The Man From Nowhere” is by Paul Evan Lehman, who wrote a lot for the Western pulps but was even more popular as a Western novelist. It’s about a young cowboy who stumbles on a plot by a crooked lawyer to swindle a beautiful young woman out of her ranch. Of course, he has to take a hand and help her, even though he does so in a way that’s bound to cause him trouble. There’s definitely a romance angle in this one, but it's more of a hardboiled crime story and a good one, too.

Marie de Nervaud is another prolific author who published almost exclusively in RANCH ROMANCES. I don’t recall reading anything by her until I came to the novelette “Ransom Range” in this issue. It’s okay, another Save the Ranch story about a cowboy who steps in to help a girl he knew when she was just a kid. Of course, she’s grown up into a beautiful woman. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but with a plot this well-worn, I need good writing to elevate it (as in the Amos Moore story discussed above), and de Nervaud’s prose just never gripped me much. I didn’t dislike it and I would read more by her, but I won’t be especially looking for her stories.

I can’t find much on-line about Lucretia Whitehead Payne, just enough to think that she may have been married to Western author Stephen Payne, but that’s mostly speculation on my part and if anyone can confirm or deny it, I’d be most appreciative. She published about two dozen stories, mostly in RANCH ROMANCES but a few in other Western romance pulps. Her story “There’s Always a Crowd” is pure rom-com at first, with a young cattleman trying to court the pretty young cook even though the colorful ranch crew is always around, but then there’s a nice burst of action and a little crime element at the end. I would have said this isn’t really my kind of story, but I surprised myself by liking it a lot.

Kingsley Moses wrote several hundred stories for the pulps. Traditional Westerns, Western romances, sports, detective, aviation, adventure, he hit most of the genres at one time or another and was also one of the crew of house-name writers at WILD WEST WEEKLY. With a resumé like that, it’s hard to say whether I’ve read anything by him or not. His story in this issue, “Aunt Azalea Gentles ’Em” is also something of a romantic comedy as the gun-toting Aunt Azalea has to help a young lawman deal with some horse thieves and keep the ex-convict father of the girl he loves from being sent back to prison. Not a great story, but it’s reasonably entertaining and had a pretty satisfying ending.

There’s also a serial installment (5^th of 6) of “Rangeland Rebels” by Robert Dale Denver, who was really Ray Nafziger. I’m not sure why more of Nafziger’s RANCH ROMANCES serials weren’t published as novels. He did at least a dozen of them that could have been done as books, and some of his novellas probably could have been, too. As far as I know, though, only one of them, “Guns of Salvation Valley” (serialized in RANCH ROMANCES as by Robert Dale Denver in 1934) was published as a book of the same name, also in 1934, as by Grant Taylor. Anyway, I didn’t read this installment of “Rangeland Rebels”—I might have if it had been the concluding episode—but it looks good, as usual with Nafziger’s work. Like Harry Olmsted, he ought to be better remembered than he is.

The usual assortment of columns and features round out this issue. I hope some of the people who wrote in to “Our Air Mail” got good pen pals out of the deal. When I was about halfway through reading this one, I thought it might turn out to be one of the best Western pulps I’ve read, based on the stories by Moore, Barker, and Lehman. The others didn’t come up to that standard, but they’re all okay to good. Overall, this issue of RANCH ROMANCES is worth reading, and I’m glad I did. 

Happy Fourth of July!

 

The art on this cover is by Robert Gibson Jones, who did a bunch of covers, most of them excellent, for FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. William Brengle, author of the lead novella, is a house-name, and the actual author behind this one is Howard Browne. Also on hand in this issue are William P. McGivern, Robert Bloch (twice, once as himself and once as Tarleton Fiske), Don Wilcox, Harold Lawlor, and Leroy Yerxa. That's a pretty good line-up. I don't own this issue, but you can find a PDF of it here, along with a bunch of other issues of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. In the meantime, Happy Fourth of July to everyone reading this in the United States, and I hope it's a great day for you and everyone elsewhere in the world, too.

Review: Gangland's Doom: The Shadow of the Pulps (50th Anniversary Edition) - Frank Eisgruber Jr.

I’ve been hearing about GANGLAND’S DOOM, the ground-breaking study of The Shadow by Frank Eisgruber Jr., for many years. By the time I got into pulp fandom in the early Eighties, the book’s original edition, published by Robert Weinberg, had been out for several years. It was reprinted later by Starmont House and Altus Press, but I never got around to picking up a copy and reading it.

When the fine folks at The Shadowed Circle decided to do a special 50^th Anniversary Edition, I got on board right away, knowing the quality of the work they do. And they certainly didn’t disappoint. I’ve just read the new edition of GANGLAND’S DOOM, and it’s fantastic.

This was one of the very first books of pulp scholarship. Eisgruber takes a good look at The Shadow’s true identity, the various false identities he employed in his war against crime, the many agents and helpers who also enlisted in that war, the great villains against whom The Shadow and his organization battled, and the multitude of settings used in the almost 400 novels in the pulp series. He covers as well the three main authors of the saga, Walter B. Gibson, Theodore Tinsley, and Bruce Elliott, and this new edition provides several appendixes, correspondence between Eisgruber and fellow Shadow expert Will Murray, and an interview with him.

Will long-time Shadow fans learn much that’s new in this volume? Well, probably not much. Numerous other books have been published that delve deeply into the history of the character, not to mention the many articles from the journal THE SHADOWED CIRCLE and earlier pulp fanzines. But is GANGLAND’S DOOM well-written, informative, and highly entertaining? It absolutely is. I don’t know of any Shadow fan who wouldn’t greatly enjoy this affectionate look at a favorite character.

And I did come across one idea I’d never encountered before, at least as far as I recall. Eisgruber discusses—and rightfully dismisses—Philip José Farmer’s speculation that the flying spy G-8, The Spider, and The Shadow were all the same man. I don’t buy that for a second, but Eisgruber mentions an alternate possibility, that following World War I, G-8 became the detective and master of disguise Secret Agent X, and I can believe that. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it seems feasible to me. (Using the word “true” loosely, of course, since we are talking about pulp characters . . .)

As for the book itself, it’s beautifully produced. You’d expect no less from editor/publisher Steve Donoso and his associates. I was a Kickstarter backer and got my copy that way, but it’s available on Amazon in a hardcover edition with a cover and illustrations by Joseph Booth (the edition I read) and a paperback with a cover by Marcin Nowacki. There’s also a Kindle edition. You can also buy the print editions and plenty of other great Shadow material directly from the publisher, which is always an excellent option. If you’re a fan of The Shadow, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. It’s a great book and one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

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.