Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Marvel Tales, May 1940

MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES started as a science fiction pulp, as you'd expect from that title, but after five issues, it abruptly changed to a Weird Menace pulp under the name MARVEL TALES. That experiment last only two issues, then it switched back to MARVEL STORIES, then MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES (again), and finally MARVEL SCIENCE FICTION. None of them were successful, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is the second and final issue under the MARVEL TALES name, with a cover by J.W. Scott that's certainly worth of a Weird Menace pulp. Most of the authors inside were top-notch, although they tended to use pseudonyms, maybe because of the generally disreputable air the whole enterprise gave off. The lead story in this issue is by Nils O. Sunderland, who was really Jack Williamson, and backing him up are Robert O. Wentworth (Edmond Hamilton), Russell Gray (Bruno Fischer), and a couple of guys using their real names, Frederic Arnold Kummer Jr. and George E. Clark. If you want to check out this pulp for yourself, the entire issue can be found here. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, January 15, 1938

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with tape around the edges placed there by a previous owner. I know that tape on pulps gives most collectors the fantods, but it doesn’t bother me as long as it’s not too heavy-handed, probably because I’m more of a reader than a collector. A case like this one is okay. The cover is by Emery Clark, who, if I recall correctly, did some DOC SAVAGE covers for Street & Smith as well. (I know I could look it up on the FMI, but I’m too lazy right now.) I like this cover okay, although I think the best WILD WEST WEEKLY covers are by H.W. Scott and R.G. Harris.

The lead story in this issue is the novelette “Comanche”, published under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin and attributed to Lee Bond, an attribution I agree with. It reads like Bond’s work. The title character is a young troubleshooter for a wealthy ranch owner who has spreads across the West. Comanche’s background is a mystery. He’s white, but he was raised by a band of Comanche Indians until he was ten years old, when he was taken in by the rancher he now works for. Where he came from, nobody knows. But he’s smart, tough, and gun-swift, making him perfect to get to the bottom of the rustling that’s plaguing one of his mentor’s spreads in New Mexico Territory. Of course, the situation turns out to be more complicated than it appears at first. Bond piles on the action and includes a case of mistaken identity to complicate things. Bond’s work tends toward the formulaic at times, but at his best, he was a top-notch Western pulpster, and I really enjoyed this yarn.

Except . . . what I didn’t realize until I got to the end of it is that it’s just the first of a series of six linked novelettes featuring Comanche, so it really doesn’t have much resolution to it. Usually in a case like this, the novelettes would then be put together into a novel published as a hardback. I don’t find any evidence of that being true with these stories, so it’s likely I’ll never know what happens with Comanche after this. (The next week’s issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY with the second Comanche story is available on the Internet Archive. I may read it or I may not, I haven’t decided yet.)

Young Texas Rangers Hungry Hawkins and Rusty Bolivar starred in scores of stories by Samuel H. Nickels, including this issue’s “Prospectin’ fer Gun Trouble”. In this one, Hungry and Rusty help an old prospector protect his claim from a bunch of outlaws. That’s the entire plot. Nickels does an excellent job with the action and Hungry and Rusty are very likable protagonists, but the thin plot kind of works against the story. Also, one of the henchmen wonders why the boss outlaw wants to take over the mine in the first place, since it’s not very productive. That’s a darned good question, and it’s one that Nickels fails to answer. I don’t know if he just forgot and none of the editors at Street & Smith called him on it, but that plot hole is left wide open.

George C. Henderson was a pretty solid Western writer during the pulp era. “War on the Broken Wheel” is a stand-alone story featuring a good pair of protagonists, a couple of deputy U.S. marshals working undercover as surveyors as they try to find out who’s stirring up trouble between the cattlemen and the sodbusters. Again, nice action and characters, but not much plot keeps this story from being as strong as it might have been. I wouldn’t have minded seeing these protagonists again, but it seems this was their only appearance.

Under his pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, Paul S. Powers wrote approximately 150 stories about Kid Wolf, a wandering adventurer and self-styled Soldier of Misfortune. I prefer Powers’ other main series character, good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, but I really enjoy the Kid Wolf stories, too. In the novelette “Kid Wolf on Wild Hog Range”, the Kid comes across an injured young prospector who has been attacked by outlaws and left to die at the tusks of a herd of wild javelinas. The Kid saves the fellow from that grisly fate, of course, and learns from him that the outlaws have kidnapped the young man’s partners in order to torture the location of their valuable mine from them. Naturally, Kid Wolf isn’t going to stand for that, so he and the young man set off to right that wrong. Powers was really good at dishing out fast-moving, action-packed prose, and this yarn races along in a very entertaining fashion, ending with an epic fistfight and a suitable comeuppance for the bad guys. An excellent story and my favorite of the Kid Wolf series I’ve read so far.

I’m also a fan of the Shorty Masters series by Allan R. Bosworth, who wrote some really fine Western novels in addition to his hundreds of top-notch pulp yarns. Shorty is a muleskinner and wagon driver who operates a freight line along with his partner, gunslinger Willie Weatherbee, also known as the Sonora Kid. Naturally, the jobs they take on usually result in trouble, as in “The Calaboose at Caliente”, which finds the intrepid due thrown in jail, accused of killing a steer and stealing its hide. Bosworth also works in a jail break, a bank robbery, and a rodeo. Although there’s usually some humor to be found in these stories, they aren’t really comedies, and they include some unusual touches like the mules in Shorty’s team being named after famous musical composers. This story has plenty of action and is very well-written. I’d say that somebody ought to collect the Shorty Masters stories, but there are more than 130 of them, so it would be a pretty big project.

Flash Moran was the hero of about 40 novelettes by William F. Bragg in WILD WEST WEEKLY. A young deputy sheriff in the cattle town of Piute, Wyoming, Flash got his nickname more for his hot temper than for his red hair. In “Ridin’ the Rustler Special”, he’s a long way from his home range on the trail of a murderer when he gets mixed up in a fight defending a hapless tramp who’s caught stealing a ride on a train. Not long after that, Flash himself is the target of a murder attempt. Naturally, everything ties together, with some rustling and a series of train robberies thrown in, to boot. This is a great story. Bragg provides plenty of well-written action with a lot of it taking place on a train thundering through the night on a rendezvous with disaster, and I love that kind of stuff. Flash Moran is likable enough, and the other characters are interesting as well. As far as I recall, this is the first Flash Moran story I’ve read and the first thing by William F. Bragg, as well. I need to read more by him, because I really enjoyed this yarn.

This is a fine issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. The first three stories are all good, despite my having a few quibbles about them, but the last three by Powers, Bosworth, and Bragg are all top-of-the-line Western pulp stories as far as I’m concerned and elevate this to an above average issue of a consistently good pulp. Definitely worth reading if you have a copy on your shelf, as long as you don’t mind that you’re getting only the first part of what’s basically a serial in “Comanche”. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Fugitive Pigeon - Donald E. Westlake

When Donald E. Westlake passed away, I don’t recall seeing any mentions of this book in the numerous tributes to him and his work. I think it’s an important novel, though, because it’s part of the transition in his career, the divergence between Westlake the comic crime novelist and Richard Stark the hardboiled novelist. THE FUGITIVE PIGEON is his sixth book, originally published in 1965. I haven’t read the two Westlake novels immediately preceding it, KILLY and PITY HIM AFTERWARDS, but judging by those titles, they don’t sound like laugh riots. I know the first three novels under the Westlake name (THE MERCENARIES, KILLING TIME, and 361) are hardboiled, because I’ve read them. So I’m guessing that THE FUGITIVE PIGEON is something of a departure, a book that still has some hardboiled elements (gangsters, hit men, crooked cops) but also a considerable amount of screwball comedy. As such, it provides a template for a lot of Westlake’s later work that mixes comedy and crime.

But, now that the pontificating is out of the way, how’s the book itself, you ask? Great fun, I’m happy to report. The narrator is Charlie Poole, an unambitious young man who’s perfectly content to run a neighborhood bar in Canarsie. The bar is owned by Charlie’s Uncle Al, who’s a mid-level gangster. Occasionally, Charlie has to hold a package at the bar for somebody until it’s picked up later, and while he suspects this has something to do with his uncle’s criminal activities, he never asks for details. He doesn’t want to know.

But then late one night as he’s about to close up, two strangers come in, and Charlie quickly realizes that they’re hit men sent there to kill him. He has no idea why anybody would send killers after him, but when he manages to escape with his life, he decides that he’d better figure it out in a hurry, because the two assassins are still on his trail. This is the beginning of a whirlwind three days in which Charlie tries to find out who wants him dead and why, an investigation complicated by the fact that he has to keep dodging the two hit men. Along the way he runs into a murder (for which he’s blamed, naturally) and a beautiful young woman (for whom he falls, naturally). It’s all very fast and entertaining and sharply plotted and written, and while there’s not much of the slapstick humor that shows up in Westlake’s later books, it’s pretty funny in places, too.

I really enjoyed this one a lot. If you haven’t read Westlake before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’re a Westlake fan but have never gotten around to reading it, I highly recommend that you do so. Either way, you’re in for a treat.

(This post originally appeared on March 22, 2009. I included a link to that post because you really should click on through to it and read the comments. Not just because of what they say, but also for the sense of nostalgia and fond memories they're liable to invoke. Showing up to comment on that post were several wonderful friends gone too soon: Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, Bob Randisi, and Randy Johnson. Those were the days, and we won't see their like again. Thankfully, Juri Nummelin, Patti Abbott, David Cranmer, and Frank Loose are all still with us. As for THE FUGITIVE PIGEON, it's available as an e-book, and used copies of the hardback and paperback editions are easily found, too.)

Movie Review: The Fall Guy (2024)

We weren’t big fans of the TV series THE FALL GUY. In fact, I can’t remember for sure if we ever even watched an entire episode of it. Maybe there was something on opposite it that we watched instead. Even though we had a VCR by that time, we didn’t record a lot. Blank tapes, you may remember, were expensive starting out!

Anyway, you might think that would make me not exactly the target audience for the movie version that came out a couple of years ago. But hey, I like Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, so why not give it a try.

Even though we didn’t watch the TV show, I knew that Colt Seavers was the name of the character played by Lee Majors, a Hollywood stuntman who also worked from time to time as a bounty hunter/private detective. In the movie, Ryan Gosling plays Seavers, but as the movie opens, he’s just a stuntman who’s badly injured in a stunt gone wrong. It’s only after months of recuperation that he’s dragged back into the movie business as a favor to his former girlfriend, a camera operator who’s directing her first feature (Emily Blunt). The shoot is in Australia, and things quickly go wrong. The star of the movie, an obnoxious action star, goes missing, and Colt Seavers becomes an unofficial private eye, pressured by the film’s producer into tracking the guy down.

Of course, this leads into a complicated plot involving murder and almost non-stop, over-the-top action reminiscent of the Fast and Furious movies. Meaning it’s loud, silly, and totally unrealistic . . . but I, uh, enjoyed it anyway.

Actually, I got a huge kick out of this movie and grinned almost all the way through it. Lots of movie and writing jokes, rapid fire banter, and all that action. I mean, you know my motto: If you’re going over-the-top anyway, you might as well go ’waaayyy over. Really, the only things this movie is missing are quicksand, a swordfight, and (my favorite) a fight on top of a moving train.

I know THE FALL GUY didn’t get very good reviews and flopped at the box office, but I had a good time watching it. It’s no masterpiece of the cinema, but neither are a lot of the movies I like. I may have to hunt up some episodes of the TV series and see if it might be a good candidate for a TV Series I’ve Missed Until Now post.

An Announcement

There are going to be books reviewed here that have AI covers because I wanted to read them, and when I did, I liked them. While I post mixed reviews from time to time and have been known to quibble about a few points here and there, I try to concentrate on books that I've enjoyed. Most of the ones with AI covers I've reviewed have been reprints of older books written long before AI existed. I know for a fact that they're either in the public domain or have been properly licensed from the rights holders. When I've reviewed new books with AI covers, it's usually because I know the author personally or have some reason to trust that the book wasn't written by AI.

I removed a comment from another post where the commenter implied that the publisher was guilty of illegal behavior. If an AI cover makes you not want to buy a book, that's fine, what you buy is entirely up to you. You can skip that post, and if you do, I hope you'll come back the next day for a post about a pulp or an old movie or a vintage paperback, because those things are still going to account for most of the content here. If not, again, that's entirely up to you. As for me, I'd rather have a copy of that 80-year-old Western novel I want to read, even if it has an AI cover.

And as for this blog, AI covers have joined the ranks of politics and religion. FIGHT THAT WAR SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Forgive me for posting in, well, anger is too strong a word. Annoyance, maybe. Forgive me for posting in annoyance. Unfortunately, there have been times in the past when I've backed off on reviewing certain books because I knew people I care about would be upset. I still believe in not going out of my way to cause trouble, but maybe I'm going to worry about it a little less in the future. So if you see something on here you don't like, I hope it won't run you off for good, but if I'm writing about something, I truly think it's worth your time and I want to tell you about it.

Review: The Buffer - J.E. Macdonnell

J.E. Macdonnell was an Australian author who wrote several hundred novels in a variety of genres. Some of his espionage thrillers were reprinted in the United States under the pseudonym James Dark, and I read a couple of those back in the day and enjoyed them. These days, however, Macdonnell is best remembered for the many World War II novels he wrote about the Australian Navy, many of which are available as e-books from Piccadilly Publishing. I recently read THE BUFFER, published originally in paperback by Horwitz in 1963.

From what I gather, Macdonnell’s novels often feature a destroyer known as the Wind Rode, and the books have a continuing cast of characters including the captain, the first lieutenant, and the chief bosun’s mate, a rank nicknamed The Buffer. In this case, The Buffer is William “Hooky” Walker, so called because his right hand was shot off during a battle and replaced with a steel hook. That doesn’t prevent Hooky from carrying out his duties and being much admired by the ship’s crew.

Not everybody gets along with Hooky, though. A new junior sub-lieutenant clashes with him almost immediately because the youngster is very much by-the-book and Hooky is an old vet who knows how to get things done even if he has to bend the regulations a little now and then. One of the sailors also hates Hooky because he’s a slacker and a malingerer and Hooky won’t let him get away with it. He has another reason for hating The Buffer, too, which comes out in time.

In addition to all the details of shipboard life, Macdonnell provides a considerable amount of action as the Wind Rode delivers a load of aviation fuel to an isolated island airfield and is attacked by Japanese bombers; runs into a submarine and trades shots with it; and finally goes into battle against a Japanese cruiser that has our heroes much outgunned. There’s also a very suspenseful scene involved an unexploded bomb. The personal drama that’s been simmering under the surface finally breaks through at the end.

THE BUFFER runs into the same problem as a lot of nautical fiction I read: much of the time, I don’t have a clue what it’s talking about. I am not a boat guy and much of the terminology sails (ha!) right over my head. However, I can figure out most of that stuff from context, and my lack of nautical knowledge isn’t a great drawback. (I do know a considerable amount about Mississippi riverboats, having researched them for numerous books, but even there, I’m far from an expert.)

Despite my comment about the terminology, I really enjoyed THE BUFFER. Hooky is a great protagonist, and Macdonnell’s prose has a blunt, straightforward style that’s very appropriate for the situation and characters. The story drew me along at a fast pace. With its ensemble cast and episodic structure, this novel reminded me a great deal of a good Sixties TV show about World War II. Being a huge fan of COMBAT! and THE RAT PATROL, I consider that high praise. There’s a direct sequel to this book and I already have it, so I plan to read it soon. I also want to go back and pick up some of the earlier books. This is great stuff, and I highly recommend it. You can find it for various platforms here.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Flight of the Silverbird - Two Steps From Hell

I came across this song by Two Steps From Hell and absolutely love it. I've heard it said of their music that it inspires you to create movies in your head, and that's certainly the case here. This is perfect for the opening credits sequence of an epic Western movie. I'm not a big one for playing music while I'm writing, but I have a hunch I may be listening to this one some while pounding the keyboard.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Big-Book Detective Magazine, February 1942

I've read several issues of BIG-BOOK WESTERN MAGAZINE over the years, but I've never read or even seen an issue of BIG-BOOK DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, Popular Publications' attempt to launch another detective pulp. Unlike its Western cousin, BIG-BOOK DETECTIVE MAGAZINE wasn't successful and ran only eight issues from December 1941 to February 1943. This is the second issue, and based on the good cover (don't know who painted it) and the lineup of authors, the magazine's failure wasn't warranted based on its quality. Authors on hand in this issue are T.T. Flynn, W.T. Ballard, Russell Gray (actually Bruno Fischer), Robert Sidney Bowen, Jackson Gregory Jr., and house-names Daniel Winters, Ray P. Shotwell, and David Crewe. The thing about those house-names is that this being Popular Publications, the actual authors were probably pretty darned good. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, September 10, 1927

William Reusswig did some nice covers, and I like the one on this issue of WEST, when it was still being published by Doubleday and coming out every week. The authors are a mix of familiar names and ones I don't recognize. The familiar: Stephen Payne, Ralph R. Perry, Oscar J. Friend, Kenneth Gilbert, and Homer King Gordon. The ones I don't know: William West Winter, Edwin Hunt Hoover, and Robert V. Carr. Perry wrote a really fine Western novel called NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY. Friend is best remembered probably as an agent and editor, but I've enjoyed the fiction by him that I've read, too. Payne had a long, productive career as a Western pulpster. I don't recall reading anything by Gilbert or Gordon, but they published steadily, too. This looks like a pretty good issue. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Stirrup HIgh/Western Word Wrangler - Walt Coburn

I’ve discussed Walt Coburn’s work here before. He’s one of my favorite Western authors, while at the same time being one of the most maddeningly inconsistent. Today, though, I’m talking about his non-fiction, not his hundreds of pulp stories and dozens of novels. Coburn is the author of two memoirs, STIRRUP HIGH and WESTERN WORD WRANGLER, and they’re both well worth reading.

STIRRUP HIGH is the better of the two. It’s the story of Coburn’s life as a boy growing up on his father’s vast ranch in Montana around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Although there were a few modern conveniences, such as cars and telephones, ranch life in Montana at that time hadn’t changed much from the Old West days (which weren’t so old then, only a couple of decades past). Young Walt was a high-spirited kid, and STIRRUP HIGH is full of his adventures, many of them in tandem with the old cowboy who served as his father’s foreman. Even in Coburn’s worst pulp stories, there’s an air of authenticity, a feeling of “this is the way it really was” when it comes to ranch life, and when you read STIRRUP HIGH, you can see why that’s true. Now, you have to remember that Coburn was a born yarn-spinner, and like a lot of fiction-writers who turn their hands to non-fiction, he can’t resist embellishing a little bit. Some of the dates that he gives don’t quite add up, and some of the stories he tells in this book don’t quite jibe with established facts . . . but I’m not sure either of those things matter. The spirit is true, and STIRRUP HIGH is vastly entertaining.

WESTERN WORD WRANGLER covers some of the same ground but also carries the story on into Coburn’s later life and is fairly unstinting in dealing with some of the mental problems that plagued him throughout his adult years, along with the physical problems that made him give up cowboying and turn to writing. Much of the material in this volume is drawn from “The Talley Book”, the long-running column that Coburn wrote for the magazine TRUE WEST. That makes for a pretty episodic narrative, and WESTERN WORD WRANGLER is not nearly as polished as STIRRUP HIGH. It also doesn’t go into the amount of detail about his writing career that I wish it would have. But it’s still entertaining and filled with information.

Walt Coburn came to a bad end, tormented by alcoholism and finally dead by his own hand because he couldn’t sell his work anymore. His stories have made a small comeback in recent years, with several paperback collections of his pulp stories from Leisure, as well as a number of hardback and large print reprints of his novels. Everything he wrote in the Twenties and Thirties is worth reading, at least based on what I’ve read so far, and good stories can be found in his work from the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, as well, although you might have to dig a little harder for it. He deserves to be remembered, and STIRRUP HIGH and WESTERN WORD WRANGLER are pretty good places to start.

(This post originally appeared on February 27, 2009. I've continued to read novels and stories by Walt Coburn, although not as frequently as I was doing back then. I still consider him one of my favorite Western writers, though, despite the inconsistency of his later work. I once had him make a cameo appearance in a house-name novel set in the early 1900s. The protagonist was a friend of Coburn's father, so he stopped at the family ranch while passing through Montana. Mention was made of young Walt, who was already quite a yarn-spinner. I hope some reader, somewhere, caught that reference. I never saw any comment about it in any of the Amazon reviews of the book.)