A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Where is Janice Gantry? - John D. MacDonald

It takes me a long time to read a book these days, a combination of being really busy, not having much time to read, and a rather scattershot attention span. But even though it took me about a week, I read John D. MacDonald’s novel WHERE IS JANICE GANTRY? and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I liked the narrator/hero in this one, Sam Brice, a former pro football player and insurance appraiser who lives in a small town on the west coast of Florida. Trouble comes into his life in the form of a young acquaintance of his who has escaped from prison and needs his help. Somewhat against his better judgment, Sam goes along with the request, and that sets in motion a series of violent events that include the disappearance of his former girlfriend, the Janice Gantry of the title.

The plot’s a little thin and probably won’t surprise many readers, but MacDonald’s ability as a pure storyteller is clearly in evidence here, pulling the reader along. I don’t doubt that under normal circumstances I would have finished this book a lot faster than I did, because when I did get a chance to read I got caught up in it and was really flipping the pages. The last fifty pages or so are very suspenseful. Well worth reading, I say.

(Wait a minute. This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 18, 2008, so that means I've been complaining about how long it takes me to read a book for at least 18 years now. Dang! I think I just need to get used to it. I'm a long-time fan of John D. MacDonald, and I plan to read the books of his that I've never gotten around to. Problem is, many of them I don't recall if I've read them or not. Oh, well, even rereads are worthwhile with JDM. This one is still in print and is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon.)

Review: Texas Land Grab - Johnny Nelson (Gordon Clive Bleeck?)

During the Seventies, Leisure Books in the United States reprinted several Western novels originally published in Australia by Cleveland Publishing, including one of the Larry and Stretch novels by Leonard F. Meares writing as Marshall Grover and several double volumes of Benedict and Brazos novels by Paul Wheelahan writing as E. Jefferson Clay. My friend Anders Nilsson, who is doing some excellent bibliographic work regarding Australian Westerns, tipped me off to the existence of another American edition of an Australian Western I’d never come across: TEXAS LAND GRAB, published under the house-name Johnny Nelson. The most likely author of this one, according to Anders, is Gordon Clive Bleeck, a very prolific Australian writer who turned out more than 400 novels in a variety of genres under many different pseudonyms and house-names. I was curious enough to find a copy of TEXAS LAND GRAB and read it.

The protagonist of this yarn is Chad Walford, a cowboy who has homesteaded some land to start his own ranch. Unfortunately, he finds himself in the middle of a three-cornered range war involving a cattle baron and a group of sodbusters who have moved in and established a new town. In a nice twist, the cattle baron and the leader of the farmers join forces against Chad, whose only allies are a hotheaded young gunfighter and a wily, half-Apache old-timer. Also involved in the story are a long-winded judge and his beautiful niece.

There are some good action scenes in this novel, including a stampede that threatens to wipe out the sodbuster town. Chad is a stalwart protagonist, if a little bit bland, and the judge and the old half-breed are colorful, well-done supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable. Overall, TEXAS LAND GRAB is nothing we haven’t seen many times before, but it’s put together reasonably well and is a fast, entertaining read if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns like I am. There are only a few instances of words and phrasing not quite ringing true to indicate that the author was Australian, not American.

Given Leisure’s history, I’ve always figured they pirated the Australian Westerns they published, and that may well be true. The American edition gives a 1979 copyright date for the Cleveland edition, but Anders believes TEXAS LAND GRAB was published originally in the mid-Sixties, based on its cover price. I’m perfectly willing to accept that because Anders knows more about this stuff than probably anybody else in the world. And I’m glad he brought this one to my attention. I had a good time reading it, and a short, enjoyable Western yarn was just what I needed right now.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1951

The cover by Leo Morey on this issue of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY caught my eye as I was looking through the Fictionmags Index. There's a decent group of writers inside this issue as well: Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Frederik Pohl (writing as James MacCreigh), James E. Gunn (writing as Edwin James), Larry T. Shaw (who was my editor, officially, for one issue of MSMM, although I never had any contact with him whatsoever), Morton Klass, and Joe Kennedy (writing as Joquel Kennedy). I'm not familiar with Klass and Kennedy, but I've read and enjoyed work by all the others. This issue is available at the Internet Archive, along with other issues of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather tattered copy in the scan, with a fine action cover painted by Sam Cherry.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue is by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, as is obvious from the vivid descriptions right from the start. The Lucky Hammer of the title is the name of a silver mine in Texas’s Big Bend region, so-called because the two old prospectors who discover the vein also find an ancient Aztec carving of a snake that’s shaped in the form of a hammer. Oh, and the hammer just happens to be lying next to the body of a dead man who appears to have guzzled down a drink from a poisoned waterhole.

Naturally, the silver strike results in the founding of a boomtown, and a boomtown always brings owlhoots, and eventually things get so lawless in the area that a call for help goes out to the Texas Rangers. And who’s going to respond to that call? I think we all know the answer to that question.

“The Lucky Hammer” is a dandy Jim Hatfield yarn full of the things that make Leslie Scott’s stories so enjoyable: a historical background, a terrible sandstorm on the desert, underground scenes in a mine, exploding dynamite, a missing archeologist, rustlers, smugglers, and gunfights galore. The big twist in the plot is fairly obvious, but to be honest, I would have felt cheated if it hadn’t been there. Sure, I knew it was coming, but I liked it anyway. Actually, there’s nothing in this novel that we haven’t seen in numerous other Hatfield novels by Scott, but he puts the various elements together so well, I still greatly enjoy reading them. He was at the top of his game in these mid-Forties Hatfield novels.

Bennie Gardner, who wrote as Gunnison Steele, turned out some excellent novels for the Thrilling Group Western character pulps, but he was also very prolific when it comes to short-short stand-alone stories. “Cold Creek Killer” in this issue is probably about 1500 words long, but in those words Gardner packs rustling, murder, and a canny sheriff bringing a killer to justice. The twist ending to this one is a little weak, I thought, but Gardner’s fast-moving prose still makes it fun to read.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t make it very far in Ben Frank’s “Doc Swap’s Powder Puff”. I just don’t like this series. I’m not sure why. The author, whose real name was Frank Bennett, puts words together well enough, but the Doc Swap stories just don’t work for me.

On the other hand, I really like the Long Sam Littlejohn stories by Lee Bond, and they’re every bit as formulaic as the Doc Swap yarns. In “Long Sam Collects a Bounty”, the good-guy outlaw is trying to corral a notorious outlaw and collect a reward, when he’s usually the one who’s the quarry in a situation like that. Naturally, his long-time nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, shows up, too. Quite a few of the Long Sam stories, like this one, take place in the Big Thicket in East Texas, and that makes for a nice change-of-pace. I wish Bond had done a little more with the character, but I still enjoy the series and am always glad to read another one.

And the same holds true for most issues of TEXAS RANGERS. Even with Doc Swap and a slightly below-average Gunnison Steele story, this one is well worth reading if you have a copy on your shelves.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Wounded and the Slain - David Goodis

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, originally published by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime [in 2007]. This one even opens with the protagonist, James Bevan, contemplating doing away with himself, even though he’s on vacation at a luxurious Jamaican resort with his beautiful young wife. Bevan’s wife is his problem, though, since their marriage is one of the most corrosive you’re likely to encounter in fiction. Like other Goodis characters, Bevan seeks refuge from that unhappiness in booze, which leads him into an encounter with violence and death.

Then, yep, you guessed it, Things Get Worse.

THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN is somewhat unusual among Goodis’s novels, in that it takes place in Jamaica rather than Philadelphia or some other large American city. It veers away from the noir stereotype in another way as well, with many of the scenes taking place in hot, bright sunshine rather than dark alleyways. The interior of James Bevan’s mind is plenty dark on its own, though, and ultimately the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, are just as mean as those of Philadelphia or New York. The motivations of some of the characters may seem a little clichéd today, but Goodis’s writing still makes them ring true. The headlong pace carries the reader along to a very satisfying conclusion. All in all, and not surprisingly, this is an excellent novel and comes with a high recommendation from me.

(This post originally appeared on June 20, 2007. The Hard Case Crime reprint mentioned above is out of print, and you can actually find copies of the original Gold Medal edition for about half the price of the HCC edition. Either way, this book is well worth reading. Goodis, however, remains one of those authors I like a lot and want to read more of, but I don't seem to get around to it.)

Review: The Shadowed Circle #8 - Steve Donoso, ed.

THE SHADOWED CIRCLE #8 is out, and it leads off with a fantastic cover by Joe Booth that ties in with Tim DeForest’s excellent article about The Shadow’s battle with the criminal organization known as The Hand that took five issues of the pulp magazine to wrap up. I’ve never read any of those particular novels, but after reading DeForest’s article, I may have to. I can’t say enough good things about Booth’s cover. I think it’s one of my favorite Shadow illustrations ever.

Elsewhere in this issue, Will Murray returns with a lengthy, informative, and entertaining article about the search for the identity of a previously unknown author who ghosted some of the novels about The Phantom Detective. What does that have to do with The Shadow, you ask? Well, quite a bit, as it turns out, since there are indications that this mysterious author may have also written a Shadow novel. It’s a great bit of pulp scholarship on Murray’s part, and for what it’s worth, I agree with the conclusions he comes to.

As editor Steve Donoso points out in his introductory remarks, this issue of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE covers just about all the various aspects of the character. Evan Lewis writes about The Shadow’s guest appearances in Street & Smith comic books other than his own. John Olsen tells us about one of his favorite episodes from the radio show. Robert Kroll examines some material that never made it into the 1994 movie, and I’m intrigued enough by this article that I might have to hunt up a copy of the novelization, which does make use of the scenes Kroll mentions. Nicholas Montelongo also writes about the various movie and television versions of The Shadow, Michael Stradford details the process of having some of the comic books featuring The Shadow bound into collected volumes, and Spencer Draper gives us the lowdown on something I never even knew existed, a pinball machine that ties in with the 1994 movie! There are tie-in pinball machines? I had no idea. The Shadow also makes a cameo appearance in “Dead Air”, a comic strip written and drawn by Ron Hill. Having worked at a small-market radio station myself, I know all about dead air.

Of course, there are fine illustrations throughout, as THE SHADOWED CIRCLE continues to be a beautifully produced journal. If you’re a fan of The Shadow, I’m sure you’re reading it already, but if by some chance you’re not, you should remedy that as soon as possible. THE SHADOWED CIRCLE #8 is available on Amazon or directly from the publisher, and you can subscribe or catch up on back issues on the journal’s website, as well. I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood to read a Shadow novel now.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Double-Action Gang Magazine, April 1938

Here's a non-Western pulp cover by A. Leslie Ross. I think he was more at home on the range, so to speak, but his non-Western covers are okay. DOUBLE-ACTION GANG MAGAZINE was part of what eventually became the Columbia pulps, so there are at least two house-names here, Mat Rand and "Undercover" Dix. Pierson Bryan, who wrote the cover story, has only this single credit in the Fictionmags Index, so I'm suspicious that might have been a pseudonym, too. Also on hand are Margie Harris, a top gang pulp author, the prolific Thomas Thursday, Robert Martin, who would go on to be a well-respected author of hardboiled private eye novels, and Bertrand L. Shurtleff. I'm still not very well-read in the gang pulps, but this looks like an okay issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, July 1934

I don't know who painted the gritty cover on this issue of COWBOY STORIES, but I like it. I think it would have made a good cover for a Western paperback, too. COWBOY STORIES was Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp behind WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY, and the authors in this issue kind of reflect that. Philip Ketchum and S. Omar Barker were top-notch Western pulpsters, but the others are unfamiliar names to me: Allan Martin, Rand Rios, Joseph C. Salak, William Lester, W.F. Bilbrey, Guy Carson, and Wallace K. Norman. Several of those published only one story, and none were prolific. Even so, that doesn't mean their stories weren't good. I don't own this issue, so I doubt if I'll ever find out.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy - Chester Gould

When I was a kid (funny how many of my posts start out that way), one of the features on the front page of the comics section in the Sunday newspaper was DICK TRACY. So I grew up reading this comic strip about the square-jawed police detective. Unfortunately, that was during an era in which the strip’s creator, author, and artist Chester Gould had taken it in some weird directions, getting away from the hardboiled police action and bringing in more and more science-fictional elements, such as hidden civilizations on the Moon. I read DICK TRACY anyway and enjoyed it, although it was never one of my favorites.

THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY, an oversized volume containing more than a dozen storylines ranging from Tracy’s first case in 1931 to episodes from the late Forties, is an excellent introduction to this classic strip, featuring numerous examples of the things that made DICK TRACY a success: hardboiled, even brutal, action with fistfights, elaborate death traps, and shoot-outs in which characters, both good and bad, actually died; grotesque villains with colorful names like Flattop, Mumbles, and the Brow; and at least an attempt to be realistic when it comes to police work, making TRACY an early example of the police procedural.

Chester Gould’s plotting, writing, and willingness to pull no punches in his stories are what made this strip work. The artwork starts off pretty crude, and while it improves some with time, it never comes close to the level of, say, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, or Hal Foster. But by the Forties it’s good enough not to detract from Gould’s fast-moving storylines. My main complaint about this volume is that it reprints only the daily strips, leaving out the Sunday pages that were part of the continuity. As a result, there are some jarring gaps in the action where the reader has to figure out what happened on Sunday from the context of Monday’s strip. This isn’t a huge problem, but it can be annoying.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I have another Dick Tracy collection, THE THIRTIES: TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, which reprints practically the entire first two years of the strip, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too.

(This post originally appeared on June 26, 2007. I don't believe I got around to reading TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, and six months after this post, that copy was lost in the Fire of '08. I don't recall ever replacing it . . . until now. My interest in Dick Tracy has been rekindled recently by reading the new strips being published on GoComics.com. The current writer, Matthew K. Manning, and artist, Howie Noel, are taking a very vintage approach to the strip and spinning a great yarn so far. So I ordered a copy of TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES as well as another classic Tracy collection. With luck I'll be writing reviews of those books before another 18 years go by!)

Review: The Monkey's Raincoat - Robert Crais

I remember when THE MONKEY’S RAINCOAT was published to great reviews, followed by more critically acclaimed novels featuring Los Angeles private detectives Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. But even though I read and really enjoyed several stand-alones by author Robert Crais, I never get around to reading any of this series. Until now. Several friends recommended it to me, so I figured it was finally time to give it a try.

So naturally, I read the first book, published as a paperback original by Bantam in 1987. For comparison purposes, me reading THE MONKEY’S RAINCOAT now is the same as me reading THE MALTESE FALCON in 1969, although THE MONKEY’S RAINCOAT feels a lot more contemporary until you start noticing that there aren’t any computers and Elvis Cole has to find a phone booth when he’s away from his office or home and has to make a call.

Elvis is the narrator of this yarn. He owns a private detective agency in partnership with the violent, enigmatic mercenary Joe Pike, who also owns a gun shop. Elvis is hired to find a missing talent agent by the man’s wife, and that’s the start of a case that spirals into murder, kidnapping, and drug dealing.

That’s really are there is to say about the plot, because there’s nothing even resembling a twist in this novel. It’s straight ahead, about as linear as a mystery novel can get and still be considered a mystery. The characters are all good, though. Elvis is a likable narrator with a talent for banter, and Pike is particularly intriguing. The writing is fast-paced and paints a good portrait of Hollywood in the Eighties. The case comes to a satisfying conclusion.

But something still seemed lacking to me. There are a few echoes of Raymond Chandler, but the Robert B. Parker influence is much heavier and I’ve seen other readers refer to the first several books in this series as Spenser in Hollywood. That’s a fairly apt description. But I’ve also been assured that the series develops into something more than that. Crais is a talented writer and I’m certainly willing to read more by him. After my mixed reaction to this one, I may wait a little while to do it.