Review: Twenty Plus Two - Frank Gruber

I’m a long-time fan of Frank Gruber’s work, but I’d only read some of his Western novels, a couple of his early mystery novels, some of his pulp mystery stories—most notably, the Oliver Quade stories collected in BRASS KNUCKLES—and his memoir THE PULP JUNGLE, which grew out of his introduction to the Quade collection. I hadn’t read any of his later mystery novels. This seemed like a good time to remedy that since Black Gat Books is about to reprint his 1961 novel TWENTY PLUS TWO, published originally in hardcover by E.P. Dutton and then reprinted in paperback that same year by Bantam. It was even made into a movie that year, starring David Janssen and with a screenplay by Gruber, which I haven't seen.

The protagonist of TWENTY PLUS TWO is Tom Alder, who’s not a private detective, although he functions pretty much like one and has contacts with detective agencies all over the country. Instead, he tracks down missing heirs and takes a cut of whatever they inherit. But as this book opens, he’s not looking for an heir. He’s taking an interest (for reasons that will be explained later in the book) in the murder of a woman who works for various movie stars answering their fan mail, running their fan clubs, etc.

That murder investigation isn’t all Alder has on his plate. A swindler and ex-con wants to hire Alder to find his younger brother. A beautiful woman who’s a friend of one of Alder’s old flames goes missing. In some odd way, all these cases seem to connect to the disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a young mobster more than twenty years earlier.

As experienced readers of these kind of novels, we’re all going to expect those plot elements to tie together eventually, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that they do. However, Gruber piles on enough complications and coincidences that eventually the reader has to do some pretty serious willing suspending of disbelief. “Sure, why not?”, if you will. Despite that, is the plot of TWENTY PLUS TWO too far-fetched? Well, no, I don’t think so. The resolution is logical and holds together, and who’s to say it couldn’t have happened that way? I don’t think Gruber cheats and conceals things from the reader, either. It’s all there to be figured out, as Tom Alder does.

The book races along, too. I was flipping the pages pretty quickly in the second half, eager to see what was going to happen. Gruber’s prose isn’t fancy, but it’s very effective when it comes to telling a story.

Gruber moved in pulp writing circles in New York and movie and TV circles in Hollywood (he created several Western series I watched as a kid), and I’ve read that he wasn’t very well-liked by some of his contemporaries, although he remained good friends with a few such as fellow pulpster Steve Fisher. He was a really good yarn-spinner and turned out top-notch stories and novels for a long time. I think I need to read more of them. In the meantime, the Black Gat paperback of TWENTY PLUS TWO will be out in early October. It’s one of the best mystery novels I’ve read this year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Blue Book Magazine, May 1931

Yikes! This great cover by Laurence Herndon illustrates the first installment of the serialized novel "The Land of Hidden Men" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which just happens to be one of the Burroughs novels I've never read. I have to get busy and catch up on some of this stuff. This issue isn't top-heavy with big-name authors, but there are still some very good pulpsters on hand including Seven Anderton, Clarence Herbert New (with a Freelances of Diplomacy story), Rollin Brown, Armand Brigaud (a JUNGLE STORIES stalwart later in his career), and Conrad Richter, whose work appeared in the pulps occasionally even though he was better known for his stories in the slicks and, later on, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Also on hand were some writers unknown to me: Ewing Walker, William F. Sturm, Henry LaCossitt, Albert Dorrington, Wilbur Hall, and Arthur K. Akers. What's this, an issue of BLUE BOOK without a single H. Bedford-Jones story, let alone two or three under his various pseudonyms? I thought that was against the law! 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Fall 1942

A common scene on Western pulp covers was to have an owlhoot standing in front of a wall on which was tacked a wanted poster bearing his likeness. The cover by Mat Kauten on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN is a good example of that. I like this cover a lot. The contents look pretty interesting, too. After appearing exclusively in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to early 1941, T.W. Ford's character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid, began appearing in Columbia Western pulps in May of '41. Except for a couple more stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY that were probably already in inventory there, from that point on Strant only showed up in various Columbia pulps, including this one. I don't know the circumstances of the move. It could be that Columbia offered more money (highly unlikely!) or the editors at Street & Smith told Ford, "Please don't send us any more of those Silver Kid stories" (the more likely explanation). Whatever the reason, I've read Silver Kid yarns from both eras of his career and always enjoyed them. Also on hand in this issue are Archie Joscelyn, Ed Earl Repp, Lee Floren, A. Kenneth Brent, Kenneth P. Wood, G.C. Ogle, and house-name Cliff Campbell.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Nothing Personal - Jason Starr

Until this book, the only thing I’d read by Jason Starr was BUST, his Hard Case Crime novel written in collaboration with Ken Bruen, which I liked quite a bit. NOTHING PERSONAL is one of Starr’s earlier novels, and it’s good enough to convince me that I need to read more of his work.

This book is about two couples in New York, the white-collar David and Leslie Sussman and the blue-collar Joey and Maureen DePino, and the way all their lives intersect in unexpected and tragic fashion. Leslie and Maureen are best friends from childhood. David is being stalked by a woman from his office with whom he’s been having an affair. Joey is a compulsive gambler up to his eyeballs in debt who has a loan shark’s goons after him. You know when things start out this bad, they’re only going to get worse . . . but the trick is in how they get worse.

I don’t mind admitting I thought I had this book figured out. I knew what was going to happen. Only I didn’t. Starr kept coming up with different but perfectly logical ways to take his story, so that every time I started to nod knowingly to myself, he yanked the rug out from under me again. That’s good stuff and kept me flipping the pages even as the events unfolding grew darker and darker. I love it when a book takes me by surprise. NOTHING PERSONAL is a fine novel, and now I have to go find more of Jason Starr’s books.

(I did read a couple more Jason Starr novels after this post appeared on July 14, 2007, and I'll probably rerun the reviews of them, too, in time. This novel is still in print in e-book and paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands.)

Review: Too Like the Lightning - Dana Chambers (Albert Fear Leffingwell)

A while back I read and very much enjoyed SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU, the first novel in the Jim Steele series by Dana Chambers, whose real name was Albert Fear Leffingwell. In the same double volume with that book, the fine folks at Stark House Press have also reprinted the second Jim Steele novel, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, and as it turns out, it’s even faster-paced than the first one.

You may recall that at the end of the previous book, our radio-scriptwriter-turned-detective narrator/protagonist was going to be married to his old flame, the beautiful bronze-haired Lisa. Well, as TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING opens, Lisa is dead, or at least presumed dead, in the crash of a missing airplane. Instead of being in bed with his wife, Steele wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. He has holes in his memory, and oh, yeah, there’s a dead guy in the bathtub.

The author explains all this pretty quickly. Or does he? It seems that Steele, in the middle of mourning for Lisa, has been recruited as an intelligence agent by the U.S. government to help get to the bottom of an evil plan by German and Japanese spies to sabotage American bombers. This book was first published in 1939, so there’s a lot of worried speculation about how there are going to be bombing raids along the East Coast and a German army will invade from Mexico. The blonde and the dead guy are tied in with Steele’s assignment, of course.

But in short order, things get more complicated than that. One of the agents Steele is working with gets blown up by a bomb. He gets sapped, shot at, captured by bad guys—or are they?—escapes, finds vital information, hides vital information, calls in the FBI—or are they?—and makes several startling discoveries, each of which changes everything. Leffingwell doesn’t help clarify things by constantly skipping scenes in order to drop us back down in the middle of the action.

All of that makes it difficult to keep up with what’s going on in TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING. However, in the end everything does come together and make sense, and getting to that point is a lot of fun. This book is packed to the gills with witty banter, and Steele’s narration is so swift and breezy, you can’t help but be entertained by it. The ending is quite satisfying, too.

I don’t think I liked this one quite as much as the first one in the series, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to fans of offbeat wartime espionage thrillers. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions. Stark House has already reprinted the next two books in the series, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Now Available: The Legend of Johnny Colt #3: Staked Plains Slaughter

The railroad has finally reached the Texas Panhandle, but not everyone is happy about it—in fact, there are some very bad people willing to slaughter a lot of folks to keep the railroad from advancing. Johnny Colt has faced down many killers before, but this mission might be his most dangerous--and last--assignment yet. When he crosses paths with a kill-crazy gang led by the murdering devil Billy Six-Ears, his undercover mission turns into a violent and blood-soaked fight for his life. With deadly gunfire erupting from all sides, Johnny Colt must rely on all his courage and sharpshooting skills to escape with his head still intact and bring these outlaws to justice…the kind of justice that swings from the end of a rope.

On the Staked Plains, death can come from anywhere. In this unrelenting, brutally violent fast-paced Western, Johnny Colt must once again put his life on the line to bring law and order to a terrifyingly violent American frontier, where bullets are cheap…and life is cheaper.

Bestselling western veteran author James Reasoner once more brings his gritty, take-no-prisoners depictions of the West in STAKED PLAINS SLAUGHTER.

PRAISE FOR JAMES REASONER:

"James Reasoner is a master of the Western. You can always depend on his work to excite and entertain." —Joe Lansdale

(This is one of the fastest-paced books I've ever written, and that's saying something. Johnny Colt's uncle, Texas Ranger Captain Esau "Brimstone" Parker, also known as the Hellfire Ranger, gets to play a pretty big part in this book. I love these characters and have really enjoyed writing the three books so far. I hope some of you wlll pick it up and enjoy it as well. The e-book edition is here, and it's available in a paperback edition, as well. Spread the word, and I'll greatly appreciate it!)

Review: The Adventures of Coffin Kirk - Arch Whitehouse

With my fondness for, shall we say, offbeat pulp stories, how in the world did I miss this series? The Coffin Kirk stories by Arch Whitehouse are unlike anything else I’ve ever read from the aviation/air war pulps. Thankfully, Age of Aces Books has reprinted them in THE ADVENTURES OF COFFIN KIRK, a very handsome trade paperback volume. (Warning: There are SPOILERS below.)

The first story, “Vultures’ Vortex”, is from the October 1937 issue of FLYING ACES. It mostly just serves as a set-up for the rest of the series as it introduces crack pilot Brian “Coffin” Kirk, so-called because of his expressionless, “dead-pan” face. When Kirk was a kid, his father was an allied intelligence agent working undercover in Berlin, and Kirk was there with him. Having witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of a vicious international arms cartel known as the Circle of Death, Kirk vows to avenge his father’s death someday, and now, with the clouds of war gathering once again in Europe and the Circle of Death still active, he launches his quest, aided by his faithful mechanic and tail gunner Tank. Now, here’s the thing about Tank, and yes, this is a SPOILER, but it’s revealed pretty early on in this first story: Tank is actually an extremely intelligent, highly trained gorilla who befriended Kirk when the boy hid out from his father’s murderers in the Berlin Zoo. Tank even talks! Well, not really. Kirk is actually a ventriloquist, but he uses the illusion of Tank speaking to fool the bad guys. Whitehouse establishes all this in the first story, which also features Kirk and Tank getting captured by some Circle of Death agents but escaping.

The duo don’t return until the June 1938 issue of FLYING ACES, which features the story “Sky Guns of Singapore”. Kirk and Tank are in the Far East in this one, trying to foil a Circle of Death plot to destroy a new British naval base and also wipe out Singapore with poison gas. Even though our heroes are successful, of course, the body count in this one almost rivals a Spider or Operator 5 novel. Those Circle of Death guys are really evil!

“Scourge of the Steel Eagles”, from FLYING ACES, October 1938, is a direct sequel to the previous story. Trying to fly back to Europe from Singapore, Kirk and Tank are attacked by some mysterious planes and forced to crash-land in the jungles of Borneo near an extinct volcano. After they find a village full of natives who have died from some unknown cause, they observe some of the planes that shot them down apparently flying into the side of the volcano. I’m not going to bother putting a spoiler notice because it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here: in a plot that could have cropped up years later in a yarn featuring James Bond, Napolean Solo and Illya Kuryakin, or Amos Burke, Secret Agent (how’s that for obscure?), the Circle of Death has a hidden airbase inside the volcano, from which they intend to spread poison gas all over Southeast Asia. But not if our boys Kirk and Tank have anything to say about it, right? I’m impressed by the way Whitehouse manages to cram a novel’s worth of plot and a high body count into these novelettes.

Kirk and Tank are still in the Far East in “Clue of the Breda Brood”, from the April 1939 issue of FLYING ACES. In fact, they’re still flying over Borneo, as hardly any time has passed since the conclusion of the previous story. Once again, their plane (a stolen Heinkel bomber this time; Whitehouse knows planes and doesn’t mind telling you all about them) is forced down. This time they find some hidden hangers full of Bredas, a Belgian plane I’d never heard of. The Bredas are instrumental in another chemical weapons attack by the Circle of Death, and this time Kirk teams up with a group of daredevil RAF pilots to foil it.

“Balloons for a Breda” appears in the August 1940 issue of FLYING ACES, and despite more than a year’s gap between stories, once again it’s a direct sequel to the previous story. There’s less aerial action in this one as it’s more of an espionage story with Kirk and a beautiful female intelligence agent teaming up to keep a Japanese spy from getting his hands on some vital defense plans. The plot isn’t as over the top as the earlier stories in the series, which is both good and bad. You don’t want to see an author writing basically the same story over and over again, but at the same time, I sort of missed the high stakes in what is a more grounded (no pun intended) yarn.

Almost a year goes by before we see Kirk and Tank again in the June 1941 issue of FLYING ACES, but despite that gap, “Fate Flies the Breda” picks up almost immediately after the end of the previous story. Our heroes are still trying to get those defense plans to an American admiral in Singapore when they’re shot down (yes, again) on an island where their survival depends on Tank being able to successfully impersonate a Nazi agent who’s pretending to be a Dutch official. Whitehouse really knows how to stretch a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. But once again, our boys defeat the villains, and as the story ends, they’re back in the air, headed toward Singapore.

We can only assume they got there safely, because with this story, the Coffin Kirk series comes to an end. It’s a wild one, you can say that for it. The plots are repetitive, but the sheer audaciousness of the whole series carries the stories along successfully. Kirk is an okay hero, but Tank is just a great character, full of personality and honestly the more effective of the pair. He saves the day time after time. If you’re a fan of aviation/war pulp yarns and don’t mind a little goofiness, I highly recommend THE ADVENTURES OF COFFIN KIRK. I had a really good time reading it, and it’s not like anything else you’re likely to read any time soon, I can guarantee that.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Action Stories, May 1929

This issue of ACTION STORIES comes from the days when the magazine featured other kinds of adventure fiction along with Westerns. The cover featuring a tough-looking Foreign Legionnaire is by H.C. Murphy Jr. The story it illustrates is by Francis James, a pseudonym for James A. Goldthwaite, a prolific pulpster who wrote a lot of adventure, detective, Western, and Weird Menace stories. Speaking of prolific, Walt Coburn, Theodore Roscoe, T.W. Ford, and Eli Colter are on hand as well, as is Andrew A. Caffrey, the least-known author in this issue. It looks like a good one.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Top-Notch Western, August 1938

This issue of TOP-NOTCH WESTERN has a decent cover by H.W. Scott. The lead novella is by Norton L. James. I've read speculation that that's a pseudonym for Ray Nafziger, but it's never been confirmed and probably never will be. We do know for sure that Brad Buckner, who also has a story in this issue, was actually Ed Earl Repp. Repp doesn't have a story under his real name in this one, so I'm not sure why he used the Buckner pen-name. Also on hand are Rolland Lynch, a prolific Western pulpster who's forgotten these days, the even more obscure James W. Egan and Frank H. Richey, and house-name John Cannon. Not a top of the line Western pulp despite its name, but probably worth reading. I don't believe I've ever seen an actual issue of TOP-NOTCH WESTERN.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: I Should Have Stayed Home - Horace McCoy

(This post originally appeared on June 19, 2009, and it seemed like a good time to rerun it because one of my favorite publishers, Black Gat Books, has just brought out a well-deserved reprint of it.)

Cullen Gallagher mentioned this novel a couple of weeks ago on his blog, and since I happened to have a copy on hand, I thought I’d go ahead and read it. I’d never read any of McCoy’s novels before, although I’ve read several of his pulp stories and enjoyed them. Also, I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME is dedicated in part to Joseph T. Shaw, the famous editor of BLACK MASK, so I figured it might be worthwhile.

Which it certainly is, although it’s not a crime novel at all. A few minor crimes take place, but they’re hardly the focus of the book. Instead it’s a Hollywood novel set in the Thirties, narrated by Ralph Carston, a young would-be actor from Georgia who’s determined to make it big in the movies. As the book opens, he’s working sporadically as an extra and living, platonically, with a bit-part actress named Mona Matthews. Ralph makes the acquaintance of a wealthy widow known for throwing lavish Hollywood parties, and despite being rather naïve, he knows that she can help him advance his career if he goes along with what she wants, which is him.

Along with Ralph’s affair with the widow, the plot features a big star who turns out to be a lesbian, an interracial couple, some nights spent in jail, a suicide, and lots of boozing and sex. What makes I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME worth reading is McCoy’s bleak, fast-paced prose. The plot may be melodramatic, but the writing is pure hardboiled, with a grim, fatalistic tone that makes the book qualify as noir, as well. I’ll definitely have to get around to McCoy’s other novels, and in the meantime, if you like Hollywood novels, this one gets my recommendation.

(I second my own recommendation. You can find the Black Gat edition here.)