I stopped in at Half Price Books today, and for a change I found a few nice items. I've had trouble finding books I wanted to buy lately. But today there was a copy of ANNO DRACULA by Kim Newman in the horror section, and I've been looking for that one for a while. I have the sequel, THE BLOODY RED BARON, but I didn't want to read it until I'd read the first one. Then, moseying over to the nostalgia and collectible section, I found the following:
CATACLYSM: THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED, by Don Pendleton, creator of the Executioner series, a very early Pinnacle Book published in 1969, back when the copyright page still admitted that Pinnacle was an imprint of Bee-Line Books, the porn publisher. The back cover copy makes this sound very much like last year's movie THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, with a series of weather-related natural disasters sweeping the country.
QUEEN OF THE FLAT-TOPS, by Stanley Johnston, a non-fiction book about the Battle of the Coral Sea and the role played in it by the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Johnston was a war correspondent and was on the Lex during the battle, and this account of it was originally published in 1942, only a few months later. The edition I bought is a 1967 Ballantine paperback. I wrote a lot about the Lexington and the Battle of the Coral Sea in my novel TRIAL BY FIRE (which is my favorite of the three World War II novels I've written), and I wish I'd had this book before I wrote mine. I couldn't resist picking it up now. World War II aviation has become a fascination of mine. (The USS Lexington now permanently moored at Corpus Christi, Texas, and used as a museum is not the original, which was sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea. The second Lex was put into service a year or so after that. It also stood in for the USS Hornet in the filming of the movie PEARL HARBOR.)
WIPED OUT: STORIES OF THE FOREIGN LEGION, by John D. Newsom, a Dell mapback from 1947. This was the real find of the day and reprints five novelettes originally published in the late Twenties in a pulp called THE FRONTIER, which eventually changed to FRONTIER STORIES and became primarily a Western pulp. French Foreign Legion stories are a dead genre today, but they were popular during the pulp era and were a staple in magazines like ARGOSY and ADVENTURE. I've become a fan of them over the years and have read quite a few by authors such as Georges Surdez, Robert Carse, and Theodore Roscoe (author of the great Thibault Corday stories). I haven't read any by Newsom, though, who was still writing them for ARGOSY in the Thirties. A few years ago I tried to interest some of my editors in a Foreign Legion novel, but no luck.
That's all I bought, but it was a pretty good haul compared to what I've been finding there.
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4 comments:
Let me just mention that anybody who hasn't read James' TRIAL BY FIRE or his other WWII novels is missing a real treat. Sure, James' other books are great, but I think those WWII tales are some of his best work.
This is what I know about John Newsom (from the FMI site). Didn't know he had books published.
NEWSOM, J(ohn) D(immock) (1893?-1954); Anthropologist, author, editor, former director of Federal Writers Project; expert on French Foreign Legion. Born in Shanghai of American descent; died on board liner Roma en-route to Italy.
There was also Ed Newsom:
Ed Newsom: pseudonym of Muriel Naomi Evans, born 1908. At least three western novels: Ride the High Places (1954 or 55), Wagons to Tucson (1954).
Foreign Legion novel sounds interesting. You'd think someone would be interesting publishing it. I would be! If you ever decide to write that, I'll promise to publish it - in Finnish...
I remember reading CATACLYSM: THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED back in 1969 - before I had read any of the Executioner books. CATACLYSM is mainly memorable to me because the hero survives by having the good sense to retreat to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Pendleton had a couple other SF books out about the same time: THE GUNS OF TERRA 10 and 1989: POPULATION DOOMSDAY which I also read at the time but don't remember as well.
- A.B.L.
Thank you for mentioning Foreign Legion books. You mention a couple of author whom I did not know. I've collected quite a few books by P.C. Wren. I'll give a look to Carse and Roscoe. The Newsom sounds like a real find. Lucky guy!
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