Forgotten Books: Night Calls the Green Falcon - Robert McCammon

I'm fudging a little this week since "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is a novella, not a novel, but it's been my favorite of Robert McCammon's work since I first read it 25 years ago, it's available by itself as an e-book, and when I reread it recently, it held up very well. So I thought I might as well say a few words about it and maybe inspire some of you to read it.

"Night Calls the Green Falcon" was first published in 1988 in the anthology SILVER SCREAM, edited by David J. Schow. I had a copy of that book but never got around to reading it. I did, however, read this story when it came out a couple of years later in McCammon's collection BLUE WORLD. That's a great collection, but "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is the real stand-out as far as I'm concerned.

Creighton Flint (real name Creighton Boomershine) is a washed-up actor, a former champion athlete from the Midwest who went to Hollywood in the early Fifties and starred in four movie serials during the fading days of that film genre, until a tragedy cut short his career. He played the masked crimefighter known as the Green Falcon and still has the costume from those serials, even though it's not in very good shape. Neither is Flint, who now lives in a rundown apartment house in a bad neighborhood in Hollywood.

A serial murderer known in the papers as the Flip-Top Killer has been preying on street people in the neighborhood, and when a friend of Flint becomes one of the victims, he sets out to track down the murderer. But he puts on the uniform of the Green Falcon to do so, which attracts unwanted attention and complicates Flint's quest for justice—which is also a quest to reclaim his lost celluloid heroism.

Things play out about like you'd expect in this novella, and McCammon opens it with a dream scene, a technique I don't like, but other than that it's very well written and the pace is absolutely relentless. More than that, and most of all, it's an unabashed love letter to serials, comic books, pulps, and all the other things that helped make so many of us what we are today, and I don't mind admitting I was a little misty-eyed when I got to the end. To quote a wise man from Alvin, Texas, I miss the old days, and I sort of miss 'em even more after reading "Night Calls the Green Falcon". McCammon's a fine writer and I still have several of his books that I haven't read yet, but I doubt if any of them will top this one for me.