Forgotten Books: The River Bend Feud - William MacLeod Raine

While I wouldn’t say that William MacLeod Raine is one of my favorite Western authors, I’ve read a number of his books and enjoyed all of them. THE RIVER BEND FEUD, published in 1939, is one of the later books in his career, and I liked it, too.

It has a particularly strong opening, with protagonist Jeff Hunter waiting in a Mexican prison to be executed by Pancho Banderas, a brutal bandit who calls himself a revolutionary. The character of Banderas is obviously inspired by Pancho Villa, but he’s even more out for himself and doesn’t really care about rising to power in Mexico. Hunter, the former manager of an American-owned mine in the Mexican mountains, and Banderas are long-time enemies.

With the help of some friends, Hunter manages to escape and make it across the Rio Grande into Texas, where he finds himself on the vast River Bend Ranch, clearly modeled after the King Ranch in that it encompasses a couple of counties and several towns. The ranch is owned by the powerful Raleigh family, one of whom, Joan Raleigh, is a beautiful young woman recently back in Texas from college in the east. Wouldn’t you know it, she’s the first member of the family Hunter encounters. And also wouldn’t you know it, the Raleighs are also under attack by the smaller ranchers on the outskirts of their ranch, as well as an evil black sheep member of the family who wants everything for himself.

Well, of course Hunter throws in with the Raleighs, and he has even more reason to do so when the Mexican government finally succeeds in chasing Pancho Banderas into Texas, where he becomes an ally of the forces that are plotting to bring down the River Bend Ranch.

The plot may be a little familiar to those of us who have read a lot of Westerns and seen plenty of Western movies, but that doesn’t stop Raine from doing a good job of making it interesting and entertaining. THE RIVER BEND FEUD is a contemporary Western, set in the same late Thirties era during which it was written and published. People not only ride horses, but cars, trucks, and airplanes play parts in the plot as well. People talk about similar movies starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and claim such settings are fantasylands, but in reality there were such places in the West where the blending of the modern era and the Old West was common. And Raine, born in England but raised in the West, knew that to be true.

I thought THE RIVER BEND FEUD maybe could have used a bit more action. It’s a little slow and talky in places, and Raine’s style can be old-fashioned, if that bothers you. I don’t mind it, as long as I don’t read a steady diet of it. And when he does cut loose, the suspense is high and the action scenes approach blood and thunder level. I really enjoyed this book, and if you enjoy the older Westerns, you probably would, too.

The Doom Legion - Will Murray

Back in 1969, there was a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where I always asked my parents to stop when we were traveling through there on our way to visit relatives in Brownwood and Blanket. I’ll bet some of you can guess why I wanted to stop. That’s right, the store had a paperback spinner rack, a comics spinner rack, and a magazine rack. That’s where I was one day, turning that paperback rack, when I spied an odd thing: two books with a paper band around them, advertising two for the price of one. They were the first couple of books in a series called THE SPIDER, by somebody I’d never heard of named R.T.M. Scott. I couldn’t look at them that well because of that paper band holding them together, but from what I could see of the first book, it looked pretty lurid, so I thought, sure, for 60 cents I’ll give this a try.

Well, I read both of those books—THE SPIDER STRIKES and THE WHEEL OF DEATH—pretty quickly, and I remember that I enjoyed them but couldn’t tell you anything else about them, and I’ve never reread them. By then I knew about pulps—I was a big fan of Doc Savage and The Shadow—and I realized these were reprints from a pulp magazine. Berkley Medallion published the paperbacks, and they did two more in the series, both under the name Grant Stockbridge. Paperback distribution being what it was in those days, though, I never came across those books, and I guess I must not have liked the first two well enough to try to hunt them down. And so I forgot about The Spider for a few years.

But then I began reading more about the character in various pulp fanzines, and more about “Grant Stockbridge”, who was usually a writer whose real name was Norvell Page, and then I picked up some reprints from an outfit called Dimedia, which also did a few Operator 5 reprints, and before you knew it, I was a fan. Over the years there have been lots of Spider reprints from various companies, and I’ve bought most of them. Wild plots, non-stop action, and a level of heroic angst not many pulp yarns ever matched. It’s great stuff.

Which brings us to THE DOOM LEGION, the latest novel from the modern-day King of the Pulps, Will Murray, which teams up The Spider with two more iconic pulp heroes, Operator 5 (mentioned above, and often in other posts on this blog) and G-8, the Flying Spy, who battled various bizarre enemies during World War I in the pages of his own long-running pulp written by Robert J. Hogan. Needless to say, with heroes like that, you need some good villains to oppose them, and Murray brings back two, one from G-8’s past (just look at that gorgeous cover by Joe DeVito, and if you ever read any of the G-8 series you can probably guess which) and one of The Spider’s old foes as well (one that I hadn’t encountered yet in the original pulp novels, many of which I still haven’t read—but I’m getting to them!).

THE DOOM LEGION begins with a Halloween party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In attendance are socialite Richard Wentworth (long suspected of being the vigilante known as The Spider) and his girlfriend Nita van Sloan. A mysterious green meteorite crashes into nearby Central Park with tragic results that over the next 24 hours fills New York with death and destruction. I don’t really need to go too much into the plot, but it’s a whirlwind of action and danger that never lets up, and Murray captures Norvell Page’s breathless style very well.

If you’re a fan of The Spider, you really can’t afford to miss this one. I’ve said this before, but Will Murray is one of the few writers who can make me feel like I’m back in junior high or high school, eagerly devouring a paperback I bought off a spinner rack for 50 or 60 cents, and I tell you, with the world the way it is today . . . those respites, those visits to the past, are sweeter than ever. I had a great time reading THE DOOM LEGION. I was already reading or rereading Spider and Operator 5 novels fairly regularly, and dang it, now I want to read some G-8, too. Meanwhile, for pulp fans, THE DOOM LEGION gets my highest recommendation.

Coming From Stark House: The Action Man/Terror Tournament - Jay Flynn

THE ACTION MAN
Denton Farr has everything he needs, money, and a fine woman. So why plan the perfect, impossible heist? Why do something that would bring the federals and the syndicate howling after him; why try a stunt that could easily get him killed and certainly send him up for the rest of his life? The action. There's something special about the way his body feels, something different about the air it breathes when he has action. That it is unnecessary doesn't matter. It is action. And why the hell does he want to climb that mountain? Because it is there. Yes, this is the heist will provide all the action that Farr will ever need...

TERROR TOURNAMENT
Ex-cop Burl Stannard has been hired as security to protect the take at a 3-day pro-amateur golf tournament. All he has to do is ride shotgun with the money to the bank. But something goes wrong. Three men pull up in a golf cart and crash their car. Shots are exchanged. A fellow ex-cop and one of the thieves are killed. When Stannard comes to, the $400,00 is gone, and no clues in sight, not even the body of the dead criminal. Who could have pulled off such a perfect heist? The more Stannard digs, the more it begins to look like an inside job but everyone involved has an airtight alibi!

I've read several novels by Jay Flynn and enjoyed them, but these two I haven't read, so I'm looking forward to them. And the introduction by Bill Pronzini is great. I can recommend this volume on that basis alone.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1946

I like this Earle Bergey cover, but then, I always like Earle Bergey covers. I don't recall ever reading anything by Stanton Coblentz, who wrote the lead story in this issue, and I probably should. The other authors in this issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES include Murray Leinster, Ross Rocklynne, Noel Loomis, John Russell Fearn writing as Polton Cross, and an author I've never heard of, Charles F. Ksanda, who sold only a handful of stories. I really like the science fiction from this era and need to read more of it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, December 1941

Okay, after seeing this cover, I'm going to have to write a scene in one of my books where the stagecoach driver holds the reins in his teeth while shooting it out with the bad guys. I really like this one. There appears to be plenty to like inside this issue of DIME WESTERN as well, with the usual line-up of great authors: L.P. Holmes, Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Tom Roan, Robert Mahaffey, and Bart Cassidy, who may or may not have also been Harry Olmsted.

Forgotten Books: The Salamanders - Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson)

I only read two or three Shadow novels a year, so at that rate I’ll never get through the entire series, but that’s all right. There are a lot of book series I’ll never finish. I try to read what I enjoy and enjoy what I read, and that’s all that matters.

My latest venture into the world of The Shadow is THE SALAMANDERS, which was published in the April 1, 1936 issue of THE SHADOW. This yarn is even more action-packed than usual, and that’s not an accident. Walter B. Gibson, who wrote 282 of the Shadow novels under the name Maxwell Grant, was under orders from the editor and publisher at Street & Smith to put even more action in the novels in order to compete with the success that THE SPIDER was having over at Popular Publications.

So THE SALAMANDERS begins with a huge fire that destroys a hotel in the town of Riverport, which is somewhere in “the South”. Gibson never gets more specific about the location than that. Not only is the hotel burned to the ground, but it looks very much like Harry Vincent, one of The Shadow’s chief agents, is killed in the blaze. For a good half of the book, it appears that Harry is a goner.

Of course, long-time fans know that he has to survive, and sure enough, later on The Shadow rescues him from the clutches of the bad guys. By this time, there have been more fires, some deadly explosions, an avalanche from which The Shadow barely escapes, shoot-outs with minions who have names like Sloopy and Jink, and creepy encounters with bizarre figures who are able to walk unscathed through infernos—the Salamanders of the title.

As often happens in Shadow novels, the big master plan behind all this actually turns out to be pretty mundane. But that doesn’t really matter, because the numerous fast-paced action scenes are the true appeal of this yarn. Gibson approaches apocalyptic levels in some of the scenes, and the final showdown in a burning mansion is great stuff.

Harry Vincent is the only agent who plays much of a part in this one, and oddly enough, The Shadow never makes use of the Lamont Cranston identity. He employs a couple of disguises, but nothing special. It’s almost like Gibson shoved all that aside to make room for the shooting and the running and the burning up and blowing up. That’s okay with me, although I kind of missed some of the usual touches. Still, THE SALAMANDERS is the best Shadow novel I’ve read in a while. If you’re a fan and haven’t read it yet, you definitely need to check it out.

Answer Death - Richard Prosch

Dan Spalding is a former state police detective who has retired from that work to run a vintage record store he inherited from his brother in Ozark City, a picturesque tourist destination reminiscent of Branson, Missouri. Not surprisingly, though, trouble keeps popping up that requires Dan to use his detective skills.

ANSWER DEATH is the first novel in this series by Richard Prosch, and it’s a good one. Dan’s problems start when a couple of shoplifters make off with a signed album by a signer who has a theater in Ozark City, as well as kind of a sleazy reputation. Dan’s efforts to recover the record lead him to discover a murder, and then the notorious singer winds up dead, too, leaving Dan with two murders to solve. Unfortunately, his efforts put everything he cares about at risk.

Modern technology plays an important part in the story, but the plot, the pacing, and the slightly melancholy first-person narration in this novel remind me very much of some of the great private eye series of the Seventies, such as Arthur Lyons’ Jacob Asch books. Dan Spalding isn’t officially a PI, but he functions much like one. He’s a fine character and makes for a very likable protagonist. Prosch’s writing is lean and effective. This is an excellent novel and the beginning of what looks like it will be a very good series. I give it a high recommendation.

42 Years Ago Today

Monday Memories: The Canyons

When I was a kid, there were two grocery stores in Azle: Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag, in downtown at the corner of Main and Stewart Streets, where the blinker light was; and Rochelle’s Grocery, on the highway service road half a mile from the street where I grew up. Trammell’s was a good-sized grocery store for that time period and even had a butcher shop in the back, as well as an attached dry goods store next door. Rochelle’s was smaller but closer (in walking distance, even), so we went there when we only needed a couple of things.

When my mother wanted to do some serious grocery shopping, though, she drove the six miles to Lake Worth and went to the A.L. Davis Supermarket there, and of course, being a little kid, I usually got dragged along. The thing is, at that point my mother didn’t like to drive on the highway, which was a four-lane divided highway with a median in the middle and crossovers every mile or so, plus a two-lane, two-way service road on each side. So she drove on the service roads, which had less traffic, coming and going. (When I think about how little traffic actually was on that highway back then, compared to now, it seems a little crazy that anybody would feel that way, but as I’ve said before and no doubt will again, it was a different time.)

Coming back from Lake Worth, the service road on that side of the highway went right along the edge of the Fort Worth Nature Center for a mile or so. The Nature Center is a city park and wild animal preserve and is still there. The view from the service road along that stretch is pretty scenic, with thickly wooded, fairly steep hills dropping down to Lake Worth (the actual lake, not the town of the same name) and the Trinity River. When we drove back along there after going to the grocery store, I always looked out across that landscape with great interest, because it reminded me of scenery I saw in all the Western TV shows and movies I watched at the time. I could imagine John Wayne or The Lone Ranger and Tonto or Roy Rogers galloping around out there and having shootouts with the bad guys. In my head, I dubbed that area “The Canyons” and started making up stories about what went on there.

Little did I know that 60 years later, I’d still be making up stories about cowboys and bad guys. But that was one of the places where it started.

To add a little more reminiscing about the Nature Center, this is the area where the infamous Lake Worth Monster, a.k.a. the Goatman, was supposed to live. At one time there was a small rehab facility for alcoholics located there, or as we called it with the usual sensitivity of kids, the Wino Farm. A dirt road that was sometimes passable, sometimes not, led from the Nature Center along the shore of the lake and then followed the river for several miles across an area known as Mud Flats before finally connecting with the road that went across the spillway at Eagle Mountain Lake, just upstream from Lake Worth. I seem to recall that Mud Flats was a popular make-out spot when I was in high school, but I never took a girl there other than Livia, and that was after we were married and would get out and just drive around on Sunday afternoons because gas was cheap and we didn’t have anything else to do. (I can no longer even imagine having so much free time we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I should have been working harder back then.) When I got around to writing TEXAS WIND, Mud Flats was also the area where gangsters took my private eye protagonist to beat him up and dump him so he’d be scared off the case he was working on. (That didn’t work out too well for them.)

Jump ahead to the time when our kids were little, and we’d often take them to the Nature Center to hike the trails and look at the buffalo and prairie dogs who lived there. Those were very enjoyable trips, and when I drive by the entrance now, there’s always a part of me that wants to go look at the buffalo. Unfortunately, what was free back then now requires an entrance fee, and I’ve never paid it just to indulge a brief burst of nostalgia. Yet.

But I think about it when I drive by, and I always glance over at The Canyons when I pass them, too, and that little kid making up exciting stories in his head is right beside me, dreaming his cowboy dreams.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, July 1949

Bruno Fischer is probably the only author in this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE who is still well-known at all. Pulp fans will recall Wilbur S. Peacock, Joe Archibald, and Morris Hershman (who is probably better known for the paperbacks he wrote later). One of the authors featured on the cover, along with Peacock, is William Degenhard, a name that's totally unknown to me. Just another example of the vast amount of once popular fiction that seems to have vanished forever.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, August 1936

That's a nice atmospheric cover on this issue of COWBOY STORIES. I don't know who painted it. Inside, the list of authors is more of a "Who?" rather than a "Who's Who". The best-known authors are probably Samuel Taylor and Cliff Walters. The lead novel is the only story listed in the Fictionmags Index for Matt O'Connell, which makes me suspect that may have been a pseudonym. There's also a story by Fridtjof Michelson, not a name to conjure up images of sagebrush and shootouts. Ol' Fridtjof managed to sell more than a dozen Western and adventure yarns to various pulps from the late Twenties to the mid-Thirties, though. And Alfred L. Garry contributes another installment in his long-running comedy Western series about Deputy Ham and Sheriff Egg.

Forgotten Books: The Sky Raider - Donald E. Keyhoe

One thing that most people have forgotten or never knew is that a lot of popular fiction used to be serialized in newspapers. This was true up into the 1940s and maybe beyond that. I don’t recall seeing any serials in newspapers when I was growing up, but it’s certainly possible that such things occurred elsewhere.

THE SKY RAIDER was serialized in The Ottawa Journal and other papers in 1929. It’s the first novel by young pilot Donald E. Keyhoe, who started writing while he was recuperating from injuries suffered in a crackup in 1922. As you might expect, he specialized in aviation stories. THE SKY RAIDER is an adventure yarn about air piracy, with some elements of the traditional mystery thrown in as well. The protagonist, Dick Trent, flies for the Air Mail, a relatively new operation at the time. Dick’s not exactly a daredevil, but he’ll run some risks while he’s flying if he has a good enough reason.

The owner of this particular Air Mail service has a beautiful daughter, a ne’er-do-well son, and a government contract to deliver a quarter of a million dollars for the Federal Reserve. Dick’s best friend takes the run carrying the money. When he doesn’t show up where he’s supposed to, Dick leads the search. He finds the wrecked and burned plane and the body of his friend. The pilot wasn’t killed in the wreck, though. Dick figures out that he actually landed the plane for some reason and then was murdered by someone who met him on the ground. The money, of course, is gone.

The owner of the Air Mail service, the father of the girl Dick loves, is soon arrested for the murder and robbery, convicted, and sent to prison to await execution. Dick believes he’s innocent, and the rest of the novel is concerned with our young hero’s efforts to ferret out the truth and uncover the real killer.

For a first novel, THE SKY RAIDER is decently plotted. You’ll think you have everything figured out more than once, but Keyhoe manages to put some nice twists on the story. It’s not very well-paced, though, lurching along with some stretches that drag. Most of the time the writing is serviceable at best, reminding me of the prose in a lot of those Stratemeyer Syndicate books from that era.

It really perks up, though, when Keyhoe is writing about flying itself. You can tell he really had a passion for it. There’s a nice scene where Dick is comparing flying to riding in a train, and train travel definitely comes off second best. (I have a feeling that if E.S. Dellinger had been writing that scene, it would have been the other way around. It’s interesting that enough people in those days had an affinity for one or the other that both aviation and railroads had millions of words of pulp fiction written about them.)

Keyhoe had a long career writing for the aviation and air-war pulps, mixing in a few detective stories along the way. He also wrote the short-lived Yellow Peril pulp series, DR. YEN SIN. Then he struck gold in the Fifties with his supposedly non-fiction books about UFOs. I gobbled up all those flying saucer books when I was a kid, and I remember reading and enjoying the ones by Keyhoe. I’d never read any of his aviation stories until THE SKY RAIDER, though.

And even though it’s very old-fashioned and has its flaws, I also found it pretty entertaining. The whole novel can be downloaded in PDF format from the Age of Aces website, with the first installment to be found here. Age of Aces also publishes a number of collections of Keyhoe’s aviation pulp stories, as well as collections by other stalwarts of that genre, and I have a feeling I’m going to be buying some of them. All three of Keyhoe’s DR. YEN SIN novels are available from Altus Press and I’ll probably spring for those as well. In the meantime, you can sample THE SKY RAIDER for free, and if you’re looking for a novel that will transport you back into another era, it’s a good one.

Overlooked Movies: Northern Pursuit (1943)

I keep finding old movies that I’ve never seen, despite the prodigious amount of them I watched on TV when I was a kid. NORTHERN PURSUIT, made in 1943, is a World War II espionage adventure starring Errol Flynn as a Canadian Mountie battling Nazi spies and saboteurs, until a bad decision leads to him being kicked out of the RCMP in disgrace. Things go from bad to worse from there as, disillusioned by what’s happened to him, he’s recruited by the very spy ring he was trying to break up.

Okay, stop me right there if you’ve figured out the big plot twist. It’s certainly not hard to do, and the script doesn’t keep the viewer in the dark for very long, either. But as I’ve said many times before, it just doesn’t matter. The fun (and this movie is a great deal of fun) is in watching some top professionals go about spinning an exciting, entertaining yarn.

I wouldn’t say Errol Flynn is one of my favorite actors, but I’ve always liked him and his movies. Helmut Dantine is the head bad guy, and he’s as sleek and evil as you’d want him to be. There’s plenty of stalwart support from John Ridgley as a fellow Mountie, Gene Lockhart (a little miscast but effective as a Nazi spy), and Tom Tully as an RCMP inspector. Jay Silverheels, Tonto his own self, is supposed to be in the movie somewhere in a bit part, but I never spotted him.

The script is by none other than the old pulpster Frank Gruber, who really knew how to tell a story, and veteran screenwriter Alvah Bessie. It’s based on a story by another prolific pulp writer, Leslie T. White. I don’t know which of White’s stories was used as the source material, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was published originally in ARGOSY or ADVENTURE. And NORTHERN PURSUIT was directed by Raoul Walsh, who directed many pictures I liked a great deal, such as THE ROARING TWENTIES, DARK COMMAND, HIGH SIERRA, and WHITE HEAT. He’s another one who really knew how to tell an exciting story. I mean, just look at the guy! That’s what a two-fisted movie director should look like.

Not that NORTHERN PURSUIT is perfect. I thought the final showdown could have been a little more dramatic, and then the very end of the movie, Flynn’s last line, is so oddly wrong and tone-deaf, especially considering all the good notes the movie’s hit up until then, that I can only suspect it was included at the insistence of some studio executive overly enamored of his own cleverness. It’s jarringly out of place, and if you watch NORTHERN PURSUIT I think you should just pretend it ended ten seconds earlier than it actually did. And if you like World War II espionage adventure movies, you definitely should watch it. I enjoyed it a lot.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North-West Romances, Spring 1944

Here's another good Mountie cover on this issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. I don't know who the artist is, but I know there are some fine authors with stories in this issue, with the biggest name probably being Dan Cushman. Two authors better known for Westerns rather than Northerns are also on hand, William Heuman and Archie Joscelyn, both of them writers I like quite a bit. Fiction House regular R.S. Lerch contributes a story, as well. Looks like a good issue of the leading Northern pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, March 13, 1926

Most of the WESTERN STORY covers during the 1920s were on the sedate side, but here's one that has some nice action. I can't read the artist's name in the scan, but maybe someone among you can identify who painted this cover. Inside this issue are two stories by Frederick Faust, one as by Max Brand and the other as by John Frederick, plus stories by Frank Richardson Pierce, Hugh Grinstead, Ray Humphreys, Austin Hall, Reginald Barker, and Kenneth Gilbert, all regular contributors to WESTERN STORY.

Forgotten Books: Renegade - Ramsay Thorne (Lou Cameron)

Not long after Lou Cameron created the Longarm series for Berkley, he began writing the Renegade series for Warner Books under the pseudonym Ramsay Thorne. Unlike Longarm, on which Cameron was one of several rotating authors, he turned out all the Renegade books himself. The series was pretty successful, running for several years. At one time, I had all the books in paperback but never read any of them.

These days, the Renegade series is available under Cameron's real name in e-book editions from Piccadilly Publishing, so when I decided it was finally time for me to sample this series, that's the route I took. And I'm glad I did, because RENEGADE is one of the better books I've read recently.

The time is the early 1890s, the setting Arizona Territory not far from the Mexican border, as the protagonist, Lieutenant Richard Walker, is about to be hanged after a court-martial. Seems he took pity on some Mexican revolutionaries/bandits who were caught on the American side of the border and let them go, and in their escape, a soldier was killed. Walker escapes as well and manages to make it across the border into Mexico, where he's promptly captured by brutal Rurales and faces execution again.

Of course, Walker escapes again, and this time he takes a Maxim gun with him, which helps him come in really handy when he falls in with that same bunch of revolutionaries. He also befriends a French mercenary who has been in Mexico since the time of Maximilian's dictatorship. Walker quickly assumes a leadership role among the revolutionaries and gets a battlefield promotion to captain--Captain Gringo, as he's known by one and all for the rest of the book, as he helps the revolutionaries in their struggle against the notorious El Presidente, Porfirio Diaz.

That pretty much sums up the plot of RENEGADE, which is a very straightforward book. But what makes it worthwhile is the wonderfully profane, crude, politically incorrect voice in which it's written, as Captain Gringo beds just about every woman he meets, mows down scores of Rurales and Federales with the machine gun he carries, and leads a long railroad chase across Mexico as he tries to get himself and his new-found friends safely from the high deserts of the border country to the jungles along the coast. There's a ton of well-written action and some bawdy humor. Sure, most of it is over the top, but that hardly ever bothers me.

The only real flaws in this one are that it's too long and therefore a little repetitive in places, and after everything that's gone before, the last couple of chapters struck me as sort of anti-climactic. But for the most part, RENEGADE is great fun (although probably not something that will be to everyone's taste) and I really enjoyed it. I'm glad the whole series is available as e-books. I may not ever get around to reading all of them, but I have a feeling I'll give it a try.

Overlooked Movies: Track of the Cat (1954)

As many times as TRACK OF THE CAT played on TV while I was growing up, you’d think I would have seen it by now, but that’s not the case. I’m always glad to come across a Western I haven’t seen, so we watched the DVD of it not long ago.

However, as it turns out, TRACK OF THE CAT is not a normal Western at all. Since it’s based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (THE OX-BOW INCIDENT), that’s kind of to be expected. Robert Mitchum, Tab Hunter, and William Hopper (Paul Drake from PERRY MASON, his own self) play brothers who don’t get along that well as they live on an isolated ranch in the California mountains with their parents, bitter old Beulah Bondi and drunkenly ineffectual Phillip Tonge. The youngest brother, played by Hunter, has been courting a girl (Diana Lynn) his mother doesn’t approve of, and she’s come to visit. Mitchum, Hunter, and Hopper also have an old maid sister, played by Theresa Wright. There are a lot of angsty undercurrents going on, and when a panther starts attacking the family’s stock and Mitchum and Hopper go out after it, that sets off a chain of tragic events.

I haven’t read the source novel, but there’s enough doom, gloom, domestic drama, and creepy subtext in TRACK OF THE CAT that while watching it, I kept thinking, “This is like Tennessee Williams wrote a Western.” I didn’t dislike it, mind you, but it’s the kind of movie that makes you ask yourself what the hell it is you’re watching. I was expecting a taut, suspenseful yarn, a man vs. nature action story with Mitchum battling the panther, but that’s not what it is.

The snowy outdoor photography by William Clothier is excellent, and director William Wellman keeps things moving along fairly well despite the talky script. The acting is okay, especially considering there’s not really a sympathetic character in the whole movie. Wait, I take that back. Joe Sam, a crazy old Indian ranch hand, is sort of sympathetic at times, when he’s not being creepy as all get-out. The really odd thing about that is Joe Sam is played by none other than Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer from the Little Rascals, who was all of 26 years old when this movie was made. It’s some pretty masterful work under heavy make-up.

So overall, I can only give this movie a qualified recommendation. It’s well made and interesting enough that I’m glad I watched it, but heavy psychological drama isn’t really my thing. If you enjoy that sort of movie and haven’t seen TRACK OF THE CAT, it’s worth checking out.

Monday Memories: Home

I don’t recall the exact date, but 40 years ago this month, Livia and I moved into the original house that we built on this property. She and I built it from the ground up, along with a great deal of help from her parents and other family members on both sides. We dug the foundation and poured the cement for it by hand, using a cement mixer and buckets. We dug the septic tanks and lateral line, even though we had to rent a jackhammer to break up the rock layer that’s close to the surface under the ground. We framed it and raised the rafters. It was a lot of work, but it was a darned good house.

The land itself, a little more than three acres, had only one tree on it when we started building. At one time it had been part of a farm, and the whole area was one big field. So at least it’s pretty level. We’ve planted dozens of trees over the years. Some lived, most didn’t. We added some storage barns. We built a detached building that served as my library and writing studio for a number of years. All of that was lost in the wildfire of 2008, almost 30 years after we moved in.

I don’t think there was ever any real question that we would rebuild right here on the same property. In December of ’08, we moved into the new house. Even before that, though, we had moved in a mobile home to live in while we decided what to do and got the new house built. So except for about a month right after the fire when we stayed with Livia’s parents, this piece of ground has been our home for the past 40 years.

I plan for it to remain our home. We’ve lived too much, and lost too much, here to ever go anywhere else. There are too many memories. Even when I’m gone, I want my ashes spread here so I’ll still be part of the place. Maybe some in the front yard, where I sat on the porch and watched the dogs play, and over in front of the garage where Patches is buried, and across the driveway where my studio used to be and Harvey is buried, and out where Dobie and Max are resting . . .

Well, you get the idea. I ain’t goin’ anywhere.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10-Story Detective Magazine, June 1949

I'm not sure I've ever come across a "girl hidden inside a tree in a graveyard" cover before, but that's what you've got on this issue of 10-STORY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, courtesy of artist Al Drake. The best-known authors inside this issue are Philip Ketchum, Joe Archibald, and Ray Cummings. There's also a story by Joseph Commings, an author who's almost competely forgotten now, but he published fairly prolifically in the mystery magazines, both pulps and digests, from the mid-Forties to the mid-Eighties, so that's a pretty long career. We were in some of the same issues of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Commings' main detective was a U.S. Senator named Brooks U. Banner. There are more than two dozen stories in this series, but his cover-featured yarn in this issue of 10-STORY DETECTIVE isn't one of them. The other authors in this issue are writers I've never heard of. I do kind of like that goofy cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fighting Western, October 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The scan is from my copy. That looks like an H.W. Scott cover to me, but I’m not entirely certain about that.

The featured story is “Six-Gun Survey”, a novella by E. Hoffmann Price. Price was a great pulp author, one who could write in almost every genre and do a good job with all of them. From what I’ve read of his work, Westerns may well have been his weakest area (with the exception of his Simon Boliver Grimes series), but those yarns are still consistently entertaining. “Six-Gun Survey” is well written, as always with Price, and the plot, which involves a land and irrigation swindle as well as camels left over the army’s failed experiment with them in Arizona Territory, is pretty interesting. Even so, this story is a little slow and not top-notch Price. Still worth reading, though.

Victor Rousseau had a long career in the pulps, stretching all the way back to 1907 and lasting until 1948. Like E. Hoffmann Price, he wrote in multiple genres. In the Thirties and Forties, he wrote primarily for Trojan Publishing Corporation, the publisher of the Spicy and Speed magazine lines, turning out scores of detective, adventure, and Western yarns. His story in this issue of FIGHTING WESTERN, “Buffalo Trail”, is a pretty good novelette which finds six mountain men joining a trail drive. The fur trapping days are just about over, and these men have to find something to do with their lives. One is young enough that he’s done some cowboying in the past, and he’s the protagonist of this tale, which has several nice plot twists I didn’t see coming at all. It suffers a little from an over-abundance of what I call “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, but despite that, I enjoyed it very much.

Laurence Donovan was yet another prolific, versatile pulpster who wrote a lot for Trojan. His story “Brand of a Thief” reads like it could have appeared in RANCH ROMANCES, since there’s a romantic rectangle in this one, as well as $30,000 in missing money from the sale of a herd. Donovan was good with action and there are some nice shoot-outs and fights, along with a satisfying plot twist. I liked this one quite a bit, too.

John Jo Carpenter was really John Reese, who wrote dozens of stories under the Carpenter name for the Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties, before going on to a successful career as an author of Western and mystery novels in both hardback and paperback. He wrote the novel on which the movie CHARLEY VARRICK is based. His story in this issue, “Gun-Wise and Trail-Shy”, uses the standard plot of the young man wrongly condemned for a crime who has to take up the owlhoot trail. But when he encounters another outlaw, things take an unexpected turn. Reese was an excellent writer, and this is another good story.

Paul Hanna was a Trojan Publishing house-name, so there’s really no way of knowing who wrote “Beasts of Pueblo”, the final story in this issue. Which is a shame, because it’s an excellent yarn and my favorite from this issue. The protagonist is a young man who runs a Wells, Fargo express office. He’s plagued by what we’d now think of as a phobia which makes him physically ill when he’s confronted by a situation calling for violence. As you’d expect, he winds up overcoming it (this is a Western pulp, after all), but this story has a lot of emotional depth and is very well-written.

There are only five stories in this issue, which is a pretty low number for a Western pulp, but they’re all substantial tales and they’re all good. I was a little surprised that the E. Hoffmann Price story is actually the weakest in the bunch, since I really like Price’s work, and even at that, it’s still entertaining! This is just a good all-around issue and I enjoyed reading it.

Good Dog

Don't feel like hunting up some good music while I can't sleep, so . . . here's a good dog instead.

Forgotten Books: The D.A. Goes to Trial - Erle Stanley Gardner

Quite a few years ago I read one of the books in Erle Stanley Gardner’s series about District Attorney Doug Selby. I couldn’t tell you which one, but I remember liking it all right despite feeling that it wasn’t nearly as good as the Perry Mason and Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novels that I’d read.

I thought it was about time I read another one, so I picked up THE D.A. GOES TO TRIAL, published in 1940 as the fourth book in the series. There’s not much point in trying to summarize the usual incredibly complicated plot. Let’s just say that it involves a dead hobo whose true identity is a mystery, a hotheaded rancher, a runaway wife, a divorce that may or may not be legal, the fingerprints of a dead man that don’t match the corpse, various cases of embezzlement and blackmail, and the return of Selby’s old girlfriend who is now a lawyer and will wind up opposing him in court. Gardner juggles all these elements until Selby finally puts them into a pattern that makes sense (I guess; sometimes it’s hard to tell with Gardner) and brings a murderer to justice.

Gardner was never known for his vividly descriptive writing, but there are some nice passages in this one about the Southern California landscape. And the plot is pretty interesting. As usual with Gardner, the second half of the book is better than the first, as the pace picks up and there’s a greater sense of urgency. Of course, the courtroom scenes, where Gardner really excels, usually come in the second half of the book, too. That’s not the case here, as the only courtroom scene is a short one lacking in fireworks, but overall the story moves along better anyway.

For me, the real problem with the Doug Selby books is Doug Selby himself. He’s a really bland, colorless protagonist, just one step up from a cipher. In this series Gardner seems to be trying to recreate the same dynamic as in the Perry Mason books: reporter Sylvia Martin is Della Street, Sheriff Rex Brandon is Paul Drake, but Doug Selby is no Perry Mason.

So I can only give THE D.A. GOES TO TRIAL a mixed recommendation. It’s entertaining if you stick with it, and I’m glad I read it, but I suspect it’ll be a good while, if ever, before I sample this series again.

(That’s my copy in the scan above. Below are covers from some of the other editions.)