Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, August 1942

Not many Western pulps had Halloween covers, at least that I've been able to find, and I think I've used all of them in past years. So this year I'm just going to fall back on an old favorite, Norman Saunders, with this cover for WESTERN SHORT STORIES. "All-Star Stories", it says, and based on the authors inside, that's a pretty solid claim. In this issue, you'll find stories by D.B. Newton, Dean Owen, H.A. DeRosso, Tom W. Blackburn, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), James P. Olsen, Hapsburg Liebe, Ralph Berard (Victor White), James C. Lynch, and Raymond W. Porter. Those are all prolific, well-regarded pulpsters.

Forgotten Novelettes: Three Weird Menace Stories by Arthur Leo Zagat

I've posted before for Halloween about Weird Menace yarns by one of my favorites, Arthur Leo Zagat. This year we have a Zagat triple feature, so to speak, in which we look at three excellent examples of the Weird Menace genre.

You might think that a story entitled "Satan Calls the Strike" would be about baseball, but you'd be wrong. This tale from the October 1937 issue of DIME MYSTERY, the leading Weird Menace pulp, centers around a small town in Massachusetts where the only real industry is the local silk mill. Ah, so it's about a workers' strike at the mill. No, no at all, although the mill does figure heavily in the plot. Instead, three sinister figures show up in town: a blind man with the mark of a red right hand on his face, who can strike others blind with only a gesture; a starving infant who causes food to go bad wherever he goes; and a beautiful woman who sucks the life from the living. Naturally, their arrival wreaks havoc in the town, and it's up to a two-fisted young lawyer to battle these apparently supernatural menaces and discover what's really going on. Zagat pours on the horror until you have to wonder how he's ever going to get any logical, reasonable explanations out of all this, and when he finally does, my impulse was to say, "Oh, come on! You expect me to believe that?" The thing of it is, the writing is really excellent in this story, with some of it coming off almost as a mainstream tale of Americana in this small town, that I wound up forgiving the ludicrous elements of the plot. This isn't the best Zagat story I've read so far, but it's right up there close to the top.

"Ghouls Ride the Highways" is from the November 1935 issue of HORROR STORIES, and it's one of the fastest-paced, most suspenseful tales you're ever likely to run across. You might not think a story set mostly on a bus would fit that description, but Zagat makes it work. The protagonist is a newly married young woman who's trying to deliver a drug to a sinister doctor that will save her new husband from a mysterious disease. When she dozes off while riding the bus, though, she wakes up to a violent nightmare that involves dangerous mountain roads and a crazed driver. Then, when she finally reaches her destination, things get worse. One of the things I love about these stories are the goofy explanations for all the supposedly supernatural goings-on, and in this story, the so-called logical summing-up is more over-the-top than ever. Plus the story has an unexpected twist at the end of the sort you don't often encounter in Weird Menace yarns.

Sandhogs, construction workers who build tunnels, usually under rivers, appear now and then as the protagonists in pulp stories, and that's the case in "Lilith--Deep Lady of Death", from the March/April 1939 issue of TERROR TALES. The engineer who designed the tunnel in this yarn, along with his girlfriend, are the protagonists in the tale of a sinister beauty who shows up deep underground to lure workers to their deaths. This is another very swift story, taking place in one short evening, and as such there's no let-up in the action and horror as Zagat keeps things rocketing along to a climax with the potential to turn apocalyptic.

All three of these stories are quite entertaining, and they just reinforce my feeling that Zagat is my favorite Weird Menace writer. I've never read any of his science fiction or mysteries, and I really need to get around to that.

Classic Horror Stories: The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft

I know when I'm beaten. After reading "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and now this story, I have to take hat in hand and humbly say that yes, yes, I am an H.P. Lovecraft fan. I have been won over.

"The Dunwich Horror", which appeared originally in the April 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, takes place around a farming community in Massachusetts, in an area where the hills have ancient stone circles atop them and some of the folks who live thereabouts have strange habits, like the Whately family, especially young Wilbur Whately, who is born and grows up in the course of this story but grows up to be something other than human . . . and that's just the beginning of the weird, potentially cataclysmic things that happen.

Once again, Lovecraft injects some dialogue and action into this yarn to go along with the all the richly detailed creepy stuff. The climax is downright thrilling. Not only that, but there are also a few unexpected (at least by me) touches of humor in this story. Granted, the lines are more droll than they are laugh-out-loud funny, but still, I'll give Lovecraft credit for making me smile.

I know I said I might continue with this series after Halloween, but I believe I've changed my mind. Honestly, as much as I've enjoyed the tales, I'm about Cthulhu-ed out. I'm sure I'll return to the series, and to other horror stories, in the future, and right now I'm planning to make a whole month of it again for Halloween next year. I'll have one more horror-related post tomorrow (not Lovecraft or Cthulhu), and after that I plan to go back to reading Westerns and mysteries for a while.  

Classic Adventure/Horror Stories: The Fire of Asshurbanipal - Robert E. Howard

Now this is a yarn! One of my favorite Robert E. Howard stories, and one of my favorite WEIRD TALES covers, with art by the great J. Allen St. John. This story is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and rightly so, but for most of its length it's a classic adventure tale with one of Howard's two-fisted American adventurers in the Middle East, Steve Clarney, who, along with his Afghan sidekick Yar Ali, ventures into the desert to find a lost city where a fantastic, mysterious gem known as the Fire of Asshurbanipal rests in the skeletal hand of a long-dead emperor. Along the way they have to battle Bedouin bandits and an Arab outlaw and slave-trader.

Well, even if you've never read this story (and I'll bet most of you have, some multiple times like me), you can guess that Steve and Yar Ali will find what they're looking for, and more besides, and it's that more that ties this yarn in with Cthulhu and his outfit. If I have one quibble with the story, it's that our heroes act more like Lovecraft protagonists in the end, rather Howard protagonists, but I can accept that in exchange for all the great stuff along the way. I reread this in the Del Rey edition THE HORROR STORIES OF ROBERT E. HOWARD and thought it held up just fine. 

Overlooked Movies: Big Ass Spider! (2013)

 

When I first saw the title of this movie, I though, “Nah, this has to got to be a joke. There’s not really a movie called BIG ASS SPIDER!” Well, as it turns out, there is, and also to my surprise, it turned out to be a pretty entertaining little film. What better movie to feature for an Overlooked Movies post the week of Halloween than a good old-fashioned Creature Feature?

BIG ASS SPIDER! is a throwback of sorts to movies like THEM!, right down to the exclamation point in the title and scenes involving the sewers along the Los Angeles River, as well as involvement by the military and a scientist who thinks he knows how to destroy the giant spider of the title. It’s actually an exterminator and his security guard sidekick who hold the key to defeating the creature, though.

This is an odd movie. For the most part, it takes a rather tongue-in-cheek approach, has some funny lines, and clearly the filmmakers have a lot of affection for the sort of movie they’re making fun of. But it’s also a little too violent and gory to work completely as a comedy. It might have been more successful if they had gone one way or the other. As it is, though, the hybrid approach works pretty well. Greg Grunberg, a top-notch character actor who has been in a ton of movies and TV shows, gets to play the lead for a change and does a fine job as the gutsy, determined exterminator. Lombardo Boyar is pretty funny as his sidekick. Ray Wise, not playing a smarmy bad guy for a change, is the officer in charge of the military effort to kill the rampaging giant spider. The acting is pretty good all around, and so are the special effects. I’m not sure why I never even heard of this movie until now, but I enjoyed watching it.

Dracula's Ghost - Charles R. Rutledge

DRACULA'S GHOST is a worthy sequel to DRACULA'S REVENGE, the first book in this excellent series by Charles R. Rutledge. Once again, police detective Jennifer Grail and occult detective Carter Decamp team up to tackle an eldritch menace, as well as Romanian gangsters. This short novel is a very effective combination of horror fiction and police procedural. I especially like the way that Grail keeps discovering so-called fictional monsters have a basis in reality. Rutledge does an excellent job of balancing these elements. I've really enjoyed the first two books in this series and look forward to seeing where Rutledge goes with it from here. Highly recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super Science Stories, May 1940

This is the second issue of Popular Publications' science fiction pulp, edited by Frederik Pohl. The cover is by an artist I'm not familiar with, Gabriel Mayorga. It seems a little too busy to me, but it's eye-catching, no doubt about that. And the line-up of authors inside is an all-star one: Robert A. Heinlein (writing as Lyle Monroe), Manly Wade Wellman (writing as Gabriel Barclay), James Blish, Raymond Z. Gallun, L. Sprague de Camp, Donald A. Wollheim, Ray Cummings, P. Schuyler Miller, Cyril Kornbluth (writing as S.D. Gottesman), and Willy Ley. Granted, some, if not all, of those stories were probably rejects from ASTOUNDING, but still, that's a pretty impressive group. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Golden West Magazine, April 1937

This issue is from Ace's short-lived attempt to publish a Western romance pulp. Not a bad cover, in my opinion. I don't know who the artist is. Most of the inside is taken up by a full-length novel by Johnston McCulley, "The Colt Cavalier", backed up by short stories by Lawrence A. Keating and Eric Thane. I don't know if McCulley's story was ever reprinted as a book, but it seems like it would have been a good candidate for a paperback edition.

Forgotten Books: Carnival Girl - Max Gareth (Stuart James)

“Max Gareth” was actually Stuart James, the author of FRISCO FLAT, which I posted about a couple of months ago. CARNIVAL GIRL may be his first novel. It was published in 1960 by Chariot Books, and a more mysterious publisher you’re unlikely to find. There’s no address in the book, not even a city, and just a simple book number on the spine. Chariot Books, whoever they were, published more than a hundred books in the early Sixties, but the only author names I recognize are Arthur Adlon and John Burton Thompson, both of whom wrote for several other softcore sleaze publishers. It must have been a pretty low-budget operation.

But that doesn’t mean the books they published were all bad. CARNIVAL GIRL is actually a well-written coming-of-age story for the most part, albeit a very violent and lurid one at times. The protagonist is a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Norma who runs away from home in New Jersey due to an abusive stepfather and winds up having to hitchhike across the country. She doesn’t have a real destination, just a desire to head west. She winds up getting a ride with a trucker who seems decent at first but winds up raping her, taking her virginity. Then she encounters a traveling carnival and finds a home there, befriending several of the performers and getting a job dancing (stripping, actually) in one of their shows. A romantic triangle soon develops between Norma, the drummer who provides music for the show she’s part of, and a young motorcycle daredevil who’s also part of the carnival.

In general, I like carny novels. Fredric Brown’s MADBALL is excellent. CARNIVAL GIRL isn’t at that level, but James spins a fast-moving, compelling tale that has a literate, well-written style and lots of interesting carnival background. The characters and plot are standard, early Sixties sleaze/soap opera. There’s a crime/noir element farther along, but it never really fits into that category as many of the other softcore novels from that era do. For what it is, it’s a very readable, entertaining yarn. Clearly, Stuart James was a natural storyteller. I have several more of his books and plan to read them soon.

Classic Horror Stories: The Space Eaters - Frank Belknap Long

I was surprised when I started reading this story from the July 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES to discover that the protagonists are none other than Frank Belknap Long (who wrote it) and his buddy H.P. Lovecraft (here just called Howard) their own selves. It starts with them discussing horror fiction and Howard complaining that he can’t really achieve the effect he’s going for with his stories, because the real depths of true horror can’t be described, only suggested.

Then one of Frank’s neighbors shows up at the door, walking around with a hole bored in his head that ought to have killed him, and tells them about a strange encounter he just had in some nearby woods. And just like that, hellity-blip, as Robert Leslie Bellem would say, we’re off on a wild adventure as the two writers battle cosmic monsters from outer space.

Having Long and Lovecraft starring in this story gives it something of a goofy, contemporary feel, as if it might have been written today. I don’t know of any other pulp stories in which the author appears so openly as a character. And yet it has some really creepy moments, too, and the menace it presents is certainly Lovecraftian. An odd mix, to be sure, but Long makes it work. I really enjoyed “The Space Eaters”. (The entire issue, including a story by August Derleth and poems by Robert E. Howard and Donald Wandrei, is available to read on-line.)

Classic Horror Stories: The Shadow Over Innsmouth - H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, now, this is a terrific story. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is the best Lovecraft yarn I’ve read so far, by far. It’s the tale of a bookish young man who’s making a tour of New England towns between his junior and senior years in college, so he can study their history and architecture. He winds up in the decaying fishing town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, even though he’s been warned against going there because the inhabitants are, well, strange. Turns out, that’s putting it mildly.

After complaining about the slow pace and lack of dialogue in other Lovecraft stories, this one is much different. It still doesn’t just race along, but it moves fairly well, there’s a lot of dialogue, and Lovecraft actually shows us most of the action instead of just summarizing it, achieving some real suspense along the way. And then at the end, there’s a twist that’s a real gut punch.

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was published originally as a stand-alone novella by some outfit called Visionary Press in 1936, then reprinted in the January 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. I’m sure those of you who are more familiar with Lovecraft and his career than I am know a lot more about the origins of this tale than I do, and if you’d like to weigh in in the comments, please do. I’m going to settle for saying that this is a wonderful yarn, and I have a feeling it’s going to stick with me. I kind of wish I’d read this sitting on my parents’ front porch in the summer of 1967 or ’68 . . . 

Girl of Prey - Pete Risley

It’s Halloween weekend in the late 90s and a movie theater is hosting a horror movie marathon in shabby Stankerton, Ohio. The town is plagued by a serial killer, the Westside Slasher. A new recreational drug called worm is gaining in popularity and a strange, beautiful girl from California is found wandering around a rock club stoned and alone. A vague image appears on an outside wall of the theater, taken by some to be a manifestation of Christ. And a bizarre confluence of religious cultism from faraway times and places seems to arise phantom-like in Stankerton, threatening to drive a few desperate souls over the edges that define them.

There's so much going on in this dark suspense novel that I wasn't sure I could summarize it adequately, so we'll let the Amazon sales copy do that. What I'll say is that Pete Risley does a great job with the Nineties setting and keeps the story racing along at a fast pace while juggling a large cast of characters. That's not easy to do, but he succeeds admirably. This is some good Halloween reading (that's when it comes out), although it is, as they say, not for the squeamish. But if you don't mind your fiction a little on the raw side, GIRL OF PREY is an excellent novel.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch, July 1936

I've noticed that Tommy guns seem to show up fairly often on the covers of TOP-NOTCH. I'm not sure who painted this cover. Tom Lovell, maybe. There's no doubt some good authors contributed stories to this issue, however: Harry F. Olmsted, Carl H. Rathjen, Wilfred McCormick (author of a bunch of young adult sports novels I read as a kid), Hapsburg Liebe, Samuel Taylor, and Jack Sterrett. I'm familiar with TOP-NOTCH mostly because that's where Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories were first published, but they put out plenty of other good adventure yarns, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second May Number 1946

Most of the RANCH ROMANCES covers in the mid-Forties were still a little on the sweet side, but they were starting to show some action now and then, as in this one by an artist I'm not familiar with, Will Gimby. There are certainly some hardboiled authors inside this issue, H.A. DeRosso and Joseph Chadwick, along with RANCH ROMANCES regulars L.P. Holmes, Stephen Payne, and James Routh. Appears to be an issue well worth reading. 

Forgotten Books: Whistling Lead - Eugene Cunningham

Eugene Cunningham is one of my favorite Western writers, but it had been a while since I read anything by him, so I decided to remedy that. WHISTLING LEAD was publlshed in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1936 and reprinted in paperback by Signet in 1949, the edition I read. (A first printing, by the way.) It’s dedicated to John F. Byrne, an editor at Fiction House during the era when Cunningham was selling a great deal to the pulps they published. Some of his novels are cobbled together from pulp novellas and novelettes, but if that’s the case with WHISTLING LEAD, I haven’t found anything to indicate that. Although it’s pretty episodic, it reads as if it were written as a novel.

The plot is fairly simple: Arthur “Big” Gavity is a drifting cowhand who works for a Texas rancher. He falls in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, but the rancher opposes any such match. He’s also ambitious and wants to make his mark as a businessman, so in order to do that, and to get his daughter away from Gavity, he moves to La Fe, a cattletown that’s poised to become a boomtown because a railroad spur is being built to it. The problem is, Gavity quits his job on the ranch and follows them to La Fe.

This is actually back-story. The novel begins with Gavity on his way to La Fe and fills in the background as it goes along. Of course, as soon as Gavity arrives in the settlement, he runs into trouble, but he’s very handy with guns and his fists, and he soon comes to the attention of the mayor, who offers him the job of town marshal since the previous marshal was just shot down by a slick tinhorn gambler. Thinking that being a lawman might win him the favor of the father of the girl he loves, Gavity accepts . . . and not surprisingly, more trouble ensues as the bad element in town tries numerous times to get rid of him and he has to break up a gang of outlaws plaguing the area.

Cunningham has a distinctive—some might say eccentric—style that takes some getting used to, but once you get into the flow of the story, it’s very effective. The tone in this novel switches between breezy, light-hearted romantic comedy to brutal, bloody violence and tragedy with such regularity and swiftness that reading it is almost like watching a tennis match, the reader’s head jerks back and forth so much. With some writers, that would be very jarring, but Cunningham really makes it work. There’s nothing unusual about the plot, but as always, it’s how an author handles a traditional plot that makes it appealing. Cunningham does a fine job of that, and as a bonus, he writes great action scenes.

Although the story is a little fanciful, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Cunningham’s work. Like Walt Coburn, he was a working cowboy as a young man, and as you can tell from the photograph of him on the back cover of the paperback edition, he certainly looks the part. I’ve seen Cunningham compared to Dashiell Hammett, and there’s some merit to that theory. He was the first of the really hardboiled Western writers, and WHISTLING LEAD bears some resemblance to RED HARVEST, although I guess to some extent most “town tamer” Westerns do. It’s probably even more appropriate to compare him to Carroll John Daly, although I think Cunningham is a better writer than Daly (and Daly is better than he usually gets credit for).

At any rate, WHISTLING LEAD is an excellent novel, and since it’s not tied in with any of Cunningham’s other novels, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start if you haven’t read his books. I enjoyed it and think it’s well worth reading.

Classic Horror Fiction: No Light for Uncle Henry - August Derleth

August Derleth’s short story “No Light for Uncle Henry” appeared in the March 1943 issue of WEIRD TALES. It was reprinted in a couple of Derleth collections, one from Arkham House and one from Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. It’s the first thing I’ve read by Derleth in quite a while, but I enjoyed it. It’s the story of a young man who goes to live with a bachelor uncle in a small Midwestern town. Another uncle had lived in the same house until recently, when he died. The surviving uncle gives the young protagonist strict instructions that no light is to be taken into the dead uncle’s former bedroom . . . but we wouldn’t have a story if the guy didn’t do exactly that, would we? What does he find when he steps into that deserted room and lights a match?

A sinister shadow cast on the wall, even though there’s nothing there.

I’m about as far from a scholar of Derleth’s work as you could find, but even without being that familiar with it, I get the feeling this is a pretty minor tale. The plot is fairly predictable, with the “twist” at the end not coming as much of a surprise. And yet, it’s a pretty entertaining yarn, a nice little slice of mild, rustic, Americana horror. I enjoyed it enough that I wouldn’t mind reading more by Derleth.

Classic Horror Stories: The Call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft

I decided to go ahead and read more of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, so why not go right to the source? H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in the February 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES and reprinted many times since. It’s a very impressive piece of inventiveness. In this one story, Lovecraft lays out the basis for a huge number of stories by many different authors: the Great Old Ones, vast cosmic beings that come from beyond the stars, landed on Earth in the planet’s infancy and are still alive, although dormant and hidden away in vanished cities, waiting to be called back to life by a cult of their devoted followers, at which time they will lay waste to humanity, or at least try to. Although not necessarily evil by their own standards—they’re beyond the concept of good and evil—to humans they represent the greatest horrors imaginable, or, in some cases, unimaginable.

“The Call of Cthulhu” itself is a good story, fast-moving by Lovecraft’s standards, in which the narrator investigates several related series of events that gradually reveal the terrible truth to him. One section of the story set in the Louisiana swamps and another on a mysterious South Seas island could have been really good adventure yarns if Lovecraft had done more than summarize them. Even at that, they’re pretty exciting, especially the climactic battle between a ship and the reborn Cthulhu.

This is a good example of why so many authors latched on to the Cthulhu Mythos and wrote their own stories set against that background. It’s such an epic concept, filled with the potential for drama, conflict, and action, that born yarn-spinners such as Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and many others, naturally would see the possibilities. From what I’ve read so far, it seems to me that Lovecraft’s stories function more as a series bible than as satisfying stories of their own (although I’m warming up to his style and see its appeal).

I’m going to continue reading these stories, including some of the other authors who wrote Mythos stories, and even though this started as a Halloween-related project, it’ll probably take me longer than that. So bear with me, even though many of you probably read all these stories years or even decades ago. They’re new to me.

Overlooked Movies: Blackbeard's Ghost (1968)

Regular readers of this blog may remember that when I was growing up, there was a drive-in movie theater about a quarter of a mile up the road, and I saw many movies there, going with my parents or older siblings when I was younger and then walking to the theater either by myself or with my friends after I was nine or ten years old. I saw plenty of Walt Disney movies there, including most of the ones that starred Dean Jones. But somehow I never saw BLACKBEARD’S GHOST, maybe because it came out in 1968, and somewhere along in there, the Eagle Drive-In changed ownership and became an adult theater, showing those dirty X-rated movies. That was the end of me going to the Eagle. (Of course, if you cut through the neighbor’s yard and went behind the Western Lodge Motel, you could see the screen fairly well from the woods back there . . . not that I would know from experience. That’s my story, anyway.)

But to get back to BLACKBEARD’S GHOST . . . Wanting something lightweight, we watched it recently, and I found it pretty entertaining. The plot is fairly typical Disney for that era: Dean Jones is the new track coach at a small college on the North Carolina coast, an area where Blackbeard the pirate was supposed to have met his death centuries earlier. He stays at a picturesque inn run by little old ladies supposedly descended from the pirates, the main one being Elsa Lanchester. Suzanne Pleshette is a professor and Jones’s romantic interest. The great Richard Deacon is the president of the college. Joby Baker, a pleasant character actor who showed up on TV a lot in those days (he played a bullfighter on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW and was one of the leads on GOOD MORNING, WORLD, a decent one-season sitcom about radio DJs) is somewhat miscast as the gangster who wants to take over the inn. Then Jones accidentally invokes an old magic spell that brings the ghost of Blackbeard back to life, but of course, he’s the only one who can see or hear the ghost. Hijinks and crude special effects ensue.

All this works only if the actor playing Blackbeard does a good job, and Peter Ustinov is great in the part, poignant at times but mostly chewing the scenery with a large amount of gusto. It’s not a great script—some of the jokes hold up, others don’t—but Ustinov throws himself into the proceedings with such enthusiasm that it’s impossible not to be entertained. Everything works out well, leaving the viewer with a warm, nostalgic feeling. At least, that’s the way it left me.

Now, I was sure I had told my Peter Ustinov story on the blog before, but I searched and don’t find any posts with his name in them, so as a bonus, here’s the tale of how I had a brush with celebrity. In 1975, parts of the movie LOGAN’S RUN were filmed at the Water Gardens in downtown Fort Worth, so my friend Bruce Washburn (Livia’s brother) and I decided to go down there one night and watch the filming. We’re walking along the street near the Water Gardens when this scruffy-looking old guy shuffles past me, a foot or so away. I didn’t pay much attention to him—there were a lot of homeless people who stayed around the Water Gardens in those days—but then a little while later, Bruce and I are standing at the top of the Water Gardens watching the scene they’re shooting down at the bottom, and sure enough, that same scruffy-looking guy shuffles out and starts acting. Yep, Peter Ustinov his own self.

I also almost bumped into Steve McQueen (literally) when he was filming THE GETAWAY in San Marcos, Texas, when I was going to college there at Southwest Texas State University, and I walked past Ben Johnson at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show & Rodeo. Didn’t speak to either of them. I probably should have, but people like that get bothered all the time. I figure sometimes it’s best just to leave ‘em alone.

Classic Horror Stories: The Hounds of Tindalos - Frank Belknap Long

I’ve seen Frank Belknap Long’s name in books and magazines countless times over the decades, but I’ve read very little by him. The title of his story “The Hounds of Tindalos” sounded familiar to me, so I decided to give it a try. It was published originally in the March 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, reprinted in the July 1937 issue of WT, in AVON FANTASY READER #16 in 1951, and in many collections and anthologies since then. I read it in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, an e-book anthology published by Wildside Press.

I’m not well versed enough in all the Mythos stuff to know exactly how “The Hounds of Tindalos” is connected to Lovecraft’s work, so I read it as I would any other yarn, looking to be entertained. And I was. It’s the tale of Frank Chalmers, a student of the occult who is convinced that through a combination of drugs and mathematics that he can see into both the past and the future. He enlists the aid of a friend of his, the narrator of the story, who is supposed to pull him out of his drug-induced trance if things start to go wrong.

Well, don’t things always go wrong in stories like this? There are things man was not meant to know, after all, and when you stare into the abyss, be careful that the abyss doesn’t stare back at you. (Hint: It always does.) So when Chalmers discovers cosmic horrors beyon his ken, those horrors discover him, as well, and decide to follow him back to our earth.

I can see where this is a Lovecraftian story, but Long spins his yarn with a lot more dialogue and narrative drive than the Lovecraft stories I’ve read so far, but also without the really creepy style at which Lovecraft was so skilled. As a result, “The Hounds of Tindalos” is faster and more fun but lacks some of the impact of Lovecraft’s tales. I enjoyed it quite a bit anyway and am glad I read it.

I do have a very indirect connection with Frank Belknap Long. In the Sixties and Seventies, he worked for Leo Margulies’ Renown Publications and was the associate editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for quite a while. Not while I was selling to MSMM, however. Sam Merwin Jr. came in to run the magazine a few years before I started submitting stories there, but if I’d gotten around to it a little earlier, I might have gotten rejection slips from Long, too.

Detective Tales, December 1940

I don't know who the artist is, but this cover is dynamic and eye-catching, so I guess it did it's job. There are some excellent authors in this issue of DETECTIVE TALES, including Wyatt Blassingame (twice, as himself and as Willliam B. Rainey) and Philip Ketchum, as well as some lesser-knowns such as Dane Gregory, Don James, and Edward S. Williams. I'd never heard of Tiah Devitt before and was surprised that she would get such a prominent cover mention. Turns out she was an actress who appeared once on Broadway and wrote a couple of dozen stories for assorted pulps and slicks from the Thirties to the Fifties.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, October 1947

Another Injury to a Hat cover on this issue of STAR WESTERN. I'm not sure of the artist. Looks to me like it might be Robert Stanley. Inside are some fine authors, including Walt Coburn (although rumor has it that by this stage of his career, his work had to be edited heavily because of his drinking problem), Giff Cheshire, William R. Cox, Dee Linford, John M. Cunningham, and Rod Patterson. I like the title of the Coburn story: "The Devil Sent His Gun-Angels!" Probably a Popular Publications editor came up with it, but whoever did, it sounds like my kind of yarn.

Forgotten Books: Gold Comes in Bricks - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

 

I’ve been in a bit of a reading funk lately. I’ve read a few good books, but for the past couple of months I’ve struggled to finish quite a few of the books I’ve read, and then when I finally did, I was disappointed in them. A few, I even wished I hadn’t wasted the time reading them.

So recently, I decided to grab a book off my shelves that I knew wouldn’t disappoint me: GOLD COMES IN BRICKS, the third Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novel, originally published in 1940 by William Morrow under the pseudonym A.A. Fair and reprinted in paperback many times since. It’s possible I’ve read this one before, but if I have, it was more than fifty years ago and I didn’t remember a thing about it, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?

This one begins with Donald being hired to pretend to be a physical trainer for a rich man who wants to find out if his daughter is being blackmailed. The idea of Donald being a physical trainer is pretty amusing to Bertha, but she wants the fee so she orders Donald to take the job. In short order, complications pile upon complications. What else would you expect in a Gardner novel? In this one, we get a murdered gambler, legal shenanigans involving corporate taxes, a romantic South Seas cruise, more shenanigans involving dredging for gold, missing love letters that provide the motive for a second murder, and jujitsu lessons. For what it’s worth, I figured out who the killer was, but not until more than  halfway through the book and I didn’t have all the plot untangled. The murderer’s identity was at least partially a guess. Donald, as usual, was ‘way ahead of me.

One reason (other than the fifty years that have passed) I don’t recall whether I’ve read this one before is the realization that the plots absolutely don’t matter in Gardner’s novels. Sure, they’re always complex and it’s a lot of fun to try to keep everything straight and maybe figure out the killer, but honestly, I pretty much forget the plot of most Gardner novels five minutes after I’ve read them. What keeps me coming back is simple: I love Donald Lam being a wise-ass and Bertha being a curmudgeonly skinflint and the camaraderie of Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake. I love the fast-paced dialogue and the breezy narrative and the humor (Gardner was a lot funnier than he’s usually given credit for). His books, especially the ones from the Thirties and Forties, have a really nice sense of time and place, too. Gardner has a reputation as not being a particularly good writer (Steve Mertz, if you’re reading this, what’s that Raymond Chandler quote about Gardner you once told me?), but he’s an absolutely wonderful storyteller.

And this book didn’t disappoint me at all and has restored my faith in fiction, at least for now. Quite an accomplishment for a 1940 mystery novel by a guy once known as the King of the Pulps, ain’t it?

Classic Horror Stories: The Colour Out of Space - H.P. Lovecraft

 As Halloween approaches each year, I generally try to read more horror fiction. I’m getting an earlier start than usual this year by delving into the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I’m not a big Lovecraft fan, but I read something by him now and then. Recently, on pretty much of a whim while waiting in a doctor’s office, I read one of his most famous stories, “The Colour Out of Space”, which appeared originally in the September 1927 issue of AMAZING STORIES and was reprinted in the October 1941 issue of FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, as well as in countless Lovecraft collections over the years. (Neither of the pulp covers have anything to do with Lovecraft’s story, but at least it rates a mention on the issue of FFM.)

I have a hunch most of you have read this story already, some of you probably more than once. The plot is a simple one: a mysterious meteorite plunges from space, lands on the farm belonging to Nahum Gardner near the town of Arkham, time passes, evil things happen. The Gardner family descends into madness. The well is ruined and nothing will grow on the land. Eventually everybody else in the area shuns the farm where all this creepy stuff happened, until an engineer comes along to conduct a survey for a dam-building project and hears the story from one of the locals.

I have to say, I still have some problems with Lovecraft’s work. As with almost everything I’ve read by him, I got to the end and thought, “Wait. That’s it?” Robert E. Howard has spoiled me. I would have much preferred if the engineer was a two-fisted scrapper and the evil entity from space crawled out of the well and the two of them whaled away at each other with the plucky human emerging triumphant over the cosmic horror. Now that’s a story! But . . . it’s not the story that Lovecraft chose to write, is it?

However, for the first time I got a real glimpse of why Lovecraft’s work remains so popular nearly a hundred years later. The long paragraphs and the scarcity of dialogue take some getting used to, but I’ll admit, in this one I got caught up in the style and the sheer creepiness of the whole thing was very effective. For once, Lovecraft actually had me flipping the pages to see what was going to happen. There’s some actual storytelling going on in this yarn, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more of these Lovecraft story posts here on the blog before the month is over.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 25, 1946

This is a cute cover by A.R. Tilburne, but I'm not sure how well it fits a magazine of two-fisted adventure yarns. However, there are some fine authors, including some of my favorites, in this issue of SHORT STORIES: Dan Cushman, Donald Barr Chidsey, James B. Hendryx (with a Halfaday Creek story), Jim Kjelgaard, Gordon Young, Paul Annixter, and Edward Parrish Ware. The famous "red sun" is barely visible on this one but still there.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, September 1940

I feel like I ought to know who painted the cover on this issue of NEW WESTERN. The hat on the cowboy with the red bandanna looks awfully familiar. I kind of want to say Walter Baumhofer, but I don't really think that's right. Anyway . . . There are some popular, prolific writers in this issue: Barry Cord (Peter Germano), James P. Olsen, John G. Pearsol, Rolland Lynch, Lee Floren, and Glenn H. Wichman, along with Marian O'Hearn, who appeared most often in RANCH ROMANCES and the other Western romance pulps. 

Forgotten Books: Her Cheating Heart - Lloyd Kevin (Harold G. Sweet)

I admit, I bought this book mostly for the great Tom Miller cover (that's my copy in the scan), but I was also curious about the author. “Lloyd Kevin” was the pseudonym of Harold G. Sweet, who published about a dozen stories under that name in the Western pulps during the Fifties and another handful under his real name. There’s not much information about him on-line. According to a newspaper in San Bernardino, California, in 1953 he was a civilian employee at Norton Air Force Base and had written a novel under the Lloyd Kevin name. However, HER CHEATING HEART, published by Monarch Books in 1962, appears to be the only Lloyd Kevin novel that exists, and I couldn’t find any under the Harold G. Sweet name. Did Sweet write this book in the early Fifties but didn’t sell it until a decade later? Or did that book mentioned in that newspaper article fail to sell at all? A little biographical blurb in HER CHEATING HEART refers to Lloyd Kevin as being the pseudonym of a “well-known author of Westerns and contemporary novels”. We may have to chalk that up as editorial hyperbole, or else Sweet was writing under other name (or names) I don’t know about, which is certainly possible.

All that being said, how’s the novel itself? Well . . . kind of a mixed bag. This is a “down on his luck drifter finds trouble” yarn. That plot has been used many times, so the appeal in a book like this lies in how well the author handles those traditional elements. The protagonist in HER CHEATING HEART is Trigg Melnor, and I have a mixed reaction to that, as well. Trigg is a good, tough, Ennis Willie-style protagonist name; Melnor doesn’t have a lot of punch. But anyway . . . Trigg hitches a ride to a big construction project in Arizona where an old friend of his has promised to get him a job. The government is building a giant missile base, and Trigg has experience operating heavy machinery. All the workers live nearby in a trailer park, and Trigg’s old buddy Hutch expect him to stay with him and his wife Joy. Trigg didn’t even know Hutch was married, let alone to a beautiful, hot-to-trot redhead who immediately falls for him.

But wait, that’s not all. The boss of the construction project, Kirby Breckline (a much better name), is an old enemy of Trigg’s, and he’s involved with Joy as well. Then there’s Breckline’s scheming wife Eunice, and a possibly sinister Italian with a secret and an agenda of his own.

With a set-up like this, I kept expecting HER CHEATING HEART to turn into a noirish crime yarn, but it never really does. There’s an attempted murder, but it’s not the focus of the plot. For the most part, this remains a domestic drama all the way through, concentrating on Joy and the three men who are involved with her. The problem is that Joy is a really bland character with almost no personality, so you have to keep asking yourself why these guys want her in the first place. She practically disappears from the pages in the scenes she’s in.

However, the book does a pretty good job of depicting blue-collar construction workers and the early Sixties setting. Trigg isn’t a very likable protagonist, but I did wind up rooting for him, at least a little. There are some poignant scenes and a very occasional touch of welcome humor. The plot lurches along and comes to a sort of satisfying climax. HER CHEATING HEART isn’t a book you want to go out and search for, but if you ever come across a copy at a reasonable price, it’s not terrible. I know, that’s about the faintest praise I can offer.

It does have that really good Tom Miller cover, but you know the old saying about not judging a book by it’s cover. That’s true here, only the opposite way around from the usual meaning. The cover is probably the best thing about HER CHEATING HEART.