The Shadowed Circle #7 - Steve Donoso, ed.

THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, the excellent fan journal devoted to the iconic character The Shadow, is back with Issue Number 7, and as always, it’s a top-notch collection of articles and artwork featuring one of my favorite characters. Highlights this time around include Nicholas Montelongo’s article about the Big Little Books featuring The Shadow (I’m not a scholar or collector of the Big Little Books, but I read a bunch of them when I was a kid, but not the ones starring The Shadow, so all this was new to me); Martin Grams Jr.’s look at The Shadow’s agents and how they translated from the pulps to the radio version; and Arthur Penteado’s lengthy and compelling essay about how the theme of redemption figures heavily in several of the pulp novels starring The Shadow. All the contents are informative and entertaining, though, and if you’re a Shadow fan you’ll read them with as much pleasure as I did. Editor/publisher Steve Donoso and his cohorts have done another fine job of assembling this issue, which gets a very high recommendation from me. You can pick it up on Amazon or on the magazine’s website.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, May 1945

I've mentioned before that I never liked going to the barber shop when I was a kid. Is this a barber chair the guy is sitting in? I think it is, and that's a bottle of hair tonic he's holding. Several other bottles are visible in the background. Maybe the redheaded babe was giving him a manicure before she had to pull that gat. Anyway, I don't like barber shops, and if any of you are barbers, I'm sorry. I mean no offense. I promise you, if you'd had to cut my hair when I was a little kid, you wouldn't have liked me, either. I was a terrible customer. But to get back to the point of this post . . . I feel like I should know who painted this cover, but I don't. Sam Cherry, maybe? Inside this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE are some good authors, most notably Fredric Brown but also Sam Merwin Jr., David X. Manners, Benton Braden (twice, once as himself and under his pseudonym Walter Wilson), and house-name J.S. Endicott (probably Merwin, if I had to guess).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly, January 8, 1938

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat battered copy in the scan. The cover art is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent depiction of T.W. Ford’s series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver conchos on his shirt and hatband, the silver-inlaid butts of his guns, and the silver death’s-head clasp on his hat's chin strap. Ford was tremendously prolific in several genres—Western, sports, detective, and aviation—as well as working in the pulps as an editor, but the Silver Kid series is probably his magnum opus. He wrote approximately 60 Silver Kid stories, all of them novella length, which is a pretty significant body of work. They appeared in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to 1941, then in various Columbia Western pulps from 1942 to 1952. Solo Strant is a small but deadly gunfighter/adventurer who’s not above selling his gun skills if he believes it's for a worthy cause.

In this issue’s lead novella, “Traitors Ride the Sundown”, Strant is hired to find out who’s trying to murder a rancher who has a spread in the Sundown Hills. On the way to take the job, he runs into trouble at an outlaw roadhouse in Bad Man’s Pass but is helped out by a friendly old-timer who is headed in the same direction. When Strant reaches his destination, he has to deal with several bushwhackings and murders before he untangles what’s going on. There are a couple of occasions where someone is about to give him some vital information, only to wind up dead. The plot is pretty simple and straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, but I really enjoy the way Ford writes. His punchy, action-packed style really races along and Solo Strant is a very likable protagonist. I’ve read several Silver Kid novellas before and always enjoyed them. “Traitors Ride the Sundown” is also quite entertaining. If somebody were to reprint this series, I’d certainly be a customer for it. Until then, I’ll read ’em where I find ’em.

Ben Conlon is best remembered for writing the Pete Rice stories, which appeared in the character’s own magazine and also in WILD WEST WEEKLY, under the pseudonym Austin Gridley, but he wrote a couple of hundred Western, sports, and adventure yarns for various pulps and under various pen-names over the years. He has a stand-alone story, “Texas Blood”, in this issue under his own name. It’s about a young former Texas Ranger starting a ranch in New Mexico and running into rustling trouble. The stereotypical pulp Western dialect is really thick in this one. Everybody talks that way. My Mangy Polecat Threshold is higher than most people’s, but Conlon overdoes it to the point that I almost gave up. I’m glad I didn’t because, other than the dialogue, his writing is pretty clean and swift and vivid, and the plot has some clever twists leading to a smashing climax. I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.

J. Allan Dunn wrote approximately 160 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY about a young Texas Ranger named Bud Jones. This issue’s yarn is called “Buckshot and Bullets” and finds Bud trying to head off a war between Texas cattlemen and Mexican sheepherders. I nearly always enjoy Dunn’s work, but a couple of things about this one bothered me, the most troublesome that he seems to think Houston is the capital of Texas, not Austin. Also, he has all the Texans referring to the Mexicans as “Mexies”, a term I don’t think I’ve ever heard. That said, this is a pretty well-written, exciting tale with some nice action. Bud Jones is a very likable protagonist, too.

The most prolific series of all in WILD WEST WEEKLY starred Billy West, the young owner of the Circle J ranch in Montana, and his two friends who work for him, feisty, redheaded Joe Scott and cantankerous old codger Buck Foster, along with Sing Lo, the ranch’s Chinese cook. Upwards of 450 novelettes starring this bunch were published between 1927 and 1941, written by half a dozen different authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. I’d read a few of them before and enjoyed them. The story in this issue, “Gun-Fight Valley”, is by Norman L. Hay, who probably wrote more Circle  J novelettes than anyone else. Our heroes are in Arizona on a cattle-buying trip when they get drawn into the mystery of a missing wagon train. What they find turns out to be somewhat unexpected. This is a nicely plotted yarn with plenty of excellent action. Billy, Joe, and Buck are standard characters but are handled well and I enjoy reading about their exploits. I’d love to see some of this series reprinted someday.

Evidently, “Burro Bait” by Phil Squires is part of a humorous series about a young man from Missouri called Hinges Hollister who goes west to become a cowboy. The story is told in the form of letters between Hinges and his mother and girlfriend back home. The dialect is so thick as to be almost indecipherable, and the humor falls flat. Not to my taste at all, and I didn’t finish it.

The issue wraps up with “Tommy Rockford Bucks the Nevada Wolves” by one of my favorite Western writers, Walker A. Tompkins. By WILD WEST WEEKLY standards, the Tommy Rockford series wasn’t that prolific: approximately 50 stories in a dozen years, 1931-43. But it’s a good one, and Tommy Rockford is one of my favorite characters from this pulp known for its series characters. He’s a young railroad detective, and if they had ever made any Tommy Rockford movies, Roy Rogers would have been perfect to play him. In this yarn, which takes place in Arizona and Mexico, despite the title, Tommy takes on an outlaw gang that has traveled from Nevada to Arizona to visit another gang and see their hideout. This leads to a stagecoach holdup, an attempted bank robbery, and Tommy being captured by the outlaws. I found this one to be something of a disappointment because, despite all those plot elements, it never comes together as a very compelling story. It’s more a case of just throwing things in the pot until there are enough pages. Even worse, Tommy does something that’s so out of character, it just about ruined the story for me, and it wasn’t even necessary to make the plot work. I think it would have been more effective handling things a different way. The story is readable enough because Tompkins’ prose is always smooth and just races right along, but this is easily the worst of the Tommy Rockford series I’ve read so far.

So what you have in this issue is definitely a mixed bag. The cover is excellent, the Silver Kid and Circle J stories are both very good, the Bud Jones story is flawed but entertaining, the Tommy Rockford story definitely sub-par, the Ben Conlon story okay but with overdone dialect, and the Hinges Hollister story not for me at all. I still like WILD WEST WEEKLY, but this is far from my favorite issue. It does make me want to read more Silver Kid and Circle J stories, though.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: River Queen - Charles N. Heckelmann

If Charles N. Heckelmann is remembered at all today by paperback fans, it’s probably as the founder and editor of Monarch Books or the editor at Popular Library during the Sixties. However, before that he worked as a writer and editor in the Western pulps, most notably those in the so-called Thrilling Group, and he continued writing Western novels from the late Forties throughout the Fifties. He was never very prolific as an author, but his books were well-regarded in their time.

I just read my first Heckelmann novel, RIVER QUEEN, and it’s a good one. That’s the title of the Graphic Books paperback reprint. The novel first appeared in hardback from Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER. RIVER QUEEN is actually the better and more appropriate title. This is a riverboat book, set largely along the Missouri River in Montana Territory, although the first section of the story centers around the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Bill Horn is the captain and pilot of the riverboat Western Star. His main rival on the river is Kay Graham, the beautiful female captain of the Queen. Both of their boats wind up being hired by the army to carry troops and supplies up the Missouri River to help deal with the rising threat of the Sioux, who have started raiding the settlements there because the army is stretched so thin due to the war. There’s also a romantic triangle going on, as well as an old enemy of Horn’s who is now a Jayhawker, ostensibly helping the Confederate side while really being out for all the loot he can get his hands on.

Why this novel was never adapted into a movie starring John Wayne, I’ll never know. Bill Horn seems to be a perfect character for the Duke to play, and considering the way Heckelmann describes him, I wonder if he thought the same thing. Barbara Stanwyck would have been great as Kay Graham, and the villain cries out to be played by Forrest Tucker. It’s not really a John Ford or Howard Hawks type of story, but in the hands of a director like Michael Curtiz or Henry Hathaway . . . Well, never mind. There’s no such movie. But it would have been a good one, because Heckelmann has packed a lot into this book: epic battles, romantic intrigue, mano a mano showdowns, and a little reasonably accurate history. The action scenes are really good, and my only real complaint is Heckelmann’s occasional tendency to slow down the story in order to explain the backgrounds of some of the characters. This is especially annoying early on, but once you get past the first chapter or so, the action never flags for very long. I enjoyed this one enough that I definitely plan to read more by Heckelmann.

(It will come as no surprise to any of you that I haven't read anything else by Charles N. Heckelmann since this post first appeared in somewhat different form on November 21, 2008. However, I did start one of his Westerns not long ago, but it also had a slow start, as mentioned above, and I didn't overcome that one. But I definitely intend to try again. I have probably half a dozen or more of his books on my shelves. Also, I found a listing on-line that identifies the artist on the cover of the paperback edition as Harry Barton. I can't guarantee that's correct, but it's the only artist ID I found. Below is the cover of the original hardcover edition published by Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER, with cover art by Ignatz Sahula-Dycke. I still say that RIVER QUEEN is a much better title, and I much prefer the Graphic Giant cover, too.)

Review: Killer's Caress - Cary Moran (Edwin Truett Long)

In 1936, Culture Publications, the publisher of the Spicy line of pulps, decided to branch out into hardbacks, using the same authors who filled the pages of their pulps. The result was a company called Valhalla Press, which managed to put out only two books before somebody decided it was a bad idea: PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER by Arthur Wallace (a name that may or may not have been a pseudonym, nobody seems to know) and KILLER’S CARESS by Cary Moran, who was actually a young writer living in Texas named Edwin Truett Long. PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER is a real rarity. I’ve never seen a copy in the wild and it can be found for sale on-line only now and then.

But KILLER’S CARESS is a different story. It’s been reprinted a couple of times, most recently by Black Dog Books. That edition is still available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon. I’ve had a copy for quite a while, and after seeing something about it on Facebook recently, I was prompted to read it.

The protagonist of this novel is gossip columnist Johnny Harding, who writes a popular newspaper column called Johnny-On-the-Spot. As such, he knows everybody from bartenders to bigshot politicians, from hat check girls to ruthless gangsters and gamblers. He has a beautiful redheaded assistant and a big lug of a driver. One evening when he’s headed out to make his rounds of the nightspots and hunt material for his column, he’s nearly rubbed out by a couple of hired killers. Later in the evening, he runs into the rich, sleazy playboy who has inherited the newspaper where he works. Said playboy has enemies all over the place including his estranged actress wife who’s trying to divorce him, a gambler and nightclub owner, the above-mentioned hat check girl, a news photographer he’s fired, and Johnny himself. The way the guy keeps getting threatened, you know he’s going to wind up dead and Johnny is probably going to be blamed for it.

But that’s not exactly what happens. Somebody winds up being murdered, all right, but it’s a friend of Johnny’s, and that sets him off on a whirlwind of action, detection, and seduction. Johnny’s furious quest to avenge his pal reminded me very much of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, although Johnny, while a tough little mug (I kept seeing a young Jimmy Cagney in my head), is no Mike Hammer. The fact that he has a pal on the homicide squad and a competent knockout of an assistant also reminded me of the Hammer novels, and I can’t help but wonder if Mickey ever read KILLER’S CARESS.

Eventually there are more murders. The pace seldom lets up, and Long crams a lot into a story that takes place in about 48 hours. Everything leads up to a great scene on a gambling ship that includes not only a gathering of the suspects and an explanation of who committed the crimes, but also features a big shootout as the cops raid the boat.

The plot is really complex, but it’s one of those that seems to make sense, especially if you squint your eyes a little and hold your mouth just right. The big appeal to me is Long’s breathless, breezy style, which he was already perfecting in dozens of stories for the Spicy pulps under various pseudonyms and house-names. I had a great time reading KILLER’S CARESS. It reminded me of the hardboiled yarns I grew up reading, and I give it a high recommendation.

I’m also very much interested in the career of Edwin Truett Long, especially since I found out that he’s buried in Fort Worth, about 20 miles as the crow flies from where I’m typing this. But more about him in another post sometime, when I’ve read more of his work.

Review: Rough Riders of the Ragged Rimrock - James J. Griffin

I think James J. Griffin has written more novels about the Texas Rangers than anyone since A. Leslie Scott, who must hold the record for the most novels featuring a Texas Ranger as the hero. But for more than twenty years, Griffin has also been spinning action-packed yarns about the Rangers starring several different protagonists.

One of his recent books, ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK (I love that title) stars veteran Ranger Will Kirkpatrick and his young sidekick Jonas Peterson. This isn’t the first novel featuring these characters, although it’s the first one I’ve read, but Griffin does a good job filling in their backgrounds: Jonas is actually a probationary Ranger in Kirkpatrick’s custody, who arrested him for taking part in a robbery, even though it was Jonas’s outlaw cousins who forced him into it. Will believes in second chances, so now he and Jonas ride on the same side of the law and cover a broad swath of West Texas and the Panhandle as they try to bring law and order to the Lone Star State.

ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK actually comes across as something of a frontier law enforcement procedural as Will and Jonas deal with several cases involving bank robberies, stagecoach holdups, crooked local lawmen, and a cattle baron and his sons who believe they’re above the law. For a while, Jonas operates on his own while Will is recovering from a bullet wound, and he acquits himself admirably before the Rangers team up again to track down a gang of stagecoach robbers who murder all the passengers when they pull a job, so as not to leave any witnesses behind.

Griffin’s passion for writing action-packed traditional Western novels really comes through in this tale, and his knowledge of horses, the landscape, and frontier life lends it a definite air of authenticity without sacrificing a bit of a mythic quality, too. I enjoyed ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK, but fair warning, it does end on sort of a cliffhanger. But I already have the next book in the series on my Kindle, so no problem there. If you’re already a fan you’ll want to read this one, and if you haven’t sampled Griffin’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. It's available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, January 1944

I really like the cover by Robert Fuqua on this issue of AMAZING STORIES. It's certainly dramatic. William P. McGivern is the dominant author in this one with three stories: the lead novella under his own name, a novelette as P.F. Costello, and a short story as Gerald Vance. Also on hand are the always-dependable Ross Rocklynne, the always-interesting Ed Earl Repp, and Berkeley Livingston, an author whose work I haven't read enough of to form an opinion. If you want to check out this issue for yourself, PDFS of it and a lot of other issues of AMAZING STORIES can be found here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, November 1940

This is a pulp that I own. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with store stamp. I’m not sure who did the cover art. The most likely suspect is Richard Lyon, but I’m not confident enough to say it’s his work.

The lead novel in this issue (and it’s actually long enough to be considered a novel this time) is “Black Diamonds” by A. Leslie, who was really A. Leslie Scott. This novel was published in hardcover in 1942 under the title THE COWPUNCHER, as by Bradford Scott, another of Leslie Scott’s pseudonyms. In this century, it was published in paperback and as an e-book by Leisure, a large print hardcover by Center Point, and remains available as an e-book and trade paperback from Amazon Encore. I read the e-book edition a couple of weeks ago, and you can find my review of it here. It’s an excellent Western novel. I think I like the title “Black Diamonds” a little better than THE COWPUNCHER, though. I suspect Scott changed it for the story’s book publication because he thought it didn’t sound enough like a Western.

I decided to go ahead and read the three short stories from the pulp. The first, “Fugitive”, is by Frank Carl Young, a forgotten pulpster who wrote more than a hundred Western stories for various pulps between 1931 and 1952. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. “Fugitive” is about a young cowboy on the run from the law who makes a home for himself working on a ranch owned by a friendly young couple. Naturally, his past catches up to him and causes trouble. The slight plot twist in the end of this one won’t catch many readers by surprise, but the writing is very good and it’s an entertaining story.

Scott Carleton was a house-name used primarily on the long-running Buffalo Billy Bates series in POPULAR WESTERN, but it appears on a few stand-alone stories, too, like this issue’s “Necktie Party”, about a young cowboy falsely accused of rustling and facing a lynching. This is a pretty well-written story for the most part, but the bit of business on which the plot ultimately turns is just too far-fetched for me to buy it. Willing suspension of disbelief got stretched to the breaking point in this one.

I don’t know anything about William Mahoney except that, according to the Fictionmags Index, he published 19 stories between 1931 and 1942, most of them in the gang pulps but with a few Westerns scattered among them. His story “Trouble Rider” in this issue reads a little like a hardboiled crime yarn with a pretty complicated plot and a harrowing torture scene that’s pretty strong stuff for a Western pulp. The protagonist is a cowboy framed for the murder of a mining tycoon in Arizona. He has to venture south of the border and get mixed up in a scheme involving blackmail, an old crime, and Mexican politics in order to clear his name. It’s a little offbeat, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and would be interested in reading Mahoney’s other Western yarns, or some of his gang pulp stories, for that matter.

Overall, I’d say this is a very good issue of WEST, but that’s due mainly to the fact that 80% of its pages are occupied by a top-notch Leslie Scott novel. But two of the three back-up stories are entertaining, too, and the third one has some nice lines in it even though in the end I thought it was a little ridiculous. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Roadside Night - Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick

In forty-plus years of reading and collecting books like this, I’d never heard of this novel or its authors, Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick. As far as I’ve been able to discover, this is the only book they ever published.

When you see the phrase “strange love” on a paperback from this era (1951), it’s usually code for a lesbian novel. Not in this case. The relationships here are strictly heterosexual. The narrator, Buck Randall, is an ex-G.I., a World War II vet who fought on Guadalcanal. He owns a tavern and a small motel on the Pacific coast in California. He’s having a minor romance with the beautiful teenage daughter of the man who owns a restaurant down the coast highway from the motel. He’s not particularly ambitious.

Then a gorgeous blonde in an expensive car stops at the tavern for a drink as she’s passing through the area, and Buck falls hard for her. He pines away until she comes back by. They start getting to know each other. She’s interested in him, too, and after they begin sleeping together, he finds out that she’s not as well-to-do as he thought at first. In fact, she’s in sort of a desperate situation, but she knows a way out, if only she can find somebody to help her . . .

Yep, you’ve read it before, starting with James M. Cain and going right on through the Fifties in the work of dozens of paperbackers like Charles Williams, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and Orrie Hitt. The femme fatale, the likable but not-too-bright hero, the scheme that will make them both rich if only nothing goes wrong . . . but it always does. The first half of ROADSIDE NIGHT doesn’t blaze any new ground, but at least it’s a fairly early example of that standard plot. What makes it worth reading is the prose, which is bleak and fast-paced, and the sweaty air of doom and desperation that hangs over the book like fog rolling in from the sea.

Then the second half of the novel throws in just enough plot twists so that everything doesn’t work out quite the way you might expect it, and ROADSIDE NIGHT turns into a really nice little noir novel. I think the ending could have been stronger – Nistler and Broderick pull back just a little when maybe they shouldn’t have – but it’s still very effective. This isn’t some lost masterpiece of crime fiction, but it’s well worth reading and would make a good candidate for reprinting. It’s too short for Hard Case Crime, probably not much more than 35,000 words, but it would work just fine in, say, a Stark House collection with a couple of other short novels. I’m really glad I ran across it, and if you happen to do likewise, I think you should grab it and read it.

(As far as I know, this book still hasn't been reprinted since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on December 4, 2009, but used copies are available on Amazon that are reasonably inexpensive. More than likely, you can find some at other on-line booksellers, too.)

Review: The Lost Continent - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels fall into three categories for me: Books I Know I’ve Read, Books I Know I Haven’t Read, and Books I May Have Read 50 or 60 Years Ago But Don’t Remember For Sure. THE LOST CONTINENT falls into that third category. I was in the mood for some ERB, and I had a hunch I hadn’t read it before, so I decided to give it a try. Besides, who can resist one of those short Ace editions with a Frank Frazetta cover?

This novel takes place in the 22^nd Century. All communication between Western and Eastern Hemispheres has been cut off for more than two hundred years, following a catastrophic war that seemed on the verge of consuming Europe and threatened the Western Hemisphere as well. No one from the West is allowed to venture past “Thirty” or “One Seventy-Five”, the dividing lines between the hemispheres. (Hence the story’s original title, “Beyond Thirty”.) Our narrator and protagonist is young naval officer Jefferson Turck, commander of the Pan-American aero-submarine Coldwater. That’s right, it’s an aero-submarine, meaning it can fly and travel underwater. How cool is that? But not surprisingly, while the Coldwater is patrolling the Atlantic, it develops engine trouble and has to ditch in the ocean. Turck can’t submerge the craft because it wouldn’t be able to resurface. Turck also has to deal with treachery among his own crew, and eventually that puts him at sea in a small boat with three companions, being washed toward what once was Europe. After two centuries, what will these stalwart Pan-Americans find?

Not surprisingly, one of the first people Turck runs into is a beautiful young woman who needs rescuing. He and his companions go on to find that England has regressed to a primitive level with rival tribes of barbarians fighting each other and zoo animals having proliferated after the fall of civilization (as you can see in that great cover). Along with the girl, they move on across the English Channel to what used to be France. Once there, they discover that civilizations do still exist in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the form of warring empires from China and Africa that are battling to take over what used to be Europe.

This is a flawed but enjoyable novel. The first half, set mostly in what used to be England, is full of intriguing concepts but bogs down a little in travelogue mode, where the characters go here and look at this thing and go there and look at this other thing. Once the scene shifts to the continent and the characters find themselves embroiled in an epic war, Burroughs once again packs the story with interesting ideas, but the whole thing feels rushed considering how broad the scope of the tale is. There’s enough meat in THE LOST CONTINENT that today’s authors probably would get a trilogy of doorstop novels out of the same plot. If I had to choose, I much prefer Burroughs’ leaner, faster-paced treatment of the story, but I still wish he’d done a little more with it. The ending is a rather abrupt deus ex machina.

Don’t get me wrong. All quibbling aside, I liked THE LOST CONTINENT. Now that I’ve read it, I’m certain it wasn’t one of the Burroughs books I read back in junior high and high school, so I’m very glad I picked it up now. Burroughs could always spin a yarn, and sometimes that’s exactly what I’m looking for. THE LOST CONTINENT is an early novel by Burroughs, published as “Beyond Thirty” in the February 1916 issue of the pulp ALL AROUND MAGAZINE, reprinted numerous times starting in the Fifties, and currently available on Amazon in various e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. If you're a Burroughs fan and haven't read it, it's well worth your time.

Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #11: Invasion: UFO - Robert Deis and Bob Cunningham, eds.

When I was a kid, I happened to read Donald E. Keyhoe’s book THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL, and that sparked a huge interest in UFOs. I quickly went on to read other books about the subject by authors such as Frank Edwards and George Adamski, and my fifth grade buddies probably got tired of me yammering about flying saucers. But I was always yammering about something or other, so it might not have made any difference.

Keyhoe, Edwards, and Adamski are all to be found in the latest issue of the always excellent MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, the INVASION: UFO issue. As you might expect, this volume is right up my alley. Keyhoe, who I’ve really come to admire and enjoy as an author of aviation pulp fiction in the past few years, is on hand with the lengthy article “The Flying Saucers Are Real”, from the January 1950 issue of TRUE, which he expanded into the book I read almost 60 years ago and have never forgotten. Edwards, whose book FLYING SAUCERS—SERIOUS BUSINESS was another favorite of mine, is mentioned. There’s an enjoyable article about Adamski, who I took as a serious researcher and author at the time when I read his book INSIDE THE FLYING SAUCERS. Turns out he was a bit of a charlatan and/or nutjob, but hey, I had a good time reading his book back then and a good time reading about him now, so it's a win as far as I’m concerned.

Gary Lovisi contributes a fine article about vintage paperbacks that exploited the flying saucer craze, and when you have photo galleries that spotlight Anne Francis and Mara Corday, you’ve got to love that, or at least I do. The final article in this issue, “Are UFOs Attacking Our Oil Fields?”, from the May 1975 issue of STAG, combines two of my interests, flying saucers and oil fields, and was written by the great Robert F. Dorr, so I’d say it’s tied for my favorite with Keyhoe’s iconic article. Bob Dorr was just such a fine writer it’s always a pleasure to read anything he wrote, and the same is true of Keyhoe.

Now, I have to make a confession: I’ve seen something strange in the sky myself, a number of years ago, and someone else was with me who saw the same thing. We’ve never been able to figure out exactly what it was, but it was sure puzzling. I’m not going to go into any more details, or you’d think that I’m a nutjob. (Well, some of you no doubt think that anyway, but why confirm it?) You can take my word for it, though, that the latest issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is another beautiful piece of work from editors Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, and I give it my highest recommendation. You can order it on Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All-American Fiction, May/June 1938

That's an intriguing cover by Rudolph Belarski on this issue of ALL-AMERICAN FICTION, and what a lineup of authors! It's hard to beat H. Bedford-Jones, Max Brand, Cornell Woolrich, Philip Ketchum, Richard Sale, and Karl Detzer. Also on hard are the lesser-known Eustace Cockrell, Robert Cochran, J.R. Beehan, and Thomas Nelson. The author of the featured story "Meet Me in Miami", Joseph Mickler, has only two credits in the Fictionmags Index, both in Munsey pulps in 1938, for whatever that's worth. I would read this issue just for those other guys if I had a copy.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, October 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The Fictionmags Index attributes the cover to Sam Cherry, but I wonder if it might be by Robert Stanley, based on the facial features and the distinctively large hands. As always when it comes to art, I could be wrong and welcome any opinions on who painted this cover.

One of the longest-running series in EXCITING WESTERN was the Tombstone and Speedy series by one of my favorite authors, W.C. Tuttle. Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith are a couple of range detectives working for the Cattleman’s Association, but their boss insists they have no detective skills and solve their cases through pure luck. Tombstone and Speedy seem to share that opinion, but I don’t know. They usually manage to do some actual detective work in these humorous, action-packed yarns. “Trouble Trailers in Tomahawk” finds the duo traveling to Tomahawk City to find a rich Easterner’s son who wants to become a rancher, while at the same time assisting an old friend of their boss who needs some help. Not surprisingly at all, the two cases turn out to be connected, and soon the bodies are dropping as three murders take place not long after Tombstone and Speedy arrive in town. Of course, they eventually untangle everything and bring the villains to justice. The plot in this one seems a little weaker to me than some, but it’s still a highly entertaining novelette. I always get a kick out of Tombstone and Speedy’s antics and their non-stop banter.

The longest-running (almost 50 stories) series in this pulp stars Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine, the son of a famous lawman who was raised by the Navajo after his father was killed during a range war. In “Navajo Turns Firebug”, Raine is sent to corral a vengeance-seeking young outlaw who’s been burning down ranch houses. Of course, not everything turns out to be as it appears at first. We know that two authors, Lee Bond and C. William Harrison, wrote Navajo Raine stories that were published under the house-name Jackson Cole, and other authors may have contributed to the series as well. I’m pretty sure this story isn’t the work of Harrison, whose plots and characters were usually a bit more complex. It might be by Lee Bond, but my hunch is that it’s by some as yet unidentified pulpster.

“A Meal For a Rodent” is a short-short by Allan K. Echols about an encounter between a homesteader and a bank robber on the run from the law. Very predictable for the most part, but it’s well-written and has a bit of a twist at the end.

Another long-running series in EXCITING WESTERN featured Pony Express rider Alamo Paige. The by-line is Reeve Walker, a house-name used by Charles N. Heckelmann, Tom Curry, and no doubt numerous other Western pulpsters. I don’t think any of the Alamo Paige stories have been attributed to the actual author. The story in this issue, “Stage Line to Hell”, finds Alamo helping out a friend who quit riding for the Pony Express because of an injury and started a stage line instead. When he’s hurt in a robbery, Alamo steps in to round up the thieves. Alamo Paige is a likable protagonist and this yarn is decently plotted and has some nice action. A worthwhile entry in the series.

I don’t know anything about Jack Gleoman except that he published a few stories in the Western and detective pulps. His short-short in this issue, “A Waddy Counts Days”, is about a cowboy accused of a murder he didn’t commit. It features as an illustration a black-and-white version of the cover art, which actually depicts a scene in the story. This is an okay but very minor story, and I’m not sure why it warranted a piece of cover art. Unless . . . Jack Gleoman was actually the pseudonym of an editor at the Thrilling Group (since all his published stories appear in Thrilling Group pulps) and he wrote the story to fit the cover that was already scheduled to be used on this issue when the contents came up a few pages short. That seems like a plausible explanation, but it’s pure speculation on my part, of course.

The issue wraps up with “Vanishing Trails”, a novelette by R.S. Lerch, an author I associate more with the Fiction House pulps even though he actually wrote for a wide variety of publishers in several different genres. This story, set in Montana during a snowstorm, has a bit of a Northern feel to it, although its plot is pure Western pulp. U.S. Marshal Crack Forsythe (a great name) trails a bandit from Wyoming to Montana and finds himself in the middle of a deadly feud between two families. This is a well-written story with a lot of action. Lerch is pretty much forgotten these days, but I’ve enjoyed most of the stories I’ve read by him. Nothing special, maybe, but dependably entertaining.

Which is a pretty good description of this entire issue. All of the stories are enjoyable but have an air of forgettableness about them. Is forgettableness a word? If it’s not, it ought to be. This issue is worth reading for fans of the Tombstone and Speedy, Navajo Tom Raine, and Alamo Paige series, but if you don’t fall into that category, don’t rush to your shelves to look for it.

Review: Desperate Blonde - Lorenz Heller

Marta Selfron is the desperate blonde of the title in this novel by Lorenz Heller, published originally by Beacon Books of Australia in 1960 under the pseudonym Laura Hale and just reprinted by Stark House. As a young woman barely out of her teens, Marta married the wrong guy, and in order to get away from him, she wound up committing a crime. Now her ex-husband is not only blackmailing Marta, he’s also stalking her. When she meets tough, handsome private detective Dirk Delgar, she thinks maybe she’s found a way out of her problem, but first, she’ll wind up enmeshed in a web of robbery and murder.

As always, Lorenz Heller spins a fine, well-written tale in DESPERATE BLONDE, a revised version of which was published in the United States by Beacon Books as THE MARRIAGE BED in 1962. Considering its pedigree, there’s really very little sex in this book, and it’s not graphic at all. Some nude swimming is about as racy as it gets on the actual page. No, this is a pure suspense yarn, as Marta, with the help of private eye Dirk, tries to get out of the trouble in which her bad decisions have landed her. Heller was really good with setting, character, and pace, and he keeps the reader flipping the pages to find out what’s going to happen. A few plot twists near the end help make for a satisfying conclusion.

I don’t think this is quite as strong a novel as the others I’ve read by Heller, but it’s a very solid, entertaining book and well worth reading. It’s available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Review: The Cowpuncher - Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott)

Alexander Leslie Scott is best remembered for his novels starring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, of course, and rightly so. But he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western novels as well, most, if not all, of them rewritten and expanded from novellas he wrote for various Western pulps. His novel THE COWPUNCHER was published under the pseudonym Bradford Scott in hardcover in 1942 by Gateway Books, one of the lending library publishers, then reprinted in paperback by Leisure in 2009 and large print hardcover by Center Point in 2010. It’s still available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon, and used copies of the Leisure paperback are easily found for sale on-line.

The original version of this story was published under the title “Black Diamonds”, as by A. Leslie, in the pulp WEST in the October 1940 issue. The black diamonds of the title refer to coal, which leads to a nice twist because this novel is about coal mining rather than gold or silver, as most Western mining yarns are. The hero, a cowboy named Huck Brannon, goes on a bender in Kansas City after the crew he belongs to delivers a trail herd there, and as a result he misses the train back home to Texas, where a rancher’s beautiful daughter is waiting for him. Circumstances forces him to hop a train to Colorado in the company of a couple of hoboes who become his friends and sidekicks.

Once there, they wind up hunting a lost treasure supposedly hidden by an evil Spanish nobleman a hundred years earlier. What they find is a coal deposit that they’re soon mining, a successful operation that makes good money and leads to a friendship with railroad magnate James G. “Jaggers” Dunn, a supporting character who often makes appearances in Scott’s novels. Of course, there are also villains who have their sights set on ruining Brannon.

THE COWPUNCHER is more epic in scope than most of Scott’s Westerns, with its action spanning a couple of years rather than a few days. It has the same vivid settings and dramatic action scenes, though, including a great one where our hero Huck has to ride a makeshift raft down a raging river in an attempt to stop a runaway train. Scott had a lot of experience with both mining and railroading, and he brought a definite air of authenticity to his stories concerning those endeavors. At times, the technical jargon gets so thick I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story.

This is a really good Western novel, the sort of yarn that would have made a great big-budget, late Forties movie from Republic Pictures. I had a fine time reading it and give it a high recommendation for fans of traditional Westerns centered around mining. By the way, I have the pulp in which the original version, “Black Diamonds”, was published, and other than changing the hero’s name from Chuck Brannon to Huck Brannon and the rancher’s beautiful daughter from Millie Doyle to Sue Doyle, Scott doesn’t appear to have revised it. Either version is well worth reading.

Review: The "Iblis" at Ludd - Talbot Mundy (William L. Gribbon)

“The ‘Iblis’ at Ludd” is the third story featuring Talbot Mundy’s most famous character, Major James Schuyler Grim, better known as Jimgrim, an American adventurer who’s a member of the British intelligence service in the perilous days following the First World War. The first two stories were combined in the fix-up novel JIMGRIM AND ALLAH’S PEACE, which I reviewed earlier this year. The short novel “The ‘Iblis’ at Ludd”, from the January 10, 1922 issue of the pulp ADVENTURE, is a direct sequel to those two yarns.

Jimgrim is still in Palestine, which is occupied by the British army and torn between Zionist and Arab factions. His assignment is to find out who stole two tons of TNT that figured in the plot of the previous story, as well as to discover the identity of the ringleader of a gang of thieves that has been stealing munitions from the British army. This ringleader is rumored to be the Iblis, which means “devil”, a dervish afflicted with leprosy. But there may be co-conspirators, and the scheme may reach all the way into the ranks of the British army. Jimgrim is assisted in his investigation by the stalwart Sikh, Narayan Singh, and Suliman, an incorrigible young beggar.

While I liked it overall, my main complaint about JIMGRIM AND ALLAH’S PEACE was that it was really talky and lacking in action. That’s kind of true in this story, as well, although I think that overall Mundy (whose real name was William Lancaster Gribbon) sets a faster pace and the prose is a little leaner. Things move along quickly enough to keep me interested, and while there’s still not much action, several scenes are genuinely suspenseful and Mundy does a great job with the setting.

The main virtue of “The ‘Iblis’ at Ludd” is the Iblis his ownself, who’s a great villain reminiscent of the Thuggee cult leader in GUNGA DIN as played by Eduardo Ciannelli. I could certainly see Ciannelli in this role, too. The biggest weakness in the story is the way it’s structured. There are several storylines going on, and Mundy moves back and forth between them in a disjointed fashion that makes it a little difficult to keep up with what’s going on. It’s not confusing enough to ruin the story, but I think it would have been more effective if a few things had been shifted around a little.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I read some of the later Jimgrim novels when they were reprinted in the Sixties, and the character in these early tales isn’t as dominant and competent as he would be later on. But it’s interesting watching him develop, and as a writer, Mundy’s prose ranges from good to excellent, so I intend to continue with the series. “The ‘Iblis’ at Ludd” is available on Amazon in several different e-book and print editions. I suspect that when it was first published more than a hundred years ago, Mundy didn’t give much if any thought to the possibility people would still be reading and reviewing it a century later.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, December 1933

The cover on this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES was done by Emmett Watson, an artist I associate more with the Munsey pulps, but it's a fine, dynamic Foreign Legion scene that I like quite a bit. Inside this issue are stories by Johnston McCulley (his first Whirlwind story; I have the Altus Press volume that reprints the entire series and really need to get around to reading it), Oscar Schisgall, Allan K. Echols, Bob du Soe, George Allan Moffatt (really Edwin V. Burkholder), Ralph R. Fleming (who published only a handful of stories), Captain Kerry McRoberts (probably Norman A. Daniels), and house-name Jackson Cole. I'll bet if I had a copy of this issue, which I don't, I'd enjoy the stories every bit as much as the cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Action, September 1948

Okay, who painted this cover, H.W. Scott or A. Leslie Ross? I can't make up my mind. I don't own this pulp, but I do have a paperback copy of the novel featured in this issue of WESTERN ACTION, "The Lost Buckaroo" by Bliss Lomax, who, of course, was really Harry Sinclair Drago. I haven't read the novel, but I believe it features his series characters, railroad detectives Rainbow Ripley and Grumpy Gibbs. Also in this issue are stories by Gerry Walker (his only credit in the FMI), the prolific Harry Van Demark, and Harold Preece, who I know mostly as a friend and correspondent of Robert E. Howard. I don't think I've ever read any of his fiction.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: White Indian - Donald Clayton Porter (Noel Gerson)

Since yesterday was Thanksgiving, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at a novel that has a connection to the Pilgrims, although it’s set somewhat later. WHITE INDIAN is the first book in what started out as the Colonization of America series. It opens in 1685, several generations after the founding of the first English colony in North America. Settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony have established an outpost known as Fort Springfield in the valley of the Connecticut River, but they have to worry constantly about Indian attacks, and with good reason. During one such raid by Seneca warriors, a young couple named Jed and Minnie Harper are killed, and their infant son is carried off by the Seneca chief Ghonka, who adopts the boy, names him Renno, and raises him to be a great warrior.

That’s just the beginning of this novel, which follows Renno to manhood. Like Tarzan, he comes to realize that he’s different from those who have raised him. Also like Tarzan, he’s the biggest, fastest, strongest bad-ass in the jungle – I mean forest – and eventually allies himself with the English while still maintaining his ties to the Seneca. He fights on the side of the English during clashes with the French, who are also trying to establish colonies in North America, and starts a long-running feud with a Frenchman who’s so evil he practically twirls his mustache. Like most of the historical fiction produced by the book packaging company Book Creations Inc., WHITE INDIAN and its sequels contain a heaping helping of soap opera to go along with plenty of colorful and sweeping action. Sometimes the historical accuracy was less than rigorous, but the editorial policy at BCI was “Never let history get in the way of a good story.” And BCI was definitely in the business of turning out good stories.

Now here’s the background of this series, for those of you who are interested. “Donald Clayton Porter”, the author of this book, was actually Noel Gerson, who was also the original “Dana Fuller Ross”. Gerson wrote a number of historical novels over the years, under his own names and those two house-names, as well as the pseudonym Bruce Lancaster and possibly others. His style is pretty unmistakable, no matter what name is on the book. His prose is a little clunky in places and sometimes he skimped on the action scenes, but he possessed the true storyteller’s knack of getting the reader to keep turning the pages. There’s also a mild edge of sexual kinkiness in many of his books, and it shows up in the White Indian novels as well. Renno has a habit of deflowering most of the beautiful English virgins he meets, and then his sidekicks among the colonists marry them and everybody is happy.

When the series began in 1979, following on the success of John Jakes’ Kent Family Chronicles and Gerson’s Wagons West novels as Dana Fuller Ross (both BCI series), it was known as the Colonization of America series, as noted above. But within three or four books, it became the White Indian series, and subsequent reprints of the early books carried that name instead. I suspect this was because someone at BCI or the publisher, Bantam, realized that readers were asking for more of those White Indian books, rather than using the more cumbersome original title. The series ran for 28 books, most of them featuring descendants of the original Renno (the longest-lasting hero in the series was also named Renno), and the books continued to appear until the mid-Nineties. Gerson wrote the first twelve, Hugh Zachary wrote #13 through #26, and BCI editor Paul Block authored the final two books in the series, which are collectible now because the series had pretty low print runs by that time. Zachary took over at least two other BCI series in mid-stream, THE AUSTRALIANS under the name William Stuart Long (originated by Vivian Long) and CHILDREN OF THE LION, published under the house-name Peter Danielson (originally George Warren). The Donald Clayton Porter name was also used on the stand-alone novel PONY EXPRESS, which I believe was by Gerson, and the short-lived Winning the West series, written probably by Gene Shelton, although Zachary may have contributed to it, as well.

As for my own connection with all this, I worked for BCI, too, and while I wrote six books as Dana Fuller Ross (the Wagons West prequels known as The Frontier Trilogy and The Empire Trilogy), I was never Donald Clayton Porter. I did one book as Peter Danielson, the final book in the Children of the Lion series. At its high point, BCI was a great place to work, with excellent editors, and the company turned out a tremendous amount of top-notch historical and Western yarns during the Seventies, Eighties, and early Nineties. If you’ve never sampled any of their series, WHITE INDIAN would be a fine place to start.

(This post originally appeared on November 27, 2009. I meant to read the rest of the White Indian series someday, but you know me. I haven't gotten around to it. I'd like to read the rest of Gerson's entries, anyway.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Review: Horror Movies, The First 75 Years, Volume 1: The Mummy - David Whitehead

I always think of David Whitehead as a Western author, either under his real name or his pseudonym Ben Bridges, and he’s a top-notch Western writer, too. But he’s also written horror novels and he’s a long-time fan of the genre. How long-time I wasn’t really aware of until I read his recent non-fiction book, HORROR MOVIES: THE FIRST 75 YEARS, VOLUME 1: THE MUMMY.

I’m a horror fan, too, although on a somewhat limited basis. I tend to like the older stuff (no surprise there), including the classic Universal monster movies from the Thirties and Forties. As I’ve mentioned before, I saw a bunch of them on NIGHTMARE, the Saturday night monster movie showcase on one of the local TV stations, hosted in suitably creepy fashion by Bill Camfield as Gorgon. During the week, Camfield was also kid’s show host Icky Twerp, playing cartoons and Three Stooges shorts on SLAM-BANG THEATER. I loved both shows but had no idea Gorgon and Icky were actually the same guy.

I’ve wandered ’way off into the weeds of nostalgia. To get back to David Whitehead’s book, he’s a fan of the same era of horror movies as me, although his expertise extends up to the Hammer Films horror boom in the Fifties and Sixties. I like those movies, too, just not as much as the ones from Universal. Whitehead starts what promises to be a very entertaining series by focusing on movies featuring sinister mummies. I had no idea there was a mummy movie made in 1899, in the dawn of filmmaking. The subgenre really gets underway, though, with 1932’s THE MUMMY, starring Boris Karloff, and its assorted sequels. THE MUMMY is an excellent film, and Whitehead covers its story, cast, production details, and reception in fascinating detail. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this movie, its sequels, and other movies featuring mummies, most of which I’ve never seen. I’ve already made a list of several I intend to try to hunt up.

If you’re a fan of classic horror movies, I can’t recommend this volume highly enough. It’s written in a fast-moving, entertaining style and presents a lot of interesting information but never in a ponderous way. Honestly, it’s easy for a book like this to bog down in minutiae. Whitehead avoids that trap and delivers a fine book of movie history. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the books in this series, which will cover Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and other classic horror movie characters.

Review: Convict Commandos: Frenzy of Fear (Commando #4571) - Alan Hebden

With the exception of Private "Jelly" Jakes -- the unit's resident coward -- the Convict Commandos were among the most fearless fighters in the British Forces. So why were they running in terror from a unit of Germans leaving their quaking comrade behind in their haste? Something was badly awry, something had happened to throw the Convict Commandos into a Frenzy Of Fear.

A few years ago I read a bunch of digital issues of COMMANDO, the long-running British war comic, and some of my favorites were in a series called Convict Commandos, created and written by legendary comics author Alan Hebden with art by Manuel Benet. As you might guess from the series title, these stories chronicle the exploits of three criminals recruited to be commandos -- strongman Titch Mooney, knife expert Smiler Dawson, and burglar and explosives expert Jelly Jakes -- and the officer who leads them on their mission, Lt. Guy Tenby. I've decided to pick up where I left off and read the rest of the series, starting with this one from 2013, which is still available on Amazon. It's a fine yarn with a particularly good plot, as the Convict Commandos set out to destroy a Nazi radar jamming operation in occupied Greece, only to encounter a menace that forces them to act nothing like their usual selves. It's a clever, very entertaining tale, and if you're a fan of war comics, I give it a strong recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, April 1939

That's a pretty daring cover on this issue of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, especially for a pulp published by Street & Smith, an outfit that could be a little stodgy from time to time. The art is by Modest Stein, not a favorite artist of mine, but I have to admit, I like this one quite a bit. Inside are stories by Donald Wandrei, Otis Adelbert Kline, J. Allan Dunn, J.J. des Ormeaux, Robert C. Blackmon, and Harry Lee Fellinge, all of them prolific and dependable pulpsters. I don't own this issue or any issues of CLUES, as far as I recall, but it seems like a pulp that would have been worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, August 30, 1941

This issue of the iconic WESTERN STORY sports a fine, very dramatic cover by A. Leslie Ross, one of my favorite pulp and paperback cover artists. The authors inside are no less notable: Harry Sinclair Drago, L.L. Foreman (with a Preacher Devlin novella), Tom W. Blackburn, S. Omar Barker, Frank Richardson Pierce (as Seth Ranger), George Michener, and Eric Howard. Definitely looks like an issue worth reading. I don't own a copy, or I just might. I do have Harry Sinclair Drago's novel BUCKSKIN EMPIRE, one installment of which is serialized in this issue. May have to see if I can find the book.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Wild Lovers - Orrie Hitt

This novel, a 1961 release from Kozy Books, is a typical Orrie Hitt yarn in some respects, but not in others. It’s a backwoods book, as you can probably tell from the cover, and sort of reminds me of some of Harry Whittington’s novels. It’s about the lives and loves of several people who come from a poor area in upstate New York known as Shanty Road. (There is, in fact, a sleaze novel by Whittington called SHANTY ROAD, published by Original Novels in 1954 under the Whit Harrison name. It would have made a good title for this book, too.)

Unlike the usual male protagonist you find in Hitt’s novels, the main character in WILD LOVERS is a young woman, Joy Gordon, who was orphaned at sixteen when a fire burned down the farm house where she lived with her parents, killing her mother and father. Left on her own, Joy moves into a shed that remains standing on the property and supports herself by selling eggs from the flock of chickens that’s almost her only possession of any value.

Almost, but not quite, because the property she inherited from her parents includes the only easy access to a lake which some developers want to turn into a hunting and fishing resort (another interest of Hitt’s). As the novel opens, though, the real estate agent in charge of the negotiations won’t meet Joy’s price. Actually, the agent is just trying to get her to go to bed with him, because in the five years since she was orphaned, she has grown up into a virginal, twenty-one-year-old beauty.

Helping out Joy is her neighbor, mechanic Pug Stark, who does meet the usual description of a big, burly Hitt hero. Pug comes from a real white trash family: his father refuses to work, and his sister is pregnant and has no idea who the father is. (Ah, the unwanted, unwed pregnancy, another favorite theme of Hitt’s.)

Then a stranger shows up, an artist from New York City whose family owns one of the properties along Shanty Road. He’s come up there to work and brought his beautiful mistress with him, and he’s a big, brawny guy, too. When he sees Joy, he immediately wants to paint a portrait of her – nude, of course – and his arrival changes everything, as Joy winds up juggling the three men who are interested in her, a neat reversal of the standard Hitt plot where the hero has to decide between three women.

That’s not the only twist that Hitt throws into the plot, as characters do things that take the reader by surprise and turn out not to be exactly what they appear to be at first. The ending won’t be any huge shock for Hitt fans, but it is pretty satisfying. The writing is good in this one, too, not quite as terse and hardboiled as in some of Hitt’s other books but with quite a few good lines.

WILD LOVERS is a good solid Orrie Hitt novel and very entertaining. If you haven’t read his work before, it would be a decent place to start, and if you have, you’ll want to read this one, too.

(How is it possible that I've been reading Orrie Hitt novels for more than 15 years? It certainly doesn't seem like it. But this post originally appeared on November 28, 2009, and WILD LOVERS wasn't the first novel by Hitt that I read, by any means. If you're interested in checking it out, there's a reprint edition available as an e-book.) 

Review: Chartered Love - Conrad Dawn

I love it when I find a little gem of a book in an unexpected place. At first glance, CHARTERED LOVE looks like it might fall into that category. Originally published in 1960 by Novel Books, one of the bottom-of-the-barrel paperback publlshers that specialized in what was then considered fiction for adults only, it’s the debut novel of Conrad Dawn, an author I’d never heard of, let alone read. Dawn published only six books, all of them from Novel Books in 1960-62. The cover promises some adventure to go along with the risque elements, and the book was reprinted recently by Black Gat Books, a consistently top-notch imprint, with an introduction by Gary Lovisi, an author whose opinions I respect, so yeah, this book might actually be pretty good.

CHARTERED LOVE starts out in very promising fashion. It’s a South Seas adventure yarn with a two-fisted boat skipper being hired by a beautiful young woman to help her recover a fortune in gold bars that went down with a refugee ship sunk by the Japanese during the early days of World War II. This is a very standard adventure plot going back to the pulp days. H. Bedford-Jones wrote probably dozens of stories that used some variation of this concept. So did plenty of other pulpsters, and the sunken treasure plot was used again and again by paperbackers and also hardcover authors such as Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, and Alistair Maclean. It’s a plot that I happen to like a lot, and I’ve even used it myself. Whether it succeeds or not is all a matter of execution. In a familiar tale such as this, a writer has to create strong characters, keep up a fast pace, provide vivid settings, and maybe, in the best of them, come up with a few twists in the standard plot.

A good protagonist is a must for this kind of novel. John Darrow, the skipper of the Malacca Maid, is a very good one. Reasonably smart, plenty tough, with morals just questionable enough to be interesting but still with a code of honor that he follows. The beautiful girl, Elizabeth McClain, is also smart and tough, not the least bit whiny, and a fine match for Darrow. The ship’s crusty old first mate is a great sidekick, the villains who are also after the gold bars are properly oily and evil, and all of them do good work as the story races along. There are some excellent action scenes during a typhoon, and the underwater diving scenes are suitably creepy. You’d barely know this book was from a so-called sleaze publisher. Except for a few mild, not-at-all graphic sex scenes, this reads very much like a Higgins or Maclean novel from the same era.

So, having read it, I’m happy to report that CHARTERED LOVE is indeed one of those lost gems. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation for fans of sea-going adventure yarns. It's available in paperback and e-book editions. I don’t know if Conrad Dawn’s other books are as good, but I’d love to find out.