Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947)

I’ve been a big fan of Cary Grant’s movies for a long time, but there are some I’ve just never gotten around to watching. I’m not sure how I missed THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER, from 1947, since it ran endlessly on TV when I was a kid, but I’ve seen it now. Probably most of you have, too, so bear with me.

Grant plays Richard Nugent, a famous painter who’s also something of a ladies’ man. After a nightclub brawl, he comes up in front of Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy, who will always be Nora Charles to me), who lets all the participants go with a warning not to get into any more trouble, especially Nugent. Later, he gives a lecture on art at the high school where Judge Turner’s younger sister Susan (Shirley Temple, no longer a child star but a cute 19-year-old in real life) is a student. Susan falls in love with Nugent, sneaks into his apartment, and is caught there with him the next morning by her sister and the assistant district attorney (Rudy Vallee, of all people). Nothing happened, but the impropriety of the situation lands Nugent in trouble, as does the punch he lands on the ADA’s jaw. After that, the court psychiatrist, who happens to be the uncle of the Turner sisters and is played by Ray Collins, who will always be Lt. Tragg from PERRY MASON as far as I’m concerned, hatches the crazy scheme of having Nugent pretend to date Susan so that she’ll grow tired of him naturally and realize he’s much too old for her.

If you’ve followed all that convoluted set-up so far, you’ll know that it’s all just a flimsy excuse for Grant to act like a teenager, spouting slang and driving a jalopy and being his usual charming but flustered self. It’s a well-worn bit, but let’s face it, nobody was ever better at it than Cary Grant. And there are no bonus points for anticipating that a real romance will develop between Grant and Loy, who admittedly have some pretty darned good screen chemistry together.

The cast is top-notch, no doubt about that. I think the director, Irving Reis, could have kept things moving at a bit faster pace at times. This movie was written by Sidney Sheldon, long before he created I DREAM OF JEANNIE and became a best-selling novelist, and it won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. I didn’t think this was my idea of an award-winning script at all. It’s consistently pleasant, mildly amusing now and then, but not all that funny and the cast has to work hard to achieve the laughs they do. Don’t get me wrong. THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER is not a bad film. I enjoyed it and am glad I finally watched it. But I don’t think it lives up to its reputation.

Review: Hunter at Large - Thomas B. Dewey

I’ve been reading Thomas B. Dewey’s books off and on for close to 60 years since discovering his series about the private eye known only as Mac while I was in high school. He’s never failed to entertain me. He’s one of those writers who never achieved huge success but published steadily for 25 years and was always well-regarded by readers and critics. Black Gat Books has just reprinted one of his stand-alones, HUNTER AT LARGE, published originally in hardcover by Simon & Shuster in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1963—an edition I owned for many years but never got around to reading.

The protagonist of this one is Mickey Phillips, a police detective in an unnamed Midwestern city, who is home one night with his wife Kathy when two men show up at the house, take Mickey by surprise, make him a prisoner, and torture and kill his wife in front of him. They leave thinking that they’ve killed Mickey, too, but he survives, which is a bad mistake for them to make.

After months of recuperation, Mickey is well enough to set out on the trail of the killers. He has to resign from the police force to do it, but he doesn’t care. He just wants revenge for Kathy’s murder. The trail leads him across the country with stops in Kansas City, Denver, and a small town in Nevada. Mickey puts his training to good use in conducting a dogged, methodical investigation which ultimately leads him to his goal with a few surprises along the way.

This is a fine suspense novel written in Dewey’s usual smooth prose with well-developed characters, especially Mickey Phillips. He never comes across as hysterical or overwrought, just very, very determined. The mystery angle is well-constructed. It’s a very bleak, humorless book, but given the plot, I don’t see how it could have been anything else. If you’ve never read Dewey’s work before, HUNTER AT LARGE isn’t really representative of his private eye novels featuring Mac or his other series protagonist Pete Schofield, but it’s well worth reading and it gets a solid recommendation from me. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10 Story Mystery Magazine, February 1942

Popular Publications' 10 STORY MYSTERY MAGAZINE lasted only nine issues, a lot shorter run than the much more successful 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE. But that doesn't mean the stories weren't good. I have no idea who did the cover on this one, but I know you can't trust a skeleton in a top hat. That's just common sense. There's a good, if somewhat odd, mix of authors inside, several of them better known in other genres: Western writer Lee E. Wells, Weird Menace author John H. Knox (to be fair, Knox wrote a lot of mysteries, too, but it's his Weird Menace stuff that's still in print), science fiction author C.M. Kornbluth (under the pseudonym Walter C. Davies), WEIRD TALES stalwart Carl Jacobi, and prolific aviation/air war author O.B. Myers. Also on hand are Francis K. Allan, Jackson Gregory Jr. (the son of Western and adventure author Jackson Gregory, I suppose), house-name Ray P. Shotwell, and two single-sale authors, Adam King and Scott Coudray. I don't own a copy of this pulp, but it certainly looks like something I'd be interested in reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, July 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Sam Cherry, as usual. This one doesn’t depict an actual scene in the story, as some do.

The Lone Wolf has a partner in this issue’s Jim Hatfield novel, “Ranger Law for Ladrones”. Thankfully, it’s not one of the numerous sidekicks Roe Richmond saddled Hatfield with in his entries in the series. This time it’s a young Ranger on his first assignment. Al Rich is pretty full of himself and not very bright, but Hatfield thinks he might have the makings of a decent Ranger eventually—if he lives long enough. That’s in doubt because Al’s big mouth tips off the bad guys that he and Hatfield are in the West Texas town of Ladrones to investigate a robbery of the local Western Union office in which a $50,000 payroll was stolen. That loot is still missing because one of the robbers was killed after he buried the money, and nobody knows where it is. Hatfield and Al are captured by the villains, but they escape and round up the varmints about halfway through the story.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, as they soon discover. But the real mystery is who wrote this one. The Fictionmags Index attributes it to Walker A. Tompkins, and there are places where it reads like Tompkins’ work. But there are also places where it doesn’t. For much of the story, it’s pretty talky and light on action, although the big gun battle at the end between Hatfield and the villains is excellent. That part really does read like Tompkins. My thinking is that maybe some other author wrote and turned in a draft of this one, and then the editor, seeing that it wasn’t very good, sent it to Tompkins to rewrite and salvage it. We’ll almost certainly never know if that’s what happened, but it seems feasible to me.

George H. Roulston is an author who’s new to me. He published only half a dozen Western pulp stories in the mid-Fifties. His story “The Fighting Tinhorn” fits its title. It’s about a drifting gambler who’s always been on the shady side, until he has to step up and stop a gun-running scheme that will plunge the Arizona frontier into bloody chaos. This is a well-written, suspenseful story that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Ray G. Ellis wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Fifties and Sixties. His story in this issue, “A Long Ride to Santa Fe”, is a stagecoach yarn in which a deputy U.S. marshal tries to deliver three desperate outlaw prisoners to the authorities in Santa Fe, a job that’s complicated by a beautiful female passenger from back east who sympathizes with the owlhoots because she doesn’t know any better. And there’s a blizzard, too. Ellis does a good job with a very traditional Western story.

Eric Allen specialized in stories set mostly in Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. His novelette in this issue, “Ambush”, finds a former Confederate guerrilla returning to his old stomping grounds in Arkansas only to find that a vicious gang of carpetbaggers led by an old enemy of his is terrorizing the people in the area. I had a little trouble warming up to this one at first, but it won me over and I wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Its biggest problem is that the main villain doesn’t show up until very late in the story. Still, it’s the sort of yarn that would have made a good 1950s movie.

Ed Montgomery published about twenty stories split evenly between the Western pulps and the slicks, mostly THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. “A Girl Named Mike” is a range war story featuring a rather lighthearted romance between a roguish rustler and a rancher’s beautiful tomboy daughter. It reads to me like it was probably aimed at the POST, but Montgomery sold it to the Thrilling Group Western line when it failed to click elsewhere. Which is not to criticize it. It’s an entertaining if very lightweight story.

The final story in the issue, “Blood on His Star”, is by-lined L.J. Searles, but that’s Lin Searles, of course, who wrote a few pulp stories but is better remembered as a Western novelist from the Sixties. The protagonist of this one, a former town-taming lawman, is clearly based on Wild Bill Hickok, right down to accidentally killing a deputy during a shootout. It has a nice hardboiled tone to it and some good action, but I wasn’t overly impressed by it.

That pretty much sums up my impression of the entire issue. None of the stories are bad. They’re all entertaining, some more than others. But none of them reach any special heights, either. This is a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. I’m still glad I read it, of course, but I hope the next one I pull off the shelf will be better.

The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 1 - Frederick Nebel

In 1931, after a very successful run in BLACK MASK with several series, Frederick Nebel began selling to DIME DETECTIVE, BLACK MASK’s main rival over at Popular Publications. Having chronicled the adventures of a private detective named Donahue for BLACK MASK, Nebel created a new one (or revived an old one from one of his Northerns, some say) in Jack Cardigan, an operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency. The adventures of Cardigan proved to be Nebel’s longest-running series. Having read and really enjoyed the Donahue stories, I was eager to move on to the Cardigan yarns, since they’re very similar.

THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 includes the stories published in DIME DETECTIVE in 1931 and ’32. The first story, “Death Alley” (DIME DETECTIVE, November 1931) involves Cardigan in a murder that at first seems tied up with a labor dispute but may have its origins in something else. It’s a good introduction to the tough, smart Cardigan.

In “Hell’s Paycheck” (December 1931), Cardigan arrives in an unnamed city (Kansas City, maybe, but that’s just a guess) on a job, and as soon as he gets off the train he’s picked up and taken for a ride. The guys planning to rub him out don’t succeed, of course, so he winds up tackling a case of political corruption, a reformer, and a blackmail racket.

“Six Diamonds and a Dick” (January 1932) finds Cardigan on the trail of some stolen diamonds, obviously. This story is important because it introduces Patricia Seaward, a female Cosmos operative who appears frequently in the series. I like her. She’s petite, according to Nebel, but plenty tough and smart.

“And Then There Was Murder” (February 1932) is a sequel to “Six Diamonds and a Dick”, as some of the repercussions from that case put Cardigan’s life in danger. The attempt to kill him goes awry, however, and results in an innocent’s death, which means Cardigan is going to go all-out to deliver justice.

In “Phantom Fingers” (March 1932), Cardigan is summoned to a meeting with a potential client, but when he gets there he finds the man dead in bed, strangled. That’s not the only strangulation murder in this fast-paced tale of jewel robberies and missing emeralds.

After several years in St. Louis, Cardigan moves back to New York City in “Murder on the Loose” (April 1932). He’s still working for the Cosmos Detective Agency, but not for long. After a clash with his boss, George Hammerhorn, he resigns. The case involves a dead man Cardigan finds in his room one evening when he returns to the hotel where he’s living. Cardigan straightens everything out, of course, and mends fences with Hammerhorn so that he’s still a Cosmos op by the time the story ends.

“Rogues’ Ransom” (August 1932) is the first time the Cardigan series is mentioned on a DIME DETECTIVE cover, although not by title in this case. Cardigan, Pat Seaward, and a couple of other Cosmos operatives are sent to Ohio to retrieve the kidnapped three-year-old daughter of a rich man. Naturally, things get violent and complicated. Although Nebel’s writing is as terse and hardboiled as ever in this one, the plot is driven by some unlikely coincidences which make this the weakest entry in the series so far, although still entertaining to read.

In “Lead Pearls” (September 1932), the job is to recover a valuable necklace stolen daringly in the street right from the neck of the rich woman wearing it. But then her butler is killed, a Cosmos Agency dick is bumped off, and the case becomes a lot more complicated and personal for Cardigan, culminating in a great rooftop shootout.

“The Dead Don’t Die” (October 1932), the title of this story says, but an acerbic drama critic known for his vicious reviews certainly does, his throat slashed from ear to ear. But since he’d hired the Cosmos Detective Agency the day before the murder, Cardigan is determined to find the killer and doesn’t back down, even when Pat Seaward is kidnapped.

As “The Candy Killer” (November 1932) opens, Cardigan is being given a new assignment: bodyguard a beautiful Polish movie star who is taking the fortune she made in Hollywood and going back to her European home. But before the boat can sail, the movie star is kidnapped and Cardigan is off another wild, violent case.

“A Truck-Load of Diamonds” (December 1932) wraps up this first volume. Cardigan is hot on the trail of a valuable diamond bracelet that’s stolen from a jewelry store messenger in broad daylight. This story is cleverly plotted but also winds up being the bleakest in the book.

One thing that really struck me in reading these stories is that although Cardigan does do some detecting and crimes get solved, these aren’t really mysteries in the way we usually think of that term. They’re action/adventure yarns in which the protagonist happens to be a private detective. The mystery is just the impetus for all the action in which Cardigan gets involved. I’m not complaining about this at all, mind you. These are wonderful stories, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction, THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 gets my highest recommendation. It's available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. I’m glad there are three more volumes to go in this series. Lots of good reading ahead!

Review: Perdition: Four Navajo Tom Raine Stories - Jackson Cole (C. William Harrison, Lee Bond?)

I’ve enjoyed all the Navajo Tom Raine stories I’ve read in the pulp EXCITING WESTERN and have written about several of them in various posts. But it occurs to me that many of you may not own any issues of EXCITING WESTERN. However, you can still read four of the Navajo Raine novelettes in an e-book collection entitled PERDITION that’s available on Amazon. I had already read one of them, so I decided to check out the others.

This collection leads off with “Boothill Beller Box”, the story I’d read before. Here’s what I said a few weeks ago when I posted about the October 1944 issue it’s in.

“The novelette “Boothill Beller Box” is a notable one. It’s part of a long series starring Arizona Ranger “Navajo” Tom Raine, and this story features Raine teaming up with Wayne Morgan, the Masked Rider, and Morgan’s sidekick, the Yaqui Indian Blue Hawk. As far as I know, this is one of only two such crossover stories between Thrilling Group Western characters. Steve Reese from RANGE RIDERS WESTERN appears in an earlier Navajo Raine story, “Rawhide Ranger”, in the April 1944 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. The title “Boothill Beller Box” refers to a telephone line being strung from a cowtown to a nearby logging camp. This is a loggers vs. cattlemen story in which Wayne Morgan is framed for murder. Just like in 1960s Marvel Comics, the two heroes meet and fight at first before realizing they’re on the same side, after which they team up to defeat the bad guy. The author of this one packs quite a bit into it and it’s a really good yarn. Unfortunately, a proofreading and/or typesetting error almost ruins the story by completely invalidating the big twist in the plot. I salvaged it by editing it in my head back to what it should have been.”

I went on to speculate about who actually wrote this story under the house-name Jackson Cole. My guess of Chuck Martin turned out to be wrong. The actual author is C. William Harrison, a dependable and prolific pulpster who also wrote paperbacks under his own name and as Coe Williams and Will Hickok. I wasn’t surprised to find out he wrote this novelette because I almost always enjoy his work. Also, the person who put this e-book together fixed the editing mistake from the original pulp version, so if this is the only one you read, you’ll never know that glitch was there.

Next up is “Ride Your Hunch, Ranger” from the May 1950 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. A notorious outlaw and gunfighter has sent word that he’s going to give up his guns and turn himself in to a local sheriff. Raine is on hand when that unexpected development occurs, but not surprisingly, there’s more to the plot that than and everything leads to a big showdown between the Arizona Ranger and a gang of killers. This story is by a different author, and once again I’m going to make a guess who was behind the Jackson Cole name: Lee Bond. This story has several similarities to Bond’s style in his long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series in TEXAS RANGERS. The characters spend a lot of time explaining the plot to each other so the reader can follow along, and during those conversations they almost always address each other by name. The story’s climax, with Raine facing off in a shootout against several men, is also reminiscent of the Long Sam stories. Bond has been identified as the author of the first nine Navajo Raine stories, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to believe he came back for some of the later ones, as well. But, again, this is just an educated guess and could be wrong.

“Passport to Perdition”, from the February 1945 issue, is another one that’s been attributed to C. William Harrison. When I saw that title, my first thought was that maybe Bennie Gardner wrote it. Gardner, best known under his pseudonym Gunnison Steele, wrote hundreds of stories and novels for the Western pulps, among them a Rio Kid novel called “Passport to Perdition” (THE RIO KID WESTERN, August 1948). But maybe this was just a case of two authors coming up with the same admittedly catchy title. This story opens with Raine being on hand for the ghost town showdown between a wealthy mine owner and an outlaw gang led by the mine owner’s former partner, who turned bad after his partner cheated him out of his share of the bonanza. The resulting gun battle would be the climax in many pulp Western stories. In this one it takes place early on and leads to an unexpected aftermath. Harrison is really at the top of his game in this one: vivid, evocative prose, great action, and genuine moral complexity in the characters, including Navajo Raine. This is easily the best story from this series that I’ve read so far.

This collection concludes with “Take a Rest, Ranger”, from the July 1949 issue. Raine is on his way to the town of Wagon Gap to take on a new assignment, but he doesn’t know the details. He’s supposed to collect a letter from his boss, Captain Burt Mossman, when he gets there that will tell him what to do. But before he can do that, he’s ambushed and finds himself mixed up in a dangerous scheme that involves the murder of a sheriff. Of course, he gets that sorted out and finally finds out what his new orders are, and they’re not what he expected at all. I think this one is by Lee Bond, although I’m not nearly as sure of that attribution as I was with the earlier “Ride Your Hunch, Ranger”. The big shootout at the end between Raine and several foes certainly smacks of Bond’s work, but that’s not definitive. I’m going to have to let this one go with a guess and nothing more.

I enjoyed this collection quite a bit. The two stories by Harrison are clearly superior, and I’m definitely going to seek out more of his contributions to the series. But they’re all entertaining and have increased my fondness for Navajo Tom Raine’s adventures. If you want a good sampling of Western pulp action, I give PERDITION a high recommendation.

Review: The Pirate and the Lady - Leslie Turner White

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a good, old-fashioned, swashbuckling historical adventure novel. THE PIRATE AND THE LADY by Leslie Turner White, published as a paperback original by Ace Books in 1961, seemed like it might be just what I was looking for. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by an artist named Chuck Smith, whose work I’m not familiar with.

The book opens in Cornwall, where the protagonist, a ship’s captain known as Black Anthony Bartholomew, works for the local magistrate, who also happens to be the kingpin of the smuggling ring that’s operating in the area. Tony is also the lover of the magistrate’s insatiable young wife, and that’s what ultimately leads to him being charged unjustly with murder and forced to flee to the colonies. During that voyage, he meets and falls in love with the daughter of an English nobleman who’s being sent to the Caribbean to put a stop to the piracy plaguing the area. The nobleman’s plan includes issuing letters of marque to British sailors so they can hunt down the French and Spanish pirates. This seems like a perfect job for Tony.

Unfortunately, he gets sidetracked to a plantation in Virginia owned by the brother of his former lover back in England. She’s there, too, and expects that she and Tony will take up right where they left off. Tony wants to get to the Caribbean, though, and be reunited with the fair Kathleen, and this leads to no end of trouble.

All this set-up actually takes up too much space in the book, but once Tony finally makes it to the Spanish Main, there’s buccaneering action a-plenty. Capture, escape, sea battles, daring plans, swordfights, even a great sidekick named Half-Arsed Jones. White, whose writing career started in the pulps, seems torn between spinning a breakneck yarn and writing a more sedate, respectable historical novel, albeit one with some spicy plot twists. It’s a combination that works more often than it doesn’t, thankfully.

Although THE PIRATE AND THE LADY looks almost like a romance, there’s actually not much domestic drama in it, mostly in the opening and then very late in the book. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit. It’s short, colorful, and reads quickly. The author, as Leslie T. White, wrote quite a few detective and adventure stories for the pulps before becoming a bestselling novelist as Leslie Turner White. The line “First Book Publication” on the cover of this one might be an indication that it’s an expanded serial or novella from the pulps, but if that’s the case, I couldn’t pin down the source. I think it’s just as likely that White wrote it as an original and then maybe sold it to Ace when it failed to sell to a hardback publisher. Either way, it’s a good yarn and well worth reading if you enjoy vintage historical adventures.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, January 11, 1936

I like the cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. I don't know who the artist is. Paul Stahr, maybe? There are some fine writers inside, including Max Brand, Cornell Woolrich, Borden Chase, Hulbert Footner, Howard Wandrei (as H.W. Guernsey), and J. Lane Linklater. Like the other Munsey pulps, the frequent serials are a bit of a problem with DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but there was still an awful lot of good fiction to be found in those pages. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, March 1937

This issue of THRILLING RANCH STORIES, which I don't own, sports a nice action-packed cover. I don't know the artist. There are stories inside by some very solid Western pulpsters including Tom Curry, Lee Bond, Larry A. Harris, Edward Parrish Ware, and Dabney Otis Collins. Rounding out the TOC are lesser-known William Dixon Bell, William Bruner, and U. Stanley Aultman. I had hoped to continue my streak of posting about pulps that I own and have read, but I ran out of time this week. 

Review: Double or Quits - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Once again I found myself in need of a book that would read quickly and provide sure-fire entertainment. Well, fry me for an oyster, what better choice than Donald Lam, Bertha Cool, and Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair?

DOUBLE OR QUITS is the fifth book in the series, published in hardback by William Morrow in December 1941 and reprinted more times than I want to count in paperback since then, as well as currently being available in an e-book edition. As with most of Gardner’s novels, the plot is so complicated that it’s difficult to follow and almost impossible to summarize. Bertha Cool is on a bit of a health kick as this one opens, and she and Donald are out fishing on a barge. I immediately figured they were actually there working on a case, but no, they’re doing it for the exercise. However, a casual conversation with another angler nets them a new client and a challenging case. Their new fishing buddy is a doctor, and some of his wife’s valuable jewels have been stolen from a safe in their house. The wife is an invalid, and her secretary/companion has disappeared, so naturally the girl is the most logical suspect. The doctor hires Donald and Bertha to find the girl and recover the jewelry.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. Before you know it, someone is dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Was it an accident, a suicide . . . or murder? As with many of Gardner’s novels, the plot hinges on his knowledge of some obscure point of law, in this case exactly what an insurance company considers a death by accidental means. Double indemnity is riding on the answer.

Along the way, there’s another murder, some false identities, several nice bits of trickery by Donald where he fools not only some of the other characters but also the reader, and finally a solution that, by and large, makes sense once Donald explains everything, which doesn’t happen until he’s almost become a murder victim himself. A month from now I’ll remember very little of the plot.

I will, however, remember that I had a lot of fun reading DOUBLE OR QUITS. I’ve long since given up trying to out-think Erle Stanley Gardner. I did pick out the murderer in this one, but it was mostly a guess. Instead of trying to figure it out, as I would, say, with an Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie novel, I just go along for the ride. In this series, it’s Donald’s brisk, funny narrative voice; in the Perry Mason books, it’s Mason’s hard-charging character, the give-and-take between Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake, and those great courtroom scenes. Gardner’s just a thoroughly entertaining writer, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s really the reason I read. If you’re a Cool and Lam fan, you’ll enjoy this one, and if you’re not, you really should give the series a try.

Review: The Devil's Ray - Donald E. Keyhoe (Flying Aces, December 1931)

I don’t know about you, but when a story opens with a mortally wounded spy gasping out a warning to our heroes about how they should look out for the dwarf at Hoi Xiang’s, a gambling and opium den in Macao, I know right away that’s my kind of yarn! “The Devil’s Ray” is a novelette by Donald E. Keyhoe that appeared in the December 1931 issue of the iconic aviation pulp FLYING ACES.

Those heroes I mentioned are Dusty Rhoades, a huge Chief Petty Officer who’s also an ace pilot despite appearing too big to fit in a plane’s cockpit, and the much smaller, cold-eyed Mike Doyle, an accused killer who joined the Marines under a fake name because the law was after him in the States. (It should be noted that Keyhoe makes it clear right away Doyle was accused of murder unjustly, but he’s still pretty hardboiled and ruthless in a fight.) The two of them are serving on the aircraft carrier Lexington, which is cruising through the South China Sea on a secret mission to locate a hidden base where a German scientist is working on a deadly new weapon. It’s also worth mentioning that this story was published several years before the Nazis rose to power in Germany, so making the villain German is a holdover from the Great War.

Mike and Dusty are recruited to work undercover on this mission and parachute into Macao. Up to this point there’s been a lot of aerial action, dogfights over the Lexington, the bad guys employing their deadly ray that turns pilots into mindless husks, etc. Mike and Dusty penetrate the villains’ sanctum, of course, and much more running, fighting, shooting, and flying action ensues. In fact, there aren’t many paragraphs in this story where some sort of breakneck adventure isn’t going on. Man, it moves!

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Donald E. Keyhoe’s books about UFOs, but that’s all I knew about him. Eventually, I discovered that he was a prolific pulp writer long before he began writing about flying saucers. He turned out hundreds of stories, mostly aviation and air-war yarns, but he also wrote detective and non-aviation adventure stories. I haven’t read a lot of his pulp work yet, but I’m becoming a big fan. I really like the terse, punchy, action-packed style in which he writes, and since he was a Marine pilot at one time, his stories have a definite ring of authenticity to them.

“The Devil’s Ray” reads like it ought to be the first of a series, but as far as I know it’s the only appearance of Mike Doyle and Dusty Rhoades. I had a great time reading it. It’s just pure pulp fun. You can read it, and many other great stories, on the Age of Aces website, and Age of Aces has also published many of Keyhoe’s stories in print collections, too, most of which I own and will get to eventually.

On a side note, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington, which plays a major part in this story, was sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of the Coral Sea during World War II. My friend, the late Western writer Jack Ballas, was in the Navy and serving on the Lexington at the time. I spent some wonderful hours talking to Jack and picking his brain about the experience when I was writing my World War II series, and I owe him a lot for the help he gave me. The Lexington was replaced with a second carrier of that name, which sailed honorably for many years before being docked permanently in Corpus Christi, Texas, where it now serves as a museum. I’ve visited it several times and toured it from the engine rooms to the bridge, and walking the flight deck and imagining what it must have been like in those days was a profoundly moving experience. If you’re ever in the Corpus Christi area, I highly recommend paying a visit to the Lexington.

Now Available: California Powdersmoke - James Reasoner

Death waits in the wasteland! Deputy Tanner Stewart just wants to deliver his prisoner, the notorious outlaw Dash Marlowe, to the California authorities who are waiting for him. Beautiful sisters Sabine and Genny LeBlanc are desperate to escape from the vengeance-seeking killer pursuing them. And in an abandoned settlement on the edge of a burning desert, a madman plots his explosive revenge on those he believes have wronged him.

CALIFORNIA POWDERSMOKE is the latest action-packed Western from legendary author James Reasoner. Guns will blaze and not everyone will make it out of the desert alive in this fast-paced adventure yarn that’s sure to please readers of traditional Westerns. See why James Reasoner has been entertaining readers for almost 50 years!

(Once again, a new release date has sneaked up on me. This new Western novel is now available on Amazon. It'll be the last new release under my name for a while. I hope to have another Snakehaven novella done by the end of the year, and there'll be at least one more new Western novel next year. In the meantime, if you're a fan of traditional Westerns, I think you'll enjoy CALIFORNIA POWDERSMOKE.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask Detective Magazine, July 1951

This is the very last issue of BLACK MASK in its original run and features an eye-catching cover by Harry Barton. It's hard to go wrong with a sexy redhead, at least as far as pulp covers go. I've read enough noir novels to know there are a lot of ways you can go wrong with a sexy redhead in real life. There are only two original stories in this issue, a novelette by G.T. Fleming-Roberts and a short story by Robert C. Dennis. There are four reprints: a Harley Quin story by Agatha Christie (Christie's only appearance in BLACK MASK? I don't know, but it seems likely she wasn't a regular), a Flashgun Casey story by George Harmon Coxe, a Daffy Dill story by Richard Sale, and a non-series yarn by Francis K. Allan. There have been several attempts to bring back BLACK MASK since 1951, but I'm not sure I consider any of them the real deal, admirable though some of them were. If you want to check out this final issue, the whole thing is on-line and can be found here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, May 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who did the cover art, but I’m not very impressed with it. I don’t guess they can all be by Norman Saunders or Robert Stanley or Sam Cherry, can they? Not that I could do any better, I hasten to add. I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.

Anyway, this is the next to last issue of NEW WESTERN, a run that lasted twenty years. It’s also a pulp that was on the stands after I was born, although being less than a year old at the time, I doubt if I ever saw a copy back then. It leads off with a short story, something of a rarity since most pulps had a novella or novelette in the first position. “Blood Star for Satan” is by William Heuman, one of my favorite Western authors. The title doesn’t fit the story at all, and neither does the blurb that some editor at Popular Publications came up with. However, the story itself is a taut little tale about an inexperienced lawman having to deal with a trio of train robbers who ride into his town. Heuman has never disappointed me and he does a fine job with this suspenseful story.

Next is “Blast a Red Trail!” by Robert L. Trimnell, billed as a novelette on the Table of Contents but closer to novella length in my opinion. And it packs in enough plot that it could almost have been a novel. The story opens with the protagonist, Blaine Sandford, in jail, charged with murdering a man he hired to help him on his freight line. Sandford is innocent, of course, and the man who was killed had dropped some hints about having enemies back in the town where he came from, two hundred miles away. So when Sandford escapes, that’s where he heads, determined to dig up the secrets of the murdered man’s past and uncover the real killer.

He winds up in the middle of a war between a freight line operated by a beautiful young woman known as The Wench and some hired killers and corrupt businessmen working with the railroad that wants to extend into the area. If that’s not enough, there’s a lot of psychological drama going on behind the scenes and the sort of family secrets that often show up in the work of Ross Macdonald, Walt Coburn, and Max Brand. In fact, this offbeat story reminds me quite a bit of some of the stories by Max Brand (Frederick Faust).

“Blast a Red Trail!” took me completely by surprise. I’d read only one other story by Robert L. Trimnell in the past, as far as I recall, and it was a humorous Western I didn’t like very much. But this story is an absolutely terrific hardboiled Western yarn with fascinating characters and a terse, fast-moving style. Trimnell wrote about 120 stories in a pulp career that lasted only eight years from 1948 to 1956. After that, he wrote one historical novel published by Lion Books and a number of soft-core novels published by Beacon/Softcover Library under the pseudonym Brian Black, before turning out a Western series called The Loner in the Seventies. Those three novels were published under his real name by Manor Books and are expensive if you can find them. I don’t think I have any, but I’m going to check my shelves. And I’m certainly going to keep my eyes open for his name on Western pulp TOCs in the future. I want to read more by this guy.

“A Man Must Fight” is a short story by Roe Richmond, not one of my favorite Western authors but one who usually can depended on for a decent story. This one is very reminiscent of the movie HIGH NOON, with a lawman who is reluctant to seek help from the townspeople when a couple of outlaws show up intent on killing him. It’s set up as a moral dilemma story but is resolved pretty easily. Other than that, it’s okay but not very memorable.

“The Rider From Hell” is another title that must have been slapped on by an editor at Popular Publications, because it doesn’t fit J.L. Bouma’s story at all. This is another lawman story as a young deputy with new-fangled ideas about keeping the peace clashes with a hard-nosed old town-taming marshal of the “shoot ’em all and sort it out later” school. It’s a low-key tale without much action, and the drama comes more from the characters than from gunplay. It’s very well-written, and although this kind of story normally isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Bouma is one of those authors who did mostly good work, published steadily for a long time, never achieved any real fame, and is mostly forgotten these days. He’s almost always worth reading, though.

Walt Coburn’s “The Death Dealer” is a long novelette that’s a reprint. It appeared originally in the July 1938 issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE as “Signed On to Die”. That title makes a little more sense than “The Death Dealer”, although quite a bit of death is dealt in this yarn. As usual with Coburn’s work, there’s a ton of back-story and a plot that’s almost too complicated to follow and difficult to describe. What we have is a stalwart young cowboy from Montana who buys a spread in Arizona known as the Haunted Cave Ranch because, well, there’s a cave on it that may well be haunted. You see, a gang of outlaws used it as a hideout and there’s a rumor that a fortune in loot is hidden in it. There’s even supposed to be a map split up in a number of pieces that, if combined, will lead to the treasure. Throw in not two but three, count ’em, three feuding owlhoot families, a beautiful girl and her spunky twin brother, a crooked range detective, some false identities, and last-minute revelations from ’way out in left field, and you have a confusing but fast-moving, action-packed, and downright compelling tale . . . which accurately describes a lot of Coburn’s work. This one is goofy as all get-out, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

I’ve probably mentioned before how I met Fred Grove at the Western Writers of America convention in San Angelo, Texas, in 1990. Let me tell you, sitting and talking with Fred Grove for a couple of hours at an outdoor barbecue, under some giant pecan trees on the banks of the Concho River as the cool of the evening settled down over West Texas, is a pretty darned good memory. His short story “Satan’s Saddlemate” wraps up this issue. (What was it with the editor of this issue? This is the second story with “Satan” in the title, plus we also have “The Rider From Hell”.) This one is about a cavalry patrol in Texas coming on a family of settlers massacred by Comanches and trailing the war party back to their village for a showdown. There’s also a white girl captive to be rescued. Although there’s some nice action late in this story, most of it is rather low-key and introspective. Grove was a really fine writer and does a good job of capturing the time and place. He’s always worth reading, and this story is no exception.

This is a very solid issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE. There’s not a bad story in the bunch, and several of them are very good to excellent. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

Review: Wild - Gil Brewer

WILD is actually the first Gil Brewer novel I ever read, approximately 40 years ago. I had heard of Brewer but didn’t know anything about him or his books except that my buddies Bill Crider and Ed Gorman said they were good. That was enough of a recommendation for me. When a copy of the original Fawcett Crest edition from 1958 came in at the used bookstore I managed, I grabbed it for myself and read it. All these years later, with Black Gat Books reprinting this novel recently, it seemed like a perfect time for one of my rare rereads.

Lee Baron is one of the few private eye protagonists in Gil Brewer’s fiction. Lee, who has been working as a private detective in California, returns to his hometown of Tampa, Florida, to take over the agency of his late father, who has just passed away. For his first case, he’s hired by an old flame to talk to her husband, from whom she’s estranged, and try to set up a reconciliation. This seems like an odd assignment for a private detective, but Lee takes the case and, wouldn’t you know it, discovers a dead body almost right away. The corpse has been mutilated, so it’s hard to tell who the dead man is. Is it the old flame’s husband? Is it one of the guys who was involved in a recent bank robbery that netted the thieves almost half a million bucks? Loot which is still missing, by the way. Or maybe the dead man was tied in with whoever hired the hulking, out-of-town thug to hand Lee a beating and scare him off the case, or kill him if he won’t scare. Let’s not forget the second murder, or the old flame’s beautiful but slutty sister, who Lee was also involved with in the old days.

And all of this is just in the first twelve hours after Lee takes the case.

WILD is a real whirlwind of a novel. Gil Brewer is known for the propulsive nature of his plots and writing, and that quality is in full force in this one. I had no clue what was going to happen next, and Lee Baron sure as hell doesn’t. But something is going to happen, you can be sure of that, and it’ll probably be bad.

I have a confession to make. When I first read WILD back in the Eighties, I didn’t care much for it. It didn’t make me a Gil Brewer fan, and I didn’t read anything else by him for quite a while. But then I read the Hard Case Crime reprint of his novel THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN (which just happens to be the next novel Brewer published after WILD) and thought it was terrific, one of the best hardboiled/noir novels I’d read in a long time. I’ve gone on to read many more of his novels and have enjoyed every one of them.

So what did I think of WILD when I reread it? I’m happy to report that I liked it much better this time around. The plot is suitably twisty, the characterization is vivid, and Brewer’s writing is quite poignant, almost poetic in places. At the same time, it still manages to capture the white-hot desperation of the people involved in this swamp of lust and greed. If you’re already a Gil Brewer fan and haven’t read WILD, you’ll definitely want to check it out. If you haven’t read Brewer, as I hadn’t all those years ago, you might want to start with one of his classics like 13 FRENCH STREET, SATAN IS A WOMAN, or THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN, as mentioned above. But WILD is well worth reading, make no mistake about that. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions. 

 

Manville Moon #7: Pay Up or Die - Richard Deming

“Pay Up or Die” is the seventh and last of the Manville Moon novellas to be reprinted in e-book format. It originally appeared in the May 1951 issue of BLACK MASK DETECTIVE. There are about a dozen more Moon short stories and novelettes that appeared in various pulps and digests, mostly MANHUNT, throughout the Fifties. Maybe a publisher will collect them one of these days.

This yarn finds our one-legged private eye protagonist being hired to protect an actress who’s been getting death threats. Before Moon can even get started, though, a murder takes place. His client is the intended victim, and there are several suspects for the killer, including a dangerous mobster who used to be married to her. Sure enough, Moon gets taken for a ride again (this seems to happen a lot) and barely escapes with his life before he untangles the case and discovers the murderer’s identity.

The plot in this one is a little more complicated than in the previous two stories, but I still figured it out well before the end. No matter. Manville Moon is as likable as ever and Richard Deming’s polished prose is a pleasure to read. There are three full-length novels featuring Moon. I have all of them and am looking forward to reading them.

Dead Man's Chest - Norbert Davis

Norbert Davis is one of the authors I was introduced to in the legendary, Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS in the Sixties. I’ve been reading and enjoying Davis’s work off and on ever since. He’s best remembered for his hardboiled yet humorous mysteries, but he wrote other kinds of stories for the pulps, too, including straight adventure. One such example is the novelette “Dead Man’s Chest”, originally published in the November 1936 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES.

The protagonist of this yarn is drifting adventurer Poco Kelly (a great name if I’ve ever seen one). A character in this story refers to him as a soldier of fortune, but Kelly immediately corrects that to “soldier, but no fortune”. He finds himself in a small town on Mexico, rescuing a beautiful American girl being pursued by sinister stalkers, getting mixed up in a torture killing, clashing with a vicious criminal, and getting captured by a gang of bandits, all while trying to locate a map (drawn on a piece of tanned human skin, no less) that’ll lead him and the beautiful girl to a fortune in gold.

There’s nothing in “Dead Man’s Chest” that we haven’t seen before, but the key to its appeal is in Davis’s handling of the material. And luckily, he does a great job of it. His prose is fast and vivid and action-packed, Poco Kelly is a very likable protagonist, and there are just enough touches of humor to remind you that you’re reading a story by Norbert Davis. And then, at the very end of the story, he throws in a nice twist that I wasn’t expecting. It put a grin on my face, too.

I really enjoyed “Dead Man’s Chest”. It’s a very solid pulp adventure tale that I found well worth reading. It’s available in a stand-alone e-book edition from Wildside Press with an informative and entertaining introduction by publisher John Betancourt. (I had no idea until I read the introduction that Davis was married to mystery author Frances Crane. I have most, if not all, of Crane’s novels about married sleuths Pat and Jean Abbott, but I’ve never read any of them. I can’t help but wonder if Davis had any influence on them. I’ve got to get around to trying those.)

Nordic & Finn - Peter Brandvold

Anders Nordic is a big, bearded Scandinavian from Dakota Territory who’s working holding down a line camp on a ranch in New Mexico. He’s an unsociable sort, so the solitary life at the line camp suits him very well. But he has to go into the nearby town of Cimarron from time to time to pick up supplies, and once day while he’s in the settlement, he sees some boys picking on a stray dog. Anders likes dogs and maybe even senses a certain kinship with this one, so he puts a stop to the abuse and sends the scared youngsters scurrying away.

Unfortunately, one of the boys is the son of the local banker, whose pride and arrogance prompts him to try to have Anders arrested. This does not go well, and Anders’ simple impulse to carry out a good deed is instead the opening move in a series of increasingly bloody and tragic circumstances.

NORDIC & FINN is the latest novel and the first in a new series from Peter Brandvold, one of today’s most popular Western writers. He’s long been a favorite of mine, and he certainly doesn’t disappoint this time around. He writes action as well as anyone in the business and always creates compelling characters. Anders Nordic is a great protagonist, very likable despite his solitary nature, or maybe because of it since the reader gets to see him temper that self-imposed isolation in his developing relationships with Finn (the dog he rescues) and several humans who prove to be good friends.

However, this is a Brandvold book, so it’s not all warm fuzzies. The action is tough and unrelenting, and not everything turns out exactly as you might expect. It sure had me turning the pages to find out what was going to happen, and it even kept me up later than I intended in order to do just that, something that almost never happens these days. If you’re a Western fan, I give NORDIC & FINN a very high recommendation. It’s available from Wolfpack Publishing in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon, and it's one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’m looking forward to the next volume in the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Detective, September 1943

I haven't seen too many tennis court shootouts on pulp covers. In fact, this one painted by H.J. Ward for an issue of SPEED DETECTIVE is the only one I recall. There are some familiar names inside, including Robert Leslie Bellem (twice, once as himself and once as Jerome Severs Perry, one of my favorite pseudonyms), Laurence Donovan (as Larry Dunn), house-names William Decatur and Randolph Barr, and Harold de Polo and Arthur Feldman, both real names as far as I know. There's a story by Lloyd Sanders, too, but it's his only credit in the Fictionmags Index, so he could be one of the Trojan Publications regulars. Or not. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, October 1944

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by George Rozen, and it accurately illustrates a scene from the lead novella in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN.

That lead novella, “Gun Thunder in Broken Bow”, is by one of my favorite Western authors, W.C. Tuttle. Most of Tuttle’s career was spent writing novels and stories in the several different series he created, but he wrote a fair number of stand-alone yarns, too. This is one of them, and it finds former convict Tex Colton returning to his hometown after spending several years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Everybody believes Tex has returned so he can get the loot he stashed, but he can’t do that since he didn’t pull the robbery in the first place. However, his brother, who has taken over his ranch in the meantime, did. (Not a spoiler—this is revealed very early on.) To add injury to insult, or vice versa, Tex’s brother has also married his old sweetheart.

As usual in a Tuttle story, there are some broadly comic characters and situations to go along with a solid Western mystery and some good action. It’s a winning formula with variations from story to story regarding which element is stressed the most and never fails to entertain me. The balance is very good in this one, with the added bonus of a nice twist in the end that I probably should have seen coming but didn’t. “Gun Thunder in Broken Bow” isn’t the equal of Tuttle’s Hashknife Hartley series, but it’s a solidly enjoyable yarn.

T.W. Ford was a pulp editor as well as an author, and he turned out hundreds of Western, detective, and sports stories for just about every publisher in the business. I’ve found him to be an inconsistent but mostly very good author. His short story in this issue, “Law in His Blood”, about a rancher who’s mistaken for a notorious outlaw, has a pretty predictable main twist to it, but the writing is excellent and Ford sneaks in another twist at the end that’s very effective. I liked this one as well.

Ralph J. Smith’s short story “Gunned From the Grave” is his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. It’s about an old gunsmith’s encounter with the man who killed his son in a shootout. A poignant, reasonably well-written story that is okay but doesn’t leave much of an impression.

The novelette “Boothill Beller Box” is a notable one. It’s part of a long series starring Arizona Ranger “Navajo” Tom Raine, and this story features Raine teaming up with Wayne Morgan, the Masked Rider, and Morgan’s sidekick, the Yaqui Indian Blue Hawk. As far as I know, this is one of only two such crossover stories between Thrilling Group Western characters. Steve Reese from RANGE RIDERS WESTERN appears in an earlier Navajo Raine story, “Rawhide Ranger”, in the April 1944 issue of EXCITING WESTERN. The title “Boothill Beller Box” refers to a telephone line being strung from a cowtown to a nearby logging camp. This is a loggers vs. cattlemen story in which Wayne Morgan is framed for murder. Just like in 1960s Marvel Comics, the two heroes meet and fight at first before realizing they’re on the same side, after which they team up to defeat the bad guy. The author of this one packs quite a bit into it and it’s a really good yarn. Unfortunately, a proofreading and/or typesetting error almost ruins the story by completely invalidating the big twist in the plot. I salvaged it by editing it in my head back to what it should have been. The author’s identity is also a mystery, since the Navajo Raine stories were published under the house-name Jackson Cole. I suspect this one may be by Chuck Martin. It reads like his work to me, and he’s known to have written Navajo Raine stories as well as contributing several Masked Rider novels to that pulp under his own name. But that’s just an educated guess on my part and may be totally wrong.

I also suspect that the next story in this issue, “Cheyenne Death Trap”, is by Chuck Martin. It’s part of the long-running series featuring Pony Express Rider Alamo Paige that was published under the house-name Reeve Walker. Paige is a good character, compact in stature as most of the Pony Express Riders were but tough, smart, and handy with a gun. In this yarn, another rider is robbed and murdered, and Paige sets out to track down the killer. In the process, he faces a death trap unlike any I’ve ever encountered in a Western pulp. This is a clever story and also a very good one.

Mel Pitzer published about 50 stories in various Western pulps between the mid-Thirties and the late Forties. His story “Killer on the Range” wraps up this issue. He uses present tense to tell this story, a technique I hardly ever see in a Western pulp and one that I don’t really care for. It works okay in this case, as an old wrangler tells the story about a stallion accused of killing a rancher. What really happened is pretty obvious, but the story reads okay and is entertaining, although still the weakest in the issue.

This is an above average issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN, which was usually pretty good to start with. W.C. Tuttle, T.W. Ford, Navajo Tom Raine, and Alamo Paige are all dependable Western pulp enjoyment. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s worth reading.