A Rough Edges Rerun: Armed . . . Dangerous . . . Brett Halliday (Robert Terrall)

A while back I had an email conversation with an author friend of mine [probably Steve Mertz] about the relative merits of Robert Terrall’s Mike Shayne novels. When I was first reading the Shayne novels back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I didn’t know that Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, had had so many ghost-writers contributing to the series. But I did know that as the Sixties went on, I began to like the novels less, and by the Seventies, I didn’t care for them at all. Later, of course, I found out that Robert Terrall was the author of the books I didn’t like.

However, a number of people whose opinions I respect do like Terrall’s Shayne novels, and since I hadn’t read one in close to forty years, I thought I ought to do so and see if my opinion of them has changed since then.

Well . . . it has and it hasn’t.

ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . . , from 1966, is one of the books I never got around to reading back then. It’s got a nice McGinnis cover, at least on the first edition, and although Mike Shayne is nowhere to be seen, the opening section certainly has plenty of action and intrigue to recommend it. Early on, there’s a beautiful French blonde, a jewel heist, the brutal shooting of an off-duty cop, and a kidnapping. But there’s a twist coming, and I’ll admit, Terrall slipped it right past me for a good while, although I caught it before it was revealed. From that point on, there are a lot more twists, as the story takes on a much larger scale and becomes part caper novel/part thriller with international implications. It’s very well written, a little dated in some respects today but not all that much, and the pace is spectacular, leaving the reader whipping through the pages to see what’s going to happen. There’s even a bit of humor as Terrall name-checks another of his pseudonyms. This is a very entertaining novel. The problem is, it’s barely a Mike Shayne novel.

Oh, a character named Shayne plays a huge part in it, make no mistake about that, but he’s so lacking in personality that the protagonist could be almost anybody. There’s no sense that this is the same character who inhabits all the books in the series actually written by Davis Dresser. Terrall may have been a better wordsmith than Dresser was, I won’t argue that point, but Dresser’s Shayne is a fascinating character, no more honest than he has to be but with a decent core, and maybe one of the most intelligent characters in mystery fiction, who is always two steps ahead of the other people in the books and three steps ahead of the reader. I think most of the other authors who ghosted full-length Shayne novels were able to capture this to a certain extent, and Terrall did, too, at first, but as his stint on the series went on, I believe he lost his handle on the character. However, I could be wrong about this, and I plan to read more of his books to see what I think.

In the meantime, should you read ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . .? Absolutely. It’s well-written and a lot of fun. If it had featured anybody but Mike Shayne, I’d give it an unqualified recommendation. But if you’ve never read a Shayne novel before, this is definitely not the place to start.

(This post originally appeared on July 10, 2009. And despite what I said in it, I haven't read any more of Terrall's Shayne novels since then. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to most of you, who know by now that I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy.)

Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860-1960 - Christine Bold

From time to time, I get in the mood to read some non-fiction, but it’s usually non-fiction about fiction. Case in point, SELLING THE WILD WEST: POPULAR WESTERN FICTION 1860-1960 by Christine Bold, published in 1980 by Indiana University Press. A friend of mine recommended this book to me, and the author’s name was familiar. I remembered that she contributed some of the essays about various authors in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS. So it seemed like something I might enjoy.

The book has an intriguing concept: it’s an examination of the way Westerns became a mass-produced genre with a lot of constraints and rules that developed because of the way it was published, as well as how some authors of Westerns were able to achieve distinct authorial voices despite those constraints and rules. Bold starts with the dime novels and progresses through the early Twentieth Century and the pulp and original paperback eras, doing quick surveys of each of those publishing methods and then analyzing in more detail the careers of several different authors from each time period.

I’m not a big fan of dime novels, but I enjoyed reading about their origins and learned a few things. The authors Bold concentrates on in this section are Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, Edward S. Ellis, and Edward L. Wheeler. I knew quite a bit about Buntline and Ingraham (I once edited a novel in which Buntline is the main character, THE DIME NOVELIST by Clay More), but Ellis and Wheeler were pretty much new to me. Bold also discusses the different approaches of the two main publishers of dime novels, Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith.

In the section on the early Twentieth Century, Bold focuses on the big sellers—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand (Frederick Faust), and Emerson Hough—as well as Frederic Remington, who (I didn’t know this) wrote several novels as well as being a legendary artist of the American West. Brand, of course, is something of a transitional figure, bridging the early days of Wister and Grey with the pulp era that he dominated. I’ve read a lot about Wister (who originated much of what we think of as Western fiction), Grey (the first bestseller in the genre), and Brand (the first King of the Pulps), but I knew much less about Remington and Hough. Neither of whom I’ve ever read, by the way.

Moving on, Bold covers the careers of several writers who “escaped” from the pulps: Alan Le May, Ernest Haycox, Jack Schaefer, and Louis L’Amour. Le May I know mostly from the movies based on his books, although I have read the novel THE SEARCHERS (and didn’t like it as much as the movie). I’ve read and loved both of Schaefer’s novels, SHANE and MONTE WALSH. I’ve come to appreciate Haycox’s work, although I have a preference for his pulp era novellas before he “escaped” those untrimmed pages. And while I haven’t read all of L’Amour’s novels and stories, by any means, I’ve read a bunch of them. L'Amour comes in for the greatest amount of criticism from Bold. She praises his marketing abilities but doesn’t seem to think much of his writing.

The book wraps up with some brief coverage of “Anti-Western Westerns” from the Seventies such as E.L. Doctorow’s WELCOME TO HARD TIMES and Ishmael Reed’s YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE DOWN. There’s also a mention of what Bold erroneously refers to as “Playboy Westerns”, clearly a reference to the various Adult Western series published under house names. Comparing them to dime novels is fair game, I think. There are certainly similarities in the way they’re produced. But I’ve never heard anybody else refer to them as Playboy Westerns, a misnomer Bold picked up probably from the fact that Playboy Paperbacks published two of the early Adult Western series, Slocum by Jake Logan and Raider and Doc by J.D. Hardin, before those series were sold to Berkley.

SELLING THE WILD WEST is an enjoyable book with plenty of interesting insights. There are stretches where the academic density of the writing made my eyes start to glaze over a little, but for the most part it moves right along and is quite entertaining if you’re interested in the subject. Which I am, considering that a huge part of my own career has been spent writing books within a specific system and following the rules (mostly unwritten) of that system, while at the same time trying to establish my own voice and get across the things that I want to get across. That’s been a lot of fun and I think I’ve been somewhat successful at it.

Witchery Plus: A Weird Tales Trilogy - Keith Chapman

Several years ago my friend Keith Chapman published a pair of stories--a fantasy in the mold of Clark Ashton Smith and a sword and sorcery yarn--in a double volume. He's redone that book, added a third story, this time a modern-day horror yarn set in Australia, and published it as WITCHERY PLUS: A WEIRD TALES TRILOGY, which is available in both e-book and print editions on Amazon.

"Night Howl" is the new story in this volume. Chapman sold a number of comic book scripts to Charlton for their horror titles, and the original version of this story was one of them, but it went unpublished when Charlton switched over to mostly reprints. Converted to prose, it appeared first on the BEAT TO A PULP website and now is in print for the first time. It's about a pair of lovers on the run from a murder charge, and in that respect, it works very well as a noir crime yarn. But there's also a possibly supernatural element involving an old Gothic paperback featuring a heroine with the same name as one of the characters in this story. Are the bizarre events of that old paperback replaying themselves in real life? Chapman uses that question as the springboard for a very well-written tale that generates suspense all the way to the end.

Now here's what I had to say (slightly edited) about the other two stories when I reviewed them back in 2013:

"After an interesting introduction that addresses the genesis of these tales, Chapman produces a fine Clark Ashton Smith pastiche set in Smith's evil-haunted French province Averoigne, "Black Art in Yvones". A young protagonist, a beautiful blonde, and a sinister femme fetale even give this tale a slight noirish feel. In the second novelette in this collection, Chapman ventures into sword-and-sorcery territory with "Wildblood and the Witch Wife", featuring a very likable pair of adventurers reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It's set in historical England rather than a fantasy world, but there's still plenty of sorcery and action."

Although probably best known for his Westerns, Keith Chapman is one of those authors who can write just about anything and do a good job of it. He's a fine storyteller, as these stories amply demonstrate. If you've never sampled his work before, WITCHERY PLUS would be a very good place to start. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, July 1933

This is a pretty grim cover by Rafael DeSoto on this early issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE. As is common with a Thrilling Group pulp, several of the authors in this one are house names: Robert Wallace, G. Wayman Jones, John L. Benton, and Kerry McRoberts. (I believe "McRoberts" went into the service during World War II and became Captain Kerry McRoberts.) The only author with a recognizable real name is William H. Stueber, who wrote some of the early Masked Rider novels. The others on hand, none of whom are the least bit familiar to me, are Maxwell Smith, Barry Brandon, and Russell Stanton. I suspect there are some decent stories in here, but I don't own a copy and this issue doesn't appear to be on-line, so I can't be sure.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, June 1947

This looks like a Robert Stanley cover to me, although, as always, I could be wrong. But I think I'm correct about there being some very good Western pulp authors inside this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE: D.B. Newton, Philip Ketchum, William R. Cox, John Reese (with two stories, one under his usual John Jo Carpenter pseudonym, one under a name I haven't encountered before, Camford Cheavly), and Robert Turner, along with the lesser known Harold R. Stoakes, Ben T. Young, Jim Chapman, Ray Hayton, and Jimmy Nichols (who was really Jhan Robbins, fairly prolific under both names but little remembered). Like all the Popular Publications Western pulps, 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE was consistently good.

The Spider: The Hangman From Hell - Will Murray

As I’ve mentioned before, I have vivid memories of how I discovered both The Spider and Operator 5: I bought the first two Berkley reprints of The Spider, THE SPIDER STRIKES! and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott, when they were packaged together in a buy-one-get-one-free deal, off the paperback spinner rack at a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where we always stopped when my parents were going to visit relatives in Blanket, Zephyr, and Brownwood. I picked up the Corinth Regency paperback reprint of the Operator 5 novel LEGIONS OF THE DEATH MASTER (by Frederick C. Davis writing under the house name Curtis Steele) off the spinner rack in Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery in downtown Azle. (Several times a week, I drive by the building where Trammell’s used to be. It’s now a Mexican restaurant, and whenever I go in there, I can look over in the bar area and see the exact spot that spinner rack used to stand.)

But I digress, as the saying goes. You know you can’t get a straight review from me without a healthy dose of nostalgia accompanying it. So, to get to why we’re all here today . . . THE HANGMAN FROM HELL is the latest novel from Will Murray teaming up the iconic pulp heroes The Spider and Operator 5, and man, is it good! One of Richard Wentworth’s associates who keeps an eye on crime in Europe for him comes to New York with some important information. But when Wentworth meets the ship he’s traveling on, he finds that his informant has been murdered. Then Wentworth’s assistant Ram Singh is attacked and nearly killed by a giant attacker wielding a hangman’s noose attached to a razor-sharp sickle. Wentworth’s investigation reveals that this attacker, a deadly assassin known as The Hangman, works for the burgeoning political terror group known as the Purple Shirts, and he’s come to the United States for the specific purpose of killing Operator 5, America’s top secret intelligence ace.

Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5’s real name, have crossed paths before and an uneasy truce exists between them. They usually have the same goal but much different methods in achieving it. Operator 5, as a government agent, has to stay within the law (mostly) while Wentworth, as the vigilante known as The Spider, takes the law into his own hands and metes out what he considers justice without hesitation. It's an explosive relationship as both of them try to track down the Hangman and find out the details of the terrible scheme the Purple Shirts are planning to coincide with a big rally in Central Park.

There’s not quite as much breakneck action in this novel as there’s been in previous Spider novels by Murray, but the investigation by our two heroes plays out with compelling urgency, and when violence does erupt, it's packed with the apocalyptic excitement that’s a trademark of the Spider yarns going back to Norvell Page, the principal author of the series back in its pulp days. Page came up with some great murder methods for his villains to use, but Murray goes him one better in this novel: the attack on New York by the Purple Shirts is one of the most ghastly I’ve encountered in pulp adventure fiction. It’s truly creepy stuff, but it’s also very effective in raising the stakes and making the reader root for Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher even more.

I also like the way Murray ties this novel in with several of the original novels from both series. It fits perfectly and naturally and there’s never a sense of it being forced into canon. This is the way to write new novels based on classic pulp series, which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect from Will Murray.

I had a great time reading THE HANGMAN FROM HELL, as you’d expect since I’m a big fan of both The Spider and Operator 5. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year and I give it a very high recommendation. And it’s put me in the mood to read some of the original pulp novels again. Whether I’ll get around to it, we’ll have to wait and see. But if I do, you’ll read the reviews here, as usual.

Halfway House - Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

A while back I read an Ellery Queen novel for the first time in many years and found that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to. My review of that book met with considerable disagreement from EQ fans. That really made me want to read another one in the series because sometimes, to be honest, if I don’t like a book it’s more my fault than the book itself. In looking over the list of EQ novels, I made an interesting discovery: I’d read all of the early novels (the ones with a place name and an object in the title, starting with THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY), and many of the later books from the late Fifties through the Sixties and Seventies, but almost none of the books from the middle period. The first one on the list that I was pretty sure I hadn’t read was HALFWAY HOUSE, from 1936, so I figured that’s the one I would try next and, if I enjoyed it, would continue on from there. (It was suggested in some of the discussion of the previous EQ review that some of the books are best read in order.)

HALFWAY HOUSE opens in Trenton, New Jersey, where Ellery has stopped over on his way back to New York. He runs into an old friend, attorney Bill Angell, who makes plans to travel to New York with Ellery after a brief meeting with his brother-in-law, a traveling salesman. This meeting is supposed to take place at an isolated house on the Delaware River. When Bill gets there, his brother-in-law is dead, stabbed in the heart. Naturally, Bill calls his old friend the great detective to help him find out what happened.

It's difficult to talk much about the plot in this novel without venturing too far into spoiler territory. Let’s just say that someone close to Bill is arrested for the murder, put on trial (in a lengthy sequence that takes up the whole middle section of the book), and convicted. But Bill and, of course, Ellery aren’t convinced that person is actually guilty, so Ellery continues his investigation and eventually uncovers the real killer—but not before pausing to interject a Challenge to the Reader, a regular feature of the EQ series in the early days.

I don’t know what sort of reputation this novel has among Ellery Queen fans, but man, I absolutely had a great time reading it. Ellery hasn’t quite shed all of his Philo Vance-like origins, but such instances are few and far between and not all that annoying. Mostly he’s a very likable protagonist. The story moves along briskly, the plot has plenty of twists and turns, the clues are planted fairly, and the writing is good enough that I was eagerly flipping the pages to find out what happened. And the Challenge to the Reader brought back a lot of good memories from when I was a regular reader of the series decades ago. (For the record, I actually did pick out the killer in this one, and it was mostly deduction, not guesswork.)

I really enjoyed HALFWAY HOUSE and am glad to see that I’m still an Ellery Queen fan. I’m going to continue with the series soon.

The Green God of Terror - Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson

Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was an interesting character in his own right: Military officer, prolific pulp author, and an important player in the creation of the whole danged comic book industry. I’m most interested in him as a pulpster who turned out scores of adventure and Western yarns. Given his background, it’s not surprising that his stories often had a military angle to them. For example, “The Green God of Terror”, his novella that’s one of the featured stories in the November 1933 issue of ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE.

The protagonist of “The Green God of Terror” is army intelligence officer Barry O’Neil, who is stationed in the Philippines. His investigation into the disappearance of a mining engineer leads him to the missing man’s beautiful sister, a fabulous emerald, a sinister Russian, and an isolated island where the Green God of Terror of the title supposedly lurks.

I’ve read several of Wheeler-Nicholson’s stories, but this one may be my favorite so far. He never takes his foot off the gas pedal, racing along from action scene to action scene, from the dark alleys of Manila to several shipboard battles to a final showdown in a hidden island temple.

No matter how over-the-top Wheeler-Nicholson’s plots get, his stories always have an air of authenticity about them. Again, not a surprise considering his background. This one is a very good example of that. His work reminds me a little of H. Bedford-Jones, although his prose isn’t quite as smooth and polished as HB-J’s.

If you’re a fan of pure, breakneck pulp adventure yarns, I give “The Green God of Terror” a very high recommendation. It’s been reprinted in HIGH ADVENTURE#194, a special issue of that long-running publication that also includes several more Wheeler-Nicholson stories. I have a copy and plan to read those stories soon. I’m looking forward to it.

The Faust Award

IAMTW’s 2024 Grandmaster and Faust Award Winner

With great pleasure, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers presents the 2024 Faust Award for Grandmaster to James Reasoner.

A veteran writer with over four decades in the publishing industry, James Reasoner has written more than 350 novels and more than 100 short stories. Although perhaps best known for westerns, he has written across many genres from mystery to fantasy to science fiction. In addition, he’s penned essays, articles and reviews. He has contributed tie-in novels to the following series: Abilene, Longarm, Lone Star, Trailsman, Cody’s Law, Wagons West, Wind River, Stagecoach Station, and Tales from Deadwood. His non‑western tie-ins include The Dead Man series, Kolchak, and Walker Texas Ranger.

This is a tremendous honor, and I’m very pleased and proud to be considered a grandmaster of tie-in fiction. My history with tie-ins as a reader goes back to the Whitman juveniles and Big Little Books of the Fifties and Sixties. I loved reading about Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Leave It to Beaver, Spin and Marty, and all the other TV shows and movies that served as the basis for those books. Those were the first tie-in novels I read, although nobody used that term then. They were just books that I enjoyed.

Then, almost 60 years ago, I went into Buddies’ Grocery and picked up an Ace paperback called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., written by somebody named Michael Avallone. From that point on, I picked up everything I could find by Avallone, and many of them were tie-in novels and movie novelizations. The Get Smart novels by William Johnston were also early favorites. I couldn’t tell you how many tie-in books I read over the years, but there were a lot.

As a writer, I had been in the business for only a little more than a year when Sam Merwin Jr., the editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, who had been buying short stories from me, asked me to try my hand at one of the Mike Shayne novellas that were published in the magazine under the house-name Brett Halliday. As Sam put it, “they run 20,000 words and pay a flat, lousy $300.” Three hundred bucks didn’t seem so lousy to me, so I told him, sure, I’d love to, and he sent me a copy of the Mike Shayne bible, which he had put together for the series’ writers. I didn’t really need it; I’d been reading the original Mike Shayne novels by Davis Dresser (the original Brett Halliday) for years and was a big fan of the series.

Sam also said for me not to worry too much about the details, just to get the story down and he’d fix anything I got wrong. As far as I could tell when I compared the published story (“Death in Xanadu”, MSMM, December 1978) with my original, he changed one word in the manuscript.

That was my first try at writing characters and settings created by other authors, and I knew right away that I had a knack for it. Since then, series work has made up the vast majority of my writing. Some highlights: Being asked to write a couple of Lone Ranger stories. The Ranger was probably my first hero. I never missed the TV show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Almost as exciting was writing a Green Hornet story. Inside the grown man typing that story was the eight-year-old kid who stayed up ‘way past his bedtime sneak-listening on a transister radio to syndicated reruns of the radio shows featuring the Green Hornet and the Lone Rangers. (The Shadow was in that same package and I’ve never written a Shadow story, but maybe one of these days.) I never missed an episode of Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and writing a Kolchak story was a great opportunity. One day my editor at Berkley called and asked if I was familiar with the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. I answered honestly that not only had I seen every episode of the series, I could sing the theme song. Luckily, I didn’t have to sing, but within minutes I was on a conference call with Chuck Norris’s brother Aaron and a couple of CBS executives in New York, and I had the job of writing three novels based on the series. Those of you who have worked on tie-in projects for properties that you love as a fan know how much pure fun it can be.

My thanks to everyone in the IAMTW. I can’t express how much I appreciate this award, but I’m truly grateful for it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sinister Stories, March 1940

SINISTER STORIES was the shortest-lived of Popular Publications' Weird Menace pulps, lasting only three issues in 1940. All three issues recycled covers from TERROR TALES. This one is particularly racy. I don't know the artist. The stories were all new, as far as I can tell. The best-known authors in this issue, at least these days, are Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer) and Robert Leslie Bellem. Some of the others were familiar names to Weird Menace fans, though, such as Donald Dale (Mary Dale Buckner) and Francis James (James A. Goldthwaite), while Raymond Whetstone, William Brailsford, and Richard G. Huzarski are all pretty obscure, at least to me. SINISTER STORIES came along at the tail-end of the Weird Menace era, or it might have lasted longer. It certainly doesn't look like a bad pulp for that genre.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, October 1942

Wanted posters show up a lot on Western pulp covers. Usually, the outlaw depicted on the poster is standing there either shooting or about to shoot. You can't really tell if the fellow on the cover of this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES is also the one on the reward dodger, but there's a good chance he is. There are stories by some fine Western pulpsters in this issue: Philip Ketchum, William Heuman, Thomas Thompson, and Frank Bonham. Other well-known authors in this one include Joe Austell Small, R.S. Lerch, John Wilstach (better known for his adventure yarns in ARGOSY and elsewhere), Carl G. Hodges (best remembered for his mystery stories and novels), and Edwin K. Sloat. Then there are the ones I'm not familiar with--P.J. Delanoye, Roy B. Angell, and W.W. Montgomery--and house names Ray P. Shotwell and Lance Kermit. I'm going to name the hero in a Western novel Lance Kermit one of these days. I'm sure this is a good issue since the Popular Publications Western pulps were consistently top-notch.

UPDATE: As Paul Herman points out in the comments, this hombre is wearing a lawman's star, so he's not the outlaw on the wanted poster. And since there's powdersmoke coming from the barrel of his gun, I reckon we can figure he just ventilated the owlhoot in question. Dadgum it, I don't know how I missed that! Thanks, Paul.

Hell-Bent for Hollywood - Fred Olen Ray

I haven’t seen all that many of Fred Olen Ray’s movies, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen that he wrote and/or directed. I first became aware of his work in the mid-Eighties when I worked at Fort Worth Books & Video and rented out his action film ARMED RESPONSE (starring David Carradine and Lee Van Cleef) many, many times. It was a popular movie for us.

Ray has just published his autobiography, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD. I always enjoy reading about creative people, so I gave it a try. He doesn’t pull many punches in telling about his life, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Florida to his early desire to be a filmmaker to the many detours along the way to achieving his dream. It’s a compelling tale that Ray spins in straightforward, no-nonsense prose.

I especially enjoyed the sections where Ray talks about our mutual friend Terrell Lee Lankford, who wrote the scripts for several of Ray’s movies over the years. Lankford was a regular commenter here in the early days of this blog and is the author of several excellent crime novels including EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, BLONDE LIGHTNING, and ANGRY MOON. If you haven’t read his books, you really should.

But to get back to Ray, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is a wonderful book. I had a very hard time putting it down. If you want insights into filmmaking and fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories about many legendary Hollywood figures, you’ll find plenty of that in the book, along with the inspiring narrative of Ray’s own life. I have a feeling he might scoff at hearing himself described as inspiring, but that’s the way it seems to me. HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available in trade paperback and e-book editions.

Manville Moon #6: Five O'Clock Shroud - Richard Deming

“Five O’Clock Shroud” is the sixth novella about Richard Deming’s one-legged private detective Manville Moon. It appeared originally in the November 1950 issue of BLACK MASK DETECTIVE and was featured on the usual fine cover by Norman Saunders.

This one has a bit more complicated plot than the previous story in the series. Moon is hired by a wealthy supporter of a politician who is running for mayor as a reform candidate. Unfortunately, it appears that the so-called reformer is actually the big boss of the ring controlling the city’s gambling. Moon even turns up proof of that. And then the murders start, and Moon finds himself targeted for death, as well as being the target of some advances from a beautiful married woman.

Deming does a good job with the political intrigue even though it’s not that difficult to figure out what’s really going on. I’ve become quite fond of Manville Moon as a character. There’s a superb scene in which he’s taken for a ride by three killers, and even though the reader knows he’s going to survive, Deming’s writing generates some genuine suspense. Moon’s escape is pretty clever, too.

If you’re a fan of hardboiled private eye tales, this is a very entertaining series. “Five O’Clock Shroud” is available on Amazon as an inexpensive e-book. I had a fine time reading it and it gets a solid recommendation from me.

Elak of Atlantis - Henry Kuttner

I’ve been meaning to read Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis stories for a long time now, and I’m getting to the age where I’m feeling a bit more urgency about getting around to the things I want to do. Also, there are collections of new Elak stories by Adrian Cole coming out, and I want to give them a try, but I thought I ought to read the originals first. Also, I’m a sucker for Atlantis stories, and Kuttner appears to have done a pretty good job of world-building in this four story series, originally published in the iconic pulp WEIRD TALES.

The saga gets underway with the novella “Thunder in the Dawn”, the longest of Kuttner’s Elak stories that was serialized in the May and June 1938 issues of WEIRD TALES. It introduces us to Elak, a lean adventurer who favors a rapier rather than a broadsword, and his rotund sidekick/comedy relief Lycon. Elak is actually the stepson of the former rule of one of Atlantis’s northern kingdoms who killed his stepfather in a duel and fled, leaving his stepbrother to take over the throne. Elak and Lycon encounter a druid priest named Dalan, who brings the news that Elak’s stepbrother has been imprisoned by an evil wizard and Vikings are besieging his homeland. Who better to travel north, unite the feuding tribes, battle the Vikings, and rescue the imprisoned king than Elak?

Nobody, of course. With a little reluctance, Elak takes up the quest. Along the way wait adventures and beautiful women and epic battles against enemies both human and sorcerous. Kuttner really packs a lot of plot and incident into this yarn, a novel’s worth despite its novella length, and it’s all very fast-paced and well-written. This is an exciting and very satisfying debut for the series.

The short story “Spawn of Dagon” appears the very next month in the July 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES and even makes the cover. There’s very little reference to the preceding story and Dalan the Druid doesn’t appear. Elak and Lycon are back to being drifting adventurers. They get involved in some political intrigue and are hired to kill a wizard and destroy the source of his power. Of course, the situation doesn’t turn out to be exactly what our two heroes believe it is. Even though I’m not the biggest fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, I recognized the name Dagon right away, and sure enough, the boys encounter some of HPL’s fish-people and there’s talk of the Elder Gods. This story has a good deal of well-written action, but after the epic scale and grand, colorful concepts of the debut novella, I found it a little disappointing. Not bad, mind you, but a very standard sword and sorcery adventure yarn enlivened a bit by the presence of the fish-people.

“Beyond the Phoenix”, from the October 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES, once again finds Elak and Lycon involved in political intrigue, but this time they’re trying to protect a king from a deadly rival, and when they fail in that, the dying monarch charges them with the job of saving his daughter and delivering his body to the god he worships. This involves a trip on an underground river reminiscent of the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series, THE GODS OF MARS. I have to wonder if Kuttner read Burroughs. It certainly seems possible. I also wonder if C.L. Moore had a hand in this story, as well as the previous one. By 1938, Kuttner and Moore knew each other and had even collaborated on one story, “Quest of the Starstone” in the November 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES. If the Elak stories had come out after they were married and collaborating on a regular basis, I would have been confident that Moore wrote all the colorful, vividly descriptive passages. But since I’ve never seen any speculation about her involvement, at least as far as I recall, I’ll just assume that being a fan of her work had an influence on Kuttner as he was writing these yarns. At any rate, “Beyond the Phoenix” is a good story with plenty of action.

The fourth and final Elak story by Kuttner is the novelette “Dragon Moon” from the January 1941 issue of WEIRD TALES. This one is very reminiscent of “Thunder in the Dawn”, the tale that launched the series. Once again Elak and Lycon are summoned northward to Cyrena, Elak’s homeland, by Dalan the Druid, who tells them that Elak’s stepbrother the king was possessed by some sort of evil entity and killed himself rather than give in to it. That mystical being has now possessed the king of a neighboring country and plans to conquer Cyrena by force. Being without a king, the realm has no chance of defeating its enemies. Elak is the only one who can save the day, and he can only do that by reclaiming the birthright he doesn’t want. This is another epic yarn with several adventures along the way before the final showdown, which is a huge, very well-written battle. I’ve seen comparisons between this story and Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, and maybe Kuttner was inspired by Howard’s only novel-length adventure of Conan, but they’re very different stories because Conan and Elak are very different characters. “Dragon Moon” isn’t the equal of THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, but I enjoyed it very much anyway. It’s my favorite story of the four about Elak written by Kuttner.

Overall, I really like this collection. The writing is excellent, it’s full of colorful settings and intriguing concepts, and the action is great. If you’re a sword and sorcery fan, I give ELAK OF ATLANTIS a very high recommendation. And the world Kuttner creates in these stories is interesting enough that I’m looking forward to seeing what Adrian Cole does with the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, April 20, 1940

A dramatic cover by Rudolph Belarski graces this issue of ARGOSY. I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that snakes show up fairly often in Belarski's covers. I may have to investigate this. As always, there are some excellent writers in this issue: Theodore Roscoe, Charles Marquis Warren, Jack Byrne, Chandler Whipple, Kenneth Perkins, and one I'm not familiar with, Robert W. Cochran. Although the serials can drive a reader crazy, ARGOSY was certainly one of the great pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, August 1953

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. The background looks like A. Leslie Ross’s work to me, but the figures don’t. Whoever painted it, I think it’s a fairly effective cover. Since it was a Columbia pulp, REAL WESTERN STORIES had a reputation as a low-budget production, but editor Robert W. Lowndes regularly turned out enjoyable magazines, and I was eager to find out if this issue was one of them.

A friend of mine is a fan of Seven Anderton’s work, and based on his recommendation I’ve read several of Anderton’s stories over the years. His novella “Cyclone in Petticoats” leads off this issue. It opens with a determined young woman named Ruth Horn arriving from the East in the Western town where her uncle owns the bank. He’s her last living relative, or so she thinks. Actually, the bank was robbed and her uncle was killed a short time before she got there. During the journey, she’s made the acquaintance of veterinarian “Bones” Egan, who fills her in on the troubles in the area brought on a corrupt banker and a crooked cattleman, and Ruth decides to stick around, run the bank, and break the hold that the two villains have on the town and the basin where it’s located.

This is a very well-written story with lots of good dialogue, interesting characters, and a well-handled romance between Ruth and Egan. Anderton keeps things moving along at a nice pace. What there’s a shortage of is action. The story is almost over before anybody burns any powder. The big showdown/battle is pretty good, mind you. I enjoyed “Cyclone in Petticoats” mostly because of Anderton’s excellent prose.

If you’ve never read any of Lon Williams’ stories about Deputy Lee Winters . . . well, there’s really nothing else in the Western pulps like this lengthy series. Winters is always running into bizarre situations, often with a hint, or more than a hint, of the supernatural. Sometimes, as in “A Desert Hippocrates”, the story in this issue, the threat facing Winters is just weird. The plot involves a pair of British doctors in the Old West performing some rather odd surgeries. Williams’ work has a very distinctive voice, which I like, but I’ve found the Lee Winters series to be hit and miss for me, and probably more misses than hits. This one is an average entry, mildly entertaining, but somehow it doesn’t quite work.

Lee Floren makes his first of two appearances in this issue with the short story “A Trap for a Skunk”, under the pseudonym Lew Smith. I’m not a big fan of Floren’s work, but his stories usually move along at a nice clip and this one is no exception. The plot concerns a couple of old-timers who have to take drastic action to save a young friend of theirs from the cattle baron who’s plotting to kill him. This isn’t a bad yarn, but I thought it was sorely lacking one final twist that it needed. The ending is really flat.

A.A. Baker worked for Grayhound Bus Lines and wrote Western novels and short stories on the side, publishing steadily but never achieving much fame in the genre. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before, but his short story in this issue, “Abel Cain Strikes Back”, is pretty good. Abel Cain is a frontier judge keeping law and order in a California mining boomtown. In this yarn, a mob storms the jail not to lynch a prisoner but to free him so that he can lead his rescuers to a new gold strike. Baker throws a nice twist into the mix and comes up with an entertaining story featuring good characters and some nice action. Baker wrote more than thirty Abel Cain stories between 1948 and 1959, and I wouldn’t mind reading more of them.

Richard Brister wrote hundreds of Western, detective, and sports stories for the pulps as well as a dozen or so Western novels. His short story in this issue, “Learn and Live”, concerns an encounter between a notorious outlaw and the consumptive doctor who patches up a bullet wound for him. It’s well-written and clever, a pretty good yarn.

“Boothill Double-Cross” is by Crag Martin, an author about whom I know absolutely nothing except that he published nine stories in various Western pulps in the early Fifties. This one is about a young sheriff trying to clear the name of a friend of his who has been accused of robbing the local bank. It’s a very predictable story with nothing that stands out about the writing or the plot. Average at best, partially redeemed by some decent action at the end.

“The Lie” is by Fred Landreth, his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me wonder if the name was a one-time pseudonym. I don’t know about that, but this short-short about a youngster visiting the camp of two notorious outlaws, bent on taking up a career as an owlhoot himself, is well-written. There’s not much to it, but I enjoyed it.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of Lee Floren’s work, mostly because it’s so inconsistent. I think his early novels about drifting adventurers Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe are my favorites of what I’ve read by him. Floren wrote another long-running series about two-fisted jurist Judge Lemanuel Bates and his sidekick, postmaster Tobacco Jones. More than two dozen of these yarns were published in various pulps. Floren’s novelette in this issue, “Loco Lead”, is the next to last Judge Bates story in the pulps, although he would continue to write novels about the character throughout the Sixties. This is a pretty good one featuring a would-be killer employing an unusual method in an attempt to commit murder. The plot is solid, there’s some nice action, and I found Judge Bates and Tobacco Jones to be likable protagonists. The only sign of Floren’s frequent carelessness is that one of the characters changes names almost paragraph to paragraph, sometimes called Bart Smith and sometimes Luke Smith. I suppose Stan Lee would have explained that by saying that his full name is Barton Lucas Smith. Also, Lowndes should have caught that, but I doubt that he did much diligent line editing on these stories. I don’t recall ever reading any of the stories in this series before, but based on “Loco Lead”, I wouldn’t hesitate to try another one. I might even check and see if I have any of Floren’s Judges Bates novels on my shelves.

Overall, I’d say this is a very average issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES. The best story is Seven Anderton’s novella, which is very good although I thought it could be better. Lee Floren surprised me by contributing my second-favorite story in this issue with “Loco Lead”, followed by A.A. Baker with a tale about another frontier judge, Abel Cain. The other stories are all readable with varying degrees of entertainment value. If you’re inclined to check out any of these stories for yourself, you can find the entire issue on-line here.

One Good Deed - David Baldacci

Aloysius Archer is a combat veteran of World War II and also an ex-con who was sent to prison for a crime he was tricked into. When he’s released on parole in 1949, he winds up in Poca City, a small city in an unidentified Western state that’s probably Colorado, based on geographic clues in David Baldacci’s novel ONE GOOD DEED. Although Archer is supposed to stay out of trouble, he soon finds himself working for a rich local businessman, hired to collect a debt from the guy’s mortal enemy. Not only that, but Archer gets involved with the rich man’s beautiful mistress, who just happens to be the daughter of the man who owes the debt. Add a beautiful female parole officer with a deadly background of her own into the mix, and then a murder where it looks like Archer has been set up to be the fall guy, and you have the makings of a tough, terse Gold Medal-type novel, which is exactly what I think perennial bestseller Baldacci was trying to write in ONE GOOD DEED.

This trend continues with more murders, convoluted criminal schemes, the spectre of past crimes haunting the present, and some excellent action scenes. The problem is that Harry Whittington or Day Keene or Charles Williams would have spun this same yarn in 160 or 144 or even 128 pages, and David Baldacci takes 464 pages to tell his story.

I suspect there are two reasons for this: Baldacci’s publishers would have balked if he’d turned in a 40,000-50,000 word manuscript, and Baldacci, who has been writing fat contemporary thrillers for more than two decades (and very successfully, I might add) just doesn’t know how to write shorter books. This one could have been trimmed considerably by just not describing in detail every item of clothing and every piece of furniture, sometimes more than once.

But other than the length, which I really shouldn’t be complaining about because I knew it was that long when I started it—and it’s really not fair to judge books written today by the standards of books written 70 or more years ago (and vice versa)—how was it? Well, I read the whole thing and didn’t consider stopping (skimming did enter my mind a time or two, but I didn’t do it), so I’d have to say I liked it fairly well. Yes, it’s too long. Yes, there are some anachronisms. No, Baldacci doesn’t even come close to playing fair with the reader where the solution to the mystery is concerned. But the plot is interesting, the characters are good, and Archer is a great protagonist, smart and tough enough to untangle everything but far from a superman like Jack Reacher. I really liked the guy. Everything wraps up in a long, effective courtroom scene a little reminiscent of a Perry Mason novel.

There are two more novels, so far, about Aloysius Archer. Did I enjoy ONE GOOD DEED enough to read them, too? The jury is still out on that (no pun intended), but honestly, I’m leaning toward giving the second one a try. If I do, I’m sure you’ll read about it here.

ONE GOOD DEED Kindle Hardcover Paperback

Happy Fourth of July

This is a bit of a somber cover by Robert Fuqua, but modern life has gotten a bit somber, hasn't it? On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in carrying on, since we can't really do anything else. I do hope it's an enjoyable day for those of you celebrating in the United States. My own low-key plans include getting some writing done and maybe watching a few fireworks from our front porch tonight, if the mosquitoes aren't too bad. By the way, "Frank Patton", the author of that cover story, was a house-name. Authorship of this one has been attributed to AMAZING STORIES editor Raymond A. Palmer.

20 Years of Rough Edges

On Saturday, July 3, 2004, I published my first post on this blog. Here's how I started it:

Following the example of my friends Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, I've decided to start a blog. I may not post every day, and what gets posted here may be pretty haphazard sometimes, but I intend to talk mostly about what I'm reading and sometimes writing, as well as the events in my life I don't deem too boring. (Whether the readers find it too boring is, of course, up to them.) Don't expect anything about politics or religion.

We've lost Bill and Ed since then, of course, Ed in 2016 and Bill in 2018, and I still catch myself thinking now and then that I'm going to tell them about something I read or ask them about some book or author. I've never known two finer men than those two, and their inspiring me to start this blog is only one of the very, very many things for which I'm thankful to them.

Over the years, Rough Edges has become primarily a book review blog, although my own writing sneaks in now and then, as well as some real-life stuff. But still no politics or religion.

Here's how I ended that first post:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a professional writer and have been since 1976. Yesterday I finished my 165th novel, so I'm sort of between projects at the moment. I have to do some research and come up with a proposal for a historical novel, and then the next thing on the schedule is a house-name Western novel. I have work lined up through the spring of '05, which in the world of freelance fiction writing is considered pretty good job security. Of course, it could all come to a crashing halt after that.

That's enough to start this off. Feel free to comment if the mood strikes you.

The writing didn't come to a crashing halt. I'm currently working on my 425th novel. That means I've written 260 novels (or 61% of my novel output) since starting this blog. I don't think there's any connection, but I like playing with numbers. I have house-name work lined up through the end of 2025 and plan to continue writing some under my own name, too, assuming I stay sane enough to do it. And this blog will continue, too. As I said about the WesternPulps group a few months ago, it's a labor of love and I intend to keep on with it as long as I'm capable of doing so, even if it gets to the point where I'm just posting to myself.

My sincere thanks to all of you who have visited, whether you're new here or have been reading since 2004, and everything in between. Your comments and emails and just knowing that you're out there have meant a great deal to me.

The Other Woman - Charles Burgess

As we all know, many of the soft-core sex novels published in the Fifties and Sixties were actually crime or mystery novels in disguise. That’s certainly true of Charles Burgess’s THE OTHER WOMAN, published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and about to be reprinted by Black Gat Books.

The narrator/protagonist of this one is Neil Cowan, a real estate agent in a small city on the west coast of Florida. Neil gets involved in a deal to sell a large piece of land to a wealthy developer who’s going to put houses all over it. In the process of arranging this, Neil meets the developer’s wife Emmaline, a blonde who is the most beautiful woman Neil has ever seen. He’s happily married with a nice sexy wife and a small child, but he falls for Emmaline despite that and soon they’re having a torrid affair, which continues until, in true noir novel fashion, Emmaline suggests what a good life they’d have if her husband, who’s considerably older than her, was dead. And who better to hurry him along off this mortal coil than Neil?

From this point on, THE OTHER WOMAN veers off into something a bit less like a Gold Medal novel. Even though he’s obsessed with Emmaline, Neil isn’t just about to commit murder for her. Unfortunately, her husband winds up dead anyway, and Neil is the only potential suspect who doesn’t have a solid alibi. When one of the local police detectives learns of the affair between Neil and Emmaline, he’s convinced that Neil is the killer and goes after him doggedly, looking for proof—proof that the actual murderer is willing to provide to pull the frame tighter around Neil. In order to save himself, he’ll have to uncover the real killer.

I’d never heard of Charles Burgess, but the Florida setting and the excellent writing had me suspecting that Burgess was a previously unknown pseudonym for Day Keene or Harry Whittington or Talmage Powell. The book doesn’t really read like the work of any of those authors, however, and a bit of subsequent investigation turns up the fact that Burgess wrote another hardboiled novel called BACKFIRE, apparently published only in Australia. I don’t think he was Australian, though. He had at least one story in MANHUNT in the late Fifties, and he wrote a number of true crime stories for various detective magazines. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably his real name, and he might well have been a reporter since many of them wrote those true crime yarns as a sideline. But that’s purely guesswork on my part.

As for THE OTHER WOMAN, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although the affair between Neil and Emmaline is what the whole plot hinges on, there’s really not much sex in the book, only a few scenes that don’t go on very long. I’m a little surprised Beacon published it. It’s more of a solid mystery novel with a reasonably clever solution. It reads very much as if Burgess wrote it intending to try to sell it to Gold Medal or Ace, and when it didn’t click at one of those houses, he sexed it up a little and sent it to Beacon. We’ll never know if that’s true, of course, but you can tell from that description what sort of book this is. I liked it, and if you’re a fan of noirish, hardboiled mysteries, I think THE OTHER WOMAN is well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crack Detective Stories, November 1945

This issue of CRACK DETECTIVE STORIES has a nice cover by Irene Endris, one of several female pulp cover artists I know of. Inside are stories by T.W. Ford (probably best remembered as a Western author although he wrote a little bit of everything in the pulps), Talmage Powell, Emil Petaja (best known as a science fiction author), Rex Whitechurch, Marcus Lyons (who was really James Blish, definitely well-known as a science fiction author), and house-names Cliff Campbell and Grant Lane. As usual with a pulp produced on a very small budget by editor Robert W. Lowndes, this is probably better than it has any right to be. I haven't read it, but if you want to check it out, the whole issue can be found here.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Romances, March 1955

A very late issue of this long-running pulp that debuted in 1937. The cover is by Frank McCarthy, an artist I associate more with paperback covers. The pulp era may have been winding down, but there are new stories in this issue by such long-time pulpsters as Norman Daniels, Arthur Lawson, Theodore J. Roemer, and Kenneth L. Sinclair, as well as a reprint by the prolific Western romance author Isabel Stewart Way. Pretty close to a last gasp (there was only one more issue of RANGELAND ROMANCES after this one) but I'll bet it was fairly entertaining.

Under the Lake - Stuart Woods

Quite a while back, prompted by a recommendation from Bill Crider (I think), I went on a little Stuart Woods binge and read maybe a dozen of his novels over a couple of years. I would read one from time to time after that, but Woods began concentrating most of his efforts on lawyer Stone Barrington, a character I really didn’t care for, so I stopped reading him altogether.

But I remember always intending to get around to one of Woods’ early novels I’d heard quite a bit about, the Southern Gothic/thriller UNDER THE LAKE. The e-book edition of it was on sale recently, so I thought, why not?

The protagonist of this novel, first published in 1987, is journalist/columnist John Howell, who has left the newspaper business after winning the Pulitzer Prize for a true crime book he wrote. Against his better judgment, he takes on the job of ghostwriting the autobiography of an ambitious businessman/politician. To accomplish this task, he holes up in a rustic cabin owned by his brother-in-law on a picturesque lake in the north Georgia mountains.

In what will come as no surprise to most readers, many of the inhabitants of the local area are eccentric and colorful and some of them are vaguely sinister. Odd things begin to happen. Howell has visions and is visited by what seem to be ghosts. He gets hints of hidden secrets and long-ago crimes that center on the lake next to the cabin. Can Howell uncover the truth without endangering his own life and the lives of people he’s come to care about?

UNDER THE LAKE is a very slow burn, but Woods somehow kept me turning the digital pages anyway. I always thought that his prose was often flat and clumsy in places, but he had that indefinable storytelling ability. This one actually seems a little better written than most of the others of his that I’ve read.

Then, after that lengthy build-up, there’s an avalanche of plot twists and revelations in the last 40 or 50 pages. I’ve mentioned before that when Livia and I are watching some movie or TV show that begins to stretch credibility, one of us usually makes the sarcastic comment, “Sure, why not?” UNDER THE LAKE reaches the “Sure, why not?” point in the late going. And yet, I have to admit I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s different from what I usually read, it’s pretty well-done, and it might be enough to get me to read some of his other early books that I never got around to. We’ll see.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Something For Cat - Henry Mancini

I came across this video a few months ago and must have played it a hundred times since then. The animation is cute and appeals to my fondness for the Sixties, but I usually just listen to the music, which really resonates with me. It's from the soundtrack of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, and I've seen that movie so I must have heard the song in it, but I don't recall it from that at all. Instead, to me it sounds like it should have been the theme song from an early Sixties private eye TV series, and I can almost see the opening montage in my head as I listen to the music. I was a huge fan of PETER GUNN and 77 SUNSET STRIP and all the others from that era, and this would have fit right in. One of these days I might just write something like that. It would be a pretty limited market, but it sure would be fun.

Hands Beyond the Grave - Henry Treat Sperry

I’ve gotten interested in the obscure pulp author Henry Treat Sperry, probably because when I looked him up on the Fictionmags Index, I noticed something odd. His first published story was “Hands Beyond the Grave” in the September 1934 issue of TERROR TALES, the first issue of that iconic Weird Menace pulp. Sperry’s second story, though, was “Posies for the Widdy” in the First December Number, 1934, of RANCH ROMANCES. Anybody who can go directly from TERROR TALES to RANCH ROMANCES is my kind of writer!

I don’t have that issue of RANCH ROMANCES, but I do have the facsimile reprint edition of that TERROR TALES published by Steeger Books, so I went ahead and read Sperry's story. It starts off as if Sperry was influenced to a certain extent by H.P. Lovecraft. The narrator of the story is a well-to-do young New Englander named Robert Mercer, who awakens one night to find a sinister, amorphous shape lurking at the foot of his bed. There’s lot of “nameless dread”, “unspeakable terror”, and “too horrified to move”. But then, unlike most of Lovecraft’s protagonists, Sperry has his hero bound out of bed, grab an ornamental javelin off the wall, and attack the lurking presence. It doesn’t do much good, of course: the thing vanishes with an explosion that leaves Mercer senseless. He calls a buddy of his, a doctor who’s also a psychical researcher, and with the help of an elderly female medium, they set out to find out what it is that’s haunting Mercer and why.

That early battle is the high point of the action in this story, which goes back to brooding and being scared, as well as a murder and finally an explanation of sorts. Honestly, I thought this yarn cried out for one more twist that never came, but for a debut story, it’s well-written and flows well, even though you wouldn’t exactly call it fast-paced. More action and dialogue than HPL, though.

I haven’t been able to find out much about Henry Treat Sperry. He was born in 1903 and died in 1938 at age 35. He was married and worked as an assistant editor at Popular Publications, helping with several of the pulps to which he sold stories. His writing career lasted only four years, but during that time he published almost 70 stories, most of them Weird Menace but with a scattering of detective and G-Man yarns, a few Western romances, and even an air-war story or two. One of his Western romances was called “Locoed Cowgirl” (RANCH ROMANCES, First February Number, 1938). I’m sure it was innocent enough, but I can’t help but think that would be a good title for a Weird Menace/Western romance crossover about a seemingly demonically possessed cowgirl. I’d read that.

In the meantime, the other stories in the first issue of TERROR TALES look great, and I plan to read them, too. That facsimile reprint is available on Amazon or directly from the Steeger Books website.

The Trail of Death - Peter Henry Morland/Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

“The Trail of Death”, which appeared in the May 21, 1932 issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE under the pseudonym Peter Henry Morland, is the third and final novella to feature Jim Tyler, the daring gunman and adventurer also known as The Wolf. It’s a good wrap-up to the series with numerous references back to the previous two stories.

After battling Mexican bandits El Tigre and Miguel Cambista separately in the first two stories, in this yarn the two villains team up to seek their vengeance on Jim Tyler. Fate lends them a hand, as one of Tyler’s friends whom he had previously rescued from the clutches of El Tigre, ventures south of the border again because he’s in love with a beautiful señorita. El Tigre and Cambista kidnap him, knowing that when Tyler gets word of his friend’s plight, he will come to their stronghold to try to save him, and then they’ll have Tyler right where they want him!

Of course, things don’t necessarily work out the way the two schemers hope they will. Plenty of action and derring-do ensue as Tyler sets out to foil their evil plan.

It all makes for an exciting, well-written tale that has a satisfying ending. Frederick Faust leaves the door open for more adventures of Jim Tyler, but as far as I know, there weren’t any. All three stories were reprinted under the Max Brand name in the collection DON DIABLO, a puzzling title since there’s absolutely no reference in any of the stories to a character known by that name. The e-book edition of that collection is still available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, and used copies of the print editions are pretty easy to come by. Also worth noting is that this third story appeared under the title “Greaser Trail” when it was published in WESTERN STORY. Evidently “The Trail of Death” was Faust’s original title for it, and somebody changed it back to that for its reprint appearance.

DON DIABLO is a really solid collection. I’m a little surprised it wasn’t published as a fix-up novel back in the Fifties or Sixties, as so many of Faust’s series of linked novellas were. If you’re a Max Brand fan and haven’t read this one, it’s well worth your time.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 12 Adventure Stories, August 1939

Popular Publications had 10 STORY WESTERN and FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES. Ace Magazines Inc. almost split the difference with 12 ADVENTURE STORIES, a short-lived (five issues) pulp that sported excellent covers by Norman Saunders and stories by a horde of house names. The featured author in this issue, Alexis Rossoff, was a real guy who wrote scores of stories for various adventure, detective, sports, and air-war pulps. The only other author in this one who's not known to be a house name is Alonzo Kirby, and since this is his only credit in the Fictionmags Index, he may well be fictional, too. For the record, the other by-lines in this issue are Paul Adams, Eric Lennox, Rexton Archer, Arthur Flint, Cliff Howe, Chester Brant, Leon Dupont, Ronald Flagg, Clint Douglas, and John Gregory. So there's really no way of knowing who wrote these stories. Given that Ace was considered a salvage market, there's a good chance some or even all of them are stories that were rejected by ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, BLUE BOOK, and SHORT STORIES. But that doesn't necessarily make them bad yarns. I've read plenty of good stories in various Ace pulps.