Review: The Case of the Lame Canary - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY is the 11^th novel in the Perry Mason series, published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1937 and reprinted many times in paperback since then. It starts off, as so many of the novels do, with something odd catching Perry Mason’s interest. A beautiful young woman carrying a canary in a cage visits Mason’s office and tries to hire him to represent her sister in a divorce action. The sister’s husband, you see, is kind of a shady character and has embezzled quite a bit of money from his wife. He’s also threatened to kill her, and that’s why the wife’s sister has the canary. She’s afraid her jerk of a brother-in-law might hurt it. Mason first refuses to take the case. He doesn’t do divorce work, he states flatly. But then he notices that the canary has a sore foot, or claw or talon or whatever you call it, and that intrigues him enough to make him agree to look into the matter.

By now you’re thinking the same thing I was: there’s a lot more to this story than what Mason’s potential client is telling him. Somebody’s going to wind up being murdered, and that canary will turn out to be important. That’s exactly what happens, of course, and we’d all be disappointed if it didn’t. Things get very complicated before the end, as they always do in a novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, but the whole thing revolves around a car wreck, multiple impersonations, a flying trip to Reno, and two, count ‘em, two inquests instead of an actual trial scene.

Since this is one of the novels from the Thirties, Mason is still more hardboiled than he would be in later decades and actually punches a guy and knocks him down. Paul Drake has some pretty funny banter in places, and the whole Perry/Della/Paul dynamic is in good form. Della gets a little tiresome with her constantly badgering Mason to leave the murders behind and take an around-the-world cruise with her, but she also comes through when Mason needs her to pull a stunt that could land her in trouble with the law.

I actually spotted the vital clue and figured out who the killer was pretty early on, which is rare for me when it comes to reading this series. I never figured out the motivation behind everything, though, and I have to admit, the clues were right there in plain sight. Still, I was proud of myself for knowing who the killer was. After that revelation, in an annoying final chapter that could have been left off the book, Gardner makes a rare misstep. This is the book where Mason proposes to Della Street, and it’s no gimmick to trap a killer, it’s the real thing. Thankfully, she turns him down. But even so, none of that rang true to me where these characters are concerned. It’s not enough of a problem to ruin the book or anything like that, but I wish he hadn’t done it.

All that said, I enjoyed THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY. I’ve been reading this series for 60 years now, and I’ve never read one I didn’t enjoy. I expect to continue reading one now and then for as long as I’m around.

Review: Apache Crossing - Will Ermine (Harry Sinclair Drago)

I admit, one reason I bought this book is because of the great Sam Cherry cover, which first appeared on the August 1949 issue of the pulp GIANT WESTERN. But also, I knew that Will Ermine, the author of APACHE CROSSING, was really Harry Sinclair Drago, a prolific and popular author of Western stories and novels under his own name as well as his best-known pseudonym Bliss Lomax, in addition to the novels he wrote as Will Ermine. I’ve read Drago’s work numerous times in the past and always enjoyed it, so I expected to like APACHE CROSSING.

The protagonist is a young cowboy named Pat Ritchie who breaks his leg while on a cattle drive through Indian Territory. His outfit has to leave him behind, and he winds up recuperating while staying with a gang of mostly sympathetic outlaws led by a frontier philosopher known as Little Bill Guthrie. Little Bill knows that Pat is tempted to remain with the gang once his leg is healed, but the boss outlaw doesn’t want the young cowboy to start riding the owlhoot trail. He tries to send Pat away, but a chance for a lucrative bank robbery comes up and the rest of the gang wants to use Pat to hold some horses in reserve for the getaway. He wouldn’t participate in the actual holdup, but in the eyes of the law he would still be an outlaw.

Of course, things don’t go as planned. There’s a big shootout in town and the gang has to scatter. Pat makes his way to Arizona, goes to work on a ranch there, falls in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, and hopes that his shady past will never catch up to him. I think we all know how that’s going to turn out. Throw in some rustlers plaguing the ranch, too, and you’ve got the makings of a riproaring traditional Western novel.

By the time this novel was published originally by Doubleday in 1950, Harry Sinclair Drago was already an old-timer, having started writing Westerns for the pulps in the early Twenties. Not surprisingly, that causes it to have a bit of an old-fashioned feel to it, rather than the hardboiled grittiness you find in a lot of post-war Westerns. Pat Ritchie is about as clean-cut and stalwart a hero as you’ll ever see, always trying to do the decent and honorable thing even when he’s hanging around with a bunch of owlhoots. Those outlaws, especially their leader Little Bill Guthrie, are the only characters in this book with any moral complexity. Drago’s portrayal of Little Bill is excellent. He was also a historian and produced several well-regarded volumes of Western non-fiction, and that gives his fiction a feeling of authenticity and realism.

APACHE CROSSING ambles along at a very pleasant pace with a fine mix of sympathetic characters, dastardly villains, vivid settings, and enough action to keep things interesting. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad the cover prompted me to buy a copy. Recommended if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Battle Birds, February 1940

I don’t own this pulp, but I do own an e-book reprint of it which I read recently because it contains one of David Goodis’s early aviation yarns, and after reading Cullen Gallagher’s excellent books about Goodis’s pulp fiction, I wanted to sample one of them. I figured I might as well go ahead and read the other stories while I was at it.

This is actually the first issue of BATTLE BIRDS’ third incarnation as a pulp. It started out as a regular aviation/air war pulp under the name BATTLE BIRDS in December 1932 and continued for 19 issues through the June 1934 issue. Then with the July 1934 issue, it became a character pulp with science fiction elements as DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, with the title character leading an air war against a future invader of the United States. I read one of those many, many years ago and probably ought to check out that series again. That lasted for 12 issues until July/August 1935. The title was dormant for a few years until BATTLE BIRDS made a comeback with this issue from February 1940.

Robert Sidney Bowen, who wrote all those earlier Dusty Ayres novels as well as scores of other aviation and air war yarns, leads off this issue with the novella “The Last Flight of the Damned”. Bowen was a solid pro who knew how to keep a story perking along with action and drama, but the plot of this one, involving a German mad scientist who comes up with a super-scientific weapon (powered by handwavium, no doubt) with which to destroy Allied planes during World War I, had been done an awful lot, even by 1940. Despite it being well-written, I had a little trouble working up much excitement about this one—which is absolutely unfair of me because I’ll read Western pulp stories with plots that had been used even more and still love them. I know that the stalwart cowboy falling in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter and saving the ranch is even more of a stereotype than the German mad scientist and his super weapon. But I guess as readers we like what we like, and “The Last Flight of the Damned”, while mildly entertaining, is nothing special.

David Goodis is up next with “Bullets For the Brave”, published under his own name instead of one of the numerous house-names under which he also worked, and it’s about as different as you can get from Bowen’s tale and have both of them still be World War I aviation yarns. There are no super-weapons in this one, just raw human emotion and suffering as an American pilot loses his nerve after surviving being shot down and gets a reputation among his squadron for being yellow. His efforts to live with that and finally redeem himself are pretty powerful stuff, and Goodis’s prose is unrelentingly bleak. This is a really good story and just makes me want to read more of Goodis’s pulp fiction.

I don’t know anything about Moran Tudury except that he wrote hundreds of stories for various aviation, sports, Western, and romance pulps beginning in the mid-Twenties and then finally cracked the slicks in the mid-Forties. His short story in this issue, “The Ghost Rides West”, is about a German ace who is shot down again and again, only to rise from the grave and continue fighting. An American pilot who flies for the Lafayette Escadrille eventually figures out the secret behind this seemingly unkillable ace. It’s a decent story. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Tudury, but based on this yarn, I would again.

Despite his name, Orlando Rigoni was a Westerner born and raised, born in Utah and spending most of his life in northern California. He was a railroader, a miner, and worked for the Forest Service in addition to being a very prolific pulpster who wrote hundreds of stories, mostly for the Western pulps, but he started out in the aviation pulps and contributed quite a few stories to them. He also wrote dozens of Western novels and is best remembered for those today. I knew his name as a Western writer long before I found out he wrote aviation stories, too. His story in this issue, “Eagles Fly Alone”, is an excellent yarn about the Horde of Hellions, a group of pilots who are mavericks and have trouble adjusting to a more disciplined style of flying and fighting when a new commander comes in. This is the first thing by Rigoni that I recall reading, although I have several of his Western novels on my shelves. I really ought to get around to reading them one of these days.

Harold F. Cruickshank is another author I knew as a Western writer long before I realized he got his start in the war and aviation pulps in the late Twenties. I haven’t really liked the Western stories I’ve read by him. I don’t know what it is, but something about them just rubs me the wrong way. He did a long series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN about a group of settlers in Sun Bear Valley, a series that’s sometimes referred to as the Pioneer Folk series. I got to the point that I just skipped those because I knew I wouldn’t enjoy them. “The Valley of the Green Death” in this issue is the first air war yarn I’ve read by him, and I wanted to give it a fair chance. One problem that crops up right away and isn’t Cruickshank's fault is that the group of pilots in this story is also called the Hellions. This is something the editor should have addressed by asking either Cruickshank or Rigoni to change the name of their group or at least not running the stories back-to-back in the same issue. But again, this isn’t Cruickshank's fault, so I pressed on. Sure enough, the villain of this story is a mad German scientist who’s invented a superscientific weapon to kill American pilots. But wait! This time the mad German scientist isn’t a wizened little gnome or a disfigured giant. No, he’s actually a pilot himself and an ace, to boot. This is a very nice twist, and I’ll give Cruickshank credit for it. The story itself isn’t bad. I thought the writing was a little clunky in places, but it moves right along and wound up being enjoyable. I’d read more of Cruickshank's aviation stories, which is good because I have some of them.

“Passport to the Grave” is the only story by Rupert B. Chandler listed in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me suspicious that the name is a pseudonym. This story has an interesting idea—a group of fliers known as Squadron Ex that’s made up of pilots from different countries—but the writing is clumsy enough that I had to reread several passages just to figure out what was going on. One of the squadron’s members is shot down and believed to be dead, and another pilot goes on a one-man mission to avenge him and uncover a traitor in the group. There are definitely things to like in this one if the writing was better. Maybe Rupert B. Chandler was a real guy and that’s the best he could do. Kind of a shame if he didn’t get a chance to develop, for whatever reason.

The final story in the issue is “The All-American Ace” by Metteau Miles, evidently the author’s real name, who published a dozen and a half stories in a brief career between 1937 and 1941. It’s a pretty good yarn about a former All-American college football player who’s now a pilot flying alongside a former teammate. When the teammate gets shot down, the protagonist sets out to avenge him (a lot of that going around). This is a pretty well-written tale with good characters. I enjoyed it.

Overall, I enjoyed the whole issue, but the more aviation stories I read, the more I realize I need to space them out. As I said above, I’m really being unfair to the genre since I’m a lot more tolerant of stereotypical plots in Westerns—and in detective and science fiction pulps, too, to be honest—than I am of these. Still, I’ve become more of an aviation pulp fan than I’ve been in the past and look forward to reading more of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, October 1944

That is one rough-looking hombre on this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE. I'm not sure if that cover is by Sam Cherry or Robert Stanley, but it's a mighty good one no matter who painted it. I don't own this issue, but if you do, it looks like a good one to read since it includes stories by L.P. Holmes, Norman A. Fox, Tom W. Blackburn, Philip Ketchum, William Heuman, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), William R. Cox, and lesser-known authors Morgan Lewis and Joe Payne. It would be hard to find a better lineup of authors in a Western pulp from the mid-Forties.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Trail of the Hunter - Dudley Dean (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

This book opens right in the middle of the action, a technique I always like, with brothers Justin and Ford Emery clashing over Justin’s wife Samantha, whom he suspects of having an affair with Ford. This rift, following a really brutal fistfight between the brothers, causes them to split up, Ford remaining on the ranch they own in Texas while Justin takes part of the herd and starts north for Dakota Territory.

As it turns out, that’s not a very smart move, because first the trail drive runs into a killer blizzard, and then a deadly menace from Samantha’s past unexpectedly shows up to threaten not only Justin and Samantha’s marriage but also their lives. And from there, things get even worse as the author, Dudley Dean McGaughey (who also wrote under the name Dean Owen and several other pseudonyms), really heaps on the trials and tribulations for the troubled couple.

This is a fine hardboiled Western novel with plenty of gritty action scenes and nice lines like describing a man as being “mean enough to braid his own hangrope”. For a Western published in 1963, there’s a lot of talk about sex, although all the actual bedding down happens off-screen, so to speak. Justin Emery is a really tough hero, absorbing an unusual amount of punishment but still coming back to take on his enemies. McGaughey was a consistently fine Western author, and I thoroughly enjoyed this particular example of his work.

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on October 2, 2009.)

Looking For Lost Streets/High Fliers, Middleweights, and Lowlifes - Cullen Gallagher

I haven’t read a great deal by David Goodis, but everything I’ve read has been very good. He’s one of those authors I need to read more. I’ve never read any of the scores of stories Goodis wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, mostly under his own name but a good number of them under house-names, as well. However, Cullen Gallagher has read those aviation yarns, as well as the sports, mystery, and Western stories Goodis sold to the pulps. In fact, there’s a good chance Gallagher has read more of Goodis’s short fiction than anyone else, since there are less than a handful of stories he hasn’t read.

Gallagher puts the knowledge gained from all this reading to superb use in two recent non-fiction books about Goodis’s pulp fiction. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF DAVID GOODIS’S PULP FICTION lays the groundwork, and then HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS delivers in spectacular fashion as Gallagher provides summaries and critical commentary on nearly 200 stories, as well as developing a well-researched case that the themes and characterizations that made Goodis’s later hardboiled crime and noir novels modern-day classics actually grew out of his work for the aviation pulps, not his early efforts in the detective pulps.

Along the way, Gallagher adds considerable insight to the use of house-names in the pulps, and LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS contains an invaluable section that identifies not just the stories Goodis wrote for Popular Publications that were published under house-names but also identifies the actual authors of dozens of other house-name stories. I’ve never seen this information before, and it’s great to know which well-known Western pulpsters actually wrote stories under the names Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and others. Gallagher dug most of this out of Popular Publications pay records that are part of a collection at the New York Public Library. This is research and scholarship well beyond the call of duty and is a real boon to fans of pulps and popular fiction.

If you’re a David Goodis fan, you really need to read these books. If you’re interested in pulp fiction in general, I give them my highest recommendation. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS is available in e-book and paperback editions. HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. They’re two of the best books I’ve read this year.

Now, we need to get more of Goodis’s aviation yarns back in print . . .

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Shaker Song - Manhattan Transfer

I love this performance beyond all reason. A while back I posted the original instrumental version of "Shaker Song" by Spyro Gyra and said that I'd post the vocal version by Manhattan Transfer, but I never got around to it. Let's remedy that.

Movie Review: The Spoilers (1955)

I can’t call this a Movie I’ve Missed because I’ve seen it before, but the last time was more than fifty years ago when I was in high school. But I recalled liking it, so when it showed up on Grit TV, I decided to give it a try.

This is actually the first version of THE SPOILERS I ever saw. Rex Beach’s bestselling 1906 adventure novel about the Yukon Gold Rush (something he experienced first-hand) has been filmed five times, twice during the Silent Era and three sound films: a 1930 version starring Gary Cooper that isn’t available and may be lost; a 1942 version starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich, the best-known and almost certainly best version if only for the cast; and this one from 1955 with Jeff Chandler, Rory Calhoun, and Anne Baxter.

It’s a familiar story: Chandler is the stalwart gold mine owner, Baxter is the flamboyant and beautiful saloon owner, and Calhoun, cast against type, is the charming but crooked gold commissioner who’s trying to swindle Chandler out of his mine and steal his girl, to boot. Elsewhere in the cast, Ray Danton is a gambler whose motivations are murky but who definitely can’t be trusted, John McEntire is Chandler’s crusty partner in the gold mine, Carl Benton Reid is a judge, Barbara Britton is the judge’s niece and some competition for Baxter, Wallace Ford is an old codger, and perennial villain Roy Barcroft is a good guy for a change, playing the local marshal. The characters jockey back and forth for position, romantic entanglements ensue, schemes are exposed, and it all culminates in a big battle between the miners and the bad guys in which a train crashes and stuff blows up real good, following by a brutal, saloon-destroying fistfight between Chandler and Calhoun.

As the only color version of THE SPOILERS, this one looks great. The location photography is good and there are plenty of bright colors. I’m not a fan of some of the Westerns made since the Seventies that are obsessed with muddy streets, filthy clothes, and scenes so dimly lit it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I don’t care if it’s realistic. The streets are muddy in this one, but other than that it’s definitely a Technicolor production. There’s some decent miniature work in the train crash, and the two leads (and their stunt doubles) throw a lot of enthusiasm into their big fight at the end. I’m not a huge fan of either Jeff Chandler or Rory Calhoun, but they’re fine here. It seemed to me that the fight is over quicker than I remember it, but it’s still pretty good.

If you’re going to watch only one version of THE SPOILERS, go with the Wayne/Scott/Dietrich effort from 1942. I’ve seen it several times, and it’s a better film. However, I think this 1955 version is worth watching, too. As I said above, I remember enjoying it the last time I saw it. I liked it this time, too, and I’m glad I saw it again.

Although I’ve been familiar with his name for years, I’ve never read anything by Rex Beach. Maybe I should. Most of his novels are in public domain, and free e-book editions are available on Amazon. If I ever get around to it, you can count on reading about it here.

Now Available: Lair of the Serpent Queen (Snakehaven #3) - James Reasoner

Jorras Trevayle is back, exploring the sprawling city of Nucarrah, a cesspit of sin and corruption, the hub of a world of danger and sinister sorcery where the giant serpents known as Nloka Maccumba roam. Rescued by the beautiful Llorna Valyasha from an attempt on his life, Trevayle pledges his allegiance to this queen of Nucarrah’s underworld, unaware that he’s sinking deeper and deeper into a war between criminals from which he may not escape! 

LAIR OF THE SERPENT QUEEN is the third exciting entry in the critically acclaimed Snakehaven saga, following the adventures of soldier and swordsman Jorras Trevayle in a world where death may strike from any direction without warning. New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner spins another breathtaking tale of sword and sorcery action in a brilliantly inventive and compelling setting. If you haven’t begun exploring Snakehaven yet, now is the time to start!

(I'm really enjoying writing these stories. This is the longest one yet, not quite long enough to call it a novel, but close. A print edition that will combine the first three stories is in the works and will be available later this fall for those of you who prefer print. I plan to do several more Snakehaven novellas next year, so as I always say at the end of these--Jorras Trevayle will return!)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Detective, September 1938

TOP-NOTCH DETECTIVE lasted for only three issues, of which this is the first one. That cover has enough going on that I thought at first it might be by Norman Saunders, but it's actually by J.W. Scott. The fact that this pulp didn't last long couldn't be due to the quality of the authors in its pages. This issue features stories by Cleve F. Adams, Arthur J. Burks, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons), Norman A. Daniels, Henry Treat Sperry, and Orlando Rigoni, as well as a number of other, lesser-known authors. That's a pretty strong lineup and an indication of a pulp worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, February 1952

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with a good Sam Cherry cover as usual for this era.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “Panhandle Freight”, is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, though, it’s a good solid story that finds Hatfield getting mixed up in a war between two freighting companies in the Texas Panhandle. Settling that trouble isn’t actually his assignment, as it usually is when he wades into a case. Instead, he’s on the trail of an outlaw he’s followed across Texas, and that hardcase has gone to work for the villainous freight line owner who plans to wipe out his competition. That’s what draws Hatfield into the trouble, and when he finds out a young woman has been kidnapped, he’s not going to stop until he puts things right. There’s no mystery in this one about who the main bad guy is—the reader knows right away. But that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment as we get a shootout at a waterhole, assorted bushwhackings and fistfights, a big fire, a stagecoach holdup, and a final showdown in which Hatfield and a young freighter who serves as sort of a proxy hero take on the whole gang. It’s traditional stuff, but done very well.

For a long time, this novel was attributed to D.B. Newton. I forget why Newton’s name was attached to it, possibly because of payment records from the August Lenniger Literary Agency. Newton is listed as the author of four Hatfield novels in the Fictionmags Index, including this one. But the manuscript of it is known to be in the collection of Tompkins’ papers at the University of California-Santa Barbara, so it seems pretty safe to say that he wrote it. Having read it now, I’m even more confident of Tompkins’ authorship. It reads just like his work with plenty of well-done action scenes and an abundance of hyphenated words, his most distinctive stylistic tag. Establishing that it is Tompkins’ work and not Newton’s is one of the reasons I find it interesting.

The other is that I was reading along in it and suddenly Anita Robertson shows up! Anita Robertson, for those of you not familiar with her, is a beautiful young woman who lives in Austin with her teenage brother Buck. She was added to the series in the mid-Forties presumably in response to the numerous letters to the editor asking that “Jackson Cole” give Hatfield a steady girlfriend. Anita and Buck appear in a dozen or so novels written by Tom Curry. Usually, Anita is in the story only very briefly, just there long enough for a quick kiss and a paragraph about how Hatfield can’t marry her until he gives up his dangerous work as a Ranger. Then Buck tags along with Hatfield as a sidekick on his latest case. The readers apparently didn’t like them, although the editors printed a few letters in support of them, but they vanished after a few years and nobody seemed to mind.

I’d read that Tom Curry was the only Hatfield author to use the characters, except for one appearance in a story by D.B. Newton. This must be the story, except it’s not by Newton. And while Buck is mentioned, he doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, Anita actually has something to do. She teams up with Hatfield to help him break the case open, and—this really surprised me—I liked her! Tompkins handles the character much better and she’s more believable. It’s kind of a shame she didn’t appear in more of the Hatfield novels by Tompkins, but getting rid of Buck is an acceptable trade-off.

This issue of TEXAS RANGERS was on the stands in January 1952 (the cover dates on pulps were off-sale dates), but it has a Christmas story in it, “Double Dick Follows a Star” by Lee Priestly, who was really Opal Shore Priestly. It’s the third in a series of four stories about a colorful old prospector named Double Dick Richards. I read another in the series a while back and found it readable and mildly amusing. I found this one to be neither of those things. I bailed after a page or so. Probably more to do with my mood than the story itself, although I wouldn’t swear to that.

“Dead Man’s Boots” is a novelette also by Walker A. Tompkins, but it has his name on it, and reading it so soon after “Panhandle Freight” just convinced me that Tompkins did author that Hatfield novel. The styles are identical. The novelette is a good one using the “outlaw masquerades as a lawman” plot. In this case, escaped convict Rand Weston, sent to Yuma Prison for a murder he didn’t commit, winds up assuming the identity of a murdered range detective who was supposed to investigate the murder of a beautiful young woman’s rancher father. That’s a lot of murders there, but Tompkins untangles things with his usual skill. This one starts off especially well but eventually feels a little rushed. It probably would have worked better at novella length. But it’s still a very enjoyable yarn and well worth reading.

“Fiddle and Fight” by Cy Kees is another humorous story, this time about a fiddling contest. The Devil does not show up, which is kind of a shame because it might have made this one better. This is another story I didn’t like and didn’t finish. Man, I really must have been in a grumpy mood when I read this issue!

On the other hand, I thought “Haggerty’s Valley” by Francis H. Ames was pretty good. Ames published about 80 stories in various Western pulps in the decade between the late Forties and the late Fifties. If I’ve ever read anything by him before, I don’t remember it. This one uses the old amnesia plot, as our protagonist wakes up wounded and not knowing who he is, being tended to by a beautiful girl who tells him he’s a deputy and has to rescue her from a gang of vicious outlaws who are after her. I kept waiting for one more twist in this story that never materialized, but it's well-written, moves along nicely, and had plenty of action.

You know anything by Clifton Adams will be well-written. “The First of May”, his short story in this issue, certainly is. It’s about a young man who wants to avenge the death of his brother, but he has to wait for his twenty-first birthday to do so because of a promise he made. This is more of a psychological Western than anything else, and because of that I found it a little unsatisfying overall. I don’t think it’s one of Adams’ better stories, but it might hit the target for other readers.

The issue wraps up with Lee Bond’s “Long Sam Pays a Visit”, and it’s a momentous entry in the long-running series that debuted in the very first issue of TEXAS RANGERS along with the Jim Hatfield novels. This is the final Long Sam Littlejohn story. Appropriately, it finds the heroic outlaw returning to the small settlement in the Piney Woods of East Texas where he grew up. The visit doesn’t go as planned, though, because Sam has to deal with an old acquaintance who has turned into a vicious owlhoot. This is a good story with plenty of drama and action and a nice plot twist near the end. Long Sam’s constant nemesis, Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Fry is mentioned but doesn’t appear, for a change. While it isn’t exactly a series finale as we think of them now, this story does end with at least a hint that life may be about to change for the better for Long Sam Littlejohn. I’ve been reading these stories for so long that Sam seems like an old friend now, so I hope things worked out for him. And I’m glad there are still plenty of earlier stories in the series that I haven’t read yet.

Despite the fact that I didn’t finish a couple of the stories and the one by Clifton Adams was slightly disappointing, I think that overall this is a pretty issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and the novelette by Tompkins are both very entertaining, the Long Sam yarn is one of the better ones in the series, and the Ames story was a pleasant surprise since I didn’t know what to expect from that one. I’m also happy to have confirmed that the Hatfield story is by Tompkins. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading, and who knows, you might enjoy those humorous yarns more than I did.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Golden Widow - Floyd Mahannah

I don’t know about you, but when I pick up a paperback from 1957 and it’s got a beautiful blonde on the cover and the hero’s name is Dex Nolan . . . well, I think, “This is my kind of book.” That reaction isn’t always right, of course. Just because a hardboiled crime novel was published in the Fifties doesn’t make it good. But the odds are that I’ll enjoy it, and in this case, my instincts were right on the money.

You really have to be a longtime fan of this stuff to recognize the name Floyd Mahannah. He wrote only a half-dozen or so novels, but he was a prolific author of hardboiled short stories and novelettes, many of them published in the iconic digest magazine MANHUNT.

THE GOLDEN WIDOW finds former cop Dex Nolan in a tough spot as the story opens. Having left the police force to operate a gold mine in Arizona, he’s just lost the property in a lawsuit over unpaid taxes. So he’s broke and at loose ends, and when a former girlfriend shows up asking him to help her because she’s being blackmailed, you know Dex is going to say yes. You also know that his decision is going to wind up landing him in a lot of trouble, and of course you’d be right. It seems that the former girlfriend’s husband has been murdered, and while she has an alibi for that killing, she’s up to her neck in other assorted troubles. Dex, acting like a private eye even though he’s not one officially, locates the blackmailer, and sure enough, that guy winds up dead in short order, too. That’s just the start of it, though. You get gangsters, drug smuggling, a suitcase full of loot, the cops chasing Dex for murders he didn’t commit, shootouts in the desert, and more double- and triple-crosses than you can keep up with. Dex takes a lot of punishment in this book, both physical and emotional, before the final twist comes barreling down on him and the reader.

Ultimately, you may spot the killer in this one – I did – but the fun in reading it is in Mahannah’s tough-minded prose and the classic Fifties setting. THE GOLDEN WIDOW is kind of a generic novel, but I mean that in a good way, in that it’s a prime example of the sort of book that I grew up reading and enjoying. I’ll probably get around to reading the rest of Mahannah’s novels. I have another one on hand and hope to get to it soon.

(Morgan Freeman voice-over: "As you might suspect, James did not get around to reading another of Floyd Mahannah's novels soon, and in fact, he has not read any of Mahannah's work since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 11, 2009. Although he would still like to, one of these days.")

Review: Ride for Vengeance - John Callahan (Joseph Chadwick)

Ed Cavanaugh is a down-on-his-luck rancher who leaves his spread in drought-ridden Texas to head for Arizona with his herd of cattle, hoping to make a new start there. But he’s still in New Mexico Territory, a long way from Arizona, when he runs smack-dab into a barbed wire fence holding his cattle off from water they desperately need. Cavanaugh is a law-abiding man and doesn’t want to cut the fence, but he may have to in order to save his livestock.

That’s how RIDE FOR VENGEANCE, a 1967 Ace Double Western by John Callahan (who was actually Joseph Chadwick) opens, and the author immediately enlists the reader’s sympathy for Ed Cavanaugh, who’s a fine protagonist, a decent man who can be plenty tough and hardboiled when he’s backed into a corner. And if there’s one thing Joseph Chadwick can do to his protagonists, it’s back them into a corner!

That’s what happens in RIDE FOR VENGEANCE as Cavanaugh finds himself in the middle of a range war between the big spread that’s fenced in its holdings and the smaller ranchers adjoining it, including a pretty widow whose husband was hanged by the cruel son of the big ranch’s manager. Cavanaugh is a widower himself and has a four-year-old son along on the trail drive with him, which is something of an unusual angle for a Western novel like this. In Chadwick’s hands, it works very well, though. There’s also a romantic triangle that’s well-handled, despite not really amounting to much, some colorful old-timers, a few hotheaded kids, a stampede, and several bushwhackings and fistfights.

In other words, this is a very traditional Western novel with nothing in it you haven’t read many times before and no surprises. And yet, Chadwick’s execution of the material is almost flawless. Even though I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen, I kept flipping the pages eagerly because I wanted to see it play out. If Westerns are your comfort reading, as they are for me, I think there’s a very good chance you’ll enjoy this one. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

By the way, that's my copy in the scan above, and the cover art is by Harry Schaare. It's Ace G-682, with the novel BANDIT BRAND by Tom West (real name Fred East) on the other side. I'm pretty sure I'll be reading that one soon, too.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Bird (1988)

I’ve seen most of Clint Eastwood’s movies, both as star and director, over the years, but one I missed until now is BIRD, a biopic about the famous jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, who died young in the Fifties after abusing his body with drugs for many years.

Now, I’m a sucker for a good biopic, I love jazz, and Eastwood’s movies are very watchable. As a director, he reminds me of Howard Hawks: he does his job, tells his story, and gets out of the way. An Eastwood movie will never dazzle you with visual pyrotechnics.

Forest Whitaker plays Parker and does a great job. Most of the music is actual recordings of Parker and other musicians playing, but when Whitaker is on-stage, I never failed to believe it was him blowing those notes. The rest of the cast, all journeymen actors, no real stars, is also very good. The script, which jumps around quite a bit in time as it covers Parker’s life, is a little hard to follow at times, but not distractingly so. And the movie looks great. It really captures the look and feel of the Forties and Fifties and I didn’t spot any anachronisms, although that doesn’t guarantee there weren’t some I missed. And the music, oh, man, the music is great.

The problem with BIRD is that at more than two and a half hours long, and with relentlessly bleak subject matter, it’s just too much. There are a few touches of humor, but mostly it’s grim, grim, grim. Eastwood, being a noted lover of jazz and composer and musician himself, would surely disagree with me. This was clearly a passion project for him, and he did a good job and can be proud of it. But for a regular viewer like me, even though I’m a jazz fan, I’m glad I finally saw BIRD but would never watch it again. I will, however, continue listening to the music from that era because it’s pure greatness.

Review: Hero Stuff - Frederick C. Davis (WINGS, February 1928)

The Age of Aces website recently posted the short story “Hero Stuff” by Frederick C. Davis. Since Davis is one of my favorite pulp authors, I went ahead and read it. This is from the February 1928 issue of the aviation pulp WINGS. According to the Fictionmags Index, it’s the first of 20 stories featuring high-flying, two-fisted newsreel cameraman/pilot Nick Royce. In reading the story, it seemed to me like there might have been another one that came before it, and since this was in the second issue of WINGS, I suspect that Davis may have created Nick Royce specifically for the magazine’s debut issue and continued with him for a while. But lacking a copy of the January 1928 issue, there’s no way for me to confirm that, of course. Pure speculation on my part.

At any rate, “Hero Stuff” is narrated by Art Buckley, the head of the aerial unit for the World News Reel Company, an outfit that flies out of an airfield located on Long Island. As this story opens, the head of the company arrives with an unexpected guest: a matinee idol from Hollywood who’s starring in a new flying picture set during the Great War. The movie is all in the can except for one stunt, and the World News Reel’s pilots are going to help the star and the picture’s director pull it off. It involves the plane being flown by the star going into a tailspin, causing him to have to bail out over No Man’s Land. There’s considerable risk to the parachute stunt, which the star is going to perform himself. But he needs somebody to actually fly the plane, and that’s the job Nick Royce gets.

Unfortunately, Nick’s vixenish girlfriend is also on hand, and the Hollywood star makes a play for her. This leads to considerable friction and even some fisticuffs between the two men whose lives will be entwined once they’re thousands of feet in the air in a canvas-and-wood crate.

“Hero Stuff” is well-written, as you’d expect from Davis, and he keeps things moving along briskly with touches of humor and action and danger. I really enjoyed this yarn. It’s no lost classic, but I found it very entertaining, enough so that I’d love to see somebody do a complete collection of the Nick Royce stories. I’d be happy to read more of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, August 1935

This issue of DETECTIVE TALES starts off with a good, dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer and has a strong line-up of authors inside: top pulpsters Frederick C. Davis, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, Wyatt Blassingame, Franklin H. Martin, J. Lane Linklater, R.T.M. Scott, and George Armin Shaftel (once as himself and once under the pseudonym George Rosenberg), plus lesser-known George Edson and Wilton Hazzard along with house-name Emerson Graves. Davis, Page, Blassingame, and Ernst would make this pulp well worth reading for me if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fighting Western, October 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my beat-up copy in the scan. You can’t see it, but the upper third or so of the rear cover is gone, having been ripped off in an obviously haphazard manner. But the contents are complete. The cover is by H.W. Scott, I think.

FIGHTING WESTERN was part of the same line as SPICY/SPEED WESTERN, but unlike the Spicies, there weren’t a lot of house-names used in it. The authors tend to use their real names or regular pseudonyms. This issue, in fact, starts out with a novella by a very well-known author (well-known to pulp fans, anyway), E. Hoffmann Price. “Six-Gun Survey” has as its protagonist a young cowboy-turned-surveyor who inadvertently becomes mixed up in an irrigation/land development swindle and tries to set things right, even though it means a lot of bullets coming his way and some bogus criminal charges that land him behind bars. This is an excellent yarn, fast-moving and very well-written, with a likable hero and a good supporting cast (including an Arab camel driver and camel left over from the army’s experiments with them in Arizona). I really enjoyed this one, which isn’t surprising considering how reliable a pulpster Price was.

The next story is a novelette by an author who wrote even more than Price, Victor Rousseau. He was a big name in early science fiction and then later on became a stalwart in the Spicy line, often under his pseudonym Lew Merrill and assorted other names. He’s writing under his own name in “Buffalo Trail”, which finds six mountain men in New Mexico giving up fur trapping to become cowboys. They run into plenty of trouble on a cattle drive to the railhead in Kansas. This is a pretty good story. Rousseau wasn’t as skilled a writer as Price, but he moves things along well and the action is very good. The only problems are that there are so many characters we don’t get to know them very well, and the “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue is really thick. Still, I enjoyed it, as I usually do with Rousseau’s work.

Laurence Donovan is another well-known pulp author. I’ve read quite a bit by him over the years and nearly always enjoyed the stories. His story in this issue, “Brand of a Thief”, is a convoluted tale in which a ranch foreman frames himself for a theft in order to save the girl he works for from the attentions of a lowdown skunk. Only things don’t work out that way at all. This one reads like it could have been intended for RANCH ROMANCES or one of the other Western romance pulps, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s an entertaining, well-written story.

John Jo Carpenter was the regular pseudonym of John Reese, which he used on dozens of stories in various Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties and on at least one Western novel that I know of. His story in this issue, “Gun-Wise and Trail-Shy”, is a hardboiled tale about a young outlaw’s fateful encounter with a slightly older but more experienced owlhoot. Reese was a fine writer, so it’s not surprising that this is a good story.

The issue wraps up with “Beast of Pueblo” by “Paul Hanna”, the only use of a house-name in this issue. I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s a good yarn about a young man who runs a Wells Fargo station. He’s big and brawny, good with his fists and a gun, but a crippling psychological fear keeps him from engaging in violence. It’s a fairly offbeat angle for a Western pulp story, even though we know from the start that before the story is over, our protagonist will have been forced to overcome his fear and burn some powder and throw some punches. That’s exactly what happens, but the author handles it very well and turns in an excellent yarn to end this issue on a high note.

Now, here’s an interesting (I hope) sidelight: this issue was edited by Kenneth Hutchinson and Wilton Matthews, the editors for Trojan Publications who got in trouble with the law for fraud by taking stories from old issues, slapping some phony author’s name on them, or using the name of a real author who had nothing to do with the story, then reprinting them as new and collecting the checks themselves. Which means it’s possible some of the stories in this issue were actually unacknowledged reprints that Hutchinson and Matthews used in their scheme. The Paul Hanna story seems to be the most likely candidate for that. For one thing, the story has an illustration with it that I really feel like I’ve seen somewhere else before. However, all this should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. It’s certainly possible that all the stories in here are on the up-and-up.

What’s important for our purposes as readers is that every story is a good one. If you’d told me that the best Western pulp I’d read recently was an issue of FIGHTING WESTERN, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s the case. This is a really good one, and if you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Conquerors From the Darkness - Robert Silverberg

As author Robert Silverberg explains in his introduction to the 1979 Ace reprint of CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, the story first saw life as a novella, “Spawn of the Deadly Sea”, in the April 1957 issue of the SF digest SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. (I’d be willing to bet that at least one reader of this blog owns a copy of that particular digest magazine.) A few years later he expanded the story into a full-length novel that was published by Holt, reprinted in paperback by Dell, and then finally reprinted again by Ace in a double volume with Silverberg’s 1957 novel MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. That’s the edition I read. [It's back in print. Details below.]

CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS is exactly the sort of vivid, galloping action yarn that made me a science fiction fan in the first place. At first it seems like a heroic fantasy novel, set in some totally different universe than ours. The oceans cover the entire planet except for a few floating cities. The only commerce is between those cities, and keeping the seas safe for the merchant vessels is a Viking-like group known as the Sea-Lords. The hero of the novel, a young man named Dovirr, lives in one of the cities but wants to be a Sea-Lord and take to the oceans. He gets his wish and rapidly rises in the ranks, and along the way the reader learns that this is indeed Earth, a thousand years after alien invaders flooded the planet for reasons known only to them, preserving a little of humanity in those floating cities. After a while, the aliens abandoned Earth, also for reasons unknown, leaving it in a vaguely medieval state except for a few remnants of the alien technology that still work.

You’d think that that background, along with Dovirr’s life among the Sea-Lords and his ascent to a position of power among them, might be enough material for a novel, but if you’ve read many books like this, the twist about halfway through won’t come as any surprise: the alien Star Beasts return to take over the planet again, and Dovirr and his comrades have to find some way to stop them with swords and sailing ships.

I really enjoyed this book. In his introduction, Silverberg mentions reading the work of Robert E. Howard, and I can see some Howardian influence in CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, most notably in the way Dovirr manages to seize command of every situation in which he finds himself, much like Conan, and in a very Howard-like final line. The pace is fast, the writing colorful, and the inner 14-year-old in me just loved it. The adult reader in me thought some parts of the story could have been developed a little more and a little better, but hey, adult readers weren’t the target audience for this yarn in the first place. I really like a lot of Silverberg’s early SF (as well as the sort-core novels he wrote as Don Elliott), and if you want to settle back and have a fine time, I highly recommend CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 24, 2009. Bill Crider provided the cover scan from the issue of SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS is currently available in both paperback and e-book editions.)

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Beaver (2011)

Some movies, you read the description of them and think to yourself, “There’s no way in hell that’s going to work.” For example, 2011’s THE BEAVER, in which Mel Gibson plays the deeply depressed owner of a toy company who begins to talk through a beaver hand puppet and so reconnects with his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed) and their two sons. Also, there’s a romance of sorts between the nerdy high school age son (Anton Yelchin) and a beautiful cheerleader (a very young Jennifer Lawrence). I fully expected that we’d watch maybe 30 minutes of this, tops, and then say “Nope.”

Instead, it’s kind of, well, not bad. It’s funny in places, the cast is good, and while things could have moved along a little faster, Foster’s direction holds it all together well. No matter what Mel Gibson is like in real life, I enjoy his work on-screen, and I’ve liked Foster since she was a kid in various Disney movies. THE BEAVER isn’t a great movie, but I enjoyed it enough to keep watching and wound up liking it.

Review: Silver River Ranch - Leslie Scott

In addition to several hundred novels featuring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, A. Leslie Scott wrote dozens of stand-alone novels, although some of these were rewritten and expanded from either Hatfield or Slade novels with the protagonist changed. But quite a few of them appear to be original stories not based on any of Scott’s pulp work. One such novel is SILVER RIVER RANCH, published by Arcadia House under the name Leslie Scott in 1961 and reprinted a couple of times in large print editions since then. I read the original Arcadia House edition. That’s my copy in the scan.

This novel opens with a vicious and bloody knife fight between the protagonist, stalwart young rancher Val Dixon, and brutal Blount Roberts, part of a trouble-making family that owns a rival ranch. Neither man dies in this encounter, but the fight solidifies the position that Dixon and the Roberts family are bitter enemies.

Except for Rosalee Roberts, a beautiful redheaded cousin of Blount and his brothers. Dixon is in love with her and hopes that someday she may return that feeling, but it seems unlikely given the rivalry between the ranches.

Complicating things is that everybody in the West Texas valley where this novel takes place has been losing stock to rustlers. Dixon hires a gunslinging young cowboy named Billy Flint, who may or may not actually be Billy the Kid, rumored to have survived his shooting by Pat Garrett over in New Mexico a while earlier. Together, Dixon and Flint set out to track down the rustlers, who they figure will turn out to be the Blount brothers.

SILVER RIVER RANCH will seem very familiar to anyone who’s read very many novels by Leslie Scott. There’s plenty of action with assorted bushwhackings and clashes with the rustlers, plus some tentative romance between Val Dixon and Rosalee Roberts and a lot of riding back and forth, sleeping, and eating. However, there’s nothing about mining or railroading, two of Scott’s favorite themes, and the descriptions of the landscape are a lot less detailed. This is Scott in pared-down mode, which makes for a very fast-moving book. The action scenes are consistently good, although the great knife fight that opens the book is the high point in that respect.

If you’re already a fan of Leslie Scott’s work, you’ll certainly enjoy this novel. It’s not fully representative of his usual yarn-spinning but close enough that if you’ve never sampled any of his stories before, you could start with this one just fine. I’ve enjoyed every one of Scott’s stand-alone novels I’ve read over the years, and this one is no exception.  

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, July 1950

Nothing like a beautiful blonde with a Tommy gun, as Rudolph Belarski demonstrates on this cover. There are some good authors in this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, including Stewart Sterling with a Gil Vine novelette (Gil Vine was a private detective in the pulps who became a house dick in a hotel when Sterling moved him to novels). Also on hand are Philip Ketchum (best known for his Westerns), O.B. Myers (best known for aviation yarns), Ray Cummings (best known for his science fiction), and detective pulp stalwarts J. Lane Linklater and Will Oursler, plus little-known, at least to me, Lew Talian and B.J. Benson.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, December 1944

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my rather ragged copy in the scan. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, not one of his best, in my opinion, but still a decent cover.

Despite being called a novel on the cover, the lead story in this issue is more of a novelette. It’s “The Dude Wrangler” by William Polk. This is a contemporary Western, set on a dude ranch in West Texas during World War II. Young cowboy Tom Glenning rides in looking for a job. Tom’s family once owned the spread when it was a working cattle ranch, but when he inherited it, he lost the place because he was such a wastrel. Now he’s reformed and just looking for a job, with no hard feelings. Or so he says. It won’t take readers very long to realize that this is one of those stories where nothing is what it appears to be. And the author does a good job of spinning a highly entertaining yarn.

William Polk has ten stories listed in the Fictionmags Index. The first nine of them appeared in the Twenties and Thirties in various slick and literary magazines. “The Dude Wrangler” is the tenth story in that list, and it’s the only Western and the only pulp story. Which leads me to suspect that “William Polk” is a pseudonym, probably slapped on by a Thrilling Group editor who was unaware of the previous stories published under that byline. However, that’s pure speculation on my part. Maybe the other William Polk actually did have a pulp Western story in him. Chances are we’ll never know, and it’s a good story no matter who wrote it.

Bascom Sturgill appears to have been the real name of an author who published a dozen stories in various Western pulps during the Forties. His short-short in this issue, “Snake-Bite Justice”, is about an old prospector seeking to avenge his partner’s murder. It’s well-written, has a nice little twist in the end, and is a pretty good story.

I’ve always found the series about Alamo Paige, Pony Express rider, to be okay, some stories better than others (which is to be expected in a house-name series) but always readable. The novelette in this issue, “The Pony Express Pays Off”, finds Paige and another Pony Express rider trying to save a fortune in diamonds that will rescue the company from debt. There’s a considerable amount of action, but at the same time the story seems to meander around a lot, filling pages but not in a very compelling fashion. I’d say this is a below average entry in the series. I don’t have any idea who wrote it under the name Reeve Walker, but I did notice a couple of oddities in style that might help me identify him someday: characters have a habit of exclaiming “What in time!” and they carry their guns in “skin-holsters”.

I’ve come to be fond of the work of Archie Joscelyn, who was a prolific pulpster but wrote even more novels under his own name and several pseudonyms, most notable among them Al Cody and Lynn Westland. His story in this issue, “Out of the Horse’s Mouth”, is an entertaining tale about a circus performer who’s framed for a robbery and murder. It’s well-written, moves right along, and has just enough of a clever plot to be interesting. Joscelyn was a consistently good author.

I don’t know anything about Hal White except that he published about fifty stories in the pulps, a mixture of Westerns, air war stories, and detective yarns. His short-short in this issue, “Man on a Horse”, about an outlaw seeking revenge on a lawman, isn’t very good. I had to read the ending twice just to figure out what happened, and I wasn’t impressed when I did understand it.

Donald Bayne Hobart is another writer, like Archie Joscelyn, who was both prolific and consistently good. “Job for the Boss”, his story in this issue, is about a young cowboy trying to bring about peace between a couple of feuding old-timers, one of whom is the owner of the spread the cowboy rides for. It’s okay, reasonably entertaining but nothing more than that, and not one of the better efforts I’ve read from Hobart.

I’ve become quite a fan of the Navajo Tom Raine series, especially the novelettes written by C. William Harrison under the Jackson Cole house-name. I’m pretty sure that “Not By a Dam Site” is by Harrison, and it’s another in a run of top-notch stories that includes “Boothill Beller Box” in the previous issue and “Passport to Perdition” in the issue after this. “Not By a Dam Site”, as you’d probably guess, centers around government efforts to build a dam and flood a valley in Arizona, and the resistance to that plan from the townspeople, ranchers, and homesteaders who live in that valley. A couple of government surveyors have died under mysterious circumstances, and Arizona Ranger Tom Raine is sent in to get to the bottom of things. He does, of course, after some suitable action. However, the plot’s not quite as complex in this one and the action a bit more sparse than usual, so I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Navajo Raine stories, but it’s still entertaining and well worth reading. Raine is an excellent character.

I’d say this is a pretty average issue overall of EXCITING WESTERN. It begins and ends very well with “The Dude Wrangler” and “Not By a Dam Site”. The stories in between are okay with the one exception, but none of them are outstanding. If you have a copy on hand, it’s worth reading, but I wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to rustle one up.

Dark Dream - Robert Martin

When I was binging on private eye fiction in the late Seventies, one of the authors I discovered thanks to the great fanzine THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE was Robert Martin with his series featuring Jim Bennett, an operative for the National Detective Agency who worked out of Cleveland. I read several of the later books in the series and recall enjoying them very much. Now Stark House Press is bringing back the Jim Bennett series and has just reprinted the first two novels, DARK DREAM and SLEEP, MY LOVE. Today I’m going to take a look at DARK DREAM, the novel-length debut of Jim Bennett, although he had appeared in pulp stories before this book was first published in hardcover by Dodd, Mead in 1951 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1952.

Bennett is sent to the northern Ohio town of Wheatville to take on a case for a local lawyer who has hired the agency. It seems that somebody has been taking potshots at the lawyer as he plays on the local golf course. Bennett hasn’t been in town long, though, before he picks up another client: the owner of a beauty salon whose business is being sabotaged. Could it be that these apparently unrelated cases will wind up being connected?

That seems to be a foregone conclusion, especially if you know that DARK DREAM is based on two pulp novellas, “Death Under Par” (DIME DETECTIVE, May 1947) and “Death Gives a Permanent Wave” (DIME DETECTIVE, October 1947. I’ll give Martin full credit, though: the combining of these two stories may not be seamless, but it’s pretty darned good. If I hadn’t known about the pulp origins already, I might not have suspected it. Multiple murders crop up, a proverbial whirlwind of action takes place over the course of the few days Bennett spends in Wheatville, he kisses a number of beautiful women (some of whom are suspects), and gets hit over the head, knocked out, poisoned, and suffers a minor bullet wound. The guy stays busy!

In addition to the mystery angle, parts of this book read almost like a mainstream novel about small-town Americana, and northern Ohio towns in the early Fifties must have been a lot like Texas towns in the early Sixties because I felt some powerful nostalgia reading this book. The businesses and the people sound very similar to what I grew up with.

I, of course, had a wonderful time reading this book. It’s pure hardboiled private eye, one of my favorite subgenres in all of fiction. I’m glad Stark House is reprinting this series. It’s a really good one and well worth being back in print. It’s available on Amazon in a nice trade paperbackdouble volume.

The pulp stories featuring Jim Bennett are also being reprinted, by the way, by Steeger Books, and I intend to check those out, as well.

BONUS RAMBLING: To clarify what I said in the first paragraph of this post, I don’t mean to make it sound as if I discovered private eye fiction in the late Seventies. The first private eye novel I ever read was either THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE or SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS, one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books, both of which I checked out from the bookmobile around 1964. Yeah, sixty years ago. Where does the time go? By the late Seventies, I had read all of Dashiell Hammett available at the time, all of Raymond Chandler, most of the Mike Shayne, Shell Scott, and Ed Noon novels, and assorted other private eye books. I’ve talked before about how I started reading THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE and how it introduced me to a number of PI writers I hadn’t been aware of, as well as allowing me to make the acquaintance of Bill Crider, Joe Lansdale, and Tom Johnson. Glory days, as they say.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Becky (2020)

Well, this movie is just about the polar opposite of the one I wrote about last week. Instead of a heart-warming, inspirational sports movie like THE BASKET, BECKY is a bloody, extremely violent thriller about a family caught in an isolated cabin by four vicious escaped convicts on a mission.

The title character, Becky, is a 13-year-old girl who’s still mourning the death of her mother a year earlier. She’s the broody, angsty sort who’s angry with her father because he’s going to get married again. The last thing she wants to do is spend a weekend at the family cabin with him and her new stepmother and stepbrother to be. Maybe not the last thing, because then the escaped convicts show up and make the situation even worse. And Becky gets a perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how mean a 13-year-old girl can be as she escapes and MacGyvers the bad guys into one deadly situation after another.

A movie like this with some plot holes in the script and a bunch of stuff that really stretches credibility relies on its cast to carry things through. Lulu Wilson, who I’d never heard of, plays Becky and does a great job of being both vulnerable and unexpectedly bad-ass. Kevin James, who I’ve liked in all his comedic roles, is cast against type as the leader of the convicts, and he’s even better as a thoroughly despicable villain. He surprised me and probably enjoyed playing evil for a change. Towering former wrestler Robert Maillet is the most sympathetic of the convicts and is also good. Joel McHale, who I usually like, plays Becky’s dad and isn’t given much of anything to do except be a jerk.

I’m not a big fan of movies that are overly violent and gory, and BECKY certainly fits that description. But it generates some genuine suspense and made me want to find out what was going to happen despite my reservations. I wound up kind of liking it and can recommend it if you don’t mind a lot of blood and if some lapses of logic don’t bother you too much. As I said about THE BASKET, I wouldn’t want a steady diet of movies like this, but BECKY is basically okay.