The Wrap Up

I don’t talk much about real life on here anymore. It hasn’t been a great year, mostly due to various medical issues in the family, but we’ve had worse. I prefer to concentrate on the more pleasant aspects of life, most notably reading and writing. So with that in mind . . .

I read 167 books this year, not as much as some years but still a very respectable total. That includes more actual pulps and pulp reprints than I’ve ever read in a single year, so I’m pleased with that. Here are my top ten favorite books I read, in alphabetical order by author:

CASINOS, MOTELS, GATORS: STORIES, Ben Boulden
NORDIC AND FINN, Peter Brandvold
GUNSMOKE RECKONING, Joseph Chadwick
WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN’S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY, Robert Deis, Wyatt Doyle, Josh Alan Friedman, eds.
THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM, Steve Donoso, ed.
HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS, Cullen Gallagher
THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1, Frederick Nebel
THE SHADOW OF VENGEANCE, Scott Oden
NEITHER BEG NOR YIELD, Jason M. Waltz, ed.
HELL STRIP, Lee Richards (Lee E. Wells)

That’s the new, expanded edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH. I read the original version when it came out a number of years ago. When I was looking over my list of books read this year, there were many, many more that could have been included because I read a lot of really good books. As always, narrowing it down to ten was not easy.

As for writing, my production actually went up a little, although it’s difficult for me to comprehend how that happened. I don’t have an exact number, but I know I wrote right around three-quarters of a million words. I’m not expecting to write as much next year, or probably ever again, to be honest. I’d be perfectly happy to do half a million words in 2025 and after that? Well, some people actually retire, even writers. That’s starting to look very appealing to me.

But that’s on down the road, and for now, many thanks to all of you reading this for sticking with me. May next year be better for all of us.

Manhunter: The Deluxe Edition - Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson

In the summer of 1973, I drove up to Denton, Texas, to look for an apartment because I was attending what was then North Texas State University and didn’t want to live in the dorm again when the fall semester started. While I was there, I stopped by Fultz News Agency on the square downtown to check out the comic books and paperbacks. One of the comics I picked up was an issue of DETECTIVE COMICS with a new back-up feature: MANHUNTER, a revival of an old Golden Age character brought to the current day and enmeshed in a thriller/espionage plotline. It was written by Archie Goodwin, a writer whose work I enjoyed, with art by Walter Simonson, a relative newcomer.

I became a fan immediately, and since I was already buying DETECTIVE on a regular basis to read the Batman stories in it, I followed the Manhunter story as well and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it was designed to be a limited storyline, and after half a dozen backup stories and a full-length crossover with Batman, that was it. The whole thing came to an end, and while I remembered it fondly, I never reread it in the more than five decades since then.

However, recently I noticed that the digital version of the collected edition was on sale, so I picked it up and read the whole thing again. Sometimes that proves to be a mistake. A while back on Kindle Unlimited I noticed another series I’d read 50+ years ago that was written and drawn by one of my favorite comics creators (who shall remain nameless), so I revisited it. I read part of the first issue, said to myself, “This makes no sense at all”, and returned it. Sometimes you just had to be there when it was new.

Thankfully, that’s not the case with MANHUNTER. I still thought it was great. I love the way Goodwin and Simonson tied it in with the original Golden Age character. The plot is maybe a tad bit thin, but the scripts move right along and Simonson’s art is excellent. The crossover with Batman is handled well. There’s an epilogue by Simonson published after Goodwin passed away, a silent story with no dialogue but using the plot Goodwin and Simonson worked out, and it’s quite good, too. I was glad I gave this one another try. If you read it back then, maybe you should revisit it, too. If you’ve never read it but enjoy Silver Age DC, it’s well worth checking out.

By the way, I did find an apartment on that trip to Denton. It was a crappy little place on Normal Street, for those of you familiar with Denton. I lived there for a year, which was the only time of my life I could say with any justification that I lived on Normal Street. I didn't care for apartment living and commuted for the rest of my college career, even though it was a pretty long drive. I do have a few good memories from that year to go with the noisy neighbors and lousy plumbing.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Stories, January 1934

Not many pulps featured New Year's covers, but SPICY STORIES did from time to time. This one from 1934 was painted by Earle Bergey before he became well-known for his many great covers on science fiction pulps. I've never heard of any of the authors who have stories in this issue, but here they are for the sake of completeness: Louise Langdon, Tom Kane, Ralph Gordon, Wilbur Braun, Reggie Coghlan, Rae King, and Bert King. Now and then you run across a familiar name in the TOC of one of these pulps, such as Robert Leslie Bellem, but for the most part, the risque pulps are a whole other world from the ones we usually talk about here.

And with that, I hope it's a great New Year for all of you.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp Revisited - Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I’ve featured this pulp before, but now I’ve had a chance to read it, thanks to a good friend who loaned me his copy. That’s it in the scan. The cover is by Allan Anderson, I think. His horses are pretty distinctive.

The issue leads off with the novelette “Tombstones For Gringos” by Les Savage Jr. Brothers Colin and Farris Shane are traveling with their ill and dying mother, looking for a new homestead. They find a good place, but it lies in the shadow of a mountain known as El Renegado because of some tragic events a couple of hundred years earlier. It seems that a Spanish captain (Spain ruled the region then) betrayed his men for the love of a woman, fled to the mountain with her, and the rest of the company was wiped out. Now the basin that lies in the shadow of the peak is cursed. And boy, everything that happens after that seems to bear out the curse. You’ve got family members killing family members (at least three cases of it), gruesome torture, and doomed love.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Savage’s original version of the tale was published many years later as “The Shadow of Renegade Basin” in the Leisure paperback of the same name, which is still available from Amazon Encore. Fiction House editor Malcolm Reiss bought the manuscript in 1948, probably because Savage was one of Fiction House’s star writers by that time and he bought everything Savage sent him. Reiss must have deemed Savage’s original version unpublishable, because he sat on it for a couple of years, then did some rewrites himself and finally published it in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES.

Since I have the book with Savage’s version in it, I skimmed through it after I’d read the pulp novelette, looking for the changes Reiss made. They’re really not extensive at all. He removed one plot element that he must have felt was too offensive (given the time period, he was right) and rewrote the ending to give it at least a tiny shred of hope, rather than the bleak nihilism of Savage’s version. I hate to side with an editor over an author, but Reiss was right to do what he did. The pulp version is better. I get that Savage was trying to push the boundaries of the genre, and he successfully did so in other novels and stories, but I think this one is a misfire.

Next up is another novelette, “Wheels of Empire” by Alexander Wallace. This one is set during the 1840s, the days of the great immigrant wagon trains, and is about a clerk from Boston who goes west seeking adventure, becomes a frontiersman, and clashes with a crooked trading post owner who swindles the immigrants who visit his fort. It’s a pretty good yarn with some nice action and a thoroughly despicable villain. Wallace was a Canadian author who published several dozen Western and adventure stories in various pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. I’ve read a few stories by him and enjoyed all of them.

Charles Dickson wrote only a few detective and Western stories for the pulps, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until I read his short story in this issue, “Ride the River”. Like most of the stories in this pulp, it’s as much a historical yarn as a traditional Western and is set during the mountain man era. The protagonist is a young fur trapper who sets out to stop a rival from stirring up an Indian war. This is a pretty well-written story, and I enjoyed it.

“Retreat to Glory” by Norman B. Wiltsey is billed as a short story, but it’s actually an article based on history like the dozens of others Wiltsey wrote for various pulps. It’s about a group of Northern Cheyenne jumping the reservation in Indian Territory and heading north toward their homeland. The army pursues them, of course. Wiltsey does an okay job recounting a fairly sad chapter in history.

“Dance of the Grizzly” is Theodore Cutting’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. The protagonist is a young Indian who has to face a grizzly bear in an ordeal of courage in order to win the girl he loves. Cutting throws in a few decent twists, but overall this story never really engaged my interest.

“Apache Flame” is bylined John Starr, a well-known Fiction House house-name. But there’s more to the background than that. A line on the Table of Contents page states that this novelette and the following one, “The Mountains Said No”, are copyright 1938 by Fiction House. The twist is that no stories by those titles were published in any Fiction House pulp in 1938. I even checked the issues from December 1937 and January 1939 just for the sake of thoroughness. Which leads me to believe that these two stories were published originally under other titles and with other bylines on them. There’s a story called “Apache!” by Ray Nafziger in an issue of FRONTIER STORIES from 1938, which seemed a likely suspect, but the writing in “Apache Flame” doesn’t really strike me as being Nafziger’s work. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Chances are, we’ll never know which “John Starr” actually wrote this story, but it’s a really good one featuring another mountain man protagonist, this one teaming up with some Spanish settlers who hate him in order to rescue some young women kidnapped by vengeful Apaches. It takes place in what will one day be New Mexico, another thing that made me think of Nafziger, who lived there while he was writing for the pulps. No matter who wrote it, “Apache Flame” really races along with good characters and plenty of action. This is a top-notch yarn.

Another Fiction House house-name, Wilton Hazzard, is the byline on the novelette “The Mountains Said No”, which wraps up this issue. The mountain man protagonist of this one comes across a wagon train under attack by a Pawnee war party and helps the immigrants run off the Indians, only to find that the wagons are being guided by an old enemy of his. Our hero and his crusty old sidekick wind up joining the wagon train, of course, to try to get them through safely to the gold fields in California. This is an excellent story, really well-written and with plenty of action. There’s a theory that a well-known science fiction author is behind the house-name on this one, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that “The Mountains Said No” is a fine yarn and I really enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a good issue of FRONTIER STORIES with a few disappointments mixed in, but I like that the emphasis is on buckskin-era stories rather than traditional Westerns. I haven’t read many issues of FRONTIER STORIES, but I think I’m going to have to hunt up more of them.

The Annual December 27th Post

Twenty years ago today, I posted about making my first fiction sale, which took place on December 27, 1976. You can read all about it here. Now, 48 years have gone by since that semi-momentous day, and half a century in this business is barreling at me. Will I make it? Who knows?

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a dog at a typewriter. Reminds me a little of me in those long-ago days. That would be a pile of rejected manuscripts behind the typewriter.

But to be serious for just a moment, to all the editors who have bought my work over the years, to all the folks who have laid down their hard-earned money to read it, to those who love it and those who hate it, and especially to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, the biggest thank you I can muster. You've kept me going, and God willing, I'll putter along a while longer.

A Cowboy's Christmas Prayer - S. Omar Barker

I first posted this twenty years ago tonight, the year I started this blog. I couldn't have predicted that I'd still be around or that the blog would, but I am and so is the blog, and some of you reading this saw that post back in 2004, too. So here it is again, my favorite Christmas poem, but I don't guarantee I'll post it again twenty years from now.

On the other hand, I might.

A COWBOY'S CHRISTMAS PRAYER
By S. Omar Barker (1894-1985)

I ain't much good at prayin', and You may not know me, Lord
I ain't much seen in churches where they preach Thy Holy Word,
But you may have observed me out here on the lonely plains,
A-lookin' after cattle, feelin' thankful when it rains,
Admirin' Thy great handiwork, the miracle of grass,
Aware of Thy kind spirit in the way it comes to pass
That hired men on horseback and the livestock we tend
Can look up at the stars at night and know we've got a friend.

So here's ol' Christmas comin' on, remindin' us again
Of Him whose coming brought good will into the hearts of men.
A cowboy ain't no preacher, Lord, but if You'll hear my prayer,
I'll ask as good as we have got for all men everywhere.
Don't let no hearts be bitter, Lord.
Don't let no child be cold.
Make easy beds for them that's sick and them that's weak and old.
Let kindness bless the trail we ride, no matter what we're after,
And sorter keep us on Your side, in tears as well as laughter.

I've seen ol' cows a-starvin, and it ain't no happy sight
Please don't leave no one hungry, Lord, on thy good Christmas night
No man, no child, no woman, and no critter on four feet
I'll aim to do my best to help You find 'em chuck to eat.

I'm just a sinful cowpoke, Lord-ain't got no business prayin'
But still I hope You'll ketch a word or two of what I'm sayin'
We speak of Merry Christmas, Lord-I reckon you'll agree
There ain't no Merry Christmas for nobody that ain't free.
So one thing more I'll ask You, Lord: Just help us what you can
To save some seeds of freedom for the future sons of man.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and good night.

The Shadowed Circle #7 - Steve Donoso, ed.

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, May 1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, January 1944

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

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, November 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Lost Continent - Edgar Rice Burroughs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, October 1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Desperate Blonde - Lorenz Heller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, December 1933

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