Review: Arizona Outlaw - Bayne Hobart

The last thing drifting young cowboy Lance Harvey wants is trouble with the law, but when he rides into the town of Elkhorn, Arizona, he finds him unwillingly mixed up in a bank robbery and then on the run from the law.  Fleeing from this injustice, he winds up in the settlement of Black Rock, where he’s promptly accused of being a mysterious murderer who dubs himself The Avenger. Several prominent citizens have been killed, and the town is gripped by fear and eager to blame the first possible suspect who comes along, namely Lance. He just can’t seem to win for losing.

But since he’s the protagonist of ARIZONA OUTLAW, a novel by Donald Bayne Hobart published by Arcadia House in 1961, you know he’ll untangle all the strands of this dangerous mess eventually and discover not only the true Identity of The Avenger but also the bad guy behind a seemingly unconnected stagecoach robbery and murder. He might even find the bank robbers who got him in trouble with the law in the first place!

After the end of the pulp era during which he wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of shorter pieces of fiction, mostly Westerns but quite a few detective and sports yarns, too, Donald Bayne Hobart continued writing for digest magazines and for library-market publishers such as Arcadia House. On the cover of ARIZONA OUTLAW, he’s by-lined only as Hobart; on the title page and the inside flap of the dust jacket, he’s Bayne Hobart. But we know this is really the prolific pulpster Donald Bayne Hobart. His style had changed slightly from the days he was writing more Masked Rider novels than anyone else, but the later novel is still recognizably his work. It’s a little milder, with more talk and not as much action as in his pulp efforts, but that’s common for an aging author. I see it in my own work. What hasn’t changed is Hobart’s ability to create a likable protagonist and move a story along at a fairly brisk pace. And the action scenes are still well done, if not as prevalent.

I enjoyed ARIZONA OUTLAW and I’m glad I have several more of Hobart’s late-career Western novels from Arcadia House on hand to read. It’s not a great Western, but I had a good time reading it and if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, you certainly might, as well.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1940

There may not be any Space Babes of the sort he's known for on this THRILLING WONDER STORIES cover by Earle Bergey, but it's pretty eye-catching anyway. And the lineup of authors inside is more than enough to spark the interest of a science fiction fan: Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Cummings, Sam Merwin Jr., G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and Gordon Giles (Otto Binder). Those guys were dependably entertaining pulpsters. If you want to check out their work, this issue and many other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES are available here. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Romances, September 1950

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of REAL WESTERN ROMANCES, but it's eye-catching, to say the least. The same artist did several other covers for REAL WESTERN ROMANCES during this time period. The style is pretty distinctive. As always with the Columbia pulps, it was edited by Robert W. Lowndes. Inside this issue, the best-known author is Lee Floren. House-names Mat Rand and Cliff Campbell are on hand, too, as well as Roger Dee (Roger D. Aycock, probably best remembered for his science fiction stories), Burt Thomas, and a few other authors I hadn't heard of: W.P. Brothers, Ennen Reeves Hall, and Val Gendron. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those are pseudonyms, but it's entirely possible they're not. I don't own this issue and it doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere. I'm not sure I would have bought it if I'd seen it on the newsstand in 1950 . . . but with that cover, I would have thought about it. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Home is the Sailor - Day Keene

HOME IS THE SAILOR is perhaps the quintessential Gold Medal novel. It has all the elements: the tough, somewhat dim hero who stays drunk for much of the story; the beautiful girl who may or may not be what she seems; the dead body that has to be disposed of; and finally the hero on the lam from the cops, charged with something that he didn’t do. Just when poor Swede Nelson thinks his situation can’t get worse, Things Get Really Bad. It all adds up to a fast-paced, maybe not entirely believable novel that’s a heck of a lot of fun to read. If anybody was ever to ask you, “What were those old Gold Medals like, anyway?”, you could do a lot worse than handing them a copy of HOME IS THE SAILOR.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 26, 2005, making it one of the earliest reviews that I've rerun. As you can see, my reviews were shorter and punchier back in those days! When I posted it, the Hard Case Crime reprint of HOME IS THE SAILOR had been published recently, and that was the edition I read, not the classic Gold Medal pictured above with the great blurb: "And Swede's troubles began." Now, as far as I can tell, the Hard Case Crime edition is also out of print, but copies of both versions can still be found for sale on-line for fairly reasonable prices. This is one of my favorite Day Keene novels, so if you haven't read it before, I think it's well worth your time.)

Review: The Gunsmith #491: Invitation to a Bank Robbery - J.R. Roberts (Robert J. Randisi)

I remember quite vividly picking up the first book in a new Western series called The Gunsmith at a newsstand on the west side of Fort Worth more than forty years ago. The book was called MACKLIN’S WOMEN, and the author was J.R. Roberts. However, I already knew that J.R. Roberts was really Robert J. Randisi because Bob and I were already friends through correspondence and the occasional phone call. He had sent me a copy of his first novel, the private eye yarn THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PENNY, and I enjoyed it so I was eager to read his first Western. MACKLIN’S WOMEN didn’t disappoint me. As always with Bob’s work, it was dialogue-driven and very fast-paced, and it was written in first person, a refreshing change from most other Western series. (Only the first dozen or so books are in first person. I read and enjoyed all of them as they came out.)

Well, most of you know what happened. The Gunsmith went on to become a huge success as one of the so-called Big Four Adult Western series (the others being Longarm, Slocum, and The Trailsman), running for more than forty years and four hundred novels. Unlike the others, The Gunsmith was a creator-owned series and didn’t belong to the publishing company, so when it was canceled at Penguin along with the others, Bob was able to take it elsewhere and continue writing new entries. The Gunsmith rolled along for several more years, a new book every month like clockwork, before health issues slowed down Bob’s production. But he continued writing Gunsmith novels.

Bob passed away last fall, after what appears will be the final Gunsmith novel, INVITATION TO A BANK ROBBERY, was published last summer. Since I read the first book all those years ago, I realized I ought to read the last one, as well, even though I’m nowhere close to reading the entire series.

As this book begins, Clint Adams, the gunfighter and adventurer known as The Gunsmith, arrives in the small town of Kennelworth, Utah, looking for what he always seeks: a little peace and quiet. You know, of course, that’s not going to happen, and before you know it, Clint has been invited to turn outlaw and join in a bank robbery being planned by a couple of would-be crooks. Things get a lot more complicated than that as the plot races along. There are shootouts and beautiful women and double-crosses and a very effective twist ending. It’s highly entertaining, as the Gunsmith books always are. This was one of my father’s favorite series, and as he told me once, “You know you’re always going to have a good time reading a Gunsmith book.”

It's clear that this wasn’t intended to be the final Gunsmith novel. The title of the next one planned for the series can be found at the end. However, without getting into spoiler territory, as this book draws to a close, Clint Adams is contemplating making a change in his life, and although this is complete speculation, I think Bob may have figured the next book would be the last one. As is, the series draws to a satisfactory conclusion, and reading it is certainly a bittersweet experience for me. Too many good friends and good writers have been lost to us too early, and Bob Randisi falls into both those categories. If you’re a fan of his work, I give INVITATION TO A BANK ROBBERY a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions, as are most of the other books in the series, almost 500 of them!

Now Available: Pulp Adventures #46 - Audrey Parente, ed.

PULP ADVENTURES #46 is out, and it’s another fine issue of this book/magazine from Bold Venture Press. More than half of this issue is devoted to the classic movie KING KONG, with a lengthy, in-depth examination by Bart Pierce of a long-time mystery: who played the woman Kong plucked out of her hotel room in the mistaken belief she was Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) and then callously threw her to her death when he realized she wasn’t? The answers—and there are indeed more than one—are surprising, and along the way there’s a lot of fascinating background information about the making of a movie that means a great deal to many of us.

Will Murray, one of my favorite authors in the business today, contributes a fine article detailing the writing of his two novels featuring King Kong that also feature another couple of guys you might have heard of: Tarzan and Doc Savage. Even though we’re from different parts of the country and our careers have developed in much different ways, I’ve always felt a certain kinship with Will Murray during the 40+ years we’ve known each other, so it came as no surprise in this article when he mentions knowing the lyrics to the theme song of the King Kong animated TV series from the Sixties. At one time, so did I, and although I can’t recall the whole thing right now, I can definitely still hear parts of that song playing in my head!

Micah Swanson Harris continues the King Kong theme by examining the possible influence of H. Rider Haggard’s fiction on Kong’s creator Merian C. Cooper. Haggard is one of those authors I really need to get around to reading more of, so I appreciated this article.

Over on the fiction side, this issue reprints H.P. Lovecraft’s “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (also published as “The White Ape”), which is a Lovecraft story I hadn’t read until now. (That’s not unusual since I really haven’t read that much of Lovecraft’s work.) As often happens with Lovecraft, I love the creepy concept of this one. There are other reprints by John Russell Fearn (a nifty little suspense tale, the first non-SF by Fearn that I’ve read), John Burke, and Shelley Smith, plus brand-new stories by Riley Hogan (a nice Weird Western tale), Dr. Richard A. Olson (one of his stories about private eye Nick Stihl, a series I haven’t tried until now, but based on this one, I need to), and an action-packed yarn by the always entertaining Teel James Glenn about a convenience store robbery that features some surprising sword-swinging. There are some assorted book reviews by me, as well.

All in all, this issue of PULP ADVENTURES is great fun with some fine articles and great artwook. You can find it on Amazon or on the publisher’s website. Highly recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Top-Notch, December 1932

TOP-NOTCH, despite its name, definitely played second-fiddle to ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, BLUE BOOK, and SHORT STORIES when it comes to adventure pulps, but even so, it published some good fiction. I like the title "Fandango Island", Fred MacIsaac was a dependable author, and John Coughlin's cover illustrating the story is pretty good. Also in this issue are stories by Leslie McFarlane (ghost of the Hardy Boys!), Galen C. Colin, Lee Bond with a Western novelette under the house-name Tex Bradley, Kenneth Gilbert, Tom J. Hopkins, Ben Conlon with a serial installment under the house-name Ralph Boston, and a Zip Sawyer story by Reginald Barker writing as Vance Richardson (I have no idea who Zip Sawyer was; not a bad pulp character name, though). That's a solid enough line-up I suspect this was an entertaining issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Masked Rider Western, January 1944

I enjoyed that Masked Rider novel by Donald Bayne Hobart I read recently enough to read another one. I don’t own the January 1944 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN, but I read it on the Internet Archive. (Actually, I read a downloaded PDF on my Kindle Fire. I’m not a fan of reading books or pulps on the computer.) I believe the cover is by George Gross.

The Masked Rider novel in this issue, “The Devil’s Range”, finds the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk in South Dakota, which places the action after November 2, 1889, when Dakota Territory became the states of North and South Dakota. The cattlemen in the area are being plagued by a gang of rustlers known as the Black Band because of the black masks they wear. They’re also having trouble with a price-gouging town boss who controls the flow of supplies in the area. The Masked Rider and Blue Hawk operate separately for the most part in this yarn. Blue Hawk trails the rustlers to locate their hideout and winds up in a heap of trouble. The Masked Rider, in his Wayne Morgan identity, investigates the crooked town boss and winds up infiltrating his gang—and pinning on a badge as the local sheriff. It’s an odd role for the notorious Robin Hood Outlaw to play, but Hobart spins the plot strands of this one very skillfully. While some of it was pretty predictable, there are some twists that actually took me by surprise, and that’s always a very welcome bonus. Hobart’s distinctive style has really grown on me. He’s becoming one of my favorite Western pulp authors, and “The Devil’s Range” is a very solid entry in a good series.

H.A. DeRosso has a well-deserved reputation among Western fans as being one of the finest authors of Western noir stories and novels. His short story in this issue, “Killers Also Die”, doesn’t really fit in that mold, although it does have a hardboiled tone. It’s a more traditional tale about a young man seeking vengeance on the man who murdered his father. However, things don’t turn out as they first appear to be.  What actually happens is very predictable, making this a story in need of a twist that never happens. It’s well-written, though, and an entertaining traditional Western story, but not one you’d give to someone who’s never read DeRosso before as an example of what he’s known for.

I’ve seen Clinton Daingerfield’s name in many Western pulp TOCs, but I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. In his story “Lone Hand for Liberty”, a young cowboy is framed for the murder of his wealthy cattleman uncle. The protagonist stands to inherit the murdered man’s ranch, so he has a good motive for murder and witnesses saw him clash with the older man, too. Even though it’s pretty obvious what’s going on in this story, and one bit of business requires a pretty big suspension of disbelief, Daingerfield keeps things moving at a nice pace and I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.

I’ve read a few stories by Mel Pitzer and thought they were okay. “Fangs of Freedom” starts out as a humorous animal story, and I had my doubts about it. It becomes more serious as it goes along. There’s a romance angle that would have made it a good fit in RANCH ROMANCES, but it’s secondary to the story of a collie being accused of turning into a cattle killer. Things come to a satisfactory conclusion, making this a minor but reasonably entertaining yarn, which seems to be a good description of everything I’ve read so far by Mel Pitzer.

Stephen Payne was a prolific and widely respected Western pulp author. I have one of his novels and several collections of his stories but haven’t read any of them. I know his reputation, though, which is why I was pretty disappointed in his novelette “Borrowed Hosses” in this issue. It's a slapstick comedy about two cowboys named Bucko and Gumbo, in much the same vein as Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper stories. (The illustration that goes with Payne’s story is by the same artist who did the illustrations for McDowell’s series.) I thought this one was just terrible and only made it a few pages before giving up. However, it prompts me to want to read one of Payne’s more serious stories to see if I like it better, or if he’s just one of those popular authors who don’t connect with me for some reason.

Since most of the pages in this issue are given over to a good Masked Rider novel, I have to say that I liked it overall, although none of the other stories are particularly outstanding and there was the one I didn’t finish. I’ll probably read something else by Donald Bayne Hobart in the near future, but maybe not another Masked Rider novel so soon. I make no promises, though.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Window With the Sleeping Nude - Robert Leslie Bellem

I used to own a copy of the original Handi-Books edition of this 1950 novel by the creator of the iconic Dan Turner, but it was missing some pages and so I never got around to reading it. Luckily, Pulpville Press has reprinted it in a nice-looking, affordable trade paperback edition that uses the same cover art as the original (which is pictured alongside this post). (The trade paperback is still available, as are hardcover and e-book editions.)

Bellem is a prime example of a “love him or hate him” author. I happen to love his work, and have ever since I discovered the Dan Turner stories years ago. No author has made me laugh more often. I think Bellem’s use of language is brilliant, and most of the Turner stories are very well-put-together mysteries, to boot, packing some pretty complex plots into short story and novelette lengths.

THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE proves that Bellem’s writing works equally as well at novel length and in third person. This isn’t a Dan Turner yarn. The hero is store detective Barney Cunard, who’s in charge of security at the biggest department store in an unnamed town. Barney arrives at work one rainy, hungover morning to find a nude blond female mannequin on his desk. He’s barely started trying to figure out how and why it got there when something else happens that has to be connected to this mystery. The body of one of the store’s window dressers is discovered in a bed in one of the store’s window displays, dressed only in lingerie and stabbed in the heart. Obviously, the killer replaced the mannequin with the corpse and left the mannequin on Cunard’s desk for some unfathomable reason.

But this is one of those novels where very little that seems obvious turns out to be true. The plot twists and turns with dizzying speed as all the action takes place in just a few hours. In that short period of time, there are several more murders and a kidnapping. Cunard gets hit on the head and knocked out, guzzles rye, runs around in the rain, and finally figures everything out from clues that Bellem cleverly plants along the way. Of course, as a veteran of the Spicy pulps, Bellem manages to find excuses for several of his female characters to wind up in various stages of undress. This novel reads very much like it could be an expansion of one of Bellem’s hundreds of pulp stories, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not. (I still don't know, so if you do, please clue us in!) He also tuckerizes at least one obscure pulp author who must have been a friend of his, and there may be more such instances that I missed. (There's a character named George Armin, so I assume this is a tip o' the fedora to prolific pulp writer George Armin Shaftel.)

Bellem has been mentioned as a possible influence on Richard S. Prather, and there are definite similarities between Bellem’s Dan Turner and Prather’s Shell Scott. I think Prather was a slightly better writer, giving some of his novels a more serious undertone than you’ll find in Bellem’s work, but Bellem’s stuff is laugh-out-loud funny, well-plotted, and very much worth reading in my opinion. I had a great time reading THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE and I suspect some of you would, too. Highly recommended. (This post was published originally in a somewhat different form on January 29, 2010.)

Review: The Bride of Osiris - Otis Adelbert Kline

Otis Adelbert Kline didn’t always look to Edgar Rice Burroughs for his inspiration, although his short novel THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS (serialized in the August, September, and October 1927 issues of WEIRD TALES) does have a subterranean civilization in it. SPOILERS AHEAD. That civilization, modeled after ancient Egypt, is located under Chicago, as young man-about-town Alan Buell discovers when his beautiful fiancée Doris Lee is kidnapped from a nightclub by some shady characters. The local head of detectives in the police department appoints Buell as a special agent and partners him with another detective, two-fisted Dan Rafferty. Buell and Rafferty track the kidnappers but wind up captured themselves and taken underground, where they encounter the usual evil high priests, sacrificial rites, and daring rescues, escapes, and recaptures. Once again, Kline mixes some A. Merritt with his Burroughs and throws in a little Sax Rohmer as well.

If you can buy the premise—and it’s a real stretch—this is a mildly entertaining yarn. There’s nothing you haven’t read before, but there’s plenty of action, a colorful setting, and some despicable villains. However, I was never able to work up a lot of enthusiasm about it. For one thing, Dan Rafferty’s grotesque Irish brogue is so thick and overdone that he’s really annoying, even though he does some admirable things and seems to be a good guy. For another, the plot seems to be building up to a climax that it never delivers. I know, you’re supposed to review the book as it is, not the way you wish it was, but I really felt like we were going to have a squad of hardboiled Chicago cops with tommy guns bust in at the end to do epic battle with a horde of crazed Egyptian cultists. Instead, although there’s some action at the end and the prospect of apocalypse, the story sort of just peters out.

There was a chapbook reprint of THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS published in the Seventies by Robert Weinberg, with a cover by Frank Hamilton, and there are e-book and trade paperback editions available on Amazon now, but it never received any sort of mass market reprint. The length probably had something to do with that, but the fact that it’s just not very good probably did, too. There are some nice scenes and concepts in THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS, but to me, overall, it’s a misfire.

Review: Trouble Percolates in Coffee City - James J. Griffin

James J. Griffin’s latest Western novel featuring Texas Rangers Will Kirkpatrick and Jonas Peterson, TROUBLE PERCOLATES IN COFFEE CITY (available in e-book and trade paperback editions), takes up right where the previous novel, ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK, left off with a bit of a cliffhanger. Griffin doesn’t take long to resolve that cliffhanger, although it leaves both of his protagonists in fairly battered shape. In fact, once they return to their headquarters in Sweetwater, Texas, Jonas is laid up for a while, leaving Will to deal with their next case alone. It’s a gruesome one, too, involving a mass murderer.

No sooner is that taken care of than our Ranger heroes get new orders: they’re to set out for Coffee City, a settlement on the Mexican border, and corral a notorious bandit whose gang is causing trouble along both sides of the Rio Grande. This mysterious mastermind is regarded as something of a Robin Hood figure by many of the people in the area, which is likely to make the mission even more challenging for Will and Jonas.

And of course, before they even reach the border, they run into more trouble along the way. When they finally arrive in Coffee City, they find quite a mystery waiting for them, and it’s a well-plotted one that results in a genuine surprise when the bandit boss’s true identity is revealed.

You can tell that Griffin really enjoys spinning these traditional Western yarns, and he does a fine job of it, too. Will Kirkpatrick is a stalwart hero, and Jonas Peterson, a provisional Ranger in Will’s custody who’s trying to reform from a brief, involuntary stint as an outlaw, is an intriguing character. The growing friendship between them is handled very well. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I’d recommend any of James J. Griffin’s books. He’s one of the top practitioners of the genre these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, May 14, 1938

This issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY sports a simple but effective cover by Emmett Watson. Inside are stories by some good authors including Judson Philips, William E. Barrett, Lawrence Treat, Arthur Leo Zagat, Edward S. Williams, Cyril Plunkett, and Bert Collier, who's the only one in that group I've never heard of. I've read and enjoyed many stories by Philips and Zagat, Treat had a successful career as a mystery author, and Barrett, although he's remembered for his mystery and aviation pulp stories, is best known as the author of LILIES OF THE FIELD.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, November 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I think the cover is by Sam Cherry. The horse and rider look like his work to me. The Fictionmags Index agrees and attributes the cover to Cherry.

I always enjoy the Tombstone and Speedy stories by W.C. Tuttle, and the lead novella in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN, “Coyote Luck for Tombstone”, is no exception. Our somewhat hapless range detective heroes, Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith, are sent to find out who’s behind the rustling on a ranch in southern Arizona, but in the process they run afoul of a mysterious bandit known as the Red Mask who’s been terrorizing the border country. Could it be that the two cases are connected? What do you think? With some help from a coyote that’s been turned into a pet and a trip across the border to a bandit sanctuary, not to mention a few attempts on their lives, Tombstone and Speedy untangle the mess and expose the villains. It’s another well-plotted, light-hearted, but also action-packed entry in the series.

I’m also a fan of the series about Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine. In this issue’s “Ranger on the Run”, Raine is bushwhacked by a gunman who’s supposed to be locked up behind bars and winds up facing a showdown in an abandoned mine tunnel. These stories were published under the house-name Jackson Cole, and at least two authors contributed yarns to the series, Lee Bond (who created it) and C. William Harrison. I feel certain this is one of Bond’s efforts, since the villains spend a lot of time standing around explaining their schemes to each other and the final shootout features Raine against three bad guys. Both of those things are very common in Bond’s stories. Predictable they may be, but they move along nicely and have plenty of well-written action.

Gunnison Steele was really Bennie Gardner. I was fortunate enough to be friends with his son Barry Gardner for several years before Barry passed away. Bennie Gardner wrote quite a few novels featuring various Western pulp characters, but he was also really prolific when it comes to short-shorts, possessing the ability to pack interesting characters and plenty of plot into three or four pulp pages. His story in this issue, “Smoke on the Mountain”, is one of those, centered around an outlaw’s attempt to force an old-timer to reveal the location of some hidden money. The old-timer’s clever way of dealing justice to his tormentor is very effective. I’ve read a bunch of Gunnison Steele stories and enjoyed every one of them.

Del Rayburn published about two dozen stories in various Western pulps between 1944 and 1950 and also wrote one episode of the TV series DEATH VALLEY DAYS. Some of his stories were reprinted in a Powell Books paperback in the Sixties called TRAIL-BLAZERS WEST. His novelette “Tough Texas Tophand” from this issue was reprinted in the November 1951 issue of THRILLING WESTERN, where I’d read it before. To quote what I said about it then: The story is about the clash between a Texas cowboy and a clan of renegade Mormons in Montana. It’s a little over-the-top (the protagonist’s name is Hondo Uvalde) but the author won me over with plenty of well-written action and some interesting characters. I wouldn’t call “Tough Tophand” a Western classic, but it’s an enjoyable story. That’s still an accurate assessment. Curious about Rayburn, I did a little more digging and came across online claims that he was actually a TV network executive with some connection to STAR TREK. Some posters on a Star Trek bulletin board make a pretty scurrilous charge against him. The whole thing seems highly unlikely to me, but it’s an interesting example of the theory that you never know what you’re going to come across on the Internet.

Another masked bandit, this time known by the name Blue Mask, shows up in “Right Handy With a Rope” by veteran Western pulpster Donald Bayne Hobart. A new ranch hand with a secret shows up to hunt down the outlaw. This is another short-short, only four pages long. Hobart was a dependable writer so it’s fairly entertaining, but it’s a really minor piece of work.

The other long-running series in EXCITING WESTERN featured Pony Express rider Alamo Paige. These were published under the house-name Reeve Walker. “In the Line of Duty” in this issue finds Paige having to helping rescue a cavalry patrol besieged by a Sioux war party. The plot is pretty simple, but the story is very well-written and features more character development than usual for Paige, implying that he used to be a cowboy, or perhaps a cavalryman, or maybe even a reformed outlaw. I’ve seen speculation connecting Tom Curry, Charles N. Heckelmann, Walker A. Tompkins, and Chuck Martin with the Reeve Walker house-name, but really there’s no telling who wrote “In the Line of Duty” and the other Alamo Paige stories. It might be Heckelmann’s work, since his stories often have more fully developed characters, but really, who knows. Whoever wrote this one, it’s really good, probably the best Alamo Paige story I’ve read so far.

This is a really solid issue of EXCITING WESTERN overall. Some of the stories are better than others, of course, but all of them are entertaining and the yarns featuring Tombstone and Speedy and Alamo Paige are top-notch, outstanding entries in those series. If you have a copy of this one on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: "I Was the Kid With the Drum" - Theodore Roscoe (ARGOSY, October 30, 1937)

Theodore Roscoe is probably best known (among those of us who remember him at all) for a fine series of French Foreign Legion stories about an old Legionnaire named Thibault Corday. These ran in the pulp ARGOSY during the Thirties.

But Roscoe wrote a lot of other things for ARGOSY besides Foreign Legion yarns, among them this novelette that takes place in a small upstate New York town called Four Corners, during the early days of the Twentieth Century. That’s such a striking cover image (by Emmett Watson, by the way) that it makes me wonder if the editor at ARGOSY had the cover painting to start with and asked Roscoe to write a story around it. Despite the words “Mystery Novelet” on the cover, you look at that Norman Rockwell-esque picture and expect some lazy, gentle piece of Americana from bygone years, don’t you? Sort of like a visit to Mayberry, only from an even earlier era, right?

And that’s what you get . . . if Andy and Opie had to solve a particularly gruesome case of murder involving spiritualism, adultery, a bass drum, and a dead cat.

“I Was the Kid With the Drum!” is one of the weirdest concoctions I’ve read in a while. It’s narrated in Huckleberry Finn-like fashion by Bud Whittier, the twelve-year-old son of Four Corners’ sheriff. One night while he’s getting into mischief where he’s not supposed to be, behind one of the town’s spookiest old houses, he discovers the bass drum that belongs to the drummer from the town’s band playing by itself. The next day, the drummer’s wife turns up missing. More strange stuff happens, mixed in with the preparations for the big marching band contest among the towns in the area that will take place at the Labor Day County Fair. Bud’s job is to help the drummer carry the big drum, but he’s more interested in playing detective.

If you read this story, you’ll think that you have everything figured out pretty early on, but Roscoe is mighty tricky. He throws a lot of plot twists into approximately 15,000 words, and this is one of those stories where you’ll look back and see that all the clues were there, only Roscoe was slick enough to slip some of them right past the reader. He slipped them past me, anyway, and came up with a really entertaining and satisfying tale. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places, but you have to expect that in a story written nearly 75 years ago.

Now, I understand that you can’t just run out and pick up a copy of the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY on my say-so. But you don't have to, because since this post was published originally in a somewhat different form on January 24, 2010, Altus Press has reprinted "I Was the Kid With the Drum" and the other Four Corners stories in two handsome trade paperbacks, as well as an e-book edition of the first volume. I have these and really need to get around to reading them, although I'll have to reread "I Was the Kid With the Drum" first. Altus Press has a number of other collections of Roscoe's pulp fiction, including the Thibault Corday stories, and even though I haven't read all of them, I don't hesitate to recommend them. Roscoe was always worth reading.

Review: One Man's Treasure - Terrance Layhew

Terrance Layhew is an author, a fan of adventure fiction (we’re acquainted through the Men’s Adventure Paperbacks of the 20^th Century group on Facebook), and the host of a popular podcast called Suit Up!, which is devoted to the kind of fiction he likes to read. And write, as it turns out.

Layhew’s first adventure novel, ONE MAN’S TREASURE, is available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions, with an excellent cover, by the way. The protagonists are two brothers from Chicago, Dixon and Sam Hastings. Dix is a lawyer, a somewhat cold-blooded, calculating sort who lives for work and gambling. Sam is an engineer, a more happy-go-lucky fellow who loves tinkering with things and is recently engaged to a beautiful reporter named Amy. Dix turns all their lives upside down when, in a high-stakes poker game, he wins what’s reputed to be a map to a fabulous treasure buried by a famous pirate on a Caribbean island several hundred years ago. Such a thing couldn’t actually be real, could it? Sam, with his quixotic nature, thinks it could be, and he persuades Dix that they should find out—an effort that leads to swordfights, modern-day pirates, shootouts, harrowing adventures, and romance for both brothers.

Layhew takes a big risk in the very structure of this novel: he tells his story in first-person chapters that alternate between the Hastings brothers. I may be too much of a traditionalist, but I’m not fond of multiple first-person POVs. However, I won’t let that keep me from giving a book a fair try, and in this case, Layhew doesn’t just pull it off, he makes it work very well. Dix and Sam are two very different personalities, and that comes through effectively in the writing. I was never thrown by it.

He also does a fine job with the pacing and action, and while there are some serious moments, the novel also has a very appealing light-hearted tone most of the time. ONE MAN’S TREASURE has the feel of an Eighties action movie, and I mean that in the best possible way. I had a really good time reading it. It’s set up for a sequel, too, and I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of well-written, entertaining adventure novels, ONE MAN’S TREASURE gets a solid recommendation from me.

Review: The Frontier Legion - Jackson Cole (?)

I read this novel when it first came out in paperback during the Sixties and loved it. I was reading all the Jim Hatfield paperbacks as they were published, and THE FRONTIER LEGION was one of my absolute favorites. Then I read it again in the Nineties and still liked it, but I wasn’t as impressed with it as I was the first time around. Now I’ve just read it again, after another thirty-year gap, and my reaction falls somewhere between the previous two: I don’t think THE FRONTIER LEGION is the very best Jim Hatfield novel, but it is really, really good. Why did I pick it up for a third time when I hardly ever reread a book, you ask? Well, I had a bibliographic reason this time around. I was trying to see if I could discover any clues as to who actually wrote the danged thing!

Let’s back up a little to some of the things I didn’t know when I first read the Popular Library paperback edition sixty years ago. For starters, I had no idea who painted the cover. Now all I have to do is look at the hats those hombres are wearing to know that it’s an A. Leslie Ross cover. A good one, too. For another thing, I had no idea that THE FRONTER LEGION was reprinted from the sixth (May 1937) issue of the pulp TEXAS RANGERS, where more than 200 Jim Hatfield novels appeared between 1936 and 1958. Oh, I was vaguely aware of pulps in those days because I was a Doc Savage fan, and the 1937 copyright date in this book was a giveaway that it probably appeared in one, but the details were still well beyond me. I didn’t know that the author, Jackson Cole, wasn’t a real person at all but rather a house-name hiding the true identities of the men who wrote the Hatfield novels.

A. Leslie Scott created this series for publisher Ned Pines and editorial director Leo Margulies. Scott wrote the first two novels, followed by one by Tom Curry, one by Samuel Mines, and then another by Curry. That brings us to THE FRONTIER LEGION, which for many years has been attributed to Scott as well. The thing is, it’s very obvious to anybody who’s read many of Scott’s novels that he didn’t write this one at all. For one thing, the Jackson Cole responsible for this novel gets a couple of things wrong: Hatfield’s commanding officer is Captain McNulty, who’s posted in the West Texas settlement of Alpine, instead of Captain "Roaring Bill" McDowell in Austin, and although he rides a golden sorrel stallion as he does in all the other novels, there’s no mention that the horse is named Goldy. These aren’t hugely important details, but I can’t believe that Leslie Scott would get them wrong. Also, this is the only novel in the entire series where these two discrepancies exist. This leads me to believe that whoever wrote THE FRONTIER LEGION didn’t contribute any other Jim Hatfield novels.

Yeah, yeah, all this is fine for bibliographic nuts like me, you’re likely thinking, but what about the story? Is THE FRONTIER LEGION a good yarn? Well, it starts off with an absolutely great train wreck and robbery carried out by an outlaw gang commanded by a brilliant but vicious mastermind known only as Allison. Allison’s gang has been wreaking havoc across West Texas, and Jim Hatfield has been assigned to break up the gang and bring Allison to justice. He’s on his way to carry out this mission, and that’s why he’s on this train to start with.

As usual, Hatfield is working undercover, which allows him to infiltrate the gang and get close to a beautiful saloon girl who has some connection with the owlhoot boss. He also has to deal with a young man who’s seeking vengeance on Allison for an earlier atrocity. Even the no-good varmints who work for Allison don’t know his true identity, which makes it very difficult for Hatfield to corral the true villain.

The author keeps this plot galloping along at a breakneck pace with plenty of well-written action, an occasional touch of humor, and a poignant moment here and there. The descriptions of the West Texas landscape aren’t anywhere near as vivid as you’ll find in Leslie Scott’s work, but they get the job done. It’s a very dramatic tale that generates a lot of suspense. I really enjoyed it and recommend it to any Hatfield fan despite the things that don’t quite line up with the rest of the series, as well as to any fan of rousing Western adventure yarns in general.

As to the author’s true identity, I have a pretty strong hunch I know who he was. But I’m still investigating, so I’ll have more to report on that in the near future, I hope.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North-West Romances, Summer 1944

Since we had a little snow here recently, this seemed like a good time to post the cover from an issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. And of course, it's always a good time to post a Norman Saunders cover, although I wouldn't put this one in the absolute top rank of his work. It's still dynamic and eye-catching, though. I don't own this issue, but it looks like a good one with stories by William Heuman, Archie Joscelyn, and Curtis Bishop (all best remembered for their Westerns but perfectly capable of writing excellent Northerns, as well), along with lesser-known authors Paul Selonke, Michael Oblinger, William Rush, Francis James (who was really the very prolific James A. Goldthwaite), and Q.C. Nindorf. I always enjoy Northerns and really need to read more of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Masked Rider Western Magazine, July 1938

I don’t own a copy of this pulp, but I recently read an e-book reprint of it that’s also available in a paperback edition. I don’t have any idea who did the pulp cover.  The lead novel was also reprinted in paperback around 1970 by Curtis Books with a cover by Vic Prezio. The fellow on the cover of that paperback edition is definitely our old friend Steve Holland. (Thanks to Martin O'Hearn for his helpful info on the paperback edition.)

“Iron Horse Gunsmoke” is the third Masked Rider novel after the series was taken over by Better Publications and became part of the Thrilling Group, after the first dozen or so issues were published by Ranger Publications. It’s the second Masked Rider tale by veteran pulpster Donald Bayne Hobart, who wrote 19 Masked Rider novels, more than any other writer who contributed to the series. (Walker A. Tompkins was second with 18.) For those of you who don’t recall, the Masked Rider was more than likely inspired by/an homage to/ripped off from The Lone Ranger. He’s a good guy outlaw who wears a mask and travels with a faithful Indian companion as they drift around the West, helping folks in need, dispensing justice to owlhoot varmints, and generally adventuring. But as it turns out, the character is a lot more interesting than you might think. Unlike The Lone Ranger, who only occasionally uses disguises, the Masked Rider spends a large portion of each novel pretending to be drifting cowboy Wayne Morgan. The novels make it clear that Morgan is not the character’s true identity; he’s just as fictional as the Masked Rider himself. Somewhere in the mists of the past, the Masked Rider and his family ran afoul of injustice, and that’s why he dons a black cape and mask and sets out to right wrongs. But who he really is or what his actual background might be, we never find out. His Yaqui friend Blue Hawk, like Tonto to The Lone Ranger, is no mere sidekick. He’s an equal partner in the fight against lawlessness and is tough and smart and just as much of a badass as The Masked Rider. They’re a great team.

In “Iron Horse Gunsmoke”, Hobart gives us a nice twist in the plot. In most Western novels featuring the building of a railroad, the cattlemen are all for it since the steel rails will make it easier for them to ship their herds to market. In this novel, however, through a series of misunderstandings, as well as events manipulated by shadowy villains, the railroaders and the ranchers are mortal enemies, and it’s up to the Masked Rider to uncover what’s really going on and expose the true villains behind the violence erupting on the range. It’s a breakneck, full-tilt yarn full of shootouts, ambushes, fistfights, avalanches, and dynamite blasts. I’ve become a fan of Hobart’s work in recent years because of this high-speed pacing and his solidly written action scenes. He has a good handle on the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk, too, and the supporting characters are always colorful and interesting in a Hobart novel. I raced through this story and really enjoyed it.

Tom Gunn was a house-name used by Syl McDowell on the Sheriff Blue Steele series. Frank Gruber has also been linked to that name, but it’s likely that other Thrilling Group regulars also used it. The short story under that by-line in this issue, “Roaring Verdict”, doesn’t strike me as the work of either McDowell or Gruber. There’s really no telling who wrote this short tale of the violent confrontation between an old lawman and a cunning outlaw. It’s almost all action and well-written, but it probably could have used some sort of plot twist. Even so, it’s an entertaining story.

The issue wraps up with “That Bond of Courage”, a short story by George H. Michener, a fairly prolific but forgotten Western pulp author. It’s about the wintry clash between two sodbusters and a local cattle baron. There’s an attempted murder, a trek through a blizzard, and some unexpected redemption. This is a well-written, low-key story that comes to a satisfactory conclusion. Nothing earthshaking here, but I liked it.

Overall, this is a good issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN MAGAZINE. The Masked Rider novel by Donald Bayne Hobart is a solidly entertaining Western adventure yarn, and it takes up most of the pages. I’m a Hobart fan and I’ve become very interested in his work, so I expect to read something else by him in the near future.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Long Midnight - Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)

We all know that Daniel Ransom is really Ed Gorman. This novel was published originally by Dell in 1992 and went unreprinted for many years, but it's available now in e-book and trade paperback editions.

The prologue takes place in the 1940s, an era which Gorman recreates well, much as he does the Fifties and Sixties in some of his other books. Richard Candlemas is a lonely high school student with some sort of mysterious special powers that are vaguely sinister. Jump ahead to the Nineties, and Candlemas is the former director of the Perpetual Light Orphanage, an establishment that closed down years earlier after a tragic car wreck claimed the lives of one of its staffers and several students. I use the word “students” because Perpetual Light, ostensibly an orphanage, was actually a school where Richard Candlemas and the people who worked for him tried to find children with psychic powers and help them develop those powers.

When one of Perpetual Light’s instructors is murdered in Chicago, a former student (the sister of one of the girls killed in the car crash) is drawn into the investigation and develops a romance with the police detective handling the case. Someone starts stalking the woman, there are more murders, the scope of the case expands to include some shadowy operatives who claim to be working for the government, and the woman finds evidence that her sister may still be alive after all, as impossible as that seems.

Gorman weaves all these plot strands together with an expert hand, bringing in a number of surprising twists along the way, but as usual in one of his novels, the characters and the little touches of humanity are the real highlights. Everybody in THE LONG MIDNIGHT seems to be carrying his or her own load of melancholy, which is not to say that the book is without hope or even an occasional bit of humor. This is a novel that’s difficult to classify. It’s part thriller, part horror, part science fiction. Mainly, though, it’s a great yarn that races along, inhabited by characters the reader cares about. That makes it well worth seeking out and reading. Highly recommended.

(This post was published in a somewhat different form on January 15, 2010. My admiration for Ed Gorman and his work remain unchanged since that time. I miss the guy and always will.)

Review: Tam, Son of the Tiger - Otis Adelbert Kline

Many, many years ago I read one or two novels by Otis Adelbert Kline and remember enjoying them, but I couldn’t tell you exactly which books I read. I do know, however, that TAM, SON OF THE TIGER wasn’t one of them, because I just read it and I'm certain I’d never read it before.

This adventure yarn was serialized in the June/July through December 1931 issues of WEIRD TALES, all with covers by C.C. Senf, by the way. It was reprinted in hardback by Avalon Books in 1962, probably in an abridged edition because most of Avalon’s editions were abridged. The pulp version was reprinted in 2010 by Pulpville Press in trade paperback and hardcover editions that are still available from the publisher. The pulp version can also be found on-line.

Kline is remembered primarily as a literary agent for some of the best-known authors of science fiction and fantasy from the pulp era, but he wrote several novels himself. They were heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. TAM, SON OF THE TIGER definitely shows that ERB influence as Tam Evans, the two-year-old son of an American soldier and adventurer in Burma, is carried off by a rare white tigress. She raises Tam to be a tiger (just like the apes raised Tarzan to be an ape), but eventually he meets an aged lama who befriended the tigress many years earlier, and this man educates Tam and teaches him how to use various weapons. Combined with his own strength and agility, these attributes make 20-year-old Tam a deadly and intelligent fighting man. So naturally, he soon runs into a beautiful princess wearing golden armor who is fighting some four-armed warriors. All of them come from a vast underground world populated by various races that gave rise to the legends of the Hindu gods, and when Tam ventures into this subterranean world to help the princess, he’s drawn into a war between those semi-deities just as you’d expect. Oh, and his father, who is still an adventurer and has believed for many years that Tam is dead, shows up, too, along with a scientist friend of his.

As you can tell from that description, TAM, SON OF THE TIGER is a real kitchen sink book. Kline keeps throwing in complication after complication, peril after peril, and in true Burroughs fashion splits his characters up and lets them have separate but interweaving storylines. Coincidences abound. While ERB is the most obvious influence in this novel (both Tarzan and Mars series), I also detected echoes of A. Merritt and Ray Cummings. Some of the vivid, bizarre descriptions of the underground world really reminded me of Merritt’s work, and I couldn’t help but think of Cummings’ THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM, too.

If I had read this when I was twelve years old, sitting on my parents’ front porch on a lazy summer day, I would have thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. No doubt about that. Reading it now when I’m much older, I still had a pretty darned good time racing through it. Derivative or not, Kline was a good storyteller and knew how to keep the reader turning the pages. I think I’m going to have to read more by him. These days, pure entertainment is what I want most of the time, and TAM, SON OF THE TIGER definitely provided that.

Review: Chaffee of Roaring Horse - Ernest Haycox

Jim Chaffee is a young cowboy who tries to start a spread of his own, but after several bad years in a row, he loses it to the bank. Jim figures he’ll go back to riding for the neighboring ranch where he used to work, but before he can do that, he finds himself mixed up in murder, a land swindle, and a range war, as well as a romantic triangle involving a wealthy Easterner and a beautiful girl who may or may not be exactly what she seems.

CHAFFEE OF ROARING HORSE has all the elements of a traditional Western, but Ernest Haycox’s usual careful attention to character and style makes this a top-notch novel. He really puts his protagonist Jim Chaffee through the wringer, too. The guy gets shot, barely survives a stampede, has to ride some deadly rapids, nearly breaks his ankle, and gets thrown in jail and is targeted by a lynch mob. Jim is tough, though, and figures out a way to set things right.

CHAFFEE OF ROARING HORSE (the title refers to Roaring Horse River, which flows through Roaring Horse Canyon) is a fairly early effort by Haycox. It was only his second full-length novel, following FREE GRASS, and was serialized in the pulp magazine WEST in October, November, and December 1929. Doubleday published it in hardcover in 1930, and Popular Library reprinted it in paperback at least twice, the first time in 1953 with a cover by Sam Cherry (I think) and in 1958 with a cover by A. Leslie Ross. I’m pretty sure that the cover on the earlier paperback was used originally as the cover of a Thrilling Group Western pulp, but I haven’t been able to find it to confirm that.

In the past, I’ve complained about the lack of action in Ernest Haycox’s books, despite them being very well-written in general, but that’s not the case with this one. There are gunfights, fistfights, and stampedes, and Haycox doesn’t shy away from the violence and have it happen off-screen or not at all, as he sometimes does. I really enjoyed CHAFFEE OF ROARING HORSE and think it may be the best Haycox novel I’ve read so far, even though it’s one you never hear much about. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I recommend it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crack Detective Stories, March 1944

I'm always a sucker for a good-looking redhead, especially one with a gat like the dame on this issue of CRACK DETECTIVE STORIES. I don't know who did the art. There are some mighty good authors inside this issue, too, including Bruno Fischer (as Russell Gray), T.W. Ford, Robert Turner, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Robert C. Blackmon, Tom Thursday, and Henry Morton. I don't own this issue and haven't read it, but it's probably another example of editor Robert W. Lowndes providing a quality product on a low budget.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, January 1935

This is the second issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't own this issue, but I like the action-packed cover. I don't know the artist. There's a really fine group of writers in this issue: W.C. Tuttle (with a Happy Hay story, a series about which I know nothing except that it ran for eight stories in NEW WESTERN), Tom Roan, Frank C. Robertson, and house-name Wes Fargo, who was sometimes E.B. Mann, sometimes Roy de S. Horn, and undoubtedly sometimes other authors, as well. No clue who wrote the novella under that name in this issue.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Three Worlds to Conquer - Poul Anderson

While I’ve never considered Poul Anderson one of my absolute favorite science fiction authors, I realized the other day that I’ve been reading his books off and on for more than forty years, starting with his Flandry series back in the mid-Sixties. I don’t recall ever reading a book of his that I didn’t like, either.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a non-series novel from 1964 that I’d never read before. It’s set in the Jovian system, on Jupiter itself and on the moon Ganymede, where there’s a mining colony from Earth. Humanity doesn’t have interstellar space travel yet, but there are colonies scattered throughout the solar system. Somewhat to the surprise of the colonists, they’ve made radio contact with a fairly primitive, centaur-like species native to Jupiter’s surface. One of these beings is smart enough to have mastered the radio on one of the scientific instruments sent down to the planet’s surface from Ganymede, and a friendship has sprung up between him and one of the scientists at the mining colony on the moon.

Then things go to hell for both of them. Civil war breaks out back on Earth, and a warship with a captain that’s still loyal to the losing side shows up on Ganymede, where most of the colonists backed the winners. The spaceship captain takes over the moon and plans to use it as a base to launch a counter-revolution. Down on Jupiter, a horde of barbarians have invaded the country of the native being who’s in contact with the mining colony. It’s no surprise that these two storylines intersect, and the two friends from different species wind up helping each other out.

Anderson makes it believable that sentient beings could live on Jupiter’s surface, and those chapters of the book are my favorites because they read almost like a sword-and-planet yarn, what with all the barbarians and fighting with swords and axes and such. Anderson handles all that very well. The political intrigue in the scenes set on Ganymede aren’t as compelling, but at least Anderson keeps the pace moving along swiftly and the reader can’t help but wonder how he’s going to tie everything together . . . which he does, quite neatly.

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER is a prime example of the sort of adventure science fiction I grew up reading. If you haven’t tried Poul Anderson’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’ve read and enjoyed Anderson’s novels but not this one, it’s worth seeking out. Plus it has a decent Jack Gaughan cover.

(Since this post originally appeared on January 8, 2010, I've found out that THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER was serialized in 1964 in the science fiction digest magazine IF. I saw issues of GALAXY now and then, but IF didn't get any distribution around where I lived, so I never would have come across that version.)