Review: The Tigress (Payoff for Paula) - Jeff Bogar (Ronald Wills Thomas)

Jeff Bogar was the pseudonym British author Ronald Wills Thomas used for a couple of dozen mysteries and thrillers between 1950 and 1955, most of them published in England by Hamilton & Company. Several of them made their way to the United States for American editions, including two published by Lion Books. Thomas’s novel PAYOFF FOR PAULA was published in paperback by Lion in 1951 under the title THE TIGRESS, and I recently read my copy of that edition. That’s it in the scan. I don’t know who did the art.

The narrator/protagonist of THE TIGRESS is Hollywood talent agent Greg Farley, who represents a number of up-and-coming young starlets. Greg is a real rarity in the movie business, a nice guy who doesn’t try to take advantage of his young female clients. But one of them suddenly turns on him unexpectedly, attacking him verbally in a nightclub where they run into each other, and when she turns up dead later that same night, stabbed to death, Greg is the only real suspect. Which means, of course, that he has to dodge the cops and uncover the real killer in order to clear his name.

This murder launches several days of whirlwind action that involves mobsters, gamblers, nightclub owners, a fortune in missing gems, and several beautiful women, including the stunning redhead Paula of the original British title. Greg, a former vaudevillian, uses the skills he learned on that circuit and his Hollywood connections to navigate this dangerous investigation, which finds him getting hit on the head and knocked out more than once in classic hardboiled fashion. Eventually, he untangles everything and solves the starlet’s murder, along with another killing later on.

This is the sort of yarn I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of times, but I always enjoy it if it’s well-written, and THE TIGRESS mostly is. The plot gets a little muddled now and then, and there are occasional reminders that the author is British and not American. But Thomas does a good job overall. The plot, the beautiful babes, the fast-paced banter, and the breezy style all remind me very much of the Carter Brown books. Not done as well as Alan G. Yates did, mind you, but still, that’s the sort of book this is, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have the other Jeff Bogar novel published by Lion Books and probably will get around to reading it in the relatively near future.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Variety Detective Magazine, August 1938

VARIETY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE was a short-lived detective pulp from Ace that changed its name to LONE WOLF DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and ran for several more years. This is the first issue under the VARIETY DETECTIVE name and sports a Norman Saunders cover, always a good selling point. Inside were assorted house-name reprints from TEN DETECTIVE ACES, DETECTIVE-DRAGNET MAGAZINE, and SECRET AGENT X, along with stories by Lester Dent and Paul Chadwick, certainly the only authors in this issue you've ever heard of, at least that we know about. There's no telling who was hiding behind those house-names. This is probably more of an interesting oddity than anything else, but Dent and Chadwick are always worth reading. In fact, if you want to check it out, the entire issue can be found here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, January 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my well-worn copy in the scan, featuring a fine dramatic cover by Sam Cherry.

I bought this issue mostly for the Leslie Scott novel, of course. It’s a bit unusual that he’s billed under his real name here and not Bradford Scott, A. Leslie, or even A. Leslie Scott. “The City of Silver”, which is long enough to be considered a novel even in this pulp version, was rewritten and expanded into the hardcover novel SILVER CITY, published by Arcadia House in 1953 and also appeared in paperback from Harlequin. The protagonist is Jim Vane, who is working as a stagecoach station agent in Nevada when the story opens but soon finds himself in the mining boomtown of Virginia City working for Adolph Sutro, one of several historical characters who figure in this novel, much like a Rio Kid yarn. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve read a Rio Kid novel that takes place in Virginia City and features some of the same characters and historical developments.

In this one by Scott, we get ambushes and stagecoach robberies, Jim Vane and some other men are trapped underground by a disaster, and there’s a big shootout at the end in which Vane uncovers the identities of the men who are behind all the villainy in this story. Those are all standard plot elements for a Scott novel, but he mixes them together with such skill that I always enjoy the story he tells. In addition, the ending of this one is a little different from most I’ve encountered in his work, which is a nice bonus. “The City of Silver” is a good novel and a fine example of Scott writing at the top of his game, with plenty of action and some nice turns of phrase.

“Cow Country Jury” is one of ten Western and detective stories that John Di Silvestro wrote for various pulps in the late Forties. That’s all I know about the author. This short-short is about a young cowboy who decides to become an outlaw, only to encounter several unexpected obstacles to his plan. It’s a fairly light-hearted yarn and has a definite oddball quality to it. For one thing, all the characters have unusual names. The young cowboy is Sorne Dangler, the stagecoach driver he tried to hold up is Brad Nunoon, and the local lawman is Sheriff Lork. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. This is a story with some promise, but it doesn’t really deliver.

Steuart Emery started writing romance and mainstream stories for the general fiction pulps in the early 1920s and then wrote hundreds of air war stories (with a few detective yarns mixed in) from the late Twenties to the late Forties. In the late Forties he began writing for the Western pulps and was a fairly prolific contributor to them throughout the Fifties. Most of his Westerns were cavalry yarns, but his novelette “Wall of Silence” in this issue doesn’t feature the cavalry, although it does have some Indian fighting in it. Instead of some young officer, Emery’s protagonist is a stagecoach driver in Arizona who used to drive a fire wagon in New York. He had to go on the run after killing a man in a barroom brawl, but a police detective from New York has tracked him down and offers him a choice: go to prison for the killing—or go back to New York testify against an Irish mobster. Unusual characters, an offbeat plot, and plenty of excellent action make this a terrific story with a very satisfying ending. I really enjoyed this one, and it made me even more of a Steuart Emery fan than I already was.

Larry A. Harris wrote hundreds of stories for the Western pulps. I’ve read a number of them and always enjoyed them, finding them competently written and dependably entertaining. That’s a good description of his short story “Killer Bait” in this issue. An old rancher sets a trap for the outlaws responsible for his son’s death. The writing has a nice hardboiled tone and the story moves right along. Maybe nothing special overall, but I had a good time reading it.

The same can’t be said for “No Decisions” by Francis H. Ames. I’d read several stories by Ames before and liked them okay, but this one is just awful. It’s a present-tense, burlesque comedy with characters named Highpockets and Knothole, and it’s about a boxing match between the champions of the settlements of Sandstone and Gumbo Flats. I made it through three pages before saying nope, not for me.

Johnston McCulley wrote more than 50 stories featuring his iconic creation Zorro for WEST between 1944 and 1949. These short adventures play much like episodes of the famous Zorro TV series, although that series was still some years in the future when these stories were written and published. “Zorro Starts the New Year” in this issue has Don Diego Vega and his famous alter-ego clashing with another aristocrat during a New Year’s party at the Vega rancho. The plot is pretty thin, but McCulley’s writing is so smooth and entertaining that the story is quite enjoyable anyway. All of McCulley’s Zorro stories, from his debut in the novel THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO to his final pulp yarns, are available in six beautiful reprint volumes from Bold Venture Press.

Despite the presence of the one story I disliked, this is a very good issue of WEST. The Steuart Emery novelette is my favorite, but Scott’s novel “The City of Silver” is very solid and entertaining, too. The presence of McCulley and Harris is just a bonus. If you have this one, or happen to stumble across a copy, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Lone Ranger - Gaylord Dubois

I’m a big fan of the Lone Ranger and have been since childhood. I always watched the TV show and read many of the novels by Fran Striker that were published by Grosset & Dunlap. In fact, I remember visiting some relatives one summer when I was about ten years old and going with my cousins to the local public library, where I was thrilled to discover about half a dozen of the Lone Ranger novels that I hadn’t read. My cousins checked them out for me using their library cards, and I was able to read all of them before we had to go home. Along about the same time, I began listening to syndicated reruns of the Lone Ranger radio show (along with The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and Gangbusters) and enjoyed those, too.

Later on, when I was in high school and college, I started watching reruns of the TV series and discovered that I still liked it, maybe even more than when I was younger. I even sat down one summer and wrote more than 25,000 words of a Lone Ranger novel that I never finished. (Yes, I know, fanfic. That’s not the only one I wrote, either. I actually finished my Tarzan novel.) Sure, I can see some of the cheesiness in the show (like the giant plastic rock and the fake trees that are in so many of the supposedly exterior scenes that were really shot on a soundstage), but the series as a whole just works for me, for whatever reason. I can still sit down, watch an episode I’ve seen many times before, and thoroughly enjoy it.

I hadn’t revisited the novels in quite a while, though. For my birthday, Livia bought the entire set of novels from a collector friend of mine who was selling them and gave them to me for my birthday. That prompted me to reread the first one after more than forty years.

First of all, despite what the cover says, this book wasn’t written by Fran Striker, who was the primary scripter of the radio show. It’s actually by Gaylord Dubois, as the title page admits, adding that it’s “based on the famous radio adventures by Fran Striker”. Later printings attribute the book itself to Striker, “based on the famous Lone Ranger adventures created by Geo. W. Trendle”. Trendle was the radio executive who came up with the idea, but I think most of the actual creation of the character came from Striker. Regardless of all that, Dubois is the real author of this one.

So how does it hold up? Well . . . I’m not going to lie and pretend it’s a great book by modern standards. Dubois’s prose is long-winded and just plain slow in many places. The plot, which involves sabotaging the building of the transcontinental railroad, has more whiskers than Gabby Hayes. And the Lone Ranger himself is off-screen for long stretches of the book that concentrate on the rather vapid and not-too-bright proxy hero and heroine.

But there are moments . . . moments like the one where the Ranger is racing to catch a runaway train to prevent a head-on collision with another train . . . or when he breaks up a lynch mob about to hang an innocent man . . . or when he has a showdown with a gang of outlaws that involves dynamite, railroad flares, and a bow and arrows . . . well, let’s just say that at those moments, I can hear the William Tell Overture playing faintly in the back of my head. If you’ve ever had that experience, you know what I mean.

A couple more interesting things about this book. It was originally published in 1936, which means it’s based solely on the radio series. Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels, and the TV version were still more than a dozen years in the future. So the characterization and descriptions of the two main characters are a little off from what you might expect if you grew up on the TV series, as I did. Even though this is the first novel in the series, it’s not an origin story at all, and there’s no mention of how the Lone Ranger came to be. It does, however, begin with a lengthy sequence about how the Ranger found his horse Silver, which is at odds with the TV continuity. Then it goes on to the main story about the railroad sabotage.

I remember that even when I read these books as a kid, I thought there was something not quite the same about the first one. The edition I read then was credited to Striker, but it just didn’t seem as good as the other books in the series, which I liked better. Later on, of course, I found out why. Gaylord Dubois was actually one of my favorite writers when I was a kid, although I never knew anything about him at the time. But he was the writer on long runs of the TARZAN comic book (with the Jesse Marsh art), and also wrote the back-up feature in TARZAN, “Brothers of the Spear”. In addition, he created and wrote the comic book TUROK, SON OF STONE, which I also read every time I could find an issue. Dubois wrote a bunch of other stuff, too: more than 3000 comic book stories, Big Little Books, juvenile novels based on other radio shows and comic strips, like DON WINSLOW OF THE NAVY, which Dubois ghosted for series creator Frank V. Martinek, and probably a lot of other things I’m not aware of. I have to wonder if he really wrote that TERRY AND THE PIRATES novel I read a couple of years ago. There’s even a blog devoted to him and his work that’s maintained by his granddaughter, and it’s well worth checking out if you’re a fan of Twentieth Century pop culture.

So, should you run right out and find a copy of this book? If you’re not already a Lone Ranger fan, probably not. But if you are and you’ve never read it, I think it’s worthwhile, as a piece of history if nothing else. I enjoyed it, and I’m sure some of you would, too.

Meanwhile, I have all the other books in the series, the ones actually written by Fran Striker, sitting right here on the shelf beside me, just waiting for me to get to them. The next one is THE LONE RANGER AND THE MYSTERY RANCH. All I have to do is look at it, and I hear the William Tell Overture again, playing its siren song . . .

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 5, 2010. I'm still a big fan of The Lone Ranger but have read only one of those other books since then. I know right where they all are, though, and one of these days . . . I've also written two Lone Ranger novellas since then that were published by Moonstone Books, and getting the chance to write stories featuring one of my childhood heroes is one of the best things that's happened to me as a writer.)

Coming Soon: Silverado Press Presents, Volume 1

I'm pleased and proud to be included in this anthology with some of the best Western writers in the business today. Livia and I collaborated on a story for this book, the first-ever team-up between Judge Earl Stark and Lucas Hallam. It's a Fort Worth-set adventure called "The Cowtown Inferno", and it worked so well I hope we can team up Hallam and Big Earl again sometime. This book will be out soon, and I'll let you know when it's available. In the meantime, you can pre-order it on Amazon and get the best price guarantee. 

Review: The Hanuvar Chronicles, Book 2: The City of Marble and Blood - Howard Andrew Jones

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A while back, I read Howard Andrew Jones’ novel LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND, the first book in his Hanuvar Chronicles, and thought it was one of the best novels I’d read in years. I bought the sequel, THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, as soon as it came out. And there it sat, unread, for some reason that I can’t fathom.

But no longer. I’ve read it now, and there’s no second-book-in-a-series slump in this one. Not hardly. THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD is absolutely fantastic.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hanuvar, he’s the former military commander of the nation of Volanus, which has fought a series of disastrous wars against the Dervan Empire. This conflict finally ends with the destruction of Volanus and the dispersion of the surviving Volani, most of them as slaves, across the empire. Hanuvar is thought to be dead—but he’s not. He’s still alive, and he has a plan. He’s going to find all of his countrymen who still live, free them one way or another, and take them to the colony he’s established called New Volanus. This campaign of freedom, waged mostly by stealth and subterfuge, gets underway in LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND and continues in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD.

That name refers to Derva itself, the center of the empire, and Hanuvar will be in more danger there than ever as he tries to carry out his epic plan.

As you may have figured out, this is all based very loosely on the wars between Rome and Carthage, and Hanuvar is inspired by (you can’t even say based on because they’re too different) Hannibal. And the scope of the story Jones is telling is so vast that he employs a brilliant strategy: each “chapter” in these books is actually a novella, telling a separate story with a beginning, middle, and end, but they all fit together to form a continuing narrative that builds momentum as it goes along. This also allows Jones to tell different kinds of stories as the overall tale progresses. One of the chapters in the first book, for example, was a pure heist story—Donald E. Westlake or Lionel White in a sword-and-sorcery milieu—and in one point in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, Hanuvar is called upon to function as a detective and solve a murder. In another chapter, Hanuvar and some of his friends and allies pull a very neat con job. Jones doesn’t neglect the sorcery, though, as there are plenty of ghosts and demons and zombies and assorted otherworldly threats for Hanuvar to deal with.

All this is told in clean, compelling, fast-moving prose. Hanuvar is a great character, as is his part-time sidekick, a young actor and writer named Antires. The world-building of this alternate Mediterranean world is extensive but handled so skillfully that the storytelling never gets bogged down in it.

If you’re a fan of sword and sorcery, alternate history, epic fantasy, or anything like that, you just can’t do any better than this series by Howard Andrew Jones. This one is available on Amazon in e-book, hardcover, paperback, and audio editions. I've already bought the third book, SHADOW OF THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN, and I promise it won’t take me as long to get around to reading it.

Now, on a personal note, most if not all of you know that Howard Andrew Jones passed away earlier this year, another one taken much too young by cancer. Howard and I weren’t close and never met in person, but I considered us friends. We interacted on Facebook and traded occasional emails, brought together by our shared fondness for Ki-Gor pulp novels and John Benteen Westerns. I can only echo what everyone else who knew him has said: he was a great guy. It’s selfish of me, but I’m glad I have quite a few of his books left to read, including the third Hanuvar novel. I only wish there were going to be a lot more.

Review: Storyteller: Helpful Hints and Tall Tales From the Writing Life - Carlton Stowers

I first met Carlton Stowers many years ago at one of the mass autograph parties TCU Press used to sponsor every December. The idea was that they would gather twenty or thirty local authors in one place, and people could come and buy signed books to give as Christmas presents. The events were usually held at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens in those days. It seemed like they sold quite a few books, but for me, the real appeal was the chance to see old friends I didn’t run into in person that often—Elmer Kelton, Jory Sherman, Kerry Newcomb, G. Clifton Wisler—and to make new friends such as, well, Carlton Stowers.

I knew who Carlton Stowers was before that. I’d seen the name many times and knew he was an Edgar Award-winning author of true crime books. I believe he was acquainted with Bill Crider, too, and I’d heard Bill speak of him. But I didn’t read true crime books so I’d never sampled his work. However, when we were introduced and I spent some time talking to the guy, we were friends right away. His interests ranged ‘way beyond true crime, and I remember telling him one time, after he’d spun a great yarn about a distant relative of his who’d ridden with Pancho Villa, “You really need to be writing fiction. You’d be great at it.”

Eventually he did, but we’ll get to that.

For several years, Stowers attended the annual Howard Days get-together in Cross Plains with his friend and literary agent Jim Donovan (a fine writer his own self), and we had lengthy, hugely enjoyable conversations about everything under the sun, as they say. I haven’t been able to make it to Cross Plains for several years now, and those conversations with Carlton are among the things I really miss. Maybe one of these days.

So, to the point of this review, last year TCU Press published STORYTELLER: HELPFUL HINTS AND TALL TALES FROM THE WRITING LIFE. It’s part memoir, part how-to book, and it’s full of entertaining stories about Stowers’ life and his varied careers as a sports reporter, columnist, feature writer, ghostwriter for sports and entertainment figures, and of course, his award-winning years as an author of true crime books. I said above that I didn’t read true crime, and I still don’t, but I swear, I really need to read Carlton’s books because I know they must be well-written and compelling. Mixed in with these reminiscences are plenty of useful, practical tips about writing non-fiction of all sorts.

There’s also a section about Stowers’ career as a Western novelist. He’s written six novels so far, and they’re all excellent. I hope he does more. In the meantime, and until I get around to reading some of those true crime books, I’m very glad to have read STORYTELLER. It’s a superb book about the writing life, and if that interests you, I give it my highest recommendation. You can find it in trade paperback on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, January 1940

I don't have any issues of SKY FIGHTERS. Maybe I should try to get my hands on some. They have good covers, well-respected authors, and hey, it's a Thrilling Publication, right? Says so right on the cover. I generally like all the other Thrilling Group pulps I've read. I don't know who did the cover on this issue, but I like it. Inside are stories by top aviation/air war pulpsters Robert Sidney Bowen, Arch Whitehouse, and Harold F. Cruickshank, plus Captain J. Winchcombe-Taylor, David Brandt, and house-name Lt. Scott Morgan. I have plenty of other things to read, of course, but one of these days . . .

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, October 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know why the front cover is missing that strip at the bottom. That’s the way I got it. Luckily, the loss doesn’t detract too much from the cover by A. Leslie Ross. Not in the top rank of Ross’s work, to my mind, but his covers are always worthwhile. I’ll put a scan of the whole cover from the Fictionmags Index at the end of this post.

This issue opens with a novelette (probably closer to a novella, really) by Seven Anderton, a distinctly named author who’s mostly forgotten but who produced consistently good work for the Western and detective pulps. “Cactus Basin Showdown” features a pair of protagonists who fit the mold of many other Western pulp yarns: Brick Gordon is a handsome, two-fisted, fast-shooting cowboy, while his sidekick Galena Jones is a much older and grizzled old codger. If you’re thinking Buster Crabbe and Al “Fuzzy” St. John, well, so was I while reading this story. Anderton adds a nice variation to the story, though. Brick handles most of the action, but Galena is really the thinking half of the duo as they pitch in to help some homesteaders who are being run out of Cactus Basin by the local cattle baron/range hog. Yes, it’s a cattleman vs. sodbusters yarn, a very standard plot, but Anderton makes it fresh with his solid writing and characterizations. Even the main villain has a little depth to him. I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

The line at the top of the cover says “15 Action-Packed Stories”, but what it doesn’t tell you is that six of them are historical articles and features. I have nothing against such things and when I come across them in pulps, I usually skim them and read the more interesting ones, but really, I’m there for the fiction, so I’m not going to delve into the non-fiction. The next actual story in this issue is “The Haunted Town” by Lon Williams, an entry in his series of Weird Westerns about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. In this one, Winters encounters a werewolf—or does he? I’ve been aware of this series for years and always figured it would be right in my wheelhouse, but I’ve read several of them now, including this one, and for some reason I just don’t really like them very much. Something about the writing in them doesn’t resonate with me, and I don’t find Winters to be a very likable protagonist. Maybe I’m wrong about them. I’d be willing to try a few more before giving up on the series, but at this point, I’m not optimistic.

I’ve read several stories by Richard Brister and enjoyed them. “The Ioway Upstart” in this issue is about a tenderfoot from Des Moines who’s stranded in a rough, lawless mining camp. Either picked on or looked down upon by nearly everybody in the camp, he comes up with a clever way to win their respect, and also the heart of the best-looking girl in town. This is an entertaining, well-written story and makes me think I need to try one of Brister’s novels.

I read another story in the Able Cain series by A.A. Baker not long ago and enjoyed it, but his entry in this issue, “Able Cain’s Arena”, left me kind of cold. The title character is a judge in a mining boomtown and comes up with the idea of building a boxing arena so the miners can settle their disputes without shooting each other. It’s not a bad idea, but the story never generated much excitement or interest in me. My fault, maybe. Too soon to pass judgment on this series, but I’ve definitely had mixed reactions to it so far.

Gene Austin wrote a lot of stories for the Western pulps, but he seems to have been on autopilot in “Whistling in Boothill”. This story about the clash between two ranchers has some nice action at the end that almost redeems it, but the plot is really thin.

“The Hombre That Hell Wouldn’t Have” is a good title. The story is by Humphrey Jones, who wrote several dozen stories for assorted Western, detective, and sports pulps. It’s a decent yarn about a prospector who’s robbed and left to die in the desert. The resolution is pretty far-fetched, but overall, not a bad story.

Ralph Berard was the pseudonym of the very prolific pulpster Victor H. White. His story in this issue, “Gold Country Boothill”, is a very suspenseful tale about a young prospector framed for murder and the trial-by-vigilante that results. This is well-written, well-plotted, and has a very nice final twist that I didn’t see coming. I liked this one.

J.J. Mathews was another very prolific pulpster who turned out scores of Western, detective, and sports stories. His story in this issue is “Devil’s Homemaker”, which isn’t a very good title for this yarn about a young man’s quest for vengeance on the man who gunned down his father. But it’s got a decent plot and some emotional complexity, and the writing has a nice hardboiled tone to it. This is another good one from a forgotten but reliable pro.

Rex Whitechurch was a pseudonym that appeared on dozens of Western, detective, and sports stories, all of them published in various Columbia pulps edited by Robert Lowndes. Was it a house-name? That’s possible, I suppose, but I honestly have no idea. The Whitechurch story in this issue, “The Bronc Riders”, is a modern-day rodeo story and more of a romance than an action story. In fact, much of it reads more like mainstream fiction than genre Western. And it’s really, really good, too—until it runs smack into an ending that left me staring at the page in disbelief. Talk about a story falling apart at the last minute! This one is promising but very disappointing.

So what we have here is an issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES that’s a very mixed bag. Several of the stories are very good to excellent, and others I didn’t like at all. I’m glad I read it and will be on the lookout for more stories by Seven Anderton and Richard Brister. Heck, I’d even give Rex Whitechurch another try, and he made me want to throw the pulp across the room! But don’t race to your shelves to look for this one.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Bottom of Every Bottle - Robert J. Randisi

Jake Gilmartin is a veteran New York City cop who finds himself in trouble when evidence of corruption surfaces against him. He’s suspended from the force, and things get even worse when an intruder shows up at his apartment one night and tries to kill him. Jake fights back and the would-be assassin winds up dead. That’s when Jake discovers that the man lying dead on his kitchen floor is another cop, a man Jake had considered a friend.

And this is just the prologue.

Most of the book is narrated by Jake’s son Rob, a gunnery instructor in the army who was also an investigator in the Military Police for a while. With no one left to trust, Jake calls on Rob for help finding out who framed him and wants him dead, even though Rob hates his father for cheating on Rob’s mother and breaking up their marriage years earlier. Reluctantly, Rob comes to New York to help Jake and finds himself mixed up in a complex and dangerous tangle involving organized crime, cops who may or may not be trustworthy, a beautiful female cab driver, and a number of colorful denizens of New York City. The scope of the plot eventually expands to cover decades of time and thousands of miles as Rob and Jake wind up facing almost overwhelming odds.

As always with a book by Bob Randisi, the pace really rockets along in this one with plenty of good dialogue and action. There’s a little humor, some very nice character bits, and an intriguing back-story that’s ripe for further exploration in a sequel, although this novel stands alone just fine. Although it’s thoroughly contemporary, I got a sense of some Gold Medal influence in the book, including the great title. It’s no secret that Bob and I have been friends for thirty years, but I try very hard not to let that influence my opinion when it comes to books by my friends. You can take my word for it: THE BOTTOM OF EVERY BOTTLE is a very good, tough cop thriller, and I recommend it highly.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 27, 2010. In the comments on that post, Bob confirmed that this novel was indeed influenced by the Gold Medals he'd read. It appears to be out of print now, but used copies can be found for reasonable prices.)

Review: Once a Fighter . . . -- Les Savage Jr.

Les Savage Jr. was a highly regarded Western writer during his lifetime, a career cut short when he died in 1958 at the age of 35 from a heart attack brought on by diabetes. Many of his novels and novellas are still in print, as resurrecting Savage’s work from the pulps and elsewhere was one of the most successful projects carried out by editor/agent Jon Tuska and his Golden West Literary Agency.

So I was a little surprised to discover that one of Savage’s novels, the Cavalry yarn ONCE A FIGHTER . . ., published as a paperback original by Pocket Books in 1956, was never reprinted and remains out of print today. The book first caught my attention because of its lurid but dramatic cover painted by Robert Schulz. Finding out it was something of an oddity in Savage’s career sealed the deal and made me read it. That’s my copy in the scan above.

The protagonist of ONCE A FIGHTER . . . is a Cavalry officer named Gil Tavister who is unjustly drummed out of the Army by a superior officer who hates him, partially because of political differences and partially because Tavister is romantically involved with the man’s daughter. With enemies on his trail, Tavister travels from Kansas to Texas, uncovers a conspiracy that threatens the Army, re-enlists under a false name, and winds up involved with the infamous Camel Corps, the ill-fated experiment that saw the Army import Arabian camels to Texas and Arizona to find out if they could replace horses. Tavister travels with the Cavalry to Fort Davis in West Texas and then on into New Mexico where a showdown with his old enemies takes place in the midst of an epic battle against the Apaches.

That’s the bare bones of the plot, and it’s a good one for a traditional Western. Savage’s characters are interesting and his writing is top-notch, very descriptive and action-packed. But at the same time, there’s a lot more going on in this book, including the likely reasons it was never reprinted.

Savage liked to push the envelope, as they say, especially when it came to the romance angles in his work. Given the pre-Civil War setting, the first part of this book reads more like a historical novel than a traditional Western, and there’s not just one interracial romance but two. Savage fought with his editors over this tendency in his work numerous times, according to Tuska. It’s particularly dominant in parts of this book, which may well have been responsible for editors shying away from reprints.

For another thing, ONCE A FIGHTER . . . has one of the most even-handed approaches to the causes of the brewing Civil War that I’ve encountered in a novel. There are sympathetic and unsympathetic characters on both sides, north and south, but the main villains are abolitionists, something that would have kept it from being reprinted in recent decades. At the same time, there are no apologies for slavery and it’s never presented as anything less than evil. It’s a complex book and offers no easy answers, other than a general disdain for fanatics and extremists on both sides.

All that said, ONCE A FIGHTER . . . is, at the same time, a rousing adventure yarn, and the final battle against the Apaches is spectacular, mixing camels and sword-fighting with the more traditional soldiers vs. Indians action. I also liked the fact that some of the book takes place at Camp Verde, the Camel Corps headquarters northwest of San Antonio, and Fort Davis in far West Texas, both places I’ve been. I really enjoyed this novel and think it’s worthy of being reprinted, but since that’s unlikely, if you want to read it you’ll have to hunt up a used copy like I did.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Round-Up Time in Texas (1937)

Watching old B-Western movies on TV as a kid, I always liked Gene Autry, although to be honest I preferred Roy Rogers to Gene. But the appeal of their movies was largely the same and since many of the same writers and directors and supporting actors were involved, that’s not surprising. As a result, though, there are more of Gene’s movies that I’ve never seen, or at least don’t remember.

And I think I would remember ROUND-UP TIME IN TEXAS.

This is truly a bizarre film. It opens in Texas where it’s, well, round-up time, as Gene and the cowboys who work for him are rounding up horses on his ranch. But then Gene gets a letter from his brother Tex (Ken Cooper), who’s in Africa prospecting for diamonds. It seems that Tex has discovered a fabulously valuable diamond mine but needs horses, and since there are no horses in Africa (?), he wants Gene to hop on a ship with a herd and deliver them.

So, five minutes into the movie, Gene is off to Africa (which looks just like the Republic backlot) with his sidekick Frog Millhouse (Smiley Burnette), where they clash with crooked nightclub owner Cardigan (LeRoy Mason), meet a sultry cabaret singer (Maxine Doyle) with a mysterious agenda of her own, befriend a fast-talking, shady but likable rogue (Earle Hodgins), and set out to investigate the disappearance of Gene’s brother, who’s been framed for murdering his partner in the diamond mine, which is located in the dreaded Valley of Superstition! Considering this movie runs a little less than an hour, and there has to be time for several musical numbers, too, Oliver Drake’s script really packs in the plot. Veteran director Joseph Kane knew how to keep things racing along, though. The movie devotes too much time to silliness like Frog being chased by lions and encountering a gorilla (actually fellow B-Western star and veteran Gorilla Man Ray Corrigan), as well as teaching a bunch of native kids how to sing, but we get enough fistfights and an explosive showdown at the end to keep things interesting.

If you want to put it in pulp terms, this movie is part WILD WEST WEEKLY, part JUNGLE STORIES, and all oddball. It might be a stretch to say it’s good, but it’s persistently, unexpectedly likable. I had a good time watching it, and it’s put me in the mood to watch more of Gene’s movies. Will I actually get around to it? Who knows, but we’ll see. If I do, I’m sure I’ll write about them here.

Monday Memories: My Home Town Revisited

A number of years ago, I did a series of blog posts called Monday Memories in which I waxed nostalgic about all sorts of things from my childhood growing up in a small Texas town called Azle. The first one featured an aerial photo of Azle taken in 1938. A friend of mine named Jim Magnuson recently read those blog posts and was inspired to start a series of drone videos on Facebook called "Azle, Then and Now". The first one is an updated version of the photo I published and can be seen here. Jim plans to do more of these and I'm really looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

And maybe I'll do some more Monday Memories posts, if I can think of things to write about. I'm not getting any younger, you know.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, January 1943

I don’t own this issue, or, for that matter, any issues of SUPER-DETECTIVE. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re usually pretty expensive when you do come across one. But when Radio Archives recently published an e-book edition of this issue, I picked it up because I wanted to read the Jim Anthony novel in it. The by-line on that novel is John Grange, but that was a house-name, and in this case, I knew that two excellent authors collaborated on the story: Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Anthony, here’s a little background. His father was an Irish adventurer, his mother a Comanche princess. He’s a millionaire industrialist with business interests all over the world, an amateur criminologist, a brilliant scientist, and a world-class athlete. He’s Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, and Jim Thorpe rolled into one. Veteran pulpster Victor Rousseau wrote the first dozen Jim Anthony novels in SUPER-DETECTIVE, Edwin Truett Long did the next three, and then friends and sometime writing partners Bellem and Ballard wrote ten more novels to finish off the series. “Murder Between Shifts” in this issue is the fourth entry by Bellem and Ballard. In Rousseau’s stories, he portrayed Jim Anthony as more of a globe-trotting adventurer, the Doc Savage part of the character. I’d read that Bellem and Ballard’s novels had more of a mystery angle, concentrating on Jim Anthony’s efforts as a criminologist. I was eager to read one and find out.

“Murder Between Shifts” finds Jim visiting Los Angeles with his pilot and sidekick Tom Gentry. Jim owns an aircraft plant there that’s doing vital work for the war effort, but there are rumors of trouble he’s checking out, and sure enough, when he tracks down the plant manager to a nightclub that caters to the swing shift workers, the man is murdered right in front of Jim’s eyes by one of the other plant executives. The thing is, the guy who pulled the trigger claims he’s innocent! Jim investigates, of course, which leads to attempts on his own life along with sensuous encounters with several beautiful babes. (SUPER-DETECTIVE was published by the same company that put out the Spicy pulps, so it’s a little more risque than some, although mild by our current standards.) Even though Jim is still the same tycoon/scientist/criminologist he is in the earlier novels by Victor Rousseau, “Murder Between Shifts” does read much more like a typical hardboiled detective yarn than Rousseau’s novels do. It’s well-written, clever enough, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It also features a cameo appearance by police lieutenant Dave Donaldson, from Bellem’s Dan Turner series, which put a grin on my face.

William B. Rainey, author of the short story “Don’t Get Killed Tonight”, was really Wyatt Blassingame, best remembered probably for his Weird Menace stories although he was a prolific pulpster who wrote a little bit of everything and wrote it well. “Don’t Get Killed Tonight” is part of his series about private detective Eddie Harveth, who works as a troubleshooter for nightclub and restaurant owners in New Orleans. It’s a good story in which Eddie gets framed for the murder of a beautiful dancer and has to go on the run from the cops as he tracks down the real killer. There’s nothing unusual or special about this story, but it’s competently written and moves right along. A tad on the forgettable side, though.

Randolph Barr was a house-name, and the real author of “The Shape of Death” is unknown, which is a shame because it really is a top-notch story featuring some fine hardboiled writing. A beautiful blonde living in a Florida trailer camp finds a dead man on her doorstep. Unfortunately, he’d made a pass at her a short time earlier in a nearby tavern, and she was heard to threaten him. The cops believe he followed her back to her trailer and she killed him, possibly in self-defense. The only one who believes she’s innocent is a young reporter who falls for her. The plot of this one is pretty traditional and even predictable, but it races along with plenty of good dialogue and excellent descriptions. I liked it a lot and wish I knew who wrote it.

The other stories in this issue are all unacknowledged reprints, a practice for which the publisher was notorious, beginning with “Carte Blanche for Murder” by Travis Lee Stokes, which was published originally as “Blonde Madness” in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES under the name Arthur Humbolt, which was also a pseudonym. The real author was Robert C. Blackmon, who wrote a bunch of detective yarns for various pulps, under numerous different names. It opens with its newspaper reporter protagonist discovering the murdered body of a beautiful blonde with her arms chopped off. Naturally, this ties in with the case of another blonde who was killed and had her legs chopped off. And our hero’s girlfriend is a beautiful blonde and has a connection with one of the suspects! As you can tell, this story is lurid and over the top and you know exactly what’s going on almost right from the start, but Blackmon delivers it in such breathless, enthusiastic prose that it’s enjoyable despite that.

Norman A. Daniels is the actual author of “Murder Stays at Home”, published in this issue under the name Max Neilson. It was published originally as “Murder at Lake Iroquois” by Charles Maxwell in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. This one finds a bunch of theater folks and artists partying at the island mansion of a wealthy producer, and of course one of them winds up dead, seemingly an open-and-shut case of a beautiful actress murdering a rival beautiful actress. That’s not how it turns out, and the murder method is actually pretty clever. Daniels was dependable and this story is good entertainment without being outstanding.

“Post Mortem” by Walton Grey was published originally in the August 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES as “Where is the Body?”, under the author’s real name, C. Samuel Campbell. It’s even more lurid and over-the-top than “Carte Blanche for Murder” as we have two police detectives running around a stereotypical old dark house complete with secret passages and a hulking monster who’s breaking people’s necks. This one is almost too silly for me to accept it, but it has its effective moments and I wound up reading the whole thing.

Looking back on the issue as a whole, it’s certainly entertaining. The Jim Anthony story and “The Shape of Death” by “Randolph Barr” are the highlights. I definitely want to read more of Bellem and Ballard’s Jim Anthony stories. Several of them, including “Murder Between Shifts”, are reprinted in SUPER-DETECTIVE JIM ANTHONY, THE COMPLETE SERIES: VOLUME 5 from Steeger Books. Not surprisingly, I’ve already ordered a copy. But if you want to sample the series, this e-book from Radio Archives isn’t a bad place to start.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Rainy Day Song - David Garfield and Herb Alpert

I've been a Herb Alpert fan for close to 60 years now, and it's great to hear the instantly recognizable sound of his trumpet on this new song. I had all of Alpert's albums with the Tijuana Brass during the Sixties and played them constantly. In more recent times (the past 20 years), I've been a frequent listener to his album SECOND WIND, which includes my all-time favorite song of his, "Fandango". I don't believe I've ever posted that one. Maybe I will the next time I can't sleep. For now, enjoy this one.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1950

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with one of my favorite Sam Cherry covers and maybe the single best depiction of Jim Hatfield that I’ve ever seen. That’s definitely the way Hatfield looks in my head as I read these pulps.

The Hatfield novel in this issue, “The Rimrock Raiders”, is by A. Leslie Scott writing as Jackson Cole. It centers around the conflict between some cattlemen in West Texas and the oil wildcatters who are moving into the region. One of those wildcatters strikes a gusher, resulting in an oil boom town and even more trouble. Naturally, it’s going to take a Texas Ranger to clean things up and expose the true villain behind all the problems, and of course that Ranger is Jim Hatfield.

In addition to knowing a lot about mining and railroading, Scott was also well-versed in geology and the oil business, and that knowledge comes through in this novel. I’m a long-time fan of oilfield yarns and this is a good one with a real sense of authenticity. There are two great scenes, one in which Hatfield comes up with a unique way of dealing with an oil rig that’s on fire, the other being the literally explosive climax that’s one of the best I’ve read in the series. Scott was at the top of his game in this one, which he rewrote and expanded a few years later into the Walt Slade novel GUNSMOKE OVER TEXAS, published by Pyramid in 1956. I read that version when I was in high school. I remembered the cover but nothing about the plot, so it didn’t spoil “The Rimrock Raiders” for me.

This novel, with its oilfield element, also reminds me of a strange discrepancy in the Hatfield series. Scott’s entries seem to be set around the turn of the 20^th Century, based on historical references, while the Hatfield novels by Tom Curry, the other main writer on the series for many years, read more like they’re set about twenty years earlier, around 1880. The novels by Walker A. Tompkins and Peter Germano are harder to pin down as to time period, but most of them seem to me to be set in the 1880s or 1890s. I find these continuity glitches, if you want to call them that, interesting, but they absolutely don’t bother me. I just enjoy the stories.

Tex Holt was a house-name used by Leslie Scott, Archie Joscelyn, and Claude Rister on novels. It also shows up on a dozen or so stories in various Thrilling Group Western pulps. That’s the by-line on “Ghost Riders of Haunted Pass” in this issue, a lightweight tale about a couple of drifting cowboys named Jim Norton and “Hungry” Hill who encounter a couple of phantom owlhoots. The banter between the protagonists reminded me a little of Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper stories, but not as silly and the story’s action doesn’t descend into slapstick comedy. It’s an okay story, but I have no idea who wrote it.

“Long Sam Crowns a King” is another entry in Lee Bond’s long-running series about the good-guy outlaw Long Sam Littlejohn. In this one, set in the South Texas brush country, Long Sam clashes with an old enemy, a former carpetbagger turned would-be cattle king. There’s some nice action, and for a change, the characters don’t stand around explaining the plot to each other. Long Sam’s nemesis, U.S. Marshal Joe Fry, is mentioned but doesn’t make an appearance. This is a solid story in a formulaic but consistently entertaining series.

“Red Butte Showdown” is by Jim Mayo, who we all know was actually Louis L’Amour. This story centers around a mysterious stranger who protects a couple of orphans (one of whom is a beautiful young woman, of course) from a villain who’s after the mine they’ve inherited. That plot sounds pretty well-worn, and to tell the truth, most of L’Amour’s plots were pretty standard stuff. But he was really, really good at them most of the time, and “Red Butte Showdown” is no exception. Not only that, but he throws in a pretty good plot twist at the end of this one. I’ve said for a long time that I think L’Amour was a better short story writer than he was a novelist, and this is a good example. I enjoyed this story a lot. It’s probably been reprinted in one of the many L’Amour short story collections, but I don’t know which.

Barry Scobee’s “Good Country for Murder” is a modern-day Western in which a park ranger in West Texas’s Big Bend encounters a vicious criminal. It’s a suspenseful, very well-written yarn that I thoroughly enjoyed. As I’ve mentioned before, Barry Scobee is the only pulp writer I know of who has a mountain named for him. It’s just outside Fort Davis, Texas, and was named after Scobee to honor his efforts in preserving the old military fort there. In addition to writing for the pulps, he was a newspaper reporter and editor in West Texas and his work really rings true when it’s set in that region. This is another very good story by him.

And this is a very good issue of TEXAS RANGERS, as well. A top-notch Hatfield novel, and four out of the five back-up stories are very good to excellent. The one story that’s weaker than the others is still entertaining. If you’re a fan of this pulp, have this issue on your shelves, and haven’t read it, I give it a high recommendation. (If you want to read the rewritten, Walt Slade version of the novel, GUNSMOKE OVER TEXAS, it’s available as an e-book on Amazon and would be well worth your time, too.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Buntline Special - Lou Cameron

Lou Cameron is an important figure in paperback history for a couple of reasons. First of all, he had a long career stretching back into the Fifties as an author of paperback originals in a wide variety of genres: mystery, war, adventure, science fiction, TV tie-ins, and movie novelizations. Then, in the mid-Seventies, he created the popular and prolific Adult Western series LONGARM. It wasn’t the first Adult Western series – there’s considerable debate about which one deserves that title – but after the first book was published in 1978, the series rolled along for almost 40 years with a new title every single month (sometimes two in one month), until there were nearly 500 Longarm novels, counting the oversized Longarm Giant novels. Several Spur Award-winning authors contributed to the series under the Tabor Evans house-name. Cameron himself falls into that category, having won a Spur in 1976 for his novel THE SPIRIT HORSES. Longarm was one of the great success stories in genre paperbacks, and it came after Cameron already had quite a reputation as an author.

Cameron didn’t concentrate solely on Longarm after creating the series, though. He contributed to a few other Adult Western series, including a couple that he created and wrote all the books himself: STRINGER under his own name and RENEGADE (really more of an adventure series set in Central and South America, although they were marketed as Westerns) as by Ramsey Thorne. He also wrote a few stand-alone traditional Westerns for Gold Medal (by then an imprint of Ballantine), which brings us to THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL.

This novel from 1988, which as far as I know has never been reprinted, has a fairly traditional plot. In the mid-1890s, a young cowboy named Matt Taylor rides into the town of Freewater, Colorado (which actually straddles the state line between Colorado and Kansas) looking for a crooked trail boss who absconded with the wages owed to Matt and the other cowhands who drove a herd of cattle up the Ogallala Trail. Matt winds up finding the man he’s looking for, but that’s just the beginning. He becomes the deputy to Freewater’s town marshal, a legendary gunman named Big Bill Burton who carries one of the long-barreled revolvers of the title. Matt quickly grows into the job of being a lawman, stopping a bank robbery and engaging in a couple of shoot-outs that gain him a reputation and some enemies who want him dead.

The story sort of ambles along in episodic fashion as Matt deals with a number of criminal cases that arise while he’s wearing a badge in Freewater. He also romances a couple of beautiful women, the town schoolmarm and the local doctor. Since this is a traditional Western, the courting is very decorous, not at all like Cameron’s Longarms. The plot works its way toward an ending that you’ll likely see coming, although Cameron does throw in a nice little twist as he wraps everything up.

So why should you read THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL? There are several reasons. Despite the predictability of the plot, Cameron peoples it with some colorful and well-drawn – and in the case of his hero Matt, very likable – characters. Not everybody turns out to be exactly what you expect them to be. Also, episodic or not, the book never really slows down. Cameron had plenty of experience at keeping the reader flipping the pages, and it shows here. There are some nice cameo appearances by actual historical characters such as Charlie Siringo, Will Rogers, and Bill Tilghman, and a brief bit that offers a clue as to the later history of one Custis Long, aka Longarm. If Cameron says something about ol’ Custis, you have to take it as gospel, in my opinion.

What I really like most about this book, though, is Cameron’s distinctive voice. For much of his career, he wrote in a pretty standard action paperback style, but over the years it began to evolve into a more colorful use of language. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it reminds me of the dialogue in the TV series DEADWOOD, without all the cussin’. This makes it easy to identify the Longarms that Cameron wrote (and to be honest, he got to the point where he overdid it in that series, in my opinion), but it works perfectly in THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL, making everything in the book sound absolutely and grittily real. You might not like it – the style is eccentric enough so that I can see how it might rub some readers the wrong way – but I think this is one of the best Westerns I’ve read in a good long while, and I highly recommend it.

(This post was published originally in a somewhat different form on February 19, 2010. THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL is still out of print, but the Stringer and Renegade series, mentioned above, are both available in e-book editions, and I recommend them both. The links go to the first book in each series.)

Review: Sara and the Mad Dog - Stephen Mertz

Music was very important to Steve Mertz. Along with writing, it was really one of his passions. He was an accomplished musician, too, and it showed in his work. His novels that feature a music industry background have a real sense of authenticity to them.

So it’s fitting that his final novel is a thriller based on the music business. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a wonderful amalgam of music history, gangster history, and fiction as the Carter Family, the First Family of Country Music, travels to New York City for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1932, arriving just in time for Sara Carter, the group’s vocalist and wife of A.P. Carter, to get involved with Vince “Mad Dog” Coll, a ruthless Irish mobster who’s engaged in a gang war with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. That’s a great concept for a novel!

Mertz does it justice, too, with a fast-paced narrative in which the action takes place in less than 24 hours. The story moves back and forth between Sara, A.P., Maybelle Carter (the third member of the group), Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) assorted gangsters, and a fictional police detective named Tom Devlin. Mertz weaves all their storylines together very skillfully and creates a real sense of momentum and suspense. Great storyteller that he was, he really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

The historical elements of the plot are well-researched and accurate, too, as Mertz explains in an afterword detailing what was fact and what was fiction. All of it comes together in a superb novel that’s the best thing I’ve read so far this year and maybe my favorite of all the Mertz novels I’ve read. I’d hate to have to pick between this one and HANK AND MUDDY, a fantastic yarn about Hank Williams and Muddy Waters. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a fitting conclusion to a legendary career, and it gets my highest recommendation. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions from Wolfpack Publishing.

And on a personal note, damn, I hate to think the phone’s never going to ring again with Steve on the other end, eager to tell me about some book or writer or the project he was planning to work on next. There was nobody else in this business like him. Nobody. He was, as they say, the Genuine Article, and I expect I’ll miss him from now on.

Review: The Art of Ron Lesser, Volume 2: Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls - Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, Daniel Zimmer, eds.

I’ve become a big fan of Ron Lesser’s artwork in the past few years. Well, actually, I’ve been a big fan of Ron Lesser’s artwork for about 60 years, because that’s how long ago it was when I first started noticing it on paperback covers as I avidly looked through the new books on the spinner racks, searching for the next one I was going to read. I loved his covers—but I had no idea they were painted by Ron Lesser. In fact, one of my early favorite covers, the one on the second Dell edition of L.L. Foreman’s novel ARROW IN THE DUST, was painted by Lesser, although I didn’t discover that until decades later. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many books I picked up because I was intrigued by the covers he painted.

A couple of years ago, THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS, spotlighting those paperback covers, was one of my favorite books of the year. Now I’ve read THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 2: DANGEROUS DAMES AND COVER DOLLS—maybe I should say, feasted my eyes on—the second volume devoted to Lesser’s art from editor Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, joined this time around by Daniel Zimmer, with an assist from Tim Hewitt. Zimmer provides a fine biographical essay about Lesser and Joe Jusko, a top-notch artist himself, contributes an excellent foreword, but of course, the real appeal of this beautiful book is the art, scores of excellent reproductions of paintings done by Lesser after his days of doing paperback covers were mostly over. Most of them, as you’d expect, feature beautiful women, but there are top-notch Civil War and Western paintings as well. Lesser was always one of those guys who could illustrate anything and do a fantastic job of it. But let’s face it, his paintings of Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and others will just take your breath away.

Then there’s my favorite section of the book: as Lesser puts it in his commentary, cover paintings for books that don’t actually exist. These might as well have come off some of those paperbacks from the spinner racks, the kind I’ve loved for most of my life. And I’d love to read those books now, even if they don’t exist. Heck, I’d write them!

If you’re a paperback lover or just enjoy some absolutely wonderful art, I give my highest recommendation to THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 2: DANGEROUS DAMES AND COVER DOLLS. It’s available on Amazon in hardback and paperback editions. I loved it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, June 1945

The cover of this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE caught my eye and intrigued me enough to read a PDF of the issue downloaded from the Internet Archive. Carnivals were common settings for pulp detective yarns and I’ve always enjoyed carny fiction. I don’t know who did this cover, but there’s a lot going on and I like it.

It's also an extremely accurate representation of a scene in the short story “Clown of Doom” by John L. Benton, a Thrilling Group house-name commonly used by Norman A. Daniels but also by Oscar J. Friend and Donald Bayne Hobart. The narrator/protagonist is named Ed Rice, which instantly rings some bells and raises some questions. Was John L. Benton, in this case, actually Emile C. Tepperman, and is “Clown of Doom” really an entry in Tepperman’s long-running Ed Race series which ran as back-up stories in THE SPIDER? Maybe an editor at Popular Publications rejected the story so Tepperman changed one letter in his hero’s name and sent it over to the Thrilling Group? Ed Race, after all, was a juggler and trickshot artist who had many adventures set in the carnival world.

Well, I can’t prove it, of course, but my answer to both of the questions I posed above is “I don’t think so.” For one thing, Ed Rice, in this story, is a spieler, a ballyhoo guy, not a marksman or juggler. The story is told in slangy, present-tense, first-person narration that doesn’t sound anything like Tepperman’s Ed Race stories. And the fact that the scene on the cover exactly matches the action in the story makes me believe that a lot more likely scenario is that this yarn was written to match an already existing cover painting. The author was probably one of the regular contributors to POPULAR DETECTIVE and the other Thrilling Group detective pulps. Whatever the truth of this situation is, the story is a pretty good one, a fast-paced yarn about a murder at a traveling carnival.

Elsewhere, the issue leads off with the novella “Motto For Murder” by Frank Johnson, also a Thrilling Group house-name used mostly by Norman A. Daniels. My hunch is that he didn’t write this story, but he might have. Private eye Rufus Reed and his two partners, his wife Pat and his younger brother Johnny, are hired to find out who’s been knocking off defendants in high-profile murder trials right after they’ve been found not guilty. It’s a fairly interesting plot and there are some excellent action scenes, but the characters are all kind of bland and I never was as intrigued as I hoped to be. Not a terrible story, but certainly forgettable.

“Pilot to Murderer” is by Walt Sheldon, a prolific pulpster who went on to a career as a well-respected paperback novelist in the Fifties and Sixties. It has a great concept: the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber on a top-secret mission discovers that there’s a murderer among them. It's up to the pilot, who also narrates the story, to figure out who the killer is. This is a terrific story that lives up to the idea. I really need to read more by Sheldon.

“Death By Proxy” by M.D. Orr is part of a series featuring British Intelligence agent Archie McCann, who battles Japanese espionage plots in New Guinea while pretending to be an anthropologist. This is the first one I’ve read. In this story, a would-be assassin turns up dead, so Archie has to solve the murder of a man who tried to kill him. The setting and the concept are great, and Archie is a likable, interesting protagonist, but the writing never worked up much urgency or suspense for me. Still, there’s enough to like that I’d be interested in reading more in the series.

Mel Watt’s novelette “The Chair Is Not Cheated” features as its sleuth an actor who plays the villainous Dr. Coffin on a radio crime drama. He has to turn detective in real life when a friend of his is accused in what seems to be an open-and-shut case of murder. What really happened is pretty predictable, but the story moves along at a decent pace. Watt could have done more with the radio background, too. Although it reads like the start of a series, this is the only “Dr. Coffin” story of which I’m aware.

Joe Archibald wrote a long (approximately 70 stories) series about private detective Willie Klump, all of which appeared in POPULAR DETECTIVE except the final two, which were published in THE SAINT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. These are comedy detective yarns, a sub-genre which, like comedy Westerns, I don’t usually care for. I had never read a Willie Klump story before, and I’m not a big fan of Archibald’s work in general, so “The Witness Share” in this issue kind of had two strikes against it to start with. But there are always exceptions, so I was willing to give it a chance, and I’m glad I did. Willie is a hapless, wise-cracking narrator who, like W.C. Tuttle’s Tombstone and Speedy, isn’t as dumb as he seems at first. In fact, he’s fairly sharp as he solves a case of jewel robbery and murder.  I enjoyed this story quite a bit more than I expected to, and I’d be happy to read more about Willie Klump.

Overall, this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE is a really mixed bag. None of the stories are terrible and I had no trouble finishing all of them. Only one, “Pilot to Murderer”, is outstanding, but “Clown of Doom” and “The Witness Share” aren’t bad. The others all have something going for them, even if they didn’t have me flipping the digital pages with a great deal of enthusiasm. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This issue is okay and I’m glad I read it, and I found enough to like that I might read another issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE in the reasonably near future. Just not right away.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Lujon - Dan Fontaine and His Orchestra

I've posted the original Henry Mancini version of this song before, but it was quite a few years ago. And this is one of those cases where I think the cover is better than the original. Dan Fontaine and His Orchestra do a great job with older music like this. When I'm having trouble sleeping, like tonight, and battling one of those dark nights of the soul as I often do, I find music like this really soothing. If there are any songs those of you reading this find particularly soul-soothing, I can always use some recommendations in the comments.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Yarns, March 1943

This is a fairly short-lived Western pulp from Columbia Publications, edited, as usual, by Robert W. Lowndes. I don't own this issue or, for that matter, any issues of WESTERN YARNS. But the cover caught my eye. It's by Sam Cherry and is one of Cherry's earliest Western pulp covers. A pretty good job, too, if you ask me. All the authors inside are well-known Western pulpsters: Ed Earl Repp, Archie Joscelyn, Lee Floren, Chuck Martin, and Ralph Berard. Maybe not the same level as the usual authors in WESTERN STORY or DIME WESTERN, but still some enjoyable yarn-spinners there.

Review: Easy Money - Robert Silverberg

Stark House has reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels published originally under the name Don Elliott. Most of these were actually hardboiled crime yarns with some sexual elements, and that’s true of the latest double volume. I just read EASY MONEY, Silverberg’s title for a novel published under the Elliott pen-name as FLESH PAWNS in 1964.

The protagonist is a young woman named Janey Vaughn, who, despite being a beautiful and voluptuous twenty-three-year-old, in the right clothes and makeup can pass for being considerably younger. Underage, in fact, which makes her the perfect foil for con man Charley Simmons, who meets Janey while she’s waitressing in a diner in Delaware. After a roll in the hay with her, Charley suggests that she accompany him to Florida, where they will run a variation on the ol’ badger game on lonely, middle-aged men vacationing in Miami. Janey will go to bed with their marks, acting like her true age when she does it, then Charley, pretending to be her older brother, will show up and claim she’s only sixteen or seventeen, leading to a payoff from the victims to keep them from being arrested for statutory rape.

It's not a foolproof plan, of course, since Janey’s not really underage, but things go along all right for a while for Janey and Charley. Inevitably, complications ensue, and threaten their arrangement. How far will they go to keep the game in operation?

As always with Silverberg’s work, the prose is smooth and polished and fast as it can be. The guy is just a great storyteller. He also does a good job of making two very unsympathetic characters . . . well, not sympathetic, exactly, but the reader can’t help but root for Janey a little. She and Charley may not be great human beings, but they’re very human, if you know what I mean.

EASY MONEY is a solid entry in this genre from Silverberg. It’s in a double volume trade paperback with GETTING EVEN (originally published as LUST DEMON by Don Elliott in 1966) that’s available on Amazon.