Review: Dream Town - David Baldacci

DREAM TOWN is the third and for the moment final book in David Baldacci’s series about Aloysius Archer, ex-GI, ex-con, and as this book opens on New Year’s Eve 1952, a private detective working for an agency in Bay Town, California, up the coast from Los Angeles. But Archer is in L.A. to celebrate the new year with his friend, actress Liberty Callahan. While they’re having dinner at Chasen’s, a female screenwriter who knows Liberty joins the pair briefly and, finding out that Archer is a private eye, hires him to find out who’s responsible for some vaguely threatening things that have happened to her lately.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, before 1953 has hardly gotten started, there’s been a murder and Archer has literally tripped over the body, just before (of course) he gets hit on the head and knocked out. That’s just the beginning of an extremely complex plot featuring, as they say, a cast of thousands. Well, not quite, but sometimes it almost feels that way. There are a lot of characters to keep up with in this book as Archer’s investigation takes him from the highest planes of Hollywood royalty to a bunch of down-and-dirty, very dangerous characters—and sometimes those are one and the same.

Okay, obligatory complaint about how the book is too long. It is, but the plot almost justifies the length in this one. For the first half of the book, things seem relatively simple, but then Baldacci throws in twist after twist, to the point that I almost felt like I was reading an Erle Stanley Gardner book. I had a really strong hunch that the whole thing was going to go off the rails sooner or later, too, but Baldacci makes it all make sense.

With that plot, setting, and time period, you know I’m the target audience for this book. All three of the Archer books seem heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler, and that influence is really strong in this one. Archer is an excellent protagonist, smart enough and tough enough to survive but not a superhero by any means. He’s pretty good with the banter, too. Baldacci does a good job capturing the early Fifties, other than one anachronism.

The first two books in this series are ONE GOOD DEED and A GAMBLING MAN, and I enjoyed both of them. DREAM TOWN is even better and ends on a great note for sequels. Baldacci has said he’s going to write more about the character. I really hope he does. You can get this one in e-book, audiobook, hardcover, or paperback, and if you’re a fan of private eye fiction in the classic style (even if it’s not old enough to actually be called a classic yet), I give it a high recommendation.

Review: The Red Tassel - David Dodge

THE RED TASSEL is the third and final novel by David Dodge to feature Al Colby, a private detective/troubleshooter who works primarily for U.S. business interests in South America. It was published in hardcover by Random House in 1950 and reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1952 with a cover by Robert Stanley. The same Stanley cover art graces the recent reprint from the fine folks at Black Gat Books, which is available in paperback from Amazon and also includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt.

In this novel, Al Colby, who is a very likable narrator/protagonist, is hired by beautiful redhead Pancha Porter, who inherited a lead and silver mine in the mountains of Bolivia from her father. The mine’s production has dropped dramatically, and Pancha wants Al to find out why and put a stop to it. The situation is complicated, as far as Al is concerned, by Pancha’s insistence on traveling to the mine with him. And since she’s footing the bill, he can’t really say no.

They run into trouble before they even arrive and meet all the colorful characters at the mine and the nearby village of Indian workers. Those colorful characters include a witch doctor who holds a grudge against Pancha’s late father, a neurotic young man and his overprotective mother, assorted surly servants and employees, and an old woman who wanders around acting like a lunatic . It’ll come as no surprise to most readers that a murder takes place sooner rather than later, and Al find himself in deadly danger more than once.

Dodge and his family lived in South America and the setting for this novel is based on a real place. You can tell that from the excellent descriptive writing. THE RED TASSEL is well-plotted, too, not extraordinarily complex but always solid and intriguing. I figured out the killer’s identity and most of what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book even a little bit. That’s how good the characters and the writing are.

Dodge is best remembered for his novel TO CATCH A THIEF, which served as the basis for the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. I haven’t read that one, but I have read the second Al Colby novel, PLUNDER OF THE SUN (also a movie) and the posthumously published THE LAST MATCH. I really liked both of those books, too. I need to read more by David Dodge. I thoroughly enjoyed THE RED TASSEL and give it a high recommendation. It’s a smoothly told, very entertaining tale.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, March 28, 1931

This isn't a particularly dramatic Mountie cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but I don't recall coming across a Mountie on a DFW cover before, so I find it interesting. I don't know who painted it. There's certainly a decent group of authors in this issue, including Hulbert Footner, Fred MacIsaac, J. Allan Dunn, J. Lane Linklater, and Edward Parrish Ware. Those are all prolific, well-respected pulpsters. I don't own this issue, but I think it would be worth reading if I did. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, January 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who painted the cover. It’s not a great cover, in my opinion, but it’s not really a bad cover, either. And the map of Texas has El Paso not quite in the right place. They didn’t think they could slip that past a born-bred-and-forever Texan like me, did they? But on to the stories.

Seven Anderton is an unjustly forgotten writer who had a decent career in the Western, detective, and sports pulps from the late Twenties to the late Fifties, producing around a hundred stories during that run, many of them novellas or novelettes. But he never wrote an actual novel as far as I know, which is probably one reason he’s forgotten. His novella “Her Name is Battle” leads off this issue, and the title is literal: the heroine is named Esther Battle. She’s a Western girl born and raised who has been at an Eastern school the past few years, but as the story opens, she’s returning to claim the ranch she’s inherited from her uncle. During the trip, she makes some allies: a giant Swede who wants to become a cowboy, and an actual down-on-his-luck cowboy who winds up being hired as Esther’s foreman. Naturally, there’s an evil banker who wants to take over the ranch, even if it means kidnapping or killing Esther before she arrives.

As far as the set-up goes, there’s nothing in this story we haven’t read many times before, but Anderton populates his yarn with distinctive, well-developed, and even colorful characters. His writing is smooth and funny at times, tough and gritty at others. “Her Name is Battle” is just a well-written, very entertaining story with a few welcome twists. Unfortunately, it kind of limps to an ending that’s not as satisfying as it could have been, which is something I’ve noticed in other stories by Anderton. It’s like he pulls back rather than going for a big finish. However, that didn’t stop me from enjoying this story, and I won’t hesitate to read more by him.

During the Thirties, Cliff Campbell was a personal pseudonym for writer and editor Abner J. Sundell. In the Forties, it became a Columbia Publications house-name used by numerous authors on Western, detective, and sports stories. The actual author of “Killer From Texas”, a novella in this issue by-lined Cliff Campbell, hasn’t been determined as far as I know, but whoever it was did a pretty good job. Drifting cowpoke Homer Kale rides into a Wyoming settlement figuring on having a quiet drink, but before you know it, he’s been accused by a beautiful girl of murdering an old prospector, and he’s locked up in jail before being taken out by a lynch mob. Homer barely escapes that necktie party and goes on the run from the law, knowing that the only way he can save his life is by finding the real killer. It’s a time-worn plot, to be sure, but “Campbell” spins his yarn with skill and enthusiasm, combining some surprisingly lighthearted scenes with a grotesque and suitably evil villain, some other colorful characters, and enough gritty action to keep things interesting. I couldn’t even make a guess who actually wrote this one, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’d read a couple of stories by W. Edmunds Claussen before and had a mixed reaction to them. One I thought was kind of okay, the other I didn’t like. His novelette in this issue, “Gun-Smuggler Trail”, falls into the kind of okay category. It has a pretty good plot: fiddlefooted adventurer Burt Moffat returns to his family’s ranch in New Mexico to find that his father and his brother (a U.S. marshal) have both been murdered, and outlaws are using the ranch to smuggle guns across the border to Pancho Villa in Mexico. The smuggling gang uses an old ghost town as its headquarters. The story is atmospheric and violent, but Claussen’s convoluted style can be hard to read and follow. So this is sort of a miss, but an interesting one that might have been a really good story in different hands.

“Gunslick Trio From Hell” is by Charles D. Richardson Jr., another author whose work I’ve found to be okay at best. In this story, a reformed outlaw who has become the respected mayor of a frontier settlement has his past crop up to haunt him in the form of three members of his old gang. Things play out about like you’d expect them to, but in rather bland fashion and nobody in the story is really all that likable. And overall, I didn’t like the story much.

Lee Floren’s work is hit-and-miss with me, but mostly I like his stories. “Triggers for a Texan” in this issue is another interesting yarn that’s not particularly well-written, but I liked it considerably better than Claussen’s novelette. It’s about a Texan who has sworn off using a gun because of violence in his past, but when he gets involved in a Wyoming range war, he has to choose whether to pick up a Colt again. We’ve all read this plot many times before, but Floren does a decent job with it, attempting a few stylistic tricks that don’t quite come off but don’t keep it from being an entertaining yarn.

Chuck Martin, who often wrote as Charles M. Martin as well, is another dependably entertaining Western pulpster. His story “Gun or Gallows” in this issue is about a young marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous Hanging Judge. He has to arrest an old friend of his for murder, but he doesn’t believe the man is guilty, so the two of them set out together to find the real killer. I didn’t like this one as much as the other stories I’ve read by Martin, but it’s not bad. The ending is a considerable stretch, though.

Lon Williams is a pretty well-regarded author because of his series of Weird Western stories about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. I’ve read a few of those, though, and I’m not really a fan. His contribution to this issue is a short stand-alone story called “Stolen Waters” about a crooked lawyer and forger getting his comeuppance. It’s a very minor story but reasonably well-written.

Overall, this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN is probably a below average Western pulp, with the best story being the “Cliff Campbell” house-name yarn, and the Seven Anderton story is good, too. None of the others are terrible, but they’re not very memorable, either. Don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have this issue. If you do read it, go in with low expectations and it’ll probably provide at least some entertainment.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Ship of Shadows - H. Bedford-Jones

THE SHIP OF SHADOWS is a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint of a vintage pulp adventure yarn by H. Bedford-Jones. This one was originally published as a complete novel in the February 1920 issue of BLUE BOOK, one of the classiest of the pulps.

Eric Venable is a minister who finds himself beset by tragedy and winds up a drug addict. That’s not a spoiler, because it’s the situation as the story opens. Venable loses his church and sinks far into the depths of degradation, only to wind up being shanghaied onto a tramp steamer bound for China. That proves to be his salvation, of course, because he’s forced to get over his opium habit and the hard work as part of the ship’s black gang builds up his body and returns his strength to him.

That’s still just prologue to the main story, which finds Venable and the ship’s engineer who has befriended him signing on as part of the crew on a mysterious ship sailing from China back to America. What Venable and his friend Garrity don’t know until it’s too late is that the ship’s passengers are all Russians, a volatile mixture of aristocrats and Bolsheviks. Each group wants to kill the other and wind up with their hands on a fortune in gems and religious artifacts which were smuggled out of Russia by a group of nobles on the run from the Reds. And there’s intrigue going on among the groups, too, as double-crosses abound.

Throw in storms at sea, a few gun battles, knife-wielding Chinamen, some far-fetched coincidences, and a little romance and you’ve got a fine example of a blood-and-thunder adventure yarn. Being decidedly old-fashioned (it was written nearly ninety years ago) [105 years ago now] and somewhat politically incorrect, it won’t be to everyone’s taste these days, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2008. I love those Black Dog Books chapbooks Tom Roberts published, own most of them, and have read many of them. Great stuff all around. I don't believe this one is available directly from the publisher anymore, but affordable used copies can be found on-line. I still highly recommend it for any fans of pulp adventure yarns.)

Review: Safari to the Lost Ages - William P. McGivern

After reading William P. McGivern’s grim and gritty crime novel SHIELD FOR MURDER a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to try one of his science fiction stories. “Safari to the Lost Ages”, a novella that appeared originally in the July 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, seemed like a good bet. It’s about a trip 30,000 years into the past, and I like a good time travel yarn now and then.

The first thing to know about this story is that there’s almost no science to it, not even any handwavium to explain how time travel exists. It just does, that’s all, and it’s so commonplace that there are companies rich people hire to take them into the past as a vacation. One such company is run by two-fisted adventurer Barry Rudd and his assistant, the burly McGregor.

Barry and McGregor are hired by beautiful Linda Carstairs to find her father, a scientist who went 30,000 years into the past but never returned to the present. Linda insists on going along on the expedition, of course, and so does her fiancé. Barry doesn’t like this, but Linda is paying for the trip, so he reluctantly agrees to her presence.

Well, naturally, things go wrong. After an encounter with a dinosaur, Barry is captured by some beautiful winged bird-girls and winds up the prisoner of some cavemen who have a village inside an extinct volcano. McGregor and the others are also taken prisoner by the cavemen. (Yes, this is one of those stories where cavemen and dinosaurs exist at the same time.) We get human sacrifice, desperate battles, treachery, noble gestures, and nick-of-time escapes. All the stuff of classic pulp adventure yarns, in other words.

And a pulp adventure yarn is really all this is, despite the minor science fiction trappings. It might as well have taken place in the Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about, where there’s a lost race around every corner. Of course, that’s fine with me. I read to be entertained, so the only question is whether or not “Safari to the Lost Ages” is entertaining.

Let me put it this way: If I had read this when I was ten years old, I would have thought it was one of the greatest stories ever written. As it is, reading it at a considerably older age, I still galloped right through it and had a very good time reading it. This is Front Porch stuff for sure. McGivern’s prose is colorful, breakneck fast, and heavy on the adverbs (I love adverbs, even though I know I’m supposed to hate them in this day and age). Barry Rudd is a stalwart hero, the villains are suitably despicable, the bird-girls are an intriguing concept I wish he had done more with, and the whole thing just raced by. If I had read this story without a by-line on it, I never would have guessed it was written by the same guy who did the bleak, low-key SHIELD FOR MURDER.

From what I’ve written about it, you ought to be able to tell whether you’re the sort of reader who would enjoy “Safari to the Lost Ages” or think it’s the stupidest thing ever. So proceed accordingly. The novella is included in THE FIRST WILLIAM P. McGIVERN SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK, which is available as an e-book on Amazon. I definitely plan to read more of McGivern’s science fiction and fantasy. By the way, McGivern also wrote the story under the house-name P.F. Costello that's featured on the cover of that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, and it's included in THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK.

Review: Jedediah Smith - Alfred Wallon

Alfred Wallon is the most prolific and popular German author of Westerns and historical novels published in the United States. His latest release is JEDEDIAH SMITH, a historical novel about the life of one of the most important figures of the Mountain Man era, and it’s excellent.

Jedediah Smith was a member of one of the first fur trapping expeditions to go all the way up the Missouri River. He helped discover the route to the northwest through South Pass, which became one of the vital parts of the great westward migration. He traveled to the Great Salt Lake and on to California, helping to open up the idea of trade with the Mexican settlements on the West Coast. And he helped scout what became the Santa Fe Trail, leading to a fateful encounter with Comanches. Wallon covers all of this in his thoroughly researched novel based primarily on journals kept by Smith and other members of his expeditions.

Along the way, there’s plenty of action: battles with Indians, clashes with Mexican soldiers, even a fight with a bear. Numerous colorful historical characters from the Mountain Man era make appearances, including Jim Bridge, John Colter, Hugh Glass, Jim Beckwourth, and the Sublette brothers.

Wallon captures not only the epic scope of these explorations that shaped the country, but he also provides a compelling insight into the mind of an explorer, as Smith is always pushing on, looking for something new, wanting to see places he hasn’t seen. The fur trapping business is what led Smith to travel throughout the West, but his own wanderlust comes through clearly as well.

JEDEDIAH SMITH is a well-written, informative, but above all entertaining chronicle of the opening of the West. Alfred Wallon has done a fine job on it, and if you’re a fan of top-notch, realistic historical fiction, I give it a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Action Stories, October 1936

This Popular Publications detective pulp was never very successful, having two short runs during the Thirties. This issue is from the second incarnation of DETECTIVE ACTION STORIES. The cover, which admittedly is pretty striking, is credited to someone named A. Nelson. This is the only listing in the Fictionmags Index for whoever that was. As for the authors inside, Ray Cummings is probably the biggest name, although Walter Ripperger was fairly prolific and popular, too. Also, one of the authors, William Moulton Marston, went on to create the iconic comic book character Wonder Woman a few years later. Other authors on hand are Victor Maxwell, Arthur V. Chester, William Corcoran, and Richard L. Hobart. Chester's story is featured on the cover despite the fact that he sold only five stories to the pulps and couldn't have been considered a big name. But the story inspired a good cover.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, May 1927

Now that's an eye-catching cover by H.C. Murphy Jr.! LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE's claim of "Real Cowboy Stories by Real Cowboys" may be a bit of an exaggeration. The real name of Eli Colter, who has a story in this issue, was May Eliza Frost, so she's not a boy at all. Maybe she was a cowgirl, I don't know about that. Frederick Nebel has a story in this one, too, and I don't recall reading that he ever worked as a cowboy, but it's possible and if he did, I hope one of you will feel free to correct me. Walt Coburn, of course, was indeed the Genuine Article. The other authors in this issue are Albert William Stone and John Byrne (apparently not the editor of the same name). I have no idea if either of them ever cowboyed. Despite all that, I'm sure this is an excellent issue, and there are plenty of examples of non-cowboy authors who wrote great Westerns. It's a pretty good bit of marketing, though. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Sandhills Shootings - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING is one of Chap O'Keefe's novels featuring range detective/hired gun Joshua Dillard. In this one, Dillard gets a letter from his brother-in-law, who is serving as a deputy marshal in a small town in Nebraska, asking him to come and help prevent a range war that's brewing in the sandhills area of that state. At the same time, Dillard is summoned to Omaha by a wealthy businessman who also has connections in the sandhills. Naturally, those two cases turn out to be related, but Dillard doesn't discover that until there are several attempts on his life, in one of which he's shot and left for dead.

Chap O'Keefe (who is really friend-of-this-blog Keith Chapman) takes a traditional Western plot and as usual spins it into something more with clever plot twists, well-developed and interesting characters, and plenty of tough, hardboiled action scenes. Joshua Dillard has turned into one of my favorite Western characters. Although he's fast with a gun and can handle himself just fine in a fistfight, he's hardly a superman, but rather a flawed but determined man trying to make his way on a brutal frontier.

THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING is now available in an affordable e-book edition. If you're a Western fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on August 1, 2011. A new edition of THE SANDHILLS SHOOTING has just been released, including a bonus article on researching Western novels and a new cover. I've added a link to the new edition above. A paperback version is also in the works. My recommendation from more than 14 years ago still stands. Keith Chapman is a fine author of traditional Westerns and always worth reading.)

Review: Montana Fury - Al Cody (Archie Joscelyn)

Archie Joscelyn started his pulp career all the way back in 1921 and wrote steadily for them, mostly Westerns, until the late Fifties, after which he devoted his efforts entirely to novels and was still turning them out until the late Seventies. He wrote under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most common of which was Al Cody. He probably published more books under the Cody name than any of the others.

MONTANA FURY, as by Al Cody, is from fairly late in Joscelyn's career, published originally in hardcover by library market publisher Avalon Books in 1967 and reprinted in paperback a couple of years later by Macfadden-Bartell, which is the edition I read. That’s my copy in the scan. The protagonist is a young man named Jake Cassius, an orphan who runs away from the family he’s been living with in Kansas and joins a cattle drive headed for Montana. The reason he wants to go to Montana is that he saw a young woman in Kansas and fell in love with her at first sight, and she was on her way to her family’s ranch in Montana.

The first half of the novel follows Jake’s adventures on the cattle drive and forms a well-done coming-of-age yarn. Then there’s an abrupt plot twist and Jake takes the blame for a murder he believes was committed by his best friend. He goes on the run from the law and heads for Montana, winds up pretending to be a U.S. marshal, and finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a range war involving the family of the girl he's in love with.

MONTANA FURY is almost a kitchen-sink book like Louis L’Amour’s TO TAME A LAND (my favorite L’Amour novel), but Joscelyn doesn’t throw quite as many elements into his tale as L’Amour did. And the writing is very different. For most of his career, Joscelyn was a very traditional Western writer, telling his stories in simple prose, but as he got older, his style changed some and this book is a good example. The dialogue has an oddball, mock-Shakespearean tone to it, reminding me of DEADWOOD without all the cussin’. There’s a certain similarity to Frederick Faust’s Max Brand novels, too, although Joscelyn, who grew up on a ranch in Montana, has more realistic settings than Faust.

I’ve read some of Joscelyn’s novels from the Seventies where this tendency is really exaggerated, and they’re not very good. MONTANA FURY is odd and distinctive, but I think it still works overall and I enjoyed it. Anyone who hasn’t read Joscelyn’s work before, though, probably shouldn’t start with this one. Try one of his novels from the Forties or Fifties instead.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I actually bought this book for the Ron Lesser cover featuring model Steve Holland. Lesser did several covers for various Western novels based on reference photographs from the same photo shoot with Holland wearing that long coat. I own several of those books. There’s also a Lesser painting based on that shoot that was never used for a Western novel cover . . . yet. I’ll have more information about that at a later date.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Each Dawn I Die (1939)

I was never a big fan of James Cagney’s movies when I was a kid, which means that even though a lot of them were shown on TV, I never watched all that many. That actually worked out okay, because now that I am a fan of his movies, there are still quite a few of them I’ve never seen until now, such as 1939’s EACH DAWN I DIE.

In this one, Cagney plays a crusading newspaper reporter who has evidence that the district attorney and his assistant are crooked. So the DA frames him for manslaughter on a drunken driving rap and gets him sent to prison for 20 years. That, of course, discredits all the allegations against the corrupt politicians.

Once he’s in the big house, Cagney befriends a charming gangster played by George Raft. I was never a big George Raft fan, either, but now I like his work quite a bit. A lot of your typical prison stuff happens—clashes with the screws and fellow cons, guys getting shivved, our protagonists being thrown in the Hole, things like that—before Raft manages to escape with a promise to clear Cagney’s name once he’s on the outside. But things don’t quite play out the way you’d expect . . . until they do.

EACH DAWN I DIE, directed by William Keighly (who directed several good Cagney films) and based on a novel by Jerome Odlum, is a thoroughly entertaining movie, an old-fashioned prison picture that hits all the usual beats but hits them very skillfully. Cagney and Raft both turn in excellent performances, and the supporting cast features just about every tough he-man supporting actor from the Thirties except Ward Bond and George Tobias, plus weaselly Victor Jory as one of the bad guys. George Bancroft is especially good as the tough but sympathetic warden. The violence of the prison riot at the end is pretty graphic for the time and very effective. Some of the plot twists are a little far-fetched, maybe, but they still work and really grab the viewer.

I had a great time watching this movie. It reminded me of all the afternoons I spent sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching old movies on the local stations. I might not want to go back to those days, but I sure don’t mind revisiting them now and then. And if you’re a Cagney and/or Raft fan and haven’t seen EACH DAWN I DIE, I give it a high recommendation.

Review: Shield for Murder - William P. McGivern

A couple of weeks ago when I reran my review of William P. McGivern’s novel ROGUE COP, my friend Jim Doherty suggested that I read McGivern’s SHIELD FOR MURDER, a novel about a cop with even less of a moral compass than the protagonist of ROGUE COP. It was an excellent suggestion, and I appreciate the recommendation.

SHIELD FOR MURDER gets down to business right away. It opens with Philadelphia police detective Barny Nolan murdering bookmaker Dave Fiest and stealing $25,000 that the bookie had on him. This is considerably more than Nolan expected to get from the killing and robbery, but unfortunately for him, the 25 grand was intended to pay off a bet made by a local gangster, and the guy wants his money back.

Nolan’s life is also complicated by young newspaper reporter Mark Brewster, who senses that there’s something fishy about Nolan’s story. Then there’s Linda Wade, the beautiful nightclub singer Nolan’s in love with. His stormy relationship with her is also a constant distraction. And Nolan, like a lot of guys who get in over their heads in noir novels, isn’t the brightest fellow in the world. Combine that with his hair-trigger temper, and it’s inevitable that his troubles start to pile up.

SHIELD FOR MURDER is a slow burn of a novel, alternating between Brewster’s investigation into the bookie’s murder and Nolan’s violent background, and Nolan’s efforts to navigate through the walls that seem to be closing in around him. Not all that much actually happens until late in the book, but McGivern’s writing is so good that it doesn’t really matter. It’s hard to say who’s the protagonist in this book, Nolan or Brewster, and to be honest, neither of them is very likable. At the same time, you can’t help but sympathize with them, at least a little.

I will say that there were times when I felt McGivern’s low-key, realistic prose could have used a bit more drama, and I wasn’t that fond of the ending. However, I raced through the book and that’s always a good thing. The police procedural bits reminded me of the 87th Precinct novels, and I can’t help but wonder if Evan Hunter ever read this. Dodd, Mead published it in hardcover in 1951, several years before the first of the 87th Precinct books. Pocket Books did a paperback reprint in 1952, there was a movie version starring Edmond O’Brien, well-cast as Barny Nolan, in 1954, and Berkley did another paperback reprint in 1988, the edition I read.

SHIELD FOR MURDER is out of print, but copies of both paperback reprints are available for reasonable prices on the Internet. Despite a few misgivings, I think it’s a very good novel and well worth reading if you’re a fan of noir crime fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, November 1938

Well, that's certainly an eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it would have made me curious about the story, that's for sure. Since Donald Wandrei wrote that cover story, it's probably pretty good. The other authors in this issue are top-notch, as well: Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich, Edward S. Aarons (as Edward Ronns), and J.J. des Ormeaux, who was really Forrest Rosaire. I've never read any of Wandrei's Cyrus North stories and don't know anything about the series, but I've always found Wandrei to be a dependable author. I don't own this issue, or any other issues of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, for that matter. The Internet Archive has some of them posted (not this one). I ought to give them a try, one of these days.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, August 9, 1941

We've seen plenty of poker games interrupted by gunfights on Western pulp covers, of course, but as far as I recall, this is the first one I've run across where the same thing happens during a game of pool. This cover is by H.W. Scott, who did nearly all the covers for WESTERN STORY during this particular era. As usual, there are plenty of good authors inside including Harry Sinclair Drago, Cliff Farrell, Hugh B. Cave, Frank Richardson Pierce writing as Seth Ranger, James B. Hendryx, Lloyd Eric Reeve, and Russell A. Bankson. I don't own this issue, but it looks like a good one. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Climb a Broken Ladder - Robert Novak

I had never heard of this novel or the author before reading it. There’s a political columnist by the name of Robert Novak, but I have my doubts he’s the same guy who wrote CLIMB A BROKEN LADDER and B-GIRL, both published in 1956 by Ace and as far as I’ve been able to determine, the only two books by this author.

CLIMB A BROKEN LADDER is a low-life novel, I guess you’d call it, a story about the drunks, beggars, and prostitutes who live along Seattle’s skid row, characters with colorful names like the Bohunk, Big Phil, Newsy Nellie, and Pushover Patty. Though not as well-written, it reminded me of what I’ve read by Charles Bukowski, since a lot of the book finds the characters just wandering around in an alcoholic haze. This makes for a pretty meandering plot, but the story does have a coherent thread running through it, that being the budding romance between the Bohunk and Newsy Nellie. The book picks up steam in the final third with a twist or two that I didn’t see coming. It never quite becomes the noir crime novel that I thought it might, but it’s dark enough to please most readers of noir.

One thing I really liked about the book is its Seattle setting. I expect most skid row novels to be set in New York or San Francisco or some place like that. Novak also does a good job of working in the back-stories of the various characters, and then at the very end throws in a final plot twist that left me going, “Huh,” even though I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it jaw-dropping. This is a pretty stark book that impressed me enough I may have to try to find a copy of Novak’s other novel, B-GIRL.

(This post originally appeared on November 14, 2008. I never found a copy of B-GIRL, and looking it up now, the copies that are for sale on-line are too pricey for me. If I ever happen to run across it in the wild for a decent price, I'll grab it, I'm sure, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen, as they say.)

Review: The Blonde and Johnny Malloy - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

A couple of weeks ago, I read and enjoyed William Ard’s SHAKEDOWN, a breezy, fast-moving private eye yarn recently reprinted by Stark House in a double volume with THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. I’ve read that one now, too, and as a grim, gritty hardboiled crime novel, it’s quite a contrast to SHAKEDOWN. But it’s every bit as good, if not better.

Johnny Malloy is a young convict working on a prison road gang in Florida, serving a ten-year sentence for driving drunk and causing an accident in which two people were killed. He’s five years into that sentence when a couple of unexpected things happen. A beautiful blonde in a red car starts driving by the place where the prisoners are working every day, giving them an eyeful. And then, without any warning, Johnny is paroled, an arrangement set up by his brother-in-law, a gambler and nightclub owner who has considerable political influence.

Johnny is grateful for being released, of course, but he soon discovers that his brother-in-law didn’t act out of the goodness of his heart. Far from it, in fact, since the guy has a plan that involves Johnny winding up dead. Oh, and that beautiful blonde? She works for the brother-in-law, of course, and before you know it, Johnny realizes he might be safer back on the road gang.

Ard makes the wise decision to spin this tough yarn in a relatively compressed time frame of five days, Monday through Friday, and he packs a lot of action and plot twists into those days, too. There’s a heavyweight prize fight with a fortune bet on it, a coalition of gangsters, cops, beautiful women, kidnapping, and a whole pile of trouble for Johnny Malloy. He handles it well. He’s not incredibly tough, or smart, for that matter, but he gets by. He’s a good protagonist, the villains are suitably despicable,  and the blonde is a better developed character than most beautiful babes in books like these.

I really enjoyed THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. Ard was a fine storyteller, no doubt about that. This one was published originally as a paperback by Popular Library in 1958 and is one of Ard’s later novels. He died much too young in 1960 at the age of 37 and no doubt would have given us many more fine novels if he had lived longer. You can read this one in that top-notch double volume from Stark House, available in paperback and e-book editions. If  you’re a fan of hardboiled novels, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Spring 1949

This is actually a fairly sedate cover by Allen Anderson on this issue of PLANET STORIES. There's a good group of writers inside, too, including Ray Bradbury (with a reprint from MACLEAN'S), Damon Knight, Alfred Coppel, Henry Hasse, Basil Wells, Stanley Mullen, and the less well-known (at least to me) Robert Abernathy and George Whitley. I don't own this issue, but it's available on-line here if any of you want to check it out. (With all the pulps that I own and all the ones that are on-line, I swear I could sit and read pulps all day, every day, and never even come close to reading all the ones I'd like to. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but what're you gonna do?) 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Sweethearts, October 1940

RANGELAND SWEETHEARTS was a short-lived (three issues) Western romance pulp from Popular Publications. This is the first issue. I don't know who painted the cover. As usual with the Western romance pulps, most of the authors are men who wrote traditional Western pulp yarns, too: Art Lawson, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Lee Floren, Rolland Lynch, and John Paul Jones. Not familiar with that last one other than the historical figure of the same name, but this one wrote quite a bit for the Western pulps from the Twenties to the Fifties. Of course, there are some female authors on hand, too: the very prolific Isobel Stewart Way, Leta Zoe Adams, and Myrtle Juliette Corey. I don't own this issue, but with those authors, I imagine it's pretty good. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Rogue Cop - William P. McGivern

William P. McGivern is one of those authors whose work I’ve been aware of for decades without ever reading much of it. I read his World War II novel, SOLDIERS OF ’44, which is part war novel (which works pretty well) and part military/legal thriller (which didn’t work, as far as I’m concerned). A few years ago I read his private eye novel BLONDES DIE HARD, written under the pseudonym Bill Peters, which I liked. You can read my comments on it here.

Now I’ve read his novel ROGUE COP, and it’s easily the best McGivern I’ve read so far. Philadelphia police detective Mike Carmody is the rogue cop of the title, up to his neck in graft and corruption. His younger brother Eddie is also a cop, but of the honest variety, and when Eddie winds up with the local mob after him, Mike has to take sides and choose whether to protect himself or his brother.

There’s probably not a lot in this book that will surprise the veteran reader of hardboiled thrillers, but boy, the pace really rockets along. McGivern’s prose is just as smooth as it can be, and he does a great job of creating rounded, morally conflicted characters, chief among them Mike Carmody himself. There are plenty of tough action scenes, and a great line near the end. I’ll definitely be seeking out more McGivern novels, and if you haven’t read ROGUE COP, it gets a high recommendation from me.

(I've actually managed to read something else by William P. McGivern since this post originally appeared on October 31, 2008, but it was one of his science fiction novels rather than one of his crime novels. You can find my review of THE GALAXY RAIDERS here. But I still intend to read more of his crime yarns.)

Review: Longhorn Stampede - Philip Ketchum

A couple of weeks ago, I read the issue of RANCH ROMANCES that contained the first installment of Philip Ketchum’s serialized novel “Longhorn Stampede”. I didn’t read that installment in the pulp because I thought I had the novel version and would probably read it one of these days. Well, it turns out that I didn’t have a copy, but then I discovered that it was published by Popular Library with an A. Leslie Ross cover, and temptation got the better of me. I found an affordable copy, ordered it, and read it as soon as it arrived. That turned out to be a good choice all around!

Llano Smith is a Texas cowboy helping drive a trail herd to the railhead in Kansas. When the owner of the herd falls sick, Llano heads for a nearby town to see if he can find a doctor. This turns out to be a mistake, because the settlement is actually run by an owlhoot who is in league with a rustling kingpin. Llano winds up in all sorts of trouble, including being framed for murder and thrown in jail to await trial and hanging.

Ah, but Llano has a secret, you see. He’s actually a reformed outlaw from Texas named Sam Todd who hit the vengeance trail when a gang of carpetbaggers wiped out his family after the war. He’s settled the score with all of them except one, and he’s lost the thirst for revenge on that one, figuring it’s better to take a new name and start a new life. (None of this is a spoiler. Ketchum lays out all the background pretty early in the book.)

Anybody who’s read many traditional Western novels and/or watched many Western movies will be able to foresee most of what happens in this novel. Coincidence plays a rather large part in Ketchum’s plot, but that doesn’t really bother me. What’s important is that he was a writer with an excellent hardboiled style who really knew how to keep a story moving along. And there are a few minor surprises as everything doesn’t work out exactly like you might expect it to.

Llano Smith is a fine protagonist, plenty tough and not always likable but still sympathetic enough for the reader to root for him. Ketchum does a very good job with the inevitable romantic triangle involving Llano, a rancher’s beautiful daughter, and a beautiful saloonkeeper in the outlaw town. At times these scenes are actually pretty racy for the time period. The action scenes are gritty and effective and build up to a smashing climax.

My copy of LONGHORN STAMPEDE has some damage to the front cover, which is probably why it was fairly affordable, but that’s it in the scan anyway. The cover isn’t really a wraparound illustration, but the back cover has more Ross art, so I’m including it as well. I love those Popular Library editions from the Fifties. Consistently good books with good covers. I’m glad I was prompted to pick this one up and read it.

Review: The Bullet Garden - Stephen Hunter

Years ago, I read Stephen Hunter’s novel HOT SPRINGS, the first book in his Earl Swagger series. I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I read the sequel PALE HORSE COMING, and loved it, too, although I thought it wasn’t quite as good as HOT SPRINGS. When the third book in the series, HAVANA, came out, I read it, of course, and it was okay, but not nearly as good as the first two. And after that, I never read anything else by Hunter, although I’ve always intended to and I actually own most of his books.

But then I noticed that there’s a fourth Earl Swagger novel called THE BULLET GARDEN, and it’s a prequel to the others, taking place during World War II, so I had to give it a try. THE BULLET GARDEN is set during summer 1944, after D-Day but well before the Battle of the Bulge. The American forces have gotten bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy because a mysterious German sniper—or snipers—seems to be able to see in the dark and is eliminating American officers and NCOs, destroying morale and making it impossible for the Americans to advance. Gererals Eisenhower and Bradley want somebody to figure out what’s going on with the sniper and put a stop to it, and who better to do that than Earl Swagger, a Marine sergeant who has already made quite a reputation for himself fighting in the Pacific.

All this is established fairly quickly, and the rest of the novel follows Earl as he’s flown to England, made a major in the relatively new OSS, and launches an investigation into the sniper problem while trying to navigate the tricky back channels of politics and espionage, an area which is not one of Earl’s natural talents.

Hunter’s reputation is that of a guy who writes really well about guns and shooting. This is absolutely correct. His action scenes are very realistic and have an undeniable air of authenticity. THE BULLET GARDEN is full of great characters and scenes and bits of dialogue.

But the plot is incredibly slow to develop and muddled by page after page of description and background that’s well-written but doesn’t really do anything except show off Hunter’s prose. I’m no fan of stripped-down modern writing. I don’t mind some telling instead of showing. A lot of modern thrillers devoid of description and oh-so-careful never to mention the weather or use a speech tag other than “said”—and as few of those as possible—strike me as bland and all sounding alike. But dang, Hunter really goes overboard in the other direction in this book. It’s just too blasted wordy. Then he adds an unpleasant subplot that may be necessary for the overall story arc but really comes across as anticlimactic. There are also several cameos by real-life writers that skirt right up to the edge of being too cutesy but don't quite go over it.

Despite all that, as I said above there are some great scenes, some thrilling, some heartbreaking, that I suspect will stay with me. I still love Earl Swagger as a character and he’s in fine form in this novel. There’s enough real suspense that at times I was flipping the pages, in a hurry to find out what was going to happen. If you’ve read the first three books in this series, by all means you should read THE BULLET GARDEN, too. It’s available on Amazon in e-book, audio, hardcover, and paperback editions. But like HAVANA, it’s just okay.

Also, this novel isn’t just a prequel to the other Earl Swagger books, but it's also a prequel to Hunter’s first novel, THE MASTER SNIPER, published more than forty years ago. I happen to have a copy of that one. I think I’ll have to read it soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, July 1935

Nobody could accuse TERROR TALES, or any of the other Weird Menace pulps, for that matter, of being subtle and restrained. That's certainly true of this cover by John Howitt, which is one of the more lurid that I recall. The lineup of authors inside this issue is pretty much an all-star one for this genre: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst, Nat Schachner, and James A. Goldthwaite writing as Francis James. All those guys wrote other things, too, of course, but they were prolific and well-regarded contributors to the Weird Menace pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

Since LEADING WESTERN was published by Trojan, making it a Spicy Pulp at least by association, you'd expect the covers to have attractive women on them, and the March 1946 issue is no exception. I don't know who painted this cover, but if I had to guess, I'd say H.W. Scott. The big galoot with the dangling quirly looks like his work. Inside this issue, the only author you've likely heard of is Giff Cheshire, whose story made the cover. The other writers on hand are Adolph Regli, Frank D. Compagnon, Henry Norton, and Mark Lish. Norton and Lish sound vaguely familiar to me, the other two not at all. I don't own this issue and wouldn't want to venture a guess as to its quality, but the cover is okay.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: West on 66 - James H. Cobb

Take a Korean War vet who’s an LA county sheriff’s deputy in 1957, have him leave Chicago after visiting relatives and head back to California along Route 66 in a souped-up hot rod, drop him down in the middle of a mystery involving several murders, vengeful gangsters, a fortune in missing loot, and a beautiful young woman on the run, and what do you have? The ingredients of a vintage Gold Medal novel, right?

Nope. WEST ON 66 by James H. Cobb was published by St. Martin’s in 1999. The plot is fairly complex, the pace races right along (as you’d expect in a book that features several fast cars), and Kevin Pulaski, the narrator/hero, is extremely likable. The action scenes are very good; there’s a long, explosive scene near the end that’s just wonderful, so much so that it overshadows the rest of the book a little. While WEST ON 66 isn’t quite the pitch-perfect recreation of an era and a writing style, it’s darned close to that level. My biggest complaint is that in a few places the author gets a shade too cute for my taste, such as when the hero is searching for a pay phone to make an important call and thinks that it sure would be handy if somebody invented a phone you could carry around in your pocket. I’m sure I do that myself sometimes, too.

I’m not a big reader of near-future techno-thrillers, but Cobb’s debut novel, CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN, is great, probably the best novel I’ve ever read in that genre. It’s pretty easy to find and well worth looking for. So is the sequel, SEA STRIKE, which is almost as good. I imagine the other two or three books in the series are, too; I just haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m glad I came across WEST ON 66, though. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on October 17, 2008. Looking at Amazon, I was a little surprised to see that WEST ON 66 is still available as an e-book, and it's even on Kindle Unlimited. So are all five of the books in the series that begins with CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN. I read the first two in that series but never got around to the others. I'm tempted to read them now, but I'm afraid too much time has passed. I really recommend WEST ON 66, though, as well as CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN and SEA STRIKE. Great books. There were six short stories featuring Kevin Pulaski published in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE between 2004 and 2009. I thought they had been collected in a book, but apparently not. I'm sure they're worth reading, too. Cobb passed away in 2014.)

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

Johnny Stevens is a private detective working for an agency in New York. His boss sends him to Miami Beach on what seems like a simple assignment: Johnny is supposed to keep tabs on a doctor who may be blackmailing a young wastrel/playboy who happens to be the son-in-law of a canned food tycoon. The client is actually the public relations firm that represents the father-in-law. Johnny doesn’t know what the outcome is supposed to be and doesn’t really care. His assignment is just to keep track of where the doctor goes at night and who he sees. Just a simple shadowing job, right?

Well, you know it’s not going to stay simple, and sure enough, there’s a murder attempt the first night Johnny is on the job. On the second night, the killer succeeds, and even though the murder takes place in front of 300 witnesses, Johnny finds himself on the spot for it and has to figure out who the real killer is in order to clear his name. That’s not the only murder before this case is wrapped up, either. Throw in several beautiful young women for Johnny to juggle, some gangsters, gambling dens, and nightclubs, and you have all the elements for a highly entertaining private eye novel of the sort that I grew up reading.

SHAKEDOWN was published originally in hardcover by Henry Holt in 1952 and reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in 1954. The by-line on the book is Ben Kerr, but the actual author was William Ard, the popular Fifties writer who passed away in 1960 at the much too young age of 37. In addition to the stand-alone mystery and suspense novels and a two-book series featuring PI Barney Glines that he authored as Ben Kerr, he wrote a well-regarded series under his own name featuring PI Timothy Dane and a couple of books starring ex-con Danny Fontaine. He started a series starring private eye Lou Largo but wrote only part of the first book before dying. Lawrence Block completed that book, and John Jakes wrote several more under Ard’s name featuring Lou Largo. Ard’s most successful work during his lifetime may well have been the Western series he wrote in the late Fifties starring adventurer Tom Buchanan, published under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Ard wrote five of those and started the sixth one, which was completed by Robert Silverberg. Used copies of the Buchanan novels were easily found in used bookstores when I was a kid, and I eagerly bought and read all of them, without having any idea who actually wrote them, of course. Nor did I care, at that point.

The fine folks at Stark House Press are about to reprint SHAKEDOWN and another of Ard’s Ben Kerr novels, THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY, in a double volume with an excellent introduction by Nicholas Litchfield. I’ll be getting to THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY soon, but for now I can give this book a high recommendation based on SHAKEDOWN. It’s very fast-paced, written in a breezy, entertaining style, and Johnny Stevens is a likable protagonist, tough but not overly so, smart but not brilliant, quick with a quip and charming with the ladies. I’m a little surprised that this is his only appearance, but hey, Ard was busy with other things. I love this kind of book and always will. I had a really good time reading SHAKEDOWN.

Review: Overboard - George F. Worts

I have a bit of a history with this book. I first saw it in the Nineties, in the dealers’ room at ClueFest, the fondly remembered mystery convention in Dallas. My attention was drawn to that great cover by Rudolph Belarski, and although I’d never heard of the novel, I knew that the author, George F. Worts, was a well-regarded writer for the pulps. Since that copy wasn’t too expensive, I bought it.

And then it sat on my shelves, unread, until it went up in smoke in the Fire of ’08.

Time went by and I didn’t replace that copy of OVERBOARD, but then one day somebody posted the cover on Facebook in one of the paperback groups, and that prompted me to look around and see if I could find an affordable copy on-line (an option I didn’t have back in the Nineties when I bought it for the first time). I had checked a few times before that and found that generally, copies cost more than I wanted to pay. But this time, I found one that wasn’t cheap, but it was within my price range. So I snapped it up, and when it arrived I took it out of the plastic bag, figuring I would read it at last.

The first 60 pages were missing. Which hadn’t been mentioned at all in the listing for it.

Well, I got my money back, but I still couldn’t read the book. If it had been just the first page or two, maybe I would have plowed ahead. But not with that big a chunk of the novel gone. I wasn’t even going to attempt it. Maybe, I thought, maybe I just wasn’t meant to read OVERBOARD. So more time passed.

And then somebody posted that cover again, and I went and checked and found a decently priced copy and took the plunge again. The cover was printed slightly off register (you can see it in the scan, which is my copy), but I didn’t care all that much as long as the book was intact and readable. By now I was determined to read OVERBOARD.

And so I have, probably thirty years after I bought it the first time. Other than that printing glitch, the copy I got is in very nice shape. But is the book actually any good, you might ask?

It absolutely is.

The protagonist is a young woman with the odd name Zorie Corey. (The reason for the name does get an explanation of sorts in the novel.) She lives in a university town in the Midwest and makes a living typing theses, dissertations, and research papers for students and professors at the school. She’s engaged to a somewhat dull and controlling professor of psychology. She lives a meek little life (Worts actually goes a little overboard, no pun intended, on her meekness, but ultimately there’s a reason for that, too) and would like to experience some actual romance and adventure before she settles down to married life.

Well, you know where this is going, don’t you? Her fiancé’s grandfather, a retired admiral, blows into town and wants Zorie’s help writing a book about his life. Her fiancé’s rakehell older brother, who’s been kicked out of the Navy because he’s a Nazi sympathizer, shows up, too, as well as a couple of sinister strangers.

Before you know it, Zorie is whisked off onto a ship bound for Hawaii, where the admiral owns a beautiful estate. Her fiancé and the fiancé’s brother are on board, too, as are the sinister strangers and a beautiful young woman who seems to think that Zorie is actually someone else. Despite the brother being a Nazi sympathizer, Zorie is falling for him, anyway. Then, while taking a stroll on deck on a dark night, someone grabs her and throws her overboard. Through a stroke of luck, she survives that murder attempt, but then, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor . . . 

That’s the first half of the book, and up to then, it’s been a lighthearted but very well written romantic suspense yarn. Things turn a lot more serious after the ship reaches Hawaii and the scene shifts to the admiral’s plantation. Intrigue and danger continue to swirl around Zorie, but the stakes are higher now. There’s still some romance, but suspense dominates the second half of the book, and it’s pretty doggoned nerve-wracking in places.

The big twist that shows up late probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but Worts’ prose is so smooth and entertaining that it doesn’t really matter. OVERBOARD is colorful, humorous, exciting, and just plain fun to read. I stayed up after midnight to finish it, and that hardly ever happens these days and hasn’t for years.

Worts is best remembered for three series he wrote for the pulps: adventure yarns featuring wireless operator Peter Moore, a.k.a. Peter the Brazen; two-fisted Singapore Sammy Shay; and mysteries featuring lawyer Gillian Hazeltine. I’ve read the Singapore Sammy stories and loved them. I have all the Peter the Brazen stories and need to get to them soon, and I have some of the Gillian Hazeltine stories, too.

But this stand-alone mystery novel, which was published in hardcover by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1943 and reprinted in that iconic paperback by Popular Library in 1950, is superb and well worth reading, too. I’m very glad I finally got around to it. I have a hunch that OVERBOARD will be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.