Half a Million Words and Counting

Some of you probably remember how I used to write a million words a year. I did that for 17 straight years, in fact, and usually posted on the blog when I reached that milestone. Then, a few years ago, for various reasons, the streak came to an end. Since then, however, I’ve never done less than half a million words a year, and since that seems like a worthwhile accomplishment, I thought I’d mention that I hit that mark yesterday.

I’ve also made noises about retiring on numerous occasions, but I came closer than ever before to doing that for next year. My age is starting to catch up to me, health-wise. It wouldn’t be actual retirement, of course. I’d still write books, but only ones that I intended to self-publish, nothing with contracts and deadlines involved. But when I mentioned that to the editor on the ghosting job I’ve been doing for many years now, she prevailed on me to do a few more books next year, and then Gary Goldstein, a good friend for more than 35 years and the editor who has bought more of my books than anybody else, became the editorial director at Dusty Saddle Publishing and asked me to write a few books for him, and I couldn't say no. So I went from the prospect of semi-retirement to having contracts and deadlines at two separate publishers next year. That adds up to, you guessed it, about half a million words. So I guess I’ll press on for a while yet. My current novel is the 432nd I’ve written, and I’d sure like to get to #450 . . .

Review: Eye Witness - George Harmon Coxe

Kent Murdock, ace news photographer for the Boston Courier-Herald, is sent on an assignment to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, supposedly to get some photos of the local university’s new head footfall coach, who is a longtime Boston sports hero. But this is just an excuse to get Murdock there, because his real mission is a personal one: he’s supposed to facilitate a reconciliation between a wealthy Boston lawyer who’s a friend of Murdock’s editor and the lawyer’s niece, who once interned at the Courier-Herald and is a friend of Murdock’s. It seems that the young woman is estranged from her uncle, who controls the trust fund she’s going to inherit, because a couple of years earlier she married a shady character the uncle disapproves of. She’s come to realize now that the marriage is a failure, and before she gets a divorce, her uncle wants her to forgive him for his meddling in her life.

Complicated enough for you? Just wait.

No sooner does Murdock get in his hotel room before a shady agent who handles nightclub entertainers barges in. That unexpected visit is followed by a beautiful blonde piano player. Murdock also gets mixed up with a seedy, down-on-his-luck private eye, a gangster who owns the nightclub where the blonde plays, a cheating wife and her gun-toting husband, and assorted other colorful characters, none of whom can be trusted. Then there’s the matter of the murder that takes place in Murdock’s hotel room. The cops are convinced at first that he’s the victim, but then when it turns out he’s not, they peg him as the killer!

EYE WITNESS was published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950, reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1956, and remains available today in an e-book edition. It falls just about in the middle of George Harmon Coxe’s long-running series about Kent Murdock, a series that’s arguably Coxe’s most successful work. I say arguably because Flashgun Casey, Coxe’s earlier, more hardboiled news photographer character, appeared not only in numerous pulp stories in BLACK MASK and a handful on novels but also was adapted into a radio series and a short-lived TV series in the early days of television. But just from the standpoint of novels, Murdock was certainly Coxe’s most popular creation.

And deservedly so. I’ve read quite a few of the Murdock novels and always enjoyed them. Coxe was a contemporary of Erle Stanley Gardner, and his books remind me of Gardner’s with their very complicated plots and tough but not overly hardboiled tone. One difference is that Kent Murdock usually isn’t two or three steps ahead of the reader the way Perry Mason and Donald Lam always were. Murdock seems to figure out the mysteries at about the same pace as the reader does. He always nabs the killer, though, and does so in a very entertaining fashion.

I had a fine time reading EYE WITNESS. It’s not the best book I’ve read in the series, that’s still THE JADE VENUS, but it’s a very good one and well worth your time if you’re a fan of well-plotted, medium-boiled mystery yarns. It’s a shame they didn’t make movies starring John Payne out of the Murdock books. I think he would have been perfect in the role.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 15 Story Detective, April 1950

John D. MacDonald is the biggest name in this issue of 15 STORY DETECTIVE, and of course, he wasn't as big a name in March 1950, when this issue was on the stands, as he soon would be as one of the leading author of paperback original novels from Gold Medal and other publishers. His first novel, THE BRASS CUPCAKE, was also published in 1950, but I don't know what month it came out. MacDonald was a well-regarded pulpster, though. The second biggest name is Norman Saunders, who painted the cover for this one, and as always with Saunders' work, it's eye-catching and crowded with action. The other authors in this issue include J.L. Bouma, best remembered for his Western novels, Ejler Jakobsson, Donn Mullaney, and a bunch of guys I'd never heard of.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, November 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m pretty sure the cover art is by H.W. Scott. This issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN contains only two pieces of fiction, which makes it something of an oddity.

We all know that the stories billed as novels in the pulps nearly always weren’t. They were usually novellas or even novelettes. But “The Gallows Brand”, T.W. Ford’s Silver Kid yarn in this issue actually is long enough to be called a novel. Taking up 75 pages of fairly small, double-columned print, I figure it’s at least 40,000 words. I like Ford’s writing, and I like his character, the drifting gunman/adventurer Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver trappings on his all-black attire, including a small silver skull that adorns the chin strap of his hat. So I was eager to plunge into this one.

The opening is intriguing. An outlaw and gunman known as Slow Joe Thorne is hired by the local justice of the peace to kill the Silver Kid. The judge claims that an enemy of his has hired Strant to kill him. And this is, in fact, true. Strant has accepted the job, but he doesn’t mean to carry it out. His guns aren’t actually for hire. He just wants to get to the bottom of the murder plot and isn’t aware that he’s also the target of a similar scheme.

But before any of that can really get underway, the Kid and Slow Joe wind up being thrown together as allies (neither of them being aware of the other’s true identity) and wind up fighting a gang of masked killers known as the Hangman Bunch, who always warn their impending victims with a drawing of a gallows with a body hanging from it. They always string up the men they kill, even if those unfortunate fellows wind up being shot first.

This is a complex plot, although it’s fairly easy to spot what’s really behind it. The Silver Kid is a very likable protagonist, Slow Joe is a great supporting character, and the villains are suitably despicable. There are plenty of well-written action scenes along the way.

However, if you sense a “but” coming, you’re right. This is a case where the story’s length actually works against it. There’s a lot of aimless riding around, and some of those action scenes, well-written though they are, don’t do anything to advance the plot. Don’t get me wrong: “The Gallows Brand” is a good story and I enjoyed reading it, but I have a feeling it would have been terrific as a novella.

The other piece of fiction in this issue is Roe Richmond’s novelette “Clean-Up”. This one is about a pair of U.S. Marshals, one an old veteran, the other a baby-faced kid who’s deadly fast with his guns, who are assigned to clean up a town being run by several outlaw bosses who have teamed up to take over. This story is almost non-stop action, and after a while I started to wonder if anybody was going to survive to the end, the way the bodies were falling. Richmond’s work is kind of hit-or-miss for me, but I enjoyed this one.

This is a good issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, although if you don’t like T.W. Ford or Roe Richmond, you’re out of luck. I actually prefer Western pulps that feature a wider variety of stories, even when the lead novel really is novel-length, as in the various Thrilling Group pulps like TEXAS RANGERS, THE RIO KID, THE MASKED RIDER, etc. But this was a nice change of pace.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Fright - Cornell Woolrich

I’ve been a Cornell Woolrich fan ever since I encountered reprints of some of his pulp stories in EQMM and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties. I’ve read many of his short stories and novelettes and enjoyed them all, but only a couple of his novels, the justly-famous THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and DEADLINE AT DAWN, which I also enjoyed. I’ve just read the Hard Case Crime reprint of Woolrich’s novel FRIGHT, originally published in 1950 under the pseudonym George Hopley.

FRIGHT is one of Woolrich’s historical suspense novels, set in 1915 and 1916, and he does a fine job of recreating that era without going overboard on the historical details. The very strait-laced attitudes of the time period play a part in the plot, too, helping to drive the protagonist to do the things he does. It’s difficult to go into detail about that plot without giving away too much, but let’s just say there’s blackmail, murder, paranoia, more murder, doomed love, more murder, and tragedy galore. Pretty much the essence of noir, in other words, and all told in smooth, if slightly old-fashioned prose that keeps the reader turning the pages. Yes, the coincidences and lapses in logic that Woolrich is notorious for can be found in FRIGHT, but as usual the writing and the raw emotional torment he inflicts on his characters more than make up for any flaws. There are passages in this book that I found genuinely disturbing, and I’m usually not easily disturbed by fiction. FRIGHT is one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time.

It’s also one of the best, and I have a feeling that it just might start me on a Woolrich binge. I don’t know if my heart can take it, though.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 22, 2007. At that time, the Hard Case Crime reprint of FRIGHT was fairly recent. That edition, pictured above, is out of print and used copies have gotten fairly expensive. However, the novel is available in a different e-book and paperback edition, and it's still well worth reading even though it did not, in fact, start me on a Woolrich binge.) 

Review: Woe to the Vanquished - Edwin Truett (Edwin Truett Long) (RED STAR DETECTIVE, June 1940)

“Woe to the Vanquished” is the second novel featuring Dr. Thaddeus Clay Harker, traveling medicine showman and top-notch criminologist and detective, and his assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones and the beautiful Brenda Sloan. It was published in the June 1940 issue of RED STAR DETECTIVE with a great cover by Emmett Watson. RED STAR DETECTIVE is the retitled pulp that ran for one issue as DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, where the first Doc Harker novel, “Crime Nest”, appeared. As this story begins Doc, Hercules, and Brenda aren’t involved in a case, they’re just on their way to the next stop where they’ll set up and sell the world-famous Chickasha Remedies that are Doc Harker’s stock-in-trade.

But then they run into a meeting of the Valiants of the Flaming Circle, a black-robed Ku Klux Klan sort of organization that firebombs and destroys a school run by a man they consider a Bolshevik. Doc and Hercules wind up being arrested and changed with murder. Crime and chaos ensue. Doc has his hands full sorting everything out and uncovering the truth about what’s really going on. Obviously, not everything turns out the way it appears at first.

The Doc Harker novels were written by prolific pulpster Edwin Truett Long under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. Long was born in Missouri but spent most of his life in Texas, and according to Tom Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the Altus Press volume that collects all three of the novels, “Woe to the Vanquished” takes place in and around a thinly disguised Wichita Falls, Texas. That by itself is enough to make it of interest to me.

I’ve become an Edwin Truett Long fan. He was not the most rigorous plotter in the world, but his stories are fast-moving, full of action, blessed with colorful, interesting characters, and have occasional touches of humor. He was just a good yarn-spinner, and it’s a shame that his service in World War II as a cryptographer in Burma left him with medical issues that took his life in 1945 when he was only 44 years old.

DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. I’ve read two of the three novels now and really enjoyed both of them, so I don’t hesitate to give this collection a high recommendation if you like off-beat, fast-paced pulp adventure and detective stories.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956)

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I like war movies, and I watched a lot of them on TV when I was a kid. But somehow, I never saw D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE. Now that I’ve watched it, I can kind of understand that. The title should have drawn my attention, but maybe I sensed that this film is only indirectly about D-Day and is barely a war movie at all.

What it is, in fact, is a romance movie told mainly in flashback. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. The story opens on a ship the night of June 5, 1944, as a combined special force of American, British, and Canadian troops are headed for Normandy to carry out a commando raid in the hope of knocking out a big gun overlooking the beaches where the regular troops will land a few hours later. Commanding the force is a British officer played by Richard Todd. One of the American officers is played by Robert Taylor. And there’s a connection between them because, you see, they’re both in love with the same girl they met, at separate times, a couple of years earlier in London. Cue the flashbacks.

The movie spends a lot more time on the relationship between Taylor and Dana Wynter, who plays the young English woman, than it does on Wynter’s romance with Todd. We also get a couple of subplots about Wynter’s father, a brigadier general who was wounded at Dunkirk but wants to get back into action, and Taylor’s commanding officer, who’s also gung-ho to the point of recklessness because he wants a promotion. Wynter’s father is played by the great British character actor John Williams, and Taylor’s commanding officer is played by the always top-notch Edmond O’Brien.

After a lot of well-done romance and British homefront scenes, we finally shift back to Todd, Taylor, and the rest of the commandos landing and going after the German gun emplacement, and for ten or fifteen minutes, D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE actually is a war movie, and decently done, too, although the filming is staged on a very small scale so we can’t see how few people are actually involved. This isn’t a cast of thousands, by any means. But it’s an exciting and satisfying battle.

Followed by a terrible and unsatisfying ending. No spoilers here, but I didn’t like it.

The movie looks good, in a mid-Fifties, major studio way, and the cast is also a good one. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Taylor. He’s one of the most dour-looking leading men I’ve ever seen. That works okay when he’s playing, say, a world-weary gunfighter in a Western, but it’s hard to like him in this move. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a character who’s basically a heel all the way through. I like Richard Todd and he’s plenty stalwart when he has to do something, which isn’t often enough. And Dana Wynter, good grief, she was a beautiful woman! And she turns in a decent performance, too, in a role where it would be easy to be too overwrought. The supporting cast features Jerry Paris in a fairly meaty role, and if you look quick, you can spot Dabbs Greer and Parley Baer, too.

It's probably a good thing I never tried to watch this when I was a kid. All the smooching and violin music would have had me switching the channel or heading outside to play. Watching it now, I thought D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE was a somewhat okay movie for what it is, but for war movie fans, it’s probably best for completists.

Review: Three Must Die! - Dan Gregory (Lorenz Heller)

Dinny Powell, the narrator/protagonist of Lorenz Heller’s novel THREE MUST DIE!, is a former journalist who’s living a quiet life as the publisher of a shopping guide in the small city of Rocky Hill, New Jersey. One peaceful Sunday afternoon, he’s out fishing in a creek with a couple of buddies of his, one a lawyer and the other a banker, when they hear a terrible car crash nearby and hurry to investigate. When they arrive on the scene, they find that the richest man in the county has been killed in the wreck, and the man’s lawyer is wandering around in a daze. A few minutes later, the members of a teenage motorcycle gang show up, too, and Dinny gets in a little scrap with one of them.

The wreck turns out to cause serious problems for Dinny, because a briefcase belonging to the rich guy’s lawyer should have been in the car but is missing, and in that briefcase is the brand-new will made by the tycoon. The cops think Dinny has the will, everybody affected by it thinks Dinny has the will, and so does a mysterious blackmailer who’s willing to kill to get what he wants.

THREE MUST DIE! is an excellent medium-boiled mystery that was published as a paperback original by Graphic Books in 1956 under the pseudonym Dan Gregory, the only time Heller used that name. The cover art is by Roy Lance. There are enough twists in the plot to keep things interesting, but Heller’s strong suit was his characters, and they’re all well-rounded and compelling, especially Dinny. His on-again, off-again romance with the girl who works on the shopping paper with him and wants to become a famous reporter is really well-handled. As a mystery, the clues are all there and I figured out who the killer was before I got to the end, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the very suspenseful climax.

THREE MUST DIE! has just been reprinted by Stark House in a very nice double volume with another of Heller’s novels, NIGHT NEVER ENDS. It’s available in e-book and paperback, and I give it a high recommendation. Lorenz Heller is just a thoroughly entertaining writer of crime and mystery fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 25, 1933

That's a nice evocative cover by Frederick Witton, an artist whose work I'm not familiar with, on this issue of SHORT STORIES. It's dated December 25, and Christmas Day was on Monday in 1933 (yes, I looked it up), so the unsold copies of this one were probably pulled off the stands on Tuesday that week. Although who wouldn't want a pulp with stories by H. Bedford-Jones, James B. Hendryx (a Corporal Downey yarn), William Merriam Rouse, George Allan England, Hapsburg Liebe, Clifford Knight, and Berton E. Cook? Well, it was the depths of the depression, after all, so I'm sure there were a lot of people who didn't have a quarter to spare, but enough people kept buying SHORT STORIES to keep it in business for a couple of decades and more after this.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

They played some snippets from this song on a recent episode of THE SIMPSONS. Yes, I still watch THE SIMPSONS. I liked it, didn't recognize it at all, and so I had to look it up. I'd heard of The Traveling Wilburys, of course, but I'm not sure I ever heard any of their music. But after listening to this one all the way through, I love it. Some of the lyrics speak to me, as they say. The ones about being old, of course, but how you should keep going to the end of the line. That's my plan.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

Review: The Daughter of Genghis Khan - John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien)

The narrator/protagonist of David Wright O’Brien’s novella “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is Dr. Cliff Saunders, an American physician who is part of a humanitarian mission aiding the Nationalist Chinese during their war against the Japanese. Since the January 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, the pulp in which this yarn originally appeared as the subject of H.W. MacCauley's dramatic cover, was actually on the newsstands during December 1941, that means the story was written well before the attack on Pearl Harbor during the period in which the United States was technically a neutral nation.

But neutrality doesn’t mean much during the chaos of war, so when Japanese forces overrun the field hospital in which Saunders and beautiful redheaded nurse Linda Barret are working, they’re both taken prisoner. At least they’re not executed outright. In fact, the Japanese officer in charges wants to deliver them to a neutral area where they’ll be safe. However, before that can happen, a group of Mongol bandits counterattack, and Saunders and Linda find themselves taken to an isolated village in the mountains that’s ruled by a beautiful young woman who claims to be the daughter of Genghis Khan. Not a descendant, mind you, but the actual daughter of the great Mongol conqueror.

That claim is part of the slight fantasy element in this story. It had to have some sort of off-trail bent to the plot, since this was FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, after all, but for the most part, “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is a pretty straightforward World War II yarn, as Saunders and Linda are forced to choose a side in the bloody conflict between the Japanese and the Mongol bandits. It’s pretty easy to figure out which side they’ll wind up on, of course, but that doesn’t detract from the breakneck action and the colorful characters and setting. This story reminded me a little of Milton Caniff’s immortal TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, and that’s a good thing.

David Wright O’Brien’s writing career was a short one. His first story was published early in 1940, and he was killed while serving in the Army Air Force in 1944 when the bomber he was in was shot down over Berlin. But he published dozens of stories during that handful of years, most of them in the Ziff-Davis pulps AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. I think it’s safe to say he was a rising star in the science fiction and fantasy fields. “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” was published under his pseudonym John York Cabot because there were two more stories by him in that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, one under his real name and one under his other pseudonym Duncan Farnsworth. (O’Brien was the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, the legendary editor of WEIRD TALES.) I’ve read several of his stories and really enjoyed all of them so far. His prose is clean and fast-moving with a very nice touch for action.

You can find the issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES containing this story here, and it’s available in other places on the Internet, as well. I need to read more by O’Brien, and I hope I manage to do so soon.

Review: One For My Dame - Jack Webb

ONE FOR MY DAME was published originally in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Avon (with a truly terrible cover) in 1964. It’s is the second novel in the recent double volume of Jack Webb’s stand-alone mystery and suspense yarns published by Stark House. I really enjoyed the first half of this book, THE DEADLY COMBO, so I had high hopes for ONE FOR MY DAME, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Rick Jackson is the owner of a pet shop in Los Angeles and leads a peaceful life with his pets, a goofy Great Dane, a hyperactive spider monkey, and a foul-mouthed mynah bird. However, Rick’s life takes a decidedly non-peaceful turn when he stops in a local watering hole one evening for a drink and finds himself sitting next to a very beautiful but very drunk redhead. He takes her back to his apartment over the pet store, but Rick is a fundamentally decent guy and doesn’t take advantage of her condition. He lets her sleep it off instead, and the next morning he puts her in a cab. He figures that’s the last he’ll see of her.

But it may be the last anybody sees of her, because she goes missing, and as it turns out, she’s the daughter of a prominent politician who’s been investigating the Mob. And Rick, as one of the last people to see her, suddenly has cops and gangsters both on his tail, as everybody wants to get their hands on something important the girl had in her possession. Rick’s problem is that he doesn’t know what it is or where it might be, but that’s not going to stop people from trying to kill him.

Hey, I can think of at least two series about hardboiled, two-fisted accountants, so why not a hardboiled, two-fisted pet store owner? Especially considering the fact that Rick has some pretty dark stuff in his background, as we find out while events unfold in this novel. ONE FOR MY DAME is one of those books that goes along in a pretty breezy, light-hearted fashion—until suddenly it doesn’t. And it’s a testament to Webb’s ability as a writer that both elements work extremely well. This is a fast-moving, very entertaining novel that I really enjoyed. THE DEADLY COMBO/ONE FOR MY DAME is available in e-book and paperback editions, and if you like smart, well-written crime fiction, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, September 1933

What would 20 cents buy in 1933? Well, it would buy a lot of things I suppose, but one possible answer is that it would buy an issue of BLACK MASK with stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, W.T. Ballard, Roger Torrey, and Eugene Cunningham. That's just a spectacular group of authors. Cunningham is best remembered as a Western author, but he wrote quite a few hardboiled yarns, too. His story in this issue is the first in a series about hotel detective Cleve Corby. Nebel's story is part of his Kennedy and McBride series, Gardner's features the phantom crook Ed Jenkins, Ballard writes about Hollywood troubleshooter Bill Lennox, Torrey's story is about policeman Dal Prentice, and Whitfield's is the first of two about private eye Dion Davies. Several of the stories from this issue have been reprinted, and I'm sure they're well worth seeking out. By the way, the cover of this issue is by J.W. Schlaikjer, who did quite a few covers for BLACK MASK during this era.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, January 1948

It’s been too long since I’ve read an issue of EXCITING WESTERN. This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross, but it also looks to me like it might be by H.W. Scott. So I’m hesitant to identify it as the work of either artist. I’m hoping some of you may be able to provide a definitive answer. Whoever painted it, it’s a pretty good cover.

I’ve enjoyed W.C. Tuttle’s Tombstone and Speedy series ever since I started reading it. The novella in this issue, “Strangers in El Segundo”, finds our eccentric range detective duo in the cowtown of the title, and once again, they’ve been fired by their exasperated boss at the Cattleman’s Association. That unfortunate circumstance doesn’t last long, however, as it just so happens the owner of the local bank has written to the Association asking for help, and Tombstone and Speedy are rehired. But wouldn’t you know it, the banker is murdered before they can talk to him and find out why he needed a pair of detectives. That sets off an apparently unrelated chain of events including a stagecoach holdup, an explosion, a kidnapping, and more murders. Tuttle was great at packing these yarns with plot despite their relatively short length. Tombstone and Speedy unravel everything and bring the villains to justice, of course, after some excellent action scenes and plenty of amusing dialogue. This is one of the few comedy Western series I like, because it’s not all comedy. The stories always feature action and mystery and colorful characters, and “Strangers in El Segundo” is no exception.

Hal White is a forgotten author these days, although he turned out dozens of stories for the Western, detective, and air war pulps. I’d read one story by him before and didn’t like it, but his novelette in this issue, “Powder on the Pecos” is very good. It starts out with a stagecoach robbery and moves on to be a story about a young rancher being framed as a rustler by the local cattle baron. The plot is very traditional, but White supplies a mildly entertaining plot twist and has a nice touch with the plentiful action scenes. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Johnston McCulley is always a dependable author, of course. This January 1948 issue was on the newsstands during December 1947, so McCulley’s story “Undercover Santa Claus” is very appropriate. It’s a heartwarming tale in which an outlaw risks his life to help out the children of an old friend. Most readers will have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen in this one, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

I’ve always enjoyed T.W. Ford’s stories (he wrote hundreds of ’em for the Western, sports, and detective pulps), and his novelette in this issue, “Man-Bait for a Gun Trap” is no exception. In this yarn, a former deputy goes undercover to infiltrate an outlaw town and rescue the brother of the girl he loves. This story is almost all hardboiled, well-written action, but Ford also manages to make the characters interesting, especially the protagonist, who gave up packing a badge and has to learn how to handle a gun left-handed since his right arm got shot up and crippled. The boss of the outlaw town, who seems to have been modeled on Lionel Barrymore, is pretty good, too. This is just an excellent story all the way around, and I really enjoyed it.

Chuck Martin’s short story “Tanglefoot” is almost as good. This is the first in a short, three-story series about Jim “Tanglefoot” Bowen, another former deputy who has to learn how to cope with a handicap, in his case a leg that never healed right after bullets broke a couple of bones in it. Bowen has retired from being a lawman and makes his living as a cobbler and range detective, but he also helps out the local sheriff from time to time, a situation complicated by the fact that the sheriff is in love with the same girl as Bowen. The two of them team up to solve a mystery and round up some outlaws, including some of the men responsible for crippling Bowen, and Martin spins the yarn in his usual straightforward, fast-paced prose. He even throws in some frontier forensics! Bowen would have made a great character for novels, and I’m sorry there are only three stories about him. I think I have the other two, so I’m looking forward to reading them.

Tex Mumford was a house-name, so there’s no telling who wrote the short story “Powerful Hombre” in this issue, but it’s another good one. It’s a lighthearted tale but not an outright comedy about a cowboy who’s too big and strong for his own good. He doesn’t know his own strength, as the old saying goes, and that gets into trouble, as when he encounters a bank robber in this yarn. This is a minor story, but it’s well-written, moves right along, and I found reading it to be a pleasant experience.

I don’t know anything about Leo Charles except that he published four stories in the late Forties, three of them in Columbia Western pulps. “Remember the Knife” in this issue is his own credit in a Thrilling Group pulp. It’s the third story in this issue with a protagonist who’s handicapped. I doubt if this was an intentional theme, but who knows. In this case, the fellow has a bad leg because a horse fell on him when, as a young outlaw, he was trying to make a getaway. He’s gone straight, and nobody in the town where he runs a stable knows about his past. He has an adopted son who also has a crippled leg and needs an operation, so he tries to get the money for it by using his uncanny skill with a knife. Unfortunately, some of his old outlaw compadres show up, and so does a U.S. Marshal. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing isn’t as good as in the other stories in this issue. But the author won me over with his characters and the genuine suspense the story generates. This is another good one.

And this is a fine issue of EXCITING WESTERN overall, with a solid Tombstone and Speedy yarn and great yarns from Ford and Martin. I was a little disappointed when I realized this issue didn’t have a Navajo Tom Raine story in it, since I really like that series, too, but I wound up thinking it’s one of the best issues of this pulp that I’ve read. If you have a copy, it’s well worth your reading time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Sons and Gunslicks - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

It was a wandering daughter job.

That's a classic set-up for hardboiled private eye fiction, and Chap O'Keefe's series character Joshua Dillard is nothing if not a hardboiled private eye in the Old West. In this novel, originally published in hardcover by Robert Hale in 2007 and recently released in an e-book version, freelance troubleshooter and range detective Dillard is hired by elderly former lawman and town tamer Jack Greatheart to find Greatheart's daughter Emily, who disappeared during a trip to Arizona. Emily was engaged to the son of a widow who owns a large ranch, and after her fiancée was killed in a gunfight before they could even get married, Emily journeyed to Arizona to meet and offer her condolences to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. She never came back, and a bloodstained coat is the only clue to her disappearance. It's up to Joshua Dillard to find Emily if she's still alive or find out what happened to her if she's not.

Naturally, once Dillard arrives on the scene, things turn out to be even more complicated and mysterious than they appear on the surface. There's a range war brewing, and Dillard has to survive gunfights, fistfights, and bushwhackings before he's able to untangle the various strands of the plot and uncover the truth of Emily Greatheart's disappearance.

As usual, Chap O'Keefe (who's really veteran author and editor Keith Chapman, as most of you already know) spins this tale in terse, no-nonsense prose and skillfully throws in enough plot twists to keep things racing along to a powerful climax. Joshua Dillard is a fine character, a dogged investigator who's plenty tough when he needs to be, and his own tragic background adds a touch of poignancy to his adventures. I've probably said this before, but fifty years ago these books would have made good Gold Medal paperbacks or Double D hardbacks.

As an added bonus in this one, O'Keefe includes "Crime on the Trail" an informative essay about the links between detective fiction and his Westerns. If you're a fan of those genres, SONS AND GUNSLICKS is well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 25, 2013. SONS AND GUNSLICKS is available in new e-book and paperback editions, and I second my own recommendation from twelve years ago that it's well worth reading.)

Review: Buzzards Fer Thanksgivin' - Cleve Endicott (Norman W. Hay) (Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936)

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY on the Internet Archive, and since it features a novelette with the great title “Buzzards Fer Thanksgivin’”, I decided to go ahead and read that yarn so I could post about it today. It’s the November 28, 1936 issue, and the cover is by R.G. Harris. I’ll read the rest of it and feature it as a Saturday Morning Western Pulp in a week or two.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Billy West/Circle J series in WILD WEST WEEKLY, it was the most prolific Western pulp series with more than 400 entries between 1927 and 1943, written by at least 15 different authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. The protagonist is Billy West, the young owner of the Circle J cattle ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, along with his sidekicks, the colorful, grizzled old-timer Buck Foster and feisty, redheaded Joe Scott.

In “Buzzards Fer Thanksgivin’”, it’s the day before the holiday and the Circle J’s Chinese cook Sing Lo is on his way back to the ranch with a buckboard full of supplies for the Thanksgiving feast when he interrupts a stagecoach robbery and is taken prisoner by the outlaws. Meanwhile, in town, Buck Foster competes in a turkey shoot to win a prize gobbler and runs afoul of some other hardcases. Unknown to any of our heroes, these two circumstances are connected and will soon lead them into a whirlwind of action.

In fact, this story is almost all action, but it’s well-written and Billy, Buck, Joe, and Sing Lo are very likable protagonists. Despite the thin plot, I found it to be a very enjoyable yarn. The actual author is Norman W. Hay, who wrote more of the Circle J stories than anyone else. If you’re a Western pulp fan and need something to do after your nap this afternoon (I assume everyone takes a nap on Thanksgiving, like I do), I can recommend reading “Buzzards Fer Thanksgivin’”.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A very happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate the holiday. As always, I have a great deal to be thankful for, including all of you reading this blog. I appreciate your patience and your continued interest after all these years. That's the First December 1930 issue of TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE, by the way, and it looks like a pretty good issue with stories by Donald Bayne Hobart, John Wilstach, Ben Conlon, and a Kroom, Son of the Sea yarn by house-name Valentine Wood. (I feel confident in saying that no one else will mention Kroom, Son of the Sea to you this Thanksgiving, but feel free to bring him up around the dinner table if you want to.)

Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #13: Fatal Femmes

The latest issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is out, and as usual, it’s a breathtakingly exciting collection of stories and artwork from the men’s adventure magazines, expertly assembled by editors Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, ably assisted this time by guest editor Eric Compton and guest contributor Terrance Layhew. The theme this time around: Fatal Femmes!

They lead off with “The Gun Moll Who Hated G-Men” from the July 1957 issue of SEE. The author is David Mazroff, whose work I’ve been familiar with for a long time due to his true crime articles and occasional fiction in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. I didn’t know until I read about it in a previous issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, however, that Mazroff was a career criminal himself and was deeply involved with organized crime. That certainly gives his work an air of authenticity. His story in this issue is a non-fiction piece about the notorious Ma Barker and her sons, and he does a great job of capturing their bloody lives and deaths.

Don Honig, a prolific contributor to the men’s adventure magazine whose work has been reprinted several times in this series, also wrote for the mystery digests. His clever crime story “Mrs. Herman and Mrs. Kenmore” is from the May 1958 issue of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. While AHMM isn’t exactly a men’s adventure magazine, I suspect there was a significant crossover with the readership of those magazines. A guy like me, for example.

W.J. Saber was really Warren Shanahan, and under his real name he wrote one of the novels featuring the comic strip hero The Phantom that were published originally by Avon back in the Seventies. I was an avid reader of those novels and read and enjoyed Shanahan’s entry back then. Under the Saber pseudonym, he wrote extensively for the men’s adventure magazines, including “Rich Lovers Wanted—Apply Mme. Crielle, Champs Elysées” from the January 1960 issue of STAG. It’s a great, lurid yarn set in Paris in the 1920s about young men being murdered and their blood being drained from them, with a dogged police detective determined to get to the bottom of the crimes.

“Kiss Me and Die” by Hiram J. Herbert (TRUE ADVENTURES, December 1960) is another true-crime yarn about the killing spree of a couple of prostitutes and their henchman/fall guy, an AWOL GI. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of true crime stories, but this one works very well and I enjoyed it.

Buz Rowan, like the author of the previous story, is an unknown quantity, likely a pseudonym. His noir crime yarn “Blood for a Nympho’s Flesh”, from the November 1962 issue of ALL MAN, is about crop-dusting, not a subject that comes up very often in such stories, I suspect. But Rowan, whoever he really was, uses it to craft a gut-punch of a story that could have been a Gold Medal novel in miniature.

I’ve read several stories and a novel by Dean W. Ballenger, and his work never fails to entertain. “The Incredible Norwegian Ice Nymphs” (NEW MAN, September 1963) is a World War II yarn about Norwegian women who fight back against the Nazis and prove to be just as deadly as their men. It’s a punchy, very entertaining tale, as you’d expect from Ballenger.

None other than the great pulp author Paul Chadwick, creator of Secret Agent X and Wade Hammond, shows up with “The Ever-Lovin’ Nude Who Watched Her Boyfriends Die” from the May 1969 issue of REAL MEN. This is the only story Chadwick wrote for the men’s adventure magazines, but it appeared three times under three different titles, in three different magazines, to boot! It’s a good story about a serial murderess who uses poison to dispose of her victims, set in France like one of the earlier stories in this volume. You can always count on Chadwick to spin a good yarn, and this one is no exception.

“Vendetta on the Street of Lonely Frauleins” wraps up the fiction in this issue. It appeared originally in the March 1966 issue of MEN and is by Mario Cleri, a prolific contributor to the men’s adventure magazines who just happens to be better known by his real name: Mario Puzo, author of THE GODFATHER and many other bestselling novels. Taking its cue from the contemporary boom in espionage and secret agent fiction, this story features freelance American operative Scarlet Tracy and her partner Charlie Hunt. Scarlet and Charlie are in Berlin to hunt down a British defector with a briefcase full of top secret documents to sell to the Russians. There seems to me to be a definite Modesty Blaise influence in this one, along with echoes of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The Lady From L.U.S.T., and the other books, movies, and TV shows from that era that featured beautiful female protagonists. I am definitely the target audience for stories like this, and I loved it. If Puzo had turned this into a paperback series, I would have been right there at the spinner rack to pick up each new book as it came out. As far as I know, this is Scarlet Tracy’s only appearance, but it’s a good one.

Eric Compton contributes a fine article about fatal femmes in novels, and Terrance Layhew has assembled a wonderful photo gallery of some of the beautiful women from the James Bond films. Both are very worthy additions to one of the best issues of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY so far. But let’s face it, all the issues have been great. If you’re a fan of great art and hard-hitting stories, this volume and all the previous ones get my highest recommendation. You can find the Fatal Femmes issue on Amazon.

Review: Ride the Wild Country - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

I read most of Keith Chapman’s Joshua Dillard novels when they were reissued some years ago, but RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY is one that I missed back then. Which is a good thing, because I was able to read it now.

For those of you who don’t know, Joshua is a former Pinkerton operative turned freelance range detective and gun-for-hire in the Old West. In this novel, originally published in hardcover by Robert Hale in 2005 and now available in e-book and paperback editions, he’s hired to accompany a New Yorker who’s paying a visit to Colorado. Instead of the man he’s expecting, his employer turns out to be a beautiful woman with a plan to turn a high country valley into a fancy hunting resort. I don’t recall ever encountering this plot in a Western before, so I was impressed by that.

Ah, but is that what’s really going on? In his usual skillful fashion, Chapman peels back more layers of the plot, adding a shady lawyer, assorted ruffians, some religious fanatics, and a young woman Joshua tries to help, leading to all sorts of trouble.

RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY is a thoroughly entertaining Western yarn with plenty of action and plot twists and a very likable protagonist in Joshua Dillard. He’s fast on the draw and can be plenty hardboiled when he needs to be but is also a genuinely decent guy who seems to have hard luck following him around the West. But that’s good luck for us, who get to read about his adventures. If you’re a Western fan, RIDE THE WILD COUNTRY gets an enthusiastic recommendation from me.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Feds, October 1936

THE FEDS was a G-Man pulp published by Street & Smith, a company that usually was very successful with anything they put out there. Not so with THE FEDS, which lasted for only 15 issues in 1936 and '37. But its lack of longevity can't be attributed to the generally pretty good covers, including this one on the second issue which is probably collectable because of the presence of all those Ku Klux Klansmen on it. I don't know who painted it. Nor were the writers any slouches. This issue features stories by Steve Fisher, Wyatt Blassingame, W.T. Ballard, Arthur J. Burks, William G. Bogart, Laurence Donovan, Jean Francis Webb, George Allan Moffatt (Edwin V. Burkholder), James Duncan (Arthur Pincus), and house-name Bruce Harley. Probably some good reading there. I don't own this issue and it doesn't appear to be available on-line, but if I did have a copy of it, I wouldn't hesitate to give it a try. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Speed Western Stories, December 1945, Plus Blog Update

This issue of SPEED WESTERN STORIES features two stories by Edwin Truett Long, one under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett and one as by Wallace Kayton. Long died earlier in 1945, apparently from an illness he contracted while serving in Burma during World War II, so these may have been some of the last stories he wrote. Or they could be unacknowledged reprints. With a Trojan pulp, one never knows. Elsewhere in this issue are stories by William R. Cox, Laurence Donovan, James P. Olsen, William J. Glynn, and house-name Max Neilson. The cover is probably by H.W. Scott. This issue can be found on-line at the Internet Archive. With a line-up of authors like that, I may have to read it one of these days.

Speaking of issues, I've been dealing with some health-related ones recently. Nothing serious, the blog's not going anywhere and neither am I, but it's left me without the time and energy to get everything done that I wanted to, including updating the blog. However, I'm hoping that normal posting will resume next week, although it may get sporadic now and then. 

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Dillinger (1973)

Given my fondness for gangster movies, and for Ben Johnson, I’m surprised I never watched 1973’s DILLINGER until now. It’s also an American International Picture, and AIP turned out some mighty entertaining movies over the years. I watched many of them at the Eagle Drive-In, but not this one. By the time DILLINGER came out, the Eagle had already switched over to showing X-rated movies.

But now I’ve seen DILLINGER. Warren Oates plays the title character, and Ben Johnson is Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who doggedly pursues not only John Dillinger but most of the other famous criminals who roamed the Midwest during the Depression, robbing banks and mowing down cops and anybody else who got in their way. Most of them show up in this movie, too, including Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. Bonnie and Clyde are mentioned numerous times, but their paths never cross that of Dillinger, which is probably a good thing because he looks down on them as non-professionals. For him, on the other hand, it’s just his job, and he’s the very best at it, at least according to him.

The script by John Milius, who also directed, has only a nodding acquaintance with historical accuracy, starting with the fact that the FBI didn’t exist when Dillinger was active. It was still the Bureau of Investigation. The various gangster characters are killed off out of historical order, often in ways that didn’t happen. But take it for what it is, a piece of entertainment, and DILLINGER is pretty darned good, with interesting characters, good dialogue, excellent photography, and a bunch of bloody shootouts. It’s a loud movie most of the time.

Oates does a fine job as Dillinger, playing him with a real zest for life and fondness for excitement. Ben Johnson, one of my favorite actors, is great as Melvin Purvis. Johnson is one of those actors I could listen to all day, no matter what he was saying. Just a great voice. Michelle Phillips is okay as Dillinger’s girlfriend, and a young Richard Dreyfuss shows up as Baby Face Nelson. The top-notch Seventies character actor Geoffrey Lewis is also a member of the gang. It seemed like Lewis was in just about every movie made for a while back then.

I had a fine time watching DILLINGER. It’s probably not a great movie, but it’s a very good one. I’m still a little flabbergasted that I didn’t see it back when it was new, but on the other hand, that gave me something good to watch now.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, October 1946

The cover on this issue of LEADING WESTERN is by H.W. Scott, an artist I generally like. This one is okay, but I'm not all that fond of the sketchy, unfinished look which was common on Western pulps in the late Forties and Fifties on covers by Scott and other artists. Inside are stories by some pretty good writers, including Philip Ketchum, Laurence Donovan, Giff Cheshire, Paul Craig (who was also Giff Cheshire), Norrell Gregory, and Harold R. Stoakes. The Trojan Western pulps, like those from Columbia, were low-budget, hit-or-miss affairs, but there are good stories to be found in them if you look. I don't own a copy of this one, but with those authors, I'd be willing to give it a try if I did.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Power of Positive Loving - William Johnston

When I was a kid, I read all the tie-in novels by William Johnston based on the TV series GET SMART. I think I liked them even more than the TV show. I also recall reading and enjoying the novelization of the movie LT. ROBIN CRUSOE, USN, which Johnston wrote under the pseudonym Bill Ford. Johnston’s books were all over the spinner racks back in those days, since he wrote dozens of excellent movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. 

However, a friend mentioned to me that Johnston’s early, non-tie-in novels are very good, too, so I decided to try a few of them. First up is THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING, published by Monarch Books in 1964. I don’t mind admitting that one reason I bought this book is because of the cover. That’s one of the cutest redheads I’ve seen on a paperback cover, and the wink really sells the book.

As for the novel itself, well, that’s pretty good, too. The protagonist is Harry Ash, a down-on-his-luck public relations guy who comes up with a scheme to promote a sleepy little coastal town in California as a hotbed of sin and sensationalism. He plans to do this by teaming up with sexpot movie starlet Babe O’Flynn (that’s a great name), who has a habit of losing her clothes and winding up in the slick magazines like LIFE and LOOK. Harry comes up with a wild story for the gossip columnists about Babe going to this little town to recover from a broken heart after a top-secret love affair with the Secretary of State. He’s going to have a photographer get pictures of her on the beach in a bikini – or less – and figures that tourists, scandal-seekers, and sensation-mongers will converge on the motel and bar that he buys in partnership with a hamburger magnate. Naturally, things don’t work out quite like Harry plans.

Monarch Books lasted only a few years, but the company published quite a few books including some Westerns and mysteries. However, it’s best known for the abundance of slightly less graphic sleaze novels it put out. Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert Silverberg all wrote pseudonymous books for Monarch, including a number of so-called non-fiction studies of various sexual subjects that were really fiction, under imposing sounding names like L.T. Woodward, M.D., and Dr. Benjamin Morse.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is risqué enough to fall into the sleaze category, but just barely. Unlike most books in that genre from that era, this one is a comedy, a racy, romantic, screwball farce that takes satiric shots at morality, the advertising business, politics, show business, the military, the media, and just about anything else you can think of. The title itself is a pun on the self-help bestseller THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. If it had been made into a movie in 1964, it probably would have starred Jack Lemmon as Harry and Ann-Margret as Babe. As usual with such a scattershot yarn, not all the jokes work all the time, but enough of them do that this is a pretty funny book. It reminds me a little of the work of Max Shulman, for those of you old enough to remember his books. (Probably the same ones who remember Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret.)

Johnston was nothing if not a versatile writer, though. I have several more of his non-tie-in novels on hand, and it looks like every one of them is considerably different from the others. I’ll be getting to them in due time and reporting on them here. For now, if you want a nice entertaining slice of mid-Sixties comedy, THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on August 27, 2010. Despite the good intentions expressed in the final paragraph, I haven't read any more of William Johnston's novels, tie-in or otherwise, since then. But I still might. I know where they are on my shelves--I think. And I stand by my comment about the redhead on the cover. She's really cute. The cover art is by Tom Miller.)

Review: Marihuana - William Irish (Cornell Woolrich)

For collectors, MARIHUANA by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish is one of the most sought-after of the legendary Dell 10-Cent editions. I’ve owned several copies over the years, but despite being a Woolrich fan ever since discovering his work in stories reprinted in ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties, I’d never read it until now.

MARIHUANA was first published as a novelette under Woolrich's name in the May 3, 1941 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, which was a large-format pulp at the time but still a pulp. Ten years later it was reprinted as a Dell 10-Cent book. Like many of the protagonists in Woolrich’s stories, King Turner, the main character in this yarn, is kind of a sad sack, an average guy who’s depressed over the break-up of his marriage. So a couple of his so-called friends (they aren’t, really) show up at his apartment with a girl he doesn’t know, and they drag him off to a marihuana den (I’m just going to use the spelling the story does) where he smokes a couple of reefers and goes a little crazy from the drug.

When he accidentally kills somebody, he takes it on the lam and his marihuana-induced paranoia results in several more murders. It doesn’t take long for the cops to get on his trail, and Woolrich skillfully goes back and forth between Turner’s descent into violent madness and the law’s efforts to catch him.

Granted, from our perspective today, this is a pretty silly plot, but when were Woolrich’s plots not a little far-fetched? What makes MARIHUANA work is its relentless pace and Woolrich’s ability to make us sympathize with a protagonist who’s caught up in things he can’t control, even though he’s a killer and an all-around unlikable guy. (Is it just me, or does the description of King Turner—the slight build, the sandy hair, the sunken cheeks—sound suspiciously like Woolrich himself?)

There are a couple of late twists that work pretty well. And even though it's pure coincidence, I can’t help but like the fact that the cop who leads the effort to find Turner is named Spillane.

I’m glad I finally read MARIHUANA. It’s a suspenseful yarn that really had me flipping the pages. Whether you’re a Woolrich fan or have never read any of his work, I give it a high recommendation. If you want to read it but don’t have the Dell 10-Cent edition, there’s a very affordable e-book edition available on Amazon.