Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Weird Tales, May 1942

This is certainly an odd cover by Ray Quigley on the May 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. But it's eye-catching, so it did its job. There are some fine authors inside this issue, too: Seabury Quinn (with a Jules de Grandin story), Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Robert Arthur, George Armin Shaftel, Greye La Spina, Malcolm Jameson, Dorothy Quick, and several I hadn't heard of: Weston Parry, Alice-Mary Schnirring, and Alonzo Deen Cole. There are interior illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov. I realize WEIRD TALES was past its peak by the Forties in the opinion of many fans, but I've enjoyed the issues from that era I've read. I haven't read this one, but I'll bet there's plenty to like in it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, February 15, 1935

The wounded hombre on this cover doesn't appear to be an Old Geezer, but we have two-thirds of our iconic trio, the Stalwart Cowboy and the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Great work on this cover by Walter Baumhofer, one of my favorite pulp cover artists. And inside, we have stories by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Bart Cassiday (also Harry F. Olmsted), Oliver King (actually Thomas E. Mount, who was better known under his pseudonym Stone Cody), John G. Pearsol, and John Colohan. That's a fantastic line-up of authors, but it was just another issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't own this issue so I haven't read it, but I'm confident that it's a great one.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: One By One - Fan Nichols

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book:

He slouched through the squalid gaudy Mexican Quarter. He could feel the bulge of the gun butt against his flat belly, held there, beneath his coat, by his belt.

I’m going to kill her, he thought. I won’t turn yellow this time. This time I’ll do it. I’ll kill her. I mustn’t get caught. I can run fast. I’ve got good legs. I can run like hell.

If you’re like me, there’s no way you’re going to read a classic noir opening like that and not keep reading.

Not surprisingly, after the first chapter ONE BY ONE flashes back to tell the story of how the protagonist, telephone lineman Jerry Ryan, gets in such a bad predicament that he’s considering murder. It was a woman, of course. Jerry is in Los Angeles, separated from his loving wife Verna by work (it’s the fall of 1932 as the book begins, in the middle of the Depression), when he makes the mistake of helping an attractive young woman who’s being thrown out of a dime-a-dance joint. The woman, who calls herself Dolly Dawn because she’s trying to break into the movies, latches onto Jerry with the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. She convinces him to give her a lift to Las Vegas, where he’s headed for a new job. Jerry is basically a good, decent guy, but he rationalizes himself into bed with Dolly and that turns out to be a huge mistake. Since he took her across a state line and then had sex with her, she tells him that she’ll turn him in to the cops for violating the Mann Act unless he continues to take care of her and pretends to be her husband.

After the noirish beginning, ONE BY ONE turns into less of a crime novel and more of a lurid, soap-operatic melodrama, as Jerry continues trying to get out of Dolly’s blackmailing clutches only to be thwarted by her again and again. That doesn’t keep it from being compelling reading, though. This novel was originally published in 1951 but reads like it was actually written during the Depression, as Nichols paints a vivid picture of shabby desperation among the cheap hotels, boarding houses, freight yards, and gin mills of small towns in California, Washington, and Oregon. Jerry is one of those likable, not-too-bright schnooks who populate novels like this, and you can’t help but root for him even though you know he’s going to do the wrong thing nine times out of ten. All of it leads up to a somewhat odd ending that I’m not sure if I like or not.

This is the first novel by Fan Nichols that I’ve read. I don’t know anything about her except that she wrote a lot of what would have to be considered hardboiled sleaze, even though she started in the Thirties before that genre really existed. ONE BY ONE was originally published by Arco Publishing, a hardcover house that put out books a lot like the ones that Beacon would be doing as paperback originals a few years later. Nichols continued to write through the early Sixties, including books for Beacon and Monarch. I liked this one enough that I’ll continue to keep an eye out for her books, although I probably won’t go on-line and order a big stack of them like I have with some authors. I certainly plan to read more by her, though, and if you run across a copy of ONE BY ONE for a reasonable price (I paid three bucks for mine at Half Price Books), my recommendation is to grab it.

(Despite the good intentions expressed in this post, it'll come as no surprise that I haven't read any more Fan Nichols novels since this was published on April 9, 2010. But several of them are available as e-books and I picked them up, so maybe I will. Among the e-book editions is a Beacon Books reprint of ONE BY ONE under the title DOLLY. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it here. Also, I've learned more about Nichols, whose real name was Frances Nichols Hanna. She was a concert pianist and model before becoming a writer. If I remember right, Roger Torrey was also a piano player. And of course, one of David Goodis's novels was filmed as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, although that wasn't the book's original title. I believe that was DOWN THERE. I guess there's just something noirish about playing the piano. All I was ever able to play was "Chopsticks", so I guess I'm safe on that score.)

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Bulletproof (1996)

Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler are professional car thieves. However, Wayans is actually an undercover cop and winds up having to protect Sandler so he can testify against a mob boss played by James Caan. Nobody can trust anybody. Much running, shooting, fighting, and cross-country hijinks ensue before everything works out in the end.

BULLETPROOF seems like the type of movie we would have watched when it came out back in 1996, but for whatever reason, we didn’t. It’s an okay buddy movie/road movie/action comedy but never rises above the okay level. The script moves right along but is completely predictable. I have a higher Adam Sandler threshold than a lot of people, but even I found him annoying at times in this one. But I like Damon Wayans and he and Sandler work well together for the most part. Mildly entertaining is the best this movie can do, but that’s all I expected from it so I wasn’t disappointed.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10-Story Detective Magazine, March 1942

Nobody could pack more into a pulp cover than Norman Saunders, as this issue of 10-STORY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE illustrates. Another Norman, Norman A. Daniels, has two stories in this issue, one under his own name and one as David A. Norman. Bruno Fischer is on hand under his Russell Gray pseudonym. Harold Q. Masur, later very successful as a mystery novelist, has a story in this issue, as does an author I'm not familiar with, Richard L. Hobart. The other stories all have house-names on them: Guy Fleming, Leon Dupont, Clint Douglas, Ralph Powers, and Harris Clivesey. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those guys were actually Norman A. Daniels, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, March 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with another fantastic cover by Sam Cherry. He was really at his peak during this era. Earlier this year when I reviewed the April 1950 issue of TEXAS RANGERS, one of the members of the WesternPulps email group commented that the Jim Hatfield novel in it, “The Rimrock Raiders”, sounded similar to the Hatfield novel in the March 1948 issue, “The Black Gold Secret”. So I had to find my copy and read that one, too. Now I have.

“The Black Gold Secret” and “The Rimrock Raiders” are both by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, so it’s not surprising that they’re similar. The basic concept—clashes between cattlemen and oil drillers who have moved into what was previously a ranching area—are the same, and Scott used that plot foundation in other novels, as well. But the details in “The Black Gold Secret” are different and it’s an equally entertaining yarn. Early on in this one, Hatfield extinguishes a burning oil well, something that he also does in “The Rimrock Raiders”, but does so in a totally different manner—and it makes for a slam-bang, very exciting scene, too. Scott layers in some geology and behind-the-scenes stuff about the oil industry and also provides plenty of shootouts and fistfights along the way. The vivid descriptions that are a Scott trademark are there but rather limited, as he keeps this one really racing along. Of course, there’s more going on than is apparent at first, but you know Hatfield will untangle all the villainy by the end, and it’s a pretty spectacular climax, too, as the main bad guy meets his end in an unexpected way. I had a great time reading this novel, and I’m sure I’ll be reading another by Scott before too much longer.

Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name, so there’s no telling who wrote “Gun Trail”, a short-short about a Texas Ranger doggedly tracking down a horse thief and murderer, only to find that things aren’t exactly what he thought they were. There’s not a lot to this story, but it’s short and punchy and enjoyable.

I started out not liking Joseph Chadwick’s work very much, but he’s won me over and become one of my favorite Western writers. I think he’s one of the best of the more hardboiled Western authors who rose to prominence in the postwar years. His novelette in this issue, “The Blizzard and the Banker”, is excellent. It’s about a small town in Dakota Territory trying to survive a hard winter. The local banker is the hero of a Western story, for a nice change, but there are several other good characters including an outlaw who’s maybe not quite as bad as his reputation would have you believe, a beautiful female faro dealer, and assorted villains. Chadwick does a fine job with the interactions of these characters as well as his depictions of the harsh weather. Just a really, really good story all the way around.

Allan K. Echols was one of those workmanlike writers who filled up the pages of Western, detective, and aviation pulps with hundreds of stories during a 30-year career (mid-Twenties to mid-Fifties; he passed away in 1953 but still had new stories coming out a couple of years later). He also wrote more than a dozen Western novels. And yet I’ve never run across anybody who proclaims themselves a big Allan K. Echols fan. His story in this issue, “Brother’s Keeper”, is an unacknowledged reprint from the January 1938 issue of ROMANTIC WESTERN. It’s not romantic at all, though. Instead, it’s about an apparently dull-witted sheriff who’s trying to figure out which of two rancher brothers is responsible for the murder of one of their enemies. It’s a well-written, solidly plotted story, and I enjoyed it, but I doubt that it’ll stick with me. Which probably helps to explain why Echols is pretty much forgotten even among devoted Western readers.

There’s also a Doc Swap story by Ben Frank in this issue. I’m sorry, but I didn’t even try to read it. I used to say that the Swap and Whopper stories by Syl McDowell in THRILLING WESTERN were my least favorite Western pulp series, but I’ve surprised myself by kind of warming up to them recently. Not so Doc Swap, which by this time had taken over from Lee Bond’s Long Sam Littlejohn as the regular backup series in TEXAS RANGERS. I just don’t find these appealing at all.

However, I’d still say this is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and Joseph Chadwick’s novelette are both excellent, and the stories by Echols and Parsons are entertaining. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, you may actually like Doc Swap, you never know.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Mum's the Word for Murder - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire as a writer when this book was published under the pseudonym Asa Baker in 1938. He was making a living writing romances and Westerns for lending library publishers, but it was a precarious one. Better things were on the horizon for him, though. The next year, 1939, Henry Holt would publish Dresser’s novel DIVIDEND ON DEATH under the pseudonym Brett Halliday, which introduced redheaded Miami private detective Michael Shayne, a character who would make Dresser a rich man (and put a few shekels in the pockets of numerous other authors, as well, present company included).

But what about MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER? It’s an important book because it’s a dry run for the introduction of Michael Shayne a year later. The detective, Jerry Burke, is a big, tough, smart Irishman like Shayne, and although he’s a cop in this book, he has a background as a private detective and shares the same sort of checkered history that Dresser was to give Shayne. The novel is narrated by Asa Baker (which was also the original byline), a struggling author of Western novels obviously patterned after Dresser himself. A number of years later, Dresser wrote himself (as Halliday) into one of the Shayne novels, SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, in much the same way. The book is set in El Paso, Dresser’s hometown and the scene of one of the best Shayne novels, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS. Burke even has a nemesis, the local chief of detectives Jelcoe, who serves the same function as Miami Beach Chief of Detective Peter Painter in the Shayne novels.

As MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER opens, Asa Baker is struggling to find inspiration for a new novel, and he finds it in the person of his old friend Jerry Burke, who has been hired by the city as a special detective to clean up crime and corruption in El Paso. Burke tells Baker about a strange advertisement that appeared in that afternoon’s paper, warning that a murder will take place at exactly 11:41 that night and challenging Burke to do something about it. The ad is signed “Mum”.

Sure enough, a wealthy businessman is murdered at exactly 11:41, and Burke invites Baker along to observe the investigation and gather material for a novel based on the case. This is just the beginning of a clever cat-and-mouse game between Burke and the mysterious serial killer who calls himself Mum. There are several more murders, and each time it appears that the case is just about solved, Dresser throws in yet another twist. Burke has the same talent that Shayne possesses: he’s always one step ahead of everybody else in the book – and two steps ahead of the reader, finally coming up with an ingenious solution that predates another author’s more famous usage of the same gimmick.

The early Shayne novels are entertaining blends of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection, many of them with plots that rival Erle Stanley Gardner for complexity. Dresser doesn’t quite have the mix down yet in this book – there’s not much comedy, for instance, and Dresser doesn’t strictly play fair, withholding a fairly important clue from the reader until late in the book – but MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is still one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a while. Dresser’s style is very smooth and keeps the pages turning easily. I had a hard time putting this one down.

By the Fifties, the Shayne novels were doing so well in paperback for Dell that Dresser pulled out this old novel, along with one he wrote under the pseudonym Hal Debrett, BEFORE I WAKE, and Dell reissued them under the Brett Halliday byline. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER proved popular enough that it was reissued again in the Sixties, this time with a McGinnis cover that’s not a particularly good one, in my opinion. Unless that’s not actually McGinnis’s work. I don’t have that edition, so maybe somebody who does can check and correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s one more Jerry Burke novel under the Asa Baker name, THE KISSED CORPSE, which came out in 1939, the same year as DIVIDEND ON DEATH. After that, Dresser was either too busy to return to that Shayne-prototype (he was writing Westerns as Peter Field and Don Davis, in addition to carrying on the Shayne series), or maybe he just thought that Jerry Burke had served his purpose. Based on my reading of this book, I plan on trying to get hold of a copy of THE KISSED CORPSE. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is long out of print, of course, like most of Dresser’s work, but copies are fairly easy to come by on-line. I liked this one a lot and give it a high recommendation.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 2, 2010. In the comments on the original post, someone asked about the "ingenious solution" in this novel and the other author who used it later. I have absolutely no idea about any of that anymore. But another commenter confirmed that the second cover is indeed by Robert McGinnis. I have a copy of the other Jerry Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE. A friend sent it to me not long after this post first appeared. I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't read it. But I know where it is. Maybe time to get it out and finally read it. Also since 2010, MUM'S THE WORD FOR MURDER has been reprinted as a very inexpensive e-book, which you can get here if you want to check it out.)

Review: Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail - Fred Blosser

I’m not sure how I missed this one when it came out last fall. Fred Blosser is an old friend, a fan and scholar of Robert E. Howard, and a fine writer. And that title! Well, that’s just pure pulp goodness and I am always the target audience for that.

Howard’s novella “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is one of my top three favorite stories by him. (The other two are “Beyond the Black River” and “Wild Water”, in case anyone is interested.) The protagonist of “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is gunfighting Texan Steve Corcoran. The protagonist of “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” is gunfighting Texan Steve Cochran. At least one of the characters in this story believes them to be one and the same, that Cochran is simply the notorious Steve Corcoran going by another name. Blosser doesn’t resolve that one way or the other, but I’d say the evidence is pretty strong that Cochran is really Corcoran.

But it doesn’t really matter. Cochran and a companion, a Papago Indian, set out into the harsh landscape of Arizona in search of a fortune in silver that’s supposed to be hidden in a lost and abandoned mission where a massacre took place a couple of hundred years earlier. They run into trouble almost right away, an ambush that proves deadly. Then things are complicated by the arrival of two beautiful young women who hate each other but are attracted to Cochran—or maybe they just want to get their hands on that silver, too.

Pursued by Apaches and bandits, Cochran finally arrives at the so-called Black Mission, only to discover another surprise waiting for him there, and this is the most dangerous and strangest of all. It’s fitting that a story written mostly in homage to Robert E. Howard would have a little H.P. Lovecraft influence, too.

Blosser really nails the pulpish tone of this story with its fast pace, frequent gritty action, and a few spicy scenes with the so-called sixgun vixens. It’s just great fun from start to finish. Then, as a bonus for REH fans, Blosser wraps things up with an entertaining essay about Howard’s Western fiction. If you’re a Howard fan or just enjoy a fine Western adventure yarn, I give “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Come As You Are - Mindi Abair

Mindi Abair is one of my favorite musicians, and I really like the easy-going vibe of this song. Sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, you want to wallow in melancholy, but sometimes you want something to lift your spirits. This song does that for me.

Review: A Gambling Man - David Baldacci

Let me start with the obligatory complaint about the length of this book: David Baldacci’s A GAMBLING MAN, like most mysteries and thrillers from the tradional publishers these days, is just too blasted long. I’ll have more to say about that later on.

For now, let’s establish that this is the second novel featuring Aloysius Archer, World War II vet, ex-con (he was sent to prison for a crime he only kinda, sorta committed, and then only for good reasons), currently on his way to Bay Town, California, to become an apprentice private detective. I read the first book, ONE GOOD DEED, last year, and although it was, yes, too long, I found enough in it to like that I wanted to give this second novel in the series a try.

As I said, Archer is on his way to California, but he stops first in Reno, Nevada, where, through some perilous circumstances, he acquires a fancy foreign car and a friend in beautiful singer/dancer/would-be movie starlet Liberty Callahan. Except for these two bits of set-up, the first fourth of the book is filler. Entertaining, well-written filler, mind you, but still . . .

Liberty accompanies Archer to California, where he goes to work for a private detective named Willie Dash, an old friend of the cop Archer helped out in the previous book. They’re hired to find out who’s blackmailing a candidate for mayor of Bay Town. The politician is rich and has a beautiful wife, whose father is the local tycoon and far richer than anybody else in the area. The guy has fingers in all sorts of pies, too, including some that may or may not be quite on the up and up.

Well, of course, somebody involved in the investigation gets murdered, although it takes Baldacci almost to the halfway point of the book to get there. Archer gets beaten up by thugs. Somebody else gets murdered. Archer meets a few beautiful dames. Turns out there were more murders nobody even knew about until Archer and Willie Dash start uncovering connections. The plot gets pretty complicated but makes sense in the end, which is relatively satisfying. There’s enough story here for a nice, tight, 160-page paperback.

A GAMBLING MAN, in its original edition, is a 438-page hardback.

But don’t take that to mean I’m giving it a bad review. There’s actually quite a bit I liked about it. The book is set in 1949, and by and large, it reads like it. There’s only one bothersome anachronism I spotted: a woman is referred to by the title Ms. Technically, the word came into existence in the early 20^th Century, but I don’t believe it was in common usage until the Seventies. Seeing somebody use it in a book set in 1949 was jarring, at least to me. But the rest of the dialogue and the attitudes of the characters ring true to me. So I guess one misstep in 438 pages isn’t too bad. (Yeah, I’m harping on the number of pages.)

The main plot is solid, too. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but well put together. I don’t know how well-read Baldacci is when it comes to classic private eye fiction, but I got the feeling that CHINATOWN must be one of his favorite movies. Nothing wrong with that. It’s one of my favorite movies, too. And I think I picked up some Raymond Chandler influence, even though the book is written in third person. Archer’s banter is reminiscent of Philip Marlowe’s, and I have to wonder if Bay Town is a nod to Chandler’s Bay City.

As for the characters, Archer is a tough, smart, likable protagonist, while still being fallible and human. I think I liked him even more in this book than I did in the previous one. Willie Dash and Liberty Callahan are both excellent supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable.

Now, to get back to the length of this book (you knew I would), the way Baldacci turns what could have been a reasonably short paperback into a fat hardback, other than the filler in the first part of the book, is by describing everything. Archer can’t enter a room without Baldacci giving us a rundown on everything that’s in it. Everybody he meets gets a thorough description. You might think this would bother me, but even I was surprised by the fact that it didn’t, much. I think that’s because even though he describes lots of things, he doesn’t dwell on any one of them for too long. He gives the reader a few details and moves on. In a way, this book reminds me of the work of Leslie Scott: it’s vividly descriptive, but yet it moves at a fairly brisk pace. (Baldacci isn’t as brisk as Scott, but then, who is?)

Also, reading this book made me realize something: I’d rather read stuff like this than a lot of modern thrillers whose authors like to talk about how they never describe anything, never use an adverb, and never, ever use a speech tag other than “said”. That’s fine if that’s how you like to write, and a lot of successful writers do, but all too often, to me that approach produces prose that’s flat and bland and boring. I was never bored reading A GAMBLING MAN, even though it took me longer than most books do.

So overall, I liked this book, and I enjoyed it enough I plan to read the third and apparently final book in the series. Not right away, but I expect I’ll get to it fairly soon. I might even move on from there and try some of Baldacci’s other books. The guy can tell a story, even if it is in sort of a long-winded way sometimes. In the meantime, this one is available in the usual e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, July 1937

I said a while back that I ought to read some issues of the air war pulp SKY FIGHTERS. Well, I don’t actually own any. But I do own the Adventure House reprint of the July 1937 issue, so I read it. The cover is by Eugene Frandzen, who painted a bunch of them for SKY FIGHTERS.

This issue leads off with the novella “North Sea Nightmare” by George Bruce. I read another novella by Bruce last year and really enjoyed it. This one is set during World War I and centers around two young Navy pilots known as Goldilocks (because he’s small and blond) and the Bear (because he’s big and burly). Goldilocks is the pilot and the Bear is the observer/gunner in a flying boat that does reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea, looking for German ships and submarines. They come up with a daring plan for a raid on the bay where most of the German navy is based. That raid provokes an even more epic battle that may change the course of the war. I like the way Bruce writes, and there’s plenty of good action in this one. Goldilocks and the Bear are good characters, too. But I never found the plot as compelling as in the other story by Bruce that I read, and I didn’t like the ending. So while I still consider this a good story, I found it somewhat disappointing. I definitely want to read more by George Bruce, though.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few of the pulp novels featuring the Lone Eagle, an American pilot/intelligence agent named John Masters whose adventures appeared in the pulp THE LONE EAGLE (later renamed THE AMERICAN EAGLE and AMERICAN EAGLES). The stories appeared under the house-name Lt. Scott Morgan but were written by several different authors, most notably F.E. Rechnitzer, who created the series. I always enjoyed the Lone Eagle stories because Masters was just as much of a spy as he was a pilot, and most of the novels had him operating extensively behind enemy lines as well as engaging in aerial dogfights. He often crossed paths with the mysterious and dangerous R-47, a seductive female German agent who became a recurring villainess. The first two novels in the series are reprinted in a very nice double volume from Black Dog Books called WINGS OF WAR, which is still available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

I said all that to say this: this issue of SKY FIGHTERS features a Lone Eagle novelette, also called “Wings of War”, and it’s the only time a story about the character appeared anywhere other than in his own pulp. I don’t know what brought that about. It’s possible one of the Lone Eagle authors turned in a manuscript that was too short and the editors at the Thrilling Group just decided to run it in SKY FIGHTERS rather than asking the author to expand it. Or maybe the story was written to order at novelette length in order to publicize the Lone Eagle’s own pulp—although that seems an odd thing to do several years into a magazine’s run. (THE LONE EAGLE debuted in 1933.) Regardless of its origins, “Wings of War” is a good story, with Masters going undercover as a German soldier returned in a prisoner exchange so that he try to find out why the Germans seemingly have abandoned a vital area along the front. Masters suspects the wily Huns are just setting a trap for the Allies. He’s right, of course, but he discovers what’s really going on only after another encounter with R-47, and as usual, their meeting almost proves fatal for Masters. There’s plenty of action, a plausible if far-fetched scheme by the Germans, and a smashing climax. I enjoyed this story, and it reminded me that it’s been too long since I read one of the full-length Lone Eagle novels.

“Luck of the Damned” is John Scott Douglas, a versatile and prolific pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, adventure, Western, and sports stories in a career that lasted from the mid-Twenties to the early Fifties. It’s about a young pilot who’s convinced he’s jinxed, especially on his birthday. So when his commanding officer orders him to fly a dangerous mission on that particular day, he has to battle not only the enemy but also his own superstition. This is an entertaining story that I thought wasn’t quite as strong as it might have been with a different twist, but it’s still worth reading.

Robert Sidney Bowen is one of the big names in aviation and air war pulp. He wrote a lot of other things, too, including boy’s adventure novels and mystery and detective yarns. I’ve been reading his work for close to 60 years now and always enjoy it. Just a very solid, dependably entertaining writer. His story in this issue, “Fledgling’s Finish”, is no exception. A young pilot volunteers for a suicidal bombing run on a castle that’s the center of the German communications network. When his commander refuses to let him, he takes it on himself to make the effort anyway. Most of the story is written from the point of view of the commanding officer, which proves to be an effective and suspenseful tactic. I really enjoyed this story.

Joe Archibald’s specialty was humorous stories. He didn’t just write them for the air war pulps (although he did a bunch of them), he turned out humorous yarns for the Western, detective, and sports pulps, too. I’m not a big fan of his work, but sometimes I find his stories mildly amusing. That’s a pretty good description of “A Flyer in Cauliflowers”. This is part of a series featuring two American pilots named Ambrose Hooley and Muley Spink (the narrator). The plot concerns a prizefight between an American flier and a British pilot to determine who deserves credit for shooting down a couple of German planes. There’s also a captured German ace who escapes and has to be hunted down. As I said above, it’s mildly amusing and moves along fairly well, so it’s a readable story. Not much more than that, mind you, but I did finish it, which is more than I can say for some of Archibald’s yarns.

Hal White wrote dozens of Western, detective, and aviation stories for the pulps between the mid-Twenties and the early Fifties, but that’s all I know about him. His story “Fly High and Die” wraps up this issue. It’s about a squadron of fighter pilots who believe they’ve been cursed by a dead German ace. Anytime they fly higher than 8000 feet, something terrible happens to them. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The actual solution to the mystery struck me as a little bland, but overall the story is okay.

And okay is a good description of this issue as a whole. The Lone Eagle story is excellent, the Robert Sidney Bowen story is very good, and even though I found the George Bruce story a little disappointing, it’s still a good story and makes me want to read more by him. The other stories are mildly entertaining but forgettable. I probably won’t go hunting for more issues of SKY FIGHTERS, but if I come across any, I won’t hesitate to grab them, either.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1945

I don't own this issue of FRONTIER STORIES, so I haven't read it. But it has a dramatic cover by Richard Case and a fine group of writers inside. The lead story by Les Savage Jr., "The Lone Star Camel Corps", may have been cannibalized for Savage for his novel ONCE A FIGHTER. It was reprinted in one of the Les Savage Jr. collections packaged by Jon Tuska and I have a copy of that book on order. I'm looking forward to reading the story. Also on hand in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES are William Heuman, Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, R.S. Lerch, Fairfax Downey, and the lesser-known Ben T. Young and Raymond L. Hill. Lots of good reading there, I have no doubt about that.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

Review: Backfire - Charles L. Burgess

A while back, I read and enjoyed Charles Burgess’s novel THE OTHER WOMAN, which was published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and reprinted last year by Stark House as part of their great Black Gat Books line. Burgess, a Florida author who specialized in writing articles for the true crime magazines, wrote only two novels, and his other one, BACKFIRE, was very rare, having been published only in Australia. Now the good folks at Stark House have tracked it down and reprinted it as well, along with Burgess’s only short story and a selection of his true crime yarns. I’ve just read BACKFIRE.

The novel’s protagonist is Martin Powers, about as normal and run-of-the-mill a guy as you could find. He’s a salesman for a cosmetics company and is recently married to a beautiful brunette named Angela. He has a pretty good life, he thinks—until somebody starts trying to kill him.

After several failed attempts on his life, Martin’s wife brings in the cops, in the person of a hulking detective named Sam Bannerman. Unfortunately, Bannerman doesn’t seem to be able to make any progress in finding out who wants Martin dead. So Martin figures if he wants to stay alive, he’d better do some investigating himself. He was adopted as a young child and knows very little about his background, so he decides that would be a good place to start. He proves to be a clever, dogged detective, too, and starts uncovering things. But will he arrive at the ultimate answer before his mysterious enemy knocks him off?

BACKFIRE is a well-constructed mystery/suspense novel that generates considerably urgency and kept me flipping the pages. I think Burgess revealed some key elements of the plot maybe a tad too early, but that didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the book. He keeps the central questions unanswered until late in the book and keeps tightening the screws on Martin until a satisfying climax.

Maybe due to Burgess’s background as a true crime author, there’s a strong sense of realism to this book, as well, a sense that the investigation really could have gone this way. There’s nothing flashy about the style, just straight-ahead storytelling, but in a story like this, that’s a very effective approach. I'm sorry Burgess didn't write more novels. I had a fine time reading BACKFIRE and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions. I haven’t yet read the true crime articles that round out the book, but I intend to.

Review: 'Nada - Daniel Boyd (Dan Stumpf)

I’m not sure how I missed this novel when it came out in 2010. I’m sure I read the reviews of it on Bill Crider’s blog and Mystery Scene, and I should have picked it up then because it sounds exactly like my kind of book. Plus, the author and I are acquainted on-line. He’s commented here under his real name, Dan Stumpf, and I’ve commented on his book and movie reviews over on Mystery Scene. But even though it took me a while to get around to it, I’m very glad I did because ‘NADA is a terrific book.

It's set in Mexico in 1936. The title does double duty, since “nada” is the Spanish word for nothing, and in this book it’s also the nickname of the small town of Quenada, which is on the other side of the desert from the abandoned Old Pesos Mine. The mine isn’t completely abandoned, however. There’s a caretaker of sorts, Vernon Culley, a World War I veteran turned bootlegger and gangster turned mining engineer. He’s the narrator, and he provides a colorful, distinctive narrative voice that’s a pleasure to read.

One day a truck shows up at the mine. The two men in it are fleeing from a gang of bandits led by the Serrano Brothers, with whom Culley is acquainted. There’s a shootout, one of the men winds up dead, and Culley discovers that the truck is full of gold bars that were entrusted to the Dutchman who was killed in the battle. He was supposed to sell the gold and return the proceeds to some Dutch Jews who fled to America from the Nazis. One of the group is the dead man’s father-in-law. The Dutchman had hired a Mexican/Indian named Ray to drive him and the gold to its destination. Ray and Culley team up to try to carry out the Dutchman’s mission, since they promised the dying man they would.

Of course, it won’t be easy since they’ll have to battle the desert, vicious bandits, and corrupt lawmen along the way. Not to mention their own mercenary impulses and the guilt that haunts Ray . . .

This is the sort of historical adventure yarn that Jack Higgins used to write, although I think ‘NADA is better written than any of the Higgins novels I’ve read. The author gives us a bunch of superb action scenes but also really develops the characters of Culley and Ray as they work together and get to know each other. They discuss books, philosophy, religion, and plenty of other subjects, but even so, Stumpf never lets the action lag for long and the pace is suspenseful and relentless.

This is the first novel that Stumpf wrote as Daniel Boyd, but he’s done several more since then. It's also the first fiction by him that I’ve read, but I’m going to have to remedy that. Meanwhile, I give ‘NADA a very high recommendation. It's available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I think it’s a lock for my top ten list at the end of the year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 30, 1939

By the end of the Thirties, ARGOSY was wrapping up its run as one of the top pulps in the business. It would still publish plenty of excellent fiction for another decade, but it wasn't as strong overall as it was at its peak in the mid-Thirties. Despite that trend, this looks like a really strong issue with a good cover by Rudolph Belarski and stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Eustace L. Adams, Allan Vaughan Elston, Louis C. Goldsmith, Bennett Foster, Frank Richardson Pierce, and an installment of one of the occult detective novels by Jack Mann (E. Charles Vivian). Those are some fine writers. I need to read those Jack Mann novels. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 27, 1938

I own a couple dozen issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY, but the August 27, 1938 issue isn’t among them. It’s available on the Internet Archive, though, and I picked it to read for a reason which I’ll get around to. The cover is by the legendary Norman Saunders, and it’s a good one illustrating the lead novella, “The Cougar’s Claws”.

That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street & Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.

Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues, approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!

Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice story.

And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.

I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it and this story is no exception.  Plenty of tough action makes this one a winner.

I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect. Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling. As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.

I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.

But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course, and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway, although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that because I really enjoyed this one.

I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another really good story.

One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole, but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.

Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think. If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Range Robbers - Oliver Strange

Oliver Strange (1871–1952) was an Englishman who worked as an editor for a British publishing company during the first half of the Twentieth Century. But he also wanted to be a writer and obviously had a fondness for American Westerns, because when he tried his hand at writing a novel, the result was THE RANGE ROBBERS, a book that’s very much the literary equivalent of an American B-Western film or pulp novel.

THE RANGE ROBBERS introduces Strange’s famous character Sudden, and it proved popular enough that over the next couple of decades he wrote nine more novels featuring Sudden. After Strange’s death, the series was continued for five more novels written by Frederick Nolan under the name Frederick H. Christian. Even though THE RANGE ROBBERS was the first book published, when Strange continued the series he backtracked in the character’s history and occasionally went forward, so the publication order isn’t the same as the chronological order.

When we meet Sudden in this one, he’s pretending to be a drifting cowboy named Green. In fairly short order, it becomes obvious why he’s adopted a new identity: Sudden is a famous gunfighter and outlaw who’s wanted for various crimes all over the West. Like many a pulp outlaw, however, he’s not really to blame for most of the offenses that have been attributed to him. Despite his reputation, he’s an honorable man, a fast shot, a great fighter, and a steadfast friend. When he goes to work on a ranch owned by an old-timer who’s having trouble with rustlers, if you’ve read very many pulp novels or watched very many B-Westerns, you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen.

In fact, there’s nothing really new in THE RANGE ROBBERS, although when it was published the plot elements hadn’t had enough time to become quite the clichés that they are now. You’ve got the elderly rancher with the beautiful daughter, the rustlers, the magnificent horse that nobody else can ride, the white villains pretending to be Indians, and so forth. One of the bad guys even kicks a dog so you'll know that he's really bad. So why read this book?

Well, for one thing, even though THE RANGE ROBBERS is a fairly long novel, Strange never lets the pace slow down. It’s full of incident and colorful characters and well-written action scenes. There’s a lot of Western slang and dialect that takes some getting used to, but that was common for the time period. Even though Strange never visited the U.S., his descriptions of the landscape are vivid and reasonably accurate. He was expert at crafting confrontations between the heroes and the villains, and along the way he adds some psychological drama to the plot reminiscent of the work of Max Brand and Walt Coburn. The two big twists near the end are predictable but satisfying.

THE RANGE ROBBERS is an old-fashioned, traditional Western and very entertaining for fans of that genre, which includes me. I have a couple of other Sudden novels and plan to read them soon.

(It'll come as no surprise to any of you that since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 5, 2010, I haven't read any more of the Sudden novels. Let's face it: I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy. But the good news is that THE RANGE ROBBERS is available in an e-book edition from the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing, along with all the other books in the series. So I have no excuse for not reading some of them, do I?)

 

Now Available: The Hellcat/The Lady is Transparent/The Dumdum Murder - Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates)

THE HELLCAT:
In which Lieutenant Al Wheeler is expected to
—solve the mystery of the decapitated head
—investigate the Sumner family without ruffling any entitled feathers
—keep the two mob killers from wiping out the Sumners

THE LADY IS TRANSPARENT:
In which Lieutenant Al Wheeler is sent out on a stormy night to an old dark house
—where a ghost has just murdered someone behind a locked door
—where the whole family believes in a century-old curse
—where a tape machine holds the only evidence of death by avenging spirit

THE DUMDUM MURDER:
In which Lieutenant Al Wheeler responds to a call about a bloody murder
—in a house of old Vaudevillians and entertainers
—involving the shooting death of a former associate of an ex-bootlegger
—that sends him into the arms of an intimidating Amazon.

(I did the introduction for this new triple volume of Al Wheeler mystery novels, and I think it's one of the best intros I've written. I sure had fun revisiting my early days as a fan of the Carter Brown books, which I still love all these decades later. This new book from Stark House is available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and I give it a high recommendation!)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Under the Canopy - David Arkenstone

I don't think I'd ever heard of David Arkenstone, but I heard this song on the radio the other day (the Spa channel on SiriusXM) and immediately liked it. It sounds to me like it ought to be the theme song from a two-fisted, pulpish, jungle adventure movie from the Fifties starring, say, John Payne and Rhonda Fleming. PIRATES OF THE CONGO! I'd watch that.

Review: Hamilton's Harem - William Kane (Ben Haas)

First of all, the fact that this book doesn’t have LUST, SIN, FLESH, SHAME, PASSION, WANTON, or ORGY in the title makes me suspect that Ben Haas, the author behind the William Kane pseudonym, came up with HAMILTON’S HAREM and the editors at William Hamling’s soft-core empire let it go. That’s my copy in the scan, and it’s in really good shape for a paperback that’s 60 years old, almost like it just came off of some bus station spinner rack. The artist hasn’t been identified.

The fact that Ben Haas wrote this means there’s a very good chance it’ll be a fine book. The protagonist is lawyer Gage Hamilton, a no-nonsense, abide-by-the-letter-of-the-law guy who finds himself administering valuable trust funds for a beautiful blond widow and her three equally beautiful, equally blond daughters (all of whom, not to worry, are of legal age). In addition, Gage also has a beautiful blond mistress who is more than a tad jealous. Sounds like a harem to me!

Gage’s life is complicated even more when each of his legal charges has some sort of soap operatic emergency that requires them to try to wheedle large sums of cash out of their trust funds. Gage has to approve such cash outlays, and in each case, the ladies pull out all the stops to convince him to go along with what they want. Throw in a lusty stable boy, a predatory lesbian, an embezzler, a hint of blackmail, and a murder, and you’ve got a book!

Some of Haas’s soft-core books are sexed-up adventure yarns, but HAMILTON’S HAREM is more of a romantic comedy, and a good one, too. I raced through it, since Haas’s prose is some of the most readable you’ll ever encounter, and there’s a great scene where a rat gets his comeuppance. The sex scenes aren’t very graphic, and most of the book is about Gage Hamilton finding some human decency under his hidebound legal exterior. I just had a really good time reading this book. It’s not much like Ben Haas’s other books, but at the same time, I think it’s one of my favorites of his so far. You’re not likely to run across a copy—Bookfinder shows only three currently for sale on-line, and they’re all pricey—but if you do, I recommend you grab it.

Review: Gun Law at Vermillion - Matt Stuart (L.P. Holmes)

Matt Stuart was a pseudonym for L.P. Holmes, one of my favorite Western authors. In fact, GUN LAW AT VERMILLION, published in hardcover by J.B. Lippincott in 1951 and reprinted in paperback by Bantam in 1952, was serialized in the pulp RANCH ROMANCES under Holmes’ real name and the title “Painted Walls” in November and December 1947. I read the Bantam paperback, which has a decent cover by Earl Mayan, although the main figure in this painting looks nothing like the protagonist of the book.

Holmes often used simple, traditional plots. In GUN LAW AT VERMILLION, former Texas Ranger Clay Orde has come to Nevada on the trail of the man he holds responsible for the deaths of his foster parents. Before he can reach his destination, though, the train he’s riding is held up. The robbers are after something unusual, though: They’re out to steal a string of pack mules bound for the town of Vermillion, where they’ll be used by a freight packing company owned by a beautiful young woman who also just happens to be on the same train as Orde.

Orde saves the girl and foils the robbery, of course, and just like that he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a war between rival freight packing companies. And the one that’s trying to run the girl out of business is owned by, you guessed it, the same guy that Orde has been tracking down! (No bonus points for guessing that. It’s pretty obvious.)

That’s it for the plot. The rest of the book consists of Orde helping the girl and falling in love with her, battling against the schemes of the man he hates, making friends with a Ute Indian called Johnny Buffalo who is a great sidekick, and surviving various ambushes, beatings, and shootouts. And I’m sure you can guess how I reacted to it.

I loved it, of course, and had a great time reading it. Holmes was one of the very best at spinning this kind of yarn. Clay Orde isn’t the most likable protagonist at times, but he has to be pretty tough in order to survive all the punishment that Holmes puts him through.

In addition to the hardcover and paperback editions from the early Fifties, GUN LAW AT VERMILLION was reprinted in paperback by Lancer under Holmes’ name. I haven’t been able to find a date for that edition, but I suspect it was late Sixties/early Seventies. A large print edition came out in the Nineties. So there are copies around, and you might come across one of them. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I think there’s a very good chance you’ll enjoy it. I certainly did.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, September 25, 1938

That's a dramatic cover by William F. Soare on this issue of SHORT STORIES. I always like seeing that red sun. There's a strong line-up of authors in this issue: Harry Sinclair Drago, Gordon Young, Frank Richardson Pierce, Warren Hastings Miller, Jackson Gregory, Lawrence Treat, H.S.M Kemp, and Captain Frederick Moore. Probably well worth reading with yarn-spinners like that. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: .44 Western Magazine, February 1948

I don't own this issue, so the information about it and the cover scan come from the invaluable Fictionmags Index. .44 WESTERN MAGAZINE, like all the other Popular Publications Western pulps, had good covers and good authors filling its pages. Robert Stanley did the excellent art on this cover (thanks to Robert R. Barrett for the artist ID), and I think it's the first one I've come across where a pocket watch gets shot, instead of some hombre's hat. Inside this issue are stories by William Heuman, Harry F. Olmsted, Dan Cushman, Tom Roan, Lee E. Wells, Clee Woods, Ben Frank, James Shaffer, and Harrison Colt. I'm not a fan of Ben Frank's work and don't really know anything about Shaffer or Colt, but the others are all dependable Western pulpsters. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Island of Kings - Blaine Stevens (Harry Whittington)

Late in his career, Harry Whittington wrote several historical novels under the pseudonym Blaine Stevens. ISLAND OF KINGS is the final book to appear under that name, and in fact, it may be the last book that Whittington wrote. I believe it was the final new Whittington novel to be published, but if I’m wrong about any of that, I hope someone will speak up in the comments.

At any rate, whether or not it possesses the historical significance of being the last Whittington novel, ISLAND OF KINGS is worth reading. It’s set in Hawaii in the 1770s and is a fictionalization of the young prince Kamehameha’s efforts to avenge his brother’s murder, unite all the Hawaiian islands, and establish himself as the king. Kamehameha’s rise to power is complicated by the arrival of the British explorer Captain James Cook and the two ships under his command. This is the first time the islanders have ever encountered anyone from the outside world.

The other protagonist in this novel is a roguish young British officer on one of the ships who falls in love with an island girl, deserts the ships, and goes native, eventually winding up involved in Kamehameha’s plan to unite the islands.

As usual in a Whittington novel, the story is fast-paced, colorful, and filled with sex and violence. Not all the characters turn out the way you’d expect, either, and such surprises are always nice. Never having studied Kamehameha or Captain Cook, I don’t know how historically accurate the book is, but it’s definitely a good yarn, which is all I was looking for.

The only real flaw in ISLAND OF KINGS is the head-scratcher of an ending, which reads like Whittington ran out of time, energy, or both. Despite that, it’s an entertaining, fast-moving novel, and worth reading despite being a definite notch or two below Whittington’s great suspense novels and Westerns.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 26, 2010. After almost 15 years, I no longer remember the ending, but I do recall where I bought the book and where I read it. Funny the things that stick in the mind. This novel is long out of print and has never been reprinted, as far as I know, but used copies are out there and don't seem too expensive, if you're a Whittington fan and want to check it out.)