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.

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

Back in the Seventies, we watched all the big disaster movies: AIRPORT, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, etc. I even read Arthur Hailey’s novel AIRPORT that was the source of the movie. It was hardly my favorite genre, but I found those movies to be reliable, if forgettable, entertainment.

So when I came across DAYLIGHT, a 1996 Sylvester Stallone movie I’d never seen, I didn’t hesitate. The description made it sound very much like one of those earlier disaster movies: some thieves fleeing through a tunnel under the Hudson River in New York City cause a wreck with a truck carrying toxic waste, and the resulting explosion and fire close off both ends of the tunnel, sealing a dozen or so survivors in there to look for a way out.

It's lucky for them that a taxi driver up on the surface is really the disgraced former chief of Emergency Services (Stallone, of course), who’s the only one who can figure out a way to get into the tunnel and lead the survivors out.

Naturally, before that we get a number of scenes introducing us to the characters who will make it through the explosion (and some who won’t). There are no real villains in this movie except the thieves who cause the disaster with their attempted getaway, and they’re not around long. Most of the movie is Stallone vs. the tunnel. The other characters are stereotypes: the would-be writer, the bickering couple and their teenage daughter, the old couple and their dog that used to belong to their dead son, the heroic cop, a few convicts from a transport van. But even though we’ve seen them all before, they’re still handled pretty effectively.

DAYLIGHT really plays a lot like CLIFFHANGER, another Stallone movie from a few years earlier in which he also plays a guy who’s the best at what he does but has personal demons from past failures haunting him. And like that earlier film, DAYLIGHT is well-made, well-acted, decently written (Stallone isn’t credited as one of the writers but contributed to the script, as usual), and an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. That’s plenty for me.

Review: John Standon of Texas - Johnston McCulley

Johnston McCulley is mostly remembered, and rightly so, as the creator of Zorro, but he wrote all sorts of pulp yarns, including a five-part serial called “John Standon of Texas” which appeared in WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE in September and October 1920. It was reprinted in a hardcover of the same title by Chelsea House, Street & Smith’s book publishing arm, in 1924. There was also a British edition from Hutchison in 1934. I have the Chelsea House edition and read it recently. Since my copy is coverless and is just a very plain-looking brown hardcover, I’ve used images I’ve found on-line of both covers.

John Standon, the hero of this one, is an American adventurer who has been prospecting in the mountains of Mexico for several years. As the story opens, he’s on his way back to Texas, having given up on finding gold. Before he can cross the border, though, he finds himself caught up in a revolution as he helps rescue some aristocrats from a gang of bandits led by a self-styled revolutionary who’s really just after loot and power.

Standon’s efforts to help these people escape from the bandits is really all this books amounts to. The plot is very simple. But there’s a ton of action, the characters are colorful and interesting, the bandit leader and his second-in-command, an American gunslinger, are suitably villainous, and McCulley plays out the whole thing in exciting, fast-paced prose. While the style is slightly old-fashioned now and then, for the most part you wouldn’t guess that this novel was written and published more than a hundred years ago.

Also, while it was published originally in WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE and the hardcover edition even says “A Western Story” on the title page, it’s not a traditional Western but rather is set in the early 20th Century. Standon packs an automatic pistol and there are mentions of airplanes. I like this setting and am always glad to come across a story that makes use of it.

My copy also has the names of a couple of previous owners written in it. So I have to thank Howard D. Lindamood of Atkins, Virginia, and Slaylin M. Kittredge, address unknown, for passing along this book until it finally wound up in my hands. Because I really enjoyed JOHN STANDON OF TEXAS. If you’re a Johnston McCulley fan or just enjoy good adventure novels, it’s worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, December 1935

This issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE sports a gruesome but eye-catching and dramatic cover by Rafael DeSoto. Nothing good ever comes from a suit of armor on a pulp cover! Inside this issue are stories by Barry Perowne (a Raffles yarn), Arthur J. Burks, Steve Fisher, Dwight V. Babcock, John Scott Douglas, Paul Hawk, Edmond Du Perrier, and the oddly named Tom Erwin Geris, who, if you rearrange the letters, turns out to be none other than Mort Weisinger, who wrote quite a few pulp stories but is best remembered as the long-time editor of the Superman titles at DC Comics during the Silver Age. He had a reputation as quite a curmudgeon as far as the writers and artists were concerned, but I didn't know any of that at the time. I just read the comic books and enjoyed them. I don't believe I've ever read any of his pulp stories, though. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, December 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my taped, trimmed, and tattered copy in the scan, but other than being beat up, it’s intact and fully readable. The cover art is by Sam Cherry, as usual during this era of TEXAS RANGERS. It’s not one of his better covers, in my opinion, but it’s certainly not bad. I don’t think Cherry was capable of painting a bad cover.

The Jim Hatfield novel in this issue, “El Diablo’s Treasure”, is by Roe Richmond. I’ve mentioned many times in the past that Richmond’s Hatfield novels aren’t really to my taste, but I read one now and then anyway because he was a pretty good writer otherwise. This one starts out very promising. Hatfield is in Del Rio, on the Texas-Mexico border, and is already in the middle of his current assignment. He’s supposed to accompany a famous archeologist, the man’s beautiful daughter, and a young mining engineer who’s engaged to the girl, as they search for a famous lost mine in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Not only is there the potential for gold, but the mine also is supposed to be the hiding place for a fortune in gems left there a couple of hundred years earlier.

Unfortunately, the arrangement with Mexico calls for the party to be escorted by a troop of Rurales commanded by an officer who is actually little more than a bandit, and there’s a gang of actual bandits roaming the area where the search is to take place. Throw in the fact that the archeologist’s daughter is a beautiful hellcat with her eye on Hatfield, angering her fiancée, and there’s plenty going on to wind up with Hatfield getting plenty of trouble heaped on his head.

That’s exactly what happens, as Richmond provides plenty of gritty, well-written fistfights, shootouts, and even some epic battles. There’s quite a bit to like in this novel. However, Richmond makes a serious misstep by never providing any sort of interesting backstory for the fortune that’s supposed to be hidden in the mine. It’s just sort of there, with a couple of vague hints that maybe the Conquistadores left it. There’s also no mention of anyone known as El Diablo, let alone an explanation of why it’s his treasure. Was Richmond simply referring to the Devil? Who knows?

My main objection to Richmond’s Hatfield novels is the presence of the annoying sidekicks he introduced to the series. Hatfield is called the Lone Wolf for a reason! Thankfully, although those characters are mentioned once, they play no part in this novel.

Ultimately, “El Diablo’s Treasure” isn’t a bad yarn. But Richmond shares something with Joseph Chadwick: he just doesn’t have a feel for the Jim Hatfield character. Hatfield never really seems like the same person who’s in the novels by Leslie Scott, Tom Curry, Walker Tompkins, and Peter Germano. If this had been a stand-alone with a totally different Texas Ranger, it would have been a better story. As is, it’s worth reading but not a great example of the series.

“War Bonnets in Wyoming” is a cavalry yarn by Gordon D. Shirreffs, one of the best all-around Western writers who was especially good in the cavalry sub-genre. In this one, the captain who’s in charge of establishing a new fort saves the life of a young Shoshone brave who’s being pursued by hostile Arapahoes. Will this be enough to save the lives of the captain, an Indian agent’s beautiful daughter, and a troop of cavalry later on? I think we know the answer to that, but Shirreffs is such a good writer it doesn’t matter. This story doesn’t have a lot of action, but it’s very suspenseful and I enjoyed it.

Harry Harrison Kroll isn’t somebody I think of as a Western writer. He wrote non-fiction about folklore and Americana, and his fiction is usually of the backwoods, hillbilly variety. But he made a few appearances in Western pulps, including the story “Catchers is Keepers” in this issue. It’s not actually a Western, though. It’s about a riverman on the Mississippi who finds a valuable raft and tries to salvage it, only to end up with trouble and a beautiful girl (but I repeat myself). Out of place though it may be, this is a fairly entertaining story.

Frank Castle got his start in the business assisting and ghosting for Western author Tom W. Blackburn, then went on to write dozens of stories under his own name for the Western pulps in the late Forties through the mid-Fifties. After that he became one of the most reliable novelists in the business, turning out books by the score: Westerns, hardboiled crime, nurse novels, soft-core novels, movie novelizations, and a lot of juvenile TV tie-in novels for Whitman under the name Cole Fannin. I’ve always thought Cole Fannin would have been a great Western pseudonym, but Castle chose to use Steve Thurman instead for the Westerns he didn’t publish under his real name. He also wrote some of the Lassiter novels under the house-name Jack Slade. I really like his work, so I was glad to see that he has a novelette in this issue called “Wild Night in Dodge”.

And a wild night it is. Dodge City is past its hell-raising peak since the railhead has long since moved on westward, but plenty of trouble is lurking there anyway for Kelly Shannon, who brings in a herd from Colorado. Before you know it, he’s met a beautiful redhead who looks just like a long-dead lover of his from Texas, he’s been accused of cheating at cards, he’s been blackjacked and knocked out, and he’s had ten thousand dollars stolen from him. And that’s just the start of a night full of fights, shootouts, double-crosses, and nefarious plans.

This is a terrific story, a 1950s Gold Medal Western novel in miniature. It’s got a hardboiled hero, a beautiful girl, and despicable villains everywhere Kelly Shannon turns. Frank Castle developed a very distinctive style that makes his later novels easy to identify, but it’s just in the formative stages here. The story races along and comes to a satisfying conclusion, and it just makes me want to read more by Castle. 

“Bedlam on the Box X” is by Ben Frank, the author of the Doc Swap series and a writer whose work I’ve grown to heartily dislike. This isn’t a Doc Swap story, so I had a little hope for it, but it’s the same sort of cutesy, allegedly humorous story and I gave up on it after a few pages. Ben Frank just isn’t for me, and I think I’m going to stop trying to read his stories. (I felt the same way about Syl McDowell’s Swap and Whopper series and finally warmed up to it, but I don’t believe it’s going to happen with Ben Frank.)

I don’t know a thing about Garold Hartsock except that he published a couple of dozen stories, mostly Westerns and a few detective stories, in the pulps during the Forties and Fifties. His story “Feud” in this issue is a grim tale about feuding families in Oregon and includes a stereotypical Romeo-and-Juliet element. Hartsock’s writing is pretty good, though, and he kept me turning the pages to the end, which was a major letdown. So, not bad, but not particularly good, either.

And that’s a pretty accurate description of this issue of TEXAS RANGERS, too. The Frank Castle novelette is superb, and the Shirreffs cavalry yarn is very good and well worth reading, too. The Hatfield novel is okay if you’re not expecting too much but frustrating in that it could have been much better, although if you just want to sample one of Richmond’s novels, this would be a good pick because the sidekicks aren’t in it. Otherwise, I’d say that if you own this one, read Castle and Shirreffs and skip the rest.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Lawman and the Songbird - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

One of my favorite characters in current Western fiction, Chap O'Keefe's freelance range detective Joshua Dillard, returns in THE LAWMAN AND THE SONGBIRD, a novel originally published by Robert Hale in 2005. It's now available in e-book and paperback editions and is well worth reading. (This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on November 20, 2014, but not to worry, those links are current and will take you right to the book on Amazon. More about that below.)

This novel delves into Joshua's past, flashing back to his days as a Pinkerton operative when he was sent to a mining boomtown in Montana to corral a gang of outlaws operating in the area. While he's tackling that job, he gets mixed up in the schemes of a beautiful saloon entertainer and is unable to prevent a deadly saloon robbery. The loot vanishes, and so does the songbird.

Years later, after personal tragedy has led him to quit the Pinkertons and embark on a hardscrabble life as a drifting troubleshooter, Joshua returns to that same Montana town, which is still plagued with lawlessness. This time he's hired as the local marshal, and a daring stagecoach robbery is the first act in a chain of events that might give Joshua a chance to redeem himself for his earlier failure—if he can survive a hail of outlaw lead.

As usual, Chap O'Keefe (who is really Keith Chapman) throws in some nice plot twists and packs the yarn he's spinning with plenty of gritty action. The pace never falters, and THE LAWMAN AND THE SONGBIRD delivers top-notch Western entertainment. Highly recommended, as are all of Keith's books.

(In addition to being a very entertaining Western yarn, the new edition of this novel has been expanded with a bonus article about how it came to be written and the editorial back-and-forth between the author and the publishing company. I find behind-the-scenes stuff like this fascinating, and it's one more reason I still highly recommend this book.)

Review: Run, Killer, Run - Lionel White

Before there was Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and his famous protagonist Parker, there was Lionel White, the first real master of the heist novel. White didn’t write about a series character, but many of the protagonists of his novels bear a resemblance to Parker, including Rand Coleman, the lead character in White’s first novel, RUN, KILLER, RUN. The original version of this novel was published as a digest novel by Rainbow Books in 1952 under the title SEVEN HUNGRY MEN. White revised it and Avon published it as a paperback original in 1959 under its current title. Then Black Gat Books reprinted that version in a very nice paperback edition that comes out today. (You can see the covers of the two previous editions below. I don't know who did the art on the Avon edition of RUN, KILLER, RUN, but the cover on the Rainbow Books edition of SEVEN HUNGRY MEN is by the great George Gross.)

Rand Coleman is a professional criminal serving time for robbery when a corrupt lawyer manages to secure his release and recruits him to pull off a big job: an armored car robbery that will net a cool two million dollars. In telling his story, White employs the classic structure of the heist novel. Coleman assembles his team and we get to know them: a couple of veteran mobsters, a hotheaded young punk, a washed-up boat skipper, a sullen first mate. A couple of beautiful girls wind up involved in the proceedings. The plan for the robbery is laid out, and then we get the execution of it.

Do things go wrong? Of course, they do! But Coleman and his team get their hands on the loot, and now all they have to do is make their getaway to Florida, and from there, who knows? Cuba? South America? Unfortunately, treachery, greed, lust, and violence are along for the ride, too.

RUN, KILLER, RUN may not have much in it that we haven’t seen before, but this is a very early example of this sort of noir crime novel. And White spins the yarn with such skill that I was totally caught up in it, eagerly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. The twists and turns that White introduces in his plot never disappointed me, either. RUN, KILLER, RUN is a terrific novel, fast-paced and well-written and very entertaining. If you enjoy heist novels, I give it a very high recommendation.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Uncertain Glory (1944)

I watched this movie a while back but decided I wanted to wait and let my reaction to it percolate in my brain some before I wrote about it, to see if I felt differently after I thought it over. UNCERTAIN GLORY, made in 1944, stars Errol Flynn, and I usually really enjoy Flynn’s movies. The script was co-authored by Max Brand. And it was directed by Raoul Walsh, one of my all-time favorite directors. So it seemed to be a movie I would really enjoy.

I hated it. And I can’t talk about why I hated it without tons of spoilers, especially about the ending. So if you’ve never seen this movie and think you might watch it someday, you might be well-advised just to move on and not read this post.

For those of you still reading, Flynn plays a somewhat different sort of character for him, a French criminal who’s a professional thief and quite possibly a murder. He’s been convicted of murder, anyway, and is about to taken to the guillotine when an Allied bombing raid wrecks the prison and he escapes. World War II is going on, you see, and of course France is currently occupied by the Nazis.

So far, so good. A French police inspector played by Paul Lukas is on Flynn’s trail, and for a while we get an excellent cat-and-mouse movie with Lukas trying to catch Flynn and Flynn trying to stay ahead of the law. Flynn, of course, makes friends with some villagers, because he’s charming and likable despite being a criminal. How could he be anything else? He’s Errol Flynn! He’s not really a bad guy. He’s just a rogue!

Or maybe not. He probably did all the things he’s accused of, the script deliberately leaves that ambiguous. But Lukas finally catches him and is ready to take him back to Paris for another date with Madame Guillotine.

But wait! The Resistance has blown up a bridge in the area, and the Nazis have taken a hundred of the local men prisoner and the local S.S. commander is threatening to execute them unless the saboteur turns himself in. Flynn hatches the idea of pretending to be the saboteur and turning himself in so that he can save the hostages, but only if Lukas will allow him to have a few more days of freedom. Lukas agrees, reluctantly.

This is all very well-done. The acting is great, the script is nice and crisp, and even though there’s not much action, Walsh keeps things moving along at an entertaining pace. I was enjoying this, waiting for what I figured was the inevitable twist: something would happen that results in a big, action-packed climax in which Flynn reveals he really is a good guy as he rescues the hostages, kills a bunch of Nazis, and redeems himself, after which Lukas lets him go to join a Resistance unit. Or else he rescues the hostages and dies in a blaze of glory with a machine gun chattering in his hands.

BIG SPOILER NOW.

What really happens: Flynn turns himself in to the S.S. and they execute him, I guess. We’re never really told one way or the other.

I was left staring at the screen with the proverbial “Wait . . . What?” look on my face. No bullets flying, no grenades going off, no stirring music? Would the ending I expected have been hokey as all get-out? Well, yeah, but it’s still what I wanted, and what I figured I was sure to get from Errol Flynn, Max Brand, and Raoul Walsh. I didn’t want some artsy “statement.”

I almost just let this one go and didn’t write about it. I’m a firm believer in the idea that you should review a book or a movie or a TV show for what it is, not what you want it to be. And to be fair, UNCERTAIN GLORY is a very well-made, well-acted movie. As a piece of cinema, it’s worth watching. But I was enormously disappointed in it.

Those of you who disagree—or agree, for that matter—feel free to let me know. Won’t bother me a bit either way.

Reviews: Fixed/Beyond the Finish - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

After reading and enjoying the first two Dr. Kildare stories by Frederick Faust writing as Max Brand, I decided to read more of Faust’s contemporary stories. Although most famous, and justly so, as a Western author, Faust wrote all sorts of stories. “Fixed” and “Beyond the Finish” are two with sports backdrops.

“Fixed” appeared in the June 13, 1936 issue of the slick magazine COLLIER’S. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a prize fight yarn about a middleweight title bout between the champ, a young Irishman named Slam Finnegan, and the challenger, a black fighter known as “Little David” Larue. Attending the fight is a gangster Faust refers to only as “Big Bill”. Bill knows something nobody else does: Slam Finnegan is going to take a dive in the ninth round, and Bill is going to clean up on a bet he made at long odds.

Of course, fixed fights never go exactly the way they’re supposed to. We all know that from the movies we’ve seen and the boxing yarns we’ve read. Sometimes the fix works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I won’t say which way it turns out here, but the fun for the reader is in the getting there, and Faust makes it fun, indeed, with lots of great dialogue between Big Bill, his lackey who attends the fight with him, other crooks and gamblers, and a beautiful girl who’s also ringside. You knew there had to be a beautiful girl, right? It’s fast and colorful and with more plot would have made a great movie with, say, Eugene Pallette as Big Bill, Joel McCrea as Slam Finnegan, and maybe Jean Arthur as the girl. I can’t help but see this stuff in my head.

“Beyond the Finish” also appeared in COLLIER’S, in the March 24, 1934 issue. With that title, it’s got to be a horse racing story. The protagonist is a young man who, after being orphaned, goes to live with his cousin, a wealthy horse breeder and trainer in Virginia. He becomes an excellent rider and is picked by his cousin to ride a new horse in the big steeplechase race. But there’s something shady going on, hijinks among horsey high society, if you will, and our hero winds up with quite a conflict going on, complicated (as these things always are) by the involvement of a beautiful young woman. Given all that, it’s not surprising that this story reminded me a little of a Dick Francis yarn, although it’s nowhere nearly as hardboiled and crime-oriented as Francis’s work. But Faust does a great job with the characters and the race itself, and he had me eager to find out what was going to happen next.

I really enjoyed both of these stories and plan to read more of Faust’s contemporary tales, even though I think maybe I’ve shaken out of my funk and am ready to go back to reading novels. We’ll see.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a great zero-g cover by Earle Bergey and a few writers inside you may have heard of: Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, Murray Leinster, and Frank Belknap Long (twice, once as himself and once as Leslie Northern). That's just a spectacular lineup. If you want to read this one, you can find it here, along with a bunch of other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Red Seal Western, August 1937

RED SEAL WESTERN is a little-remembered Western pulp these days, but it had some good covers and good authors, too. I think this cover is by Tom Lovell. The cowboy looks like his work, and so does the redhead. Inside this issue are stories by Harry Sinclair Drago, Claude Rister, Dean Owens (almost certainly a typo for Dean Owen/Dudley Dean McGaughey), Cibolo Ford (with his name misspelled on the table of contents), Mel Pitzer, and Wilfred McCormick, one of my favorite authors as a kid for his juvenile sports novels and dog stories. This certainly looks like an enjoyable Western pulp to me.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: A Soul in a Bottle - Tim Powers

For whatever reason, I’m not a big fan of ghost stories and seldom read them. But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I just read A SOUL IN A BOTTLE, a novella by Tim Powers that was published in a very nice limited edition by Subterranean Press, one of the best of the small-press publishers devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The illustrations are by J.K. Potter and are very, very good.

But what about the story itself? Well, it’s set in Hollywood and concerns a rare book dealer’s encounter with the ghost of a beautiful young poet who committed suicide nearly forty years earlier. Or was she murdered? That question gives this book a bit of a mystery feel, and the literary angle is appealing to me, too. I’d never read anything by Powers before (although I have quite a few of his books on my shelves), but I like his writing here. It’s lean and effective and zips right along. The twist ending isn’t really that much of a surprise, but it works pretty well anyway. Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read something else by Powers.

(Some years, I try to read at least one horror novel or some classic horror short stories for Halloween. Other years, I ignore it entirely. This year I'm rerunning my review of a novella about a ghost, so I guess that's kind of a middle ground. This post originally appeared on March 13, 2017. The book is still available in the same limited edition and doesn't appear to have been published otherwise. Despite my usual good intentions, I haven't read anything else by Tim Powers in the 18+ years since then.)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Mirage - Steve Cole

I like this song because parts of it sound like it could be the theme song from a 1960s British TV show produced by ITV, full of international intrigue and adventure. When I listen to it, I can see the opening credits quick-cut montage featuring picturesque scenery, beautiful women, and ugly guys with guns.

Reviews: Internes Can't Take Money/Whiskey Sour - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

I often have spells when I can’t summon up the energy and attention span to read novels. One of those spells, combined with the urge to read something by Max Brand (Frederick Faust), one of my favorite authors, served to remind me that I’d never read “Internes Can’t Take Money”, the short story that introduced his famous character Dr. Kildare. It appeared originally in the March 1936 issue of the slick magazine COSMOPOLITAN and was made into a movie starring one of my favorite actors, Joel McCrea.

Dr. Jimmy Kildare is an interne who works at a famous hospital, assigned to the emergency room. As an interne, he receives no salary and actually lives in spartan quarters at the hospital. The only times he gets out are when he occasionally visits a nearby tavern for a couple of quick beers.

However, the tavern is owned by a powerful local politician/criminal, and it’s frequented by gangsters and strongarm men, one of whom shows up one evening with a bad knife wound in his arm that he suffered in a fight with a rival mobster. Kildare happens to be there, so against his better judgment he performs emergency surgery on the yegg and saves the use of his arm, if not his life.

That earns Kildare the respect of these denizens of the underworld, who try to turn him into a mob doctor. This creates quite a conflict for the morally upright but somewhat pragmatic Jimmy Kildare, who’s from a poor farming family and has nothing going for him except his medical talent, which is considerable.

As usual with Faust’s work, the writing in this story is very good. The guy could really turn a phrase. It’s full of colorful characters and the pace barrels along nicely. Jimmy Kildare is an excellent protagonist. I raced through this story and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had such a good time reading it, in fact, that I immediately read “Whiskey Sour”, the second yarn starring Dr. Jimmy Kildare, which was published in the April 1938 issue of COSMOPOLITAN. In this one, Kildare is still mixed up with some of the same shady characters as in the previous story. When a man comes into the emergency room, or the “accident room”, as Faust calls it, with a gunshot wound, Kildare is plunged into another moral dilemma that’s complicated by the involvement of a beautiful redhead who has a secret. This is another really fine, fast-moving tale with a lot of good lines and some genuine suspense. Maybe not quite as good as “Internes Can’t Take Money” but almost.

These are the only two stories to feature this particular version of Dr. Kildare. The movie adaptation of “Internes Can’t Take Money” mentioned above was made by Paramount, but that was the only story to which they had the rights. Faust sold the character to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and MGM wanted some changes. Faust, being the good freelance writer he was, said sure and rebooted the series beginning with the novel YOUNG DR. KILDARE, which was serialized in ARGOSY late in 1938 before being published as a book by Dodd, Mead in 1940. Faust followed that with five more novels and two novellas about Dr. Kildare. I read one of the novels about forty years ago and recall enjoying it quite a bit, but I don’t remember which one it was. Might be time to just start with YOUNG DR. KILDARE and read all of them, since they’re short and move fast.

“Internes Can’t Take Money” was reprinted in THE COLLECTED STORIES OF MAX BRAND from the University of Nebraska Press in 1994. “Whiskey Sour” hasn’t been reprinted, officially. But you can find both of these stories on-line if you know where to look, and I think they’re well worth reading. Faust’s greatest success, by far, was with Westerns, but I think his talents were very well-suited to contemporary yarns as well, and I’m thinking I might just try more of them while I’m stuck in this novel-reading funk. 

Review: Goddess of the Fifth Plane - William P. McGivern

I really enjoyed that William P. McGivern science fiction novella I read a while back, so I tried another novella of his from the pulp FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. This one falls more into the fantasy category, or at least science-fantasy, since it does have a sort of science fictional element to it.

“Goddess of the Fifth Plane” appeared in the September 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and earned the cover painting by Harold W. Macauley. It’s a good cover, too. Not exactly how I pictured the title character but relatively close. And Macauley did a great job on her sidekick.

The protagonist of this yarn is Vance Cameron, a wealthy American explorer and adventurer who is in London as the story opens because he’s volunteered to use his aviator skills as a fighter pilot for the R.A.F. He doesn’t stay in London long, though, because a mysterious painting shows up in his flat, depicting a beautiful young woman and a fierce creature resembling a horned lion. Wouldn’t you know it? The painting is actually an interdimensional gateway, and Vance finds himself in another realm, up to his neck in a civil war between a deposed queen and the bad guy who has seized his throne. There’s a little political intrigue, but mostly two-fisted, swashbuckling adventure ensues as Vance fights to help the beautiful queen reclaim her kingdom. He finds a novel but very effective way to do it, too, as the plot takes a twist or two that are at least slightly surprising.

I really enjoyed this colorful, well-written yarn. It reminded me of some of the science-fantasy stories by Henry Kuttner that I’ve read. The action barrels along in a very pleasing fashion that would have had me enthralled if I’d read it when I was a kid sitting on my parents’ front porch. Reading it now as an old geezer, I was still very much entertained. If there’s still a ten-or-twelve-year-old in you who loves this stuff as much as I do, I highly recommend “Goddess of the Fifth Plane”. It’s been reprinted in the e-book THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK. I plan to delve into that collection again soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, August 27, 1938

I'm not a big fan of giant floating head covers, but this one by Emmett Watson isn't bad. Rather atmospheric, in fact. As always with ARGOSY, this issue has some good authors inside: Donald Barr Chidsey, Bennett Foster, Richard Howells Watkins, Howard Rigsby (best remembered for paperbacks written under that name and as by Vechel Howard), and Robert E. Pinkerton, as well as the lesser-known Frances Shelley Wees, C.F. Kearns, and John Randolph Phillips. The stories by Chidsey, Foster, and Wees are serial installments, also common in ARGOSY. "Lost House" by Wees was published in hardcover by Macrae in 1938. "Cut Loose Your Wolf" by Foster was published in hardcover as TURN LOOSE YOUR WOLF by Jefferson House in 1938. I think the original title is better. And Chidsey's "Midas of the Mountains" was only a three-parter, probably closer to a novella than an actual novel, and as far as I know, it's never been reprinted. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, February 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my slightly ragged copy in the scan. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. “15 Action-Packed Stories”, the cover proclaims, but what it doesn’t tell you is that eight of those are actually Special Features, Fact Features, and Departments—filler, in other words—leaving only seven pieces of actual fiction in this issue.

The lead story is “Judge Bates’ Boothill Court” by Lee Floren, the next to last entry in his Judge Bates series that started in 1940 and lasted for 26 stories, the last one being published in 1955. The stories appeared at first in various Popular Publications pulps and then moved over to various Columbia Publications pulps, where the majority of them appeared. After that, Floren used Judge Lemanuel Bates and his sidekick Tobacco Jones in several novels. Bates is the judge in a Wyoming cowtown and Jones is the local postmaster, and together they also own a ranch. They wind up involved in assorted mysteries.

Since Lee Floren was a very inconsistent writer, I always go into one of his stories with fairly low expectations. That way, if it turns out to be a good one, I’m pleasantly surprised. “Judge Bates’ Boothill Court” is one of the good ones, I’m glad to say. Bates and Jones travel to a different town for once as Bates is called on to replace another judge who’s been wounded in an ambush. As it happens, the young man accused of trying to kill the other judge is well-known to Bates and Jones, and they don’t believe he’s guilty. Not surprisingly, somebody tries to kill both of them soon after they arrive, and they’re off on a case that involves danger, a few pretty girls, and a villain who’s so obvious that he might as well be wearing a sign on his back. While there aren’t any surprises in this yarn, Floren spins it with skill and enthusiasm, and there are only a few instances of the clumsy writing he’s prone to at times. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

The long-running series by Lon Williams featuring Deputy Marshal Lee Winters is well-regarded, and it’s unusual because many of the stories feature supernatural elements. I’ve read several of them, though, and so far, I’m not a fan. “Misfortune’s Darling” in this issue is the first one I’ve read that doesn’t have anything supernatural in it. Instead, Winters investigates a series of murders and robberies plaguing travelers in his area. There’s a side plot that serves no real purpose. I realize this is damning with faint praise, but this is the best of these stories I’ve read so far. I’m willing to read more, but my patience with them is getting stretched kind of thin.

Richard Brister is a fairly dependable Western writer. His story in this issue, “Big Man in This Town”, is about a banker who turns to murder to save his failing institution. But of course things don’t play out the way he hopes. This isn’t a bad story and is decently written, but there’s not much to it.

The same can be said of John T. Lynch’s short-short “Hassayampa Hassle”, a tall tale about a whiskey drummer who drinks from a magical river that’s supposed to prevent people from telling the truth. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not really funny and just sort of ends without making any kind of point.

I’ve read a few stories by A.A. Baker that were okay, but “Death at the China Mine” in this issue isn’t one of them. It’s about a mine cave-in and a stagecoach carrying a lot of cash, I think. The plot is so muddled and the writing so poor that I just skimmed through it.

“The Golden Spike” by Gene Rodgers is a little better. A golden spike is used to complete the last link in a railroad in Oregon, and a couple of outlaws decide to steal it out of the ground. Again, things don’t play out according to plan. This short-short is somewhat entertaining, and at least it has a beginning, middle, and end.

Finally, we come to Seven Anderton’s novelette “Peaceful Pilgrim”. Thank goodness for Seven Anderton, I say. This story is about a hired gun who’s tried of fighting in senseless range wars, so he decides to go back to where he came from, the Pecos country in West Texas. So what happens as soon as he gets there? He gets mixed up in a range war, of course, as the local cattle baron decides to force all the small ranchers and sodbusters out of the valley any way he has to, including burning them out and killing them. But standing in his way is the protagonist Hank Sawyer, who finally has something worth fighting for besides pay.

You can tell from that description that this is a very traditional plot we’ve all read and seen many times before. But Anderton’s writing is top-notch as always, Hank Sawyer is a good protagonist, and there are some well-done action scenes. The only flaw in this story is that the ending isn’t as dramatic as it could have been, a tendency that I’ve discovered is common in Anderton’s Westerns. He seems to prefer not to give the reader the kind of action-packed showdowns that I like in my Western reading. That’s his choice, and I’ll still read his stories because his prose is very good, but that keeps him from becoming a real favorite of mine.

This is a very typical issue of a Columbia Western pulp edited by Robert W. Lowndes: a couple of good but not great stories by Floren and Anderton and the rest poor to mediocre. I’ll keep reading them because from time to time Lowndes got his hands on a real gem despite not being able to pay much. But I’ve learned not to expect a great deal from them. The covers are usually pretty nice, though.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Dark Brand - H.A. DeRosso

H.A. DeRosso wasn’t prolific at novel-length works, turning out only a handful of books in a career cut short by a mysterious death that might have been suicide or an accident. He wrote a lot of short stories and novelettes for the pulps, though, some of which have been collected. Several of his novels have been reissued as well.

THE DARK BRAND is one of those novels. It opens with the hero, Dave Driscoll, in jail for rustling, but the fellow in the next cell has it even worse. He’s going to be hanged the next morning for killing a bank teller during a robbery. This doomed hombre is a hardscrabble rancher with a wife, a son, and a failing spread who became a bank robber to help his family. Because of that, he’s hidden the money he got away with and refuses to tell anyone where it is, including the brutal sheriff who wants the loot for himself.

However, when Driscoll gets out of prison three years later and returns to the same town, he finds that a lot of people believe the condemned man told him where the money was hidden, and now there are various factions who want to force him to lead them to the loot by any means necessary, including torture. Driscoll really doesn’t know where the money is, but he wants to find it to help the hanged man’s wife and son.

None of DeRosso’s heroes are actually very heroic, and Driscoll fits that mold. He’s a brooding, emotionally tormented man who’s sort of forced into doing the right thing most of the time. What he goes through in this book doesn’t make him any more cheerful, that’s for sure. The story takes place near a mountain range called the Sombras that figures in some of DeRosso’s other books. The name certainly fits because there’s a somber air that hangs over THE DARK BRAND. And the title itself is an indication of the mood here, of course. Actually, THE DARK BRAND is regarded as one of DeRosso’s less bleak books, which tells you how grim he can sometimes be.

Fittingly, DeRosso writes in a spare, fast-moving style, and there are some excellent twists in the plot here, the sort that I should have seen coming but didn’t. His work has echoes of Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis, but what his books most remind me of are the noir Westerns of Ed Gorman. If you like any of those writers, I highly recommend that you pick up THE DARK BRAND or any of DeRosso’s other novels or short story collections.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on June 13, 2008. THE DARK BRAND is still available on Amazon in an e-book edition and is well worth reading.)

Review: The Deadly Combo - Jack Webb

When I started reading hardboiled mysteries in junior high, I thought Jack Webb, author of the series featuring priest/detective duo Father Joseph Shanley and Sammy Golden, was the same guy as Jack Webb the star of DRAGNET (and some excellent movies like PETE KELLY’S BLUES and -30-, but I hadn’t seen those yet). It didn’t take long to figure out that Webb the novelist was a totally different person. I read a few of his novels, which were easy to find in those days in their Signet paperback reprint editions, and remember enjoying them. But I hadn’t read anything else by him, as far as I recall, in the 50+ years since then.

Until Stark House recently reprinted two of Webb’s stand-alone novels in a handsome double volume, THE DEADLY COMBO and ONE FOR MY DAME. I started with THE DEADLY COMBO, originally published as half of an Ace Double mystery under Webb’s John Farr pseudonym. The novel opens with the discovery of a corpse in the alley behind a Los Angeles jazz club. The victim is a former jazz musician named Dandy Mullens. The cop who catches the case is Mac Stewart, a big, ugly, former prizefighter who happens to be a jazz aficionado himself and a friend of the murdered man. Mac’s quest to catch Dandy’s killer reminded me a little of how Mike Hammer often set out to avenge the murder of a friend.

Mac’s investigation takes him through a series of jazz clubs, strip joints, and fancy apartments, from the sleazy and sordid to the high class (but perhaps no less sordid). It seems there’s a legend in the jazz world that Dandy owned a solid gold trumpet, given to him as a publicity stunt decades earlier when he was one of the top musicians in the world, rather than the washed-up bum he was when he was killed. Somebody wanted that trumpet bad enough to kill for it, Mac believes, but at the same time, he happens to know that the whole story is a myth. Or is it? Halfway through this novel, the plot takes an abrupt but believable twist, and things that seemed apparent suddenly aren’t. Mac will have a lot to untangle to find the killer, if he lives long enough himself.

THE DEADLY COMBO is both a fast-paced, violent, hardboiled mystery and a love letter to jazz music, all at the same time. Mac Stewart is a great character, a bit of an intellectual as well as a tough, hard-nosed cop. Webb’s style in this novel is the prose equivalent of jazz, swooping and swirling almost into a stream-of-consciousness improvisation at times. It takes a little getting used to, but it works and is very effective. The plot winds up almost as dense and convoluted as a Ross Macdonald novel, but I think it all makes sense in the end.

What I know for certain is that I raced through THE DEADLY COMBO and really enjoyed it. I stayed up later than I normally do to finish it, and that takes a pretty compelling book at my age. The Stark House double volume, complete with a top-notch introduction by Nicholas Litchfield, is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon. I’ll be reading ONE FOR MY DAME soon.

Review: Rails Into Hell - Brent Towns

I enjoy railroad yarns, especially ones featuring railroad detectives, so the Faraday series is a natural for me as both writer and reader. I’m strictly a reader on the latest novel in the series to be released, RAILS INTO HELL by Brent Towns.

The thread that ties these books together is Faraday Security Services, owned by Matthew Faraday, a Pinkerton-like detective agency that works only for the railroads. Other than that, the books are largely stand-alones featuring different Faraday agents as the protagonists. In RAILS INTO HELL, Jack Quade has a reputation as a gunslinger for hire, and at one time that’s exactly what he was, after clashing with his rancher father and leaving home. For the past several years, however, he’s been working as an undercover Faraday agent while maintaining his reputation as a fast gun.

The murder of a surveyor who’s laying out the route for a spur line brings Quade back to his old stomping grounds, where he discovers that a range war is brewing between his father and a rich man who has moved in and started gobbling up all the smaller spreads in the area. Quade has to juggle both problems and try to find out if they might be connected, while at the same time dealing with complications involving a couple of beautiful women. And then there are the continued attempts on his life, one of which might just prove successful before he can untangle the dangerous threads of this assignment.

Towns provides a lot of genuinely surprising plot twists in this novel, along with plenty of action told in an effectively gritty style. RAILS INTO HELL reminded me of the great hardboiled Westerns published by Gold Medal, Ace, and Dell in the Fifties and Sixties. It’s well-written and fast-paced, and I hope there’ll be more Faraday novels in the future. In the meantime, this one from Wolfpack Publishing is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions, and if you’re a fan of tough-minded Western novels, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, September 1939

I think this is a Tom Lovell cover on this issue of DETECTIVE TALES, but I'm not absolutely certain. I am certain, though, that there's a great lineup of authors in these pages: Norbert Davis, Cleve F. Adams, Wyatt Blassingame, William B. Rainey (also Wyatt Blassingame), Emile C. Tepperman, Philip Ketchum, William R. Cox, Stewart Sterling, and Ray Cummings. Every one of those guys was a prolific, top-notch pulpster, and I'm sure this was a well-above average issue. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Ace High Stories, February 1954

WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES was one of the last Western pulps from Popular Publications and managed only six issues in 1953 and 1954. It's not to be confused with ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, which was published by Clayton and then Dell from 1921 to 1935, then from 1936 to 1951 by Popular Publications, where it was known variously as ACE-HIGH WESTERN MAGAZINE, ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, and ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES. WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES, which we're concerned with today, lacks the hyphen in the title. Maybe Popular was trying to cash in on some nostalgia for the earlier versions when they brought back a similar title in '53-'54, or maybe they just had a lot of stories in inventory they needed to burn off. I don't think the cover of this issue is a particularly good one, but it is another example of the iconic "poker game interrupted by a fight" scene that's so common on Western pulps. There are actually some really good authors in this issue: Gordon D. Shirreffs, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Roe Richmond, Bruce Cassiday, and house-names Lance Kermit and David Crewe. I suspect Bouma wrote one or both of those house-name yarns, but that's just a guess on my part. Really, the authors could be almost anybody. I don't own this issue, and I don't recall ever seeing any issues of WESTERN ACE HIGH STORIES. That's a lineup of authors worth reading, though. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Day of the Moon - Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann

As far as I can tell, DAY OF THE MOON has been published in only two editions, a 1983 British hardback from Robert Hale and a 1993 paperback reprint from Carroll & Graf. (No longer true. It's available in an e-book edition on Amazon.) It’s a dandy little crime thriller, tightly plotted as you’d expect from a couple of old pros like Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann and written in terse, hardboiled prose that’s a joy to read.

Flagg (we’re never told his first name) is a troubleshooter for the mob, here known as the Organization. He’s headquartered in San Francisco. As the book opens, he’s looking for the loot from an armored car robbery which has disappeared following some sort of double-cross that left the planner of the heist dead. That job isn’t the only one Flagg has on his plate, though. He’s also investigating a series of hijackings involving trucks and merchandise owned by the Organization, including some moonshining equipment. That ties in with Flagg’s third assignment, which is to find the bootlegger who’s trying to muscle in on the Organization’s illegal liquor operation in the Pacific Northwest. Not surprisingly, the armored car robbery winds up being connected to Flagg’s other two jobs as well.

Flagg reminds me a lot of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker in his low-key professionalism and also in the fact that the reader winds up rooting for him despite the fact that he’s a criminal. He actually comes across as a private eye of sorts, except his only client is the Organization. He shies away from violence, although he’s plenty tough when he has to be, and prefers to rely on his brain rather than a gun. He needs both, though, to untangle this complicated plot. I’m not aware of any other books or stories featuring Flagg and don’t know if he was intended to be a series character, but he certainly could have been. DAY OF THE MOON is a fine, enjoyable novel. One of the reviews quoted on the cover of the paperback refers to it as a “good, old-fashioned page-turner”, and that’s exactly what it is.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 23, 2008. A few days later, on May 26, Bill Pronzini provided more information about the book's background.)

"You're right that Flagg was intended to be a series character. The novel was originally sold to Leisure here, but never published because of a change of regime and policy; Wallmann and I were lucky to sell it to Hale in the U.K. And to have Carroll & Graf do a U.S. mass market edition, all thanks to Ed G. (Ed Gorman)

Incidentally, MOON is composed of three novelettes, two from AHMM, one from MSMM, that we bridged together and revised into the novel format. There's one other Flagg novelette from AHMM that we planned to use as the basis for a second novel and that has never been reprinted or collected."

(And here's the listing of the original Flagg stories from the Fictionmags Index.)

Day of the Moon, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 1970, as by William Jeffrey
Murder Is No Man’s Friend, (ss) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine November 1970, as by William Jeffrey
The Ten Million Dollar Hijack, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January 1972, as by William Jeffrey
The Island, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1972, as by William Jeffrey

(I've met both Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann, one time each, on separate occasions. I'm sure some of you know them much better than I do. I found them to be fine fellows and excellent writers. In fact, I need to read more by both of them. In the meantime, I still highly recommend this novel.)

Review: Shootout at Hellyer's Creek - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

SHOOTOUT AT HELLYER’S CREEK, recently reprinted in a new edition that’s available in e-book and paperback on Amazon, is the first novel in the Joshua Dillard series by one of my favorite Western writers, Chap O’Keefe (who is actually veteran author and editor Keith Chapman, of course).

In this novel, originally published in 1994 as a Black Horse Western by Robert Hale Ltd. in England, a stagecoach is on its way to the Arizona settlement of Hellyer’s Creek carrying three passengers and a very special cargo: $50,000 intended for the vault of the bank in Hellyer’s Creek. The passengers are a special agent for Wells, Fargo guarding the money, an English actress who’s married to the owner of the biggest saloon and gambling den in the settlement, and Clement P. Conway, a bespectacled Easterner better known as Nate Ironhorn, the author of dozens of popular Western dime novels who wants to interview the legendary lawman who’s currently the marshal of Hellyer’s Creek.

Not surprisingly, the stagecoach is ambushed by outlaws after the loot, which involves the rider who has been trailing the stage: Joshua Dillard, a former Pinkerton operative who is now a freelance gun for hire. Joshua is on a mission of his own, which he interrupts to save the passengers and help them escape from the bandits, which also brings into the story the tomboyish but beautiful redheaded daughter of a drunk who operates the next way station along the stage line. Eventually, everybody winds up in Hellyer’s Creek, trying to navigate and survive a twisty plot rife with corruption, betrayal, and violence.

As always, Chapman weaves together the various strands of his story with great skill and keeps the reader flipping the pages, eager to find out what’s going to happen next. The characters are colorful, downright eccentric in some cases, and interesting. Joshua Dillard, tough and smart but haunted by grief from a tragedy in his past, is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist.

As an added bonus in this book, Chapman includes an essay about the writing and original publication of this novel, including the fact that it wasn’t intended to be the first book in a series, but Joshua was too good a character not to bring back. Likewise, the young redheaded tomboy is a direct forerunner of Misfit Lil, the star of several later novels by Chapman and also a favorite of mine.

If you enjoy traditional Western novels that are fast-moving, full of action, and just a little offbeat, I give SHOOTOUT AT HELLYER’S CREEK a high recommendation, along with all the other Chap O’Keefe novels. I love a book with a distinctive, entertaining voice, and Keith Chapman always delivers.

#430

I just sent in my 430th novel. I used to confine posts like this to more significant milestones, but hey, at my age, every milestone is a significant one. My goal is to make it to 450 novels, which I believe is within reach barring any of the proverbial unforeseen circumstances. I got a good start on #431 while Livia was editing #430, so I had best get back to it.