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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Spring 1949

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

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Rangeland Sweethearts, October 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Longhorn Stampede - Philip Ketchum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Bullet Garden - Stephen Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, July 1935

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

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

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

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

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

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

Review: Overboard - George F. Worts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It absolutely is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, May 1938

Herbert Morton Stoops painted all different sorts of covers for BLUE BOOK, including action-packed scenes like this one. While some are better than others, of course, he was a great cover artist and I've never seen one I didn't like. The fiction in BLUE BOOK was just as consistent as the covers. Of course, it helps when you have three stories by H. Bedford-Jones in an issue. In this case, there's one under his own name, one with his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Also on hand are adventure pulp stalwarts Fulton Grant, Leland Jamieson, Warren Hastings Miller, William J. Makin (with a Red Wolf of Arabia story), William L. Chester (with an installment of a Kioga serial), and lesser-known writers Carl Cole and C.M. Chapin. This is the only story by Carl Cole listed in the Fictionmags Index. Who knows, maybe he was H. Bedford-Jones, too. You can't rule it out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, First August Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. The cover art is by Clarence Doore. His signature is visible in the lower left corner. It’s not one of Doore’s best covers, in my opinion, but it’s certainly not bad.

Giff Cheshire is a hit-or-miss author for me. Most of what I’ve read by him has been entertaining but a little bit too much on the bland side for my taste. Some of his stories are more hardboiled and are pretty good. His novella that leads off this issue, “Torment Trail”, is very hardboiled and is an excellent yarn. The protagonist, Cleve Gantry (great name for a Western hero) is partners in a hardscrabble ranch with young wastrel Nat Cole (maybe not as good a name, since Nat “King” Cole, one of my father’s favorite singers, was already very popular by the mid-Fifties). Cole pulls a robbery and frames Gantry for it. Gantry breaks out of jail and sets out to track down Cole, partially to clear his name but mostly because he wants to kill the no-good hombre. Gantry’s vengeance quest is complicated, though, by Cole’s beautiful sister and some other hardcases who are after the loot from the robbery. Set mostly in the desert—and Cheshire makes good use of that setting—this is a fast-moving, suspenseful story with some good action scenes, a fine protagonist, and a very gritty tone. I really enjoyed “Torment Trail”, which is easily the best thing I’ve ever read by Cheshire.

D.S. Halacy Jr. wrote several dozen Western and detective stories for the pulps. I’d read one story by him in the past and thought it was okay but nothing more than that. His story in this issue, “The Five Hundred Dollar Shot” is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who is willing to go to any lengths to provide for his family, even if it means going after a wanted outlaw for the reward. This is a pretty bleak story with a mostly unlikable protagonist, but it doesn’t turn out exactly like you might expect and that’s usually a good thing. So it’s nothing special, but it is a readable yarn.

“Bachelor Trouble” is by Lewis Chadwick, who wrote only half a dozen Western stories, all published in 1955 and 1956. An old rancher decides that one of the cowboys who works for him is going to marry his daughter, but the cowboy doesn’t go along with that idea. That’s all there is to the story, but it’s decently written and everything is resolved in a pleasant enough manner.

James Clyde Harper was reasonably prolific, turning out approximately 50 stories in a career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Fifties. But I didn’t care for his story “The Phantom Rifle” in this issue. It’s a mystery in which a group of settlers with a wagon train try to start a town, only to have several of their number murdered by a mysterious rifleman. The writing struck me as clumsy, and the motivation for the plot just wasn’t believable considering the place and time. This one is a clear miss as far as I’m concerned.

W.W. Hartwig published only three stories, all in RANCH ROMANCES. “The Bride’s Father” in this issue is the last of them. It’s a pure romance yarn about a young cowboy courting the daughter of a railroad tycoon. This is a well-written story with good characters, and although I thought the author could have done a little more with it, I liked it quite a bit.

Alice Axtell was the author of about thirty stories, all of them in RANCH ROMANCES in the Forties and Fifties. Her story “Big Man” is about the feud between a big rancher and the owner of a smaller spread. Their clash takes some nasty turns, and there’s more riding on it for the little rancher than just his business. The girl he wants to marry is watching to see how he handles this problem. This is another story that’s pure romance, but it’s well-written and I enjoyed it.

There are also installments of two serials, “Longhorn Stampede” by Philip Ketchum and “The Vengeance Riders” by Jack Barton, who was really Joseph Chadwick. Ketchum and Chadwick were both fine writers and I’m sure these are good stories, but as I’ve mentioned before, I have the novel version of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS and will get around to reading it one of these days, and I may have a copy of LONGHORN STAMPEDE, too. If I don't, there's a good chance I will have in the reasonably near future.

Rounding out the issue are the usual features—Western movie news, pen pals, astrology—and a somewhat Western-themed crossword puzzle completely filled out in pencil by one of the previous owners of this copy. Only a couple of erasures, too, so a pretty good job. Somehow, things like this make me feel a closer kinship to the person who owned this one originally. I can just imagine her—or him, RANCH ROMANCES is bound to have had some male readers, too—sitting at a kitchen table in 1955, working the crossword puzzle after a long day. That could be all wrong, of course, I have no way of knowing, but it’s an image I find appealing.

Overall, this is a fairly solid issue of RANCH ROMANCES. There’s only one outstanding story, but the Cheshire novella is really good and all the other stories except the one I didn’t like are well-written and entertaining, if not particularly memorable. If you have a copy, it’s worth reading. You might even want to do the crossword puzzle if somebody hasn’t beaten you to it. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Suitable for Framing - James Atlee Phillips

Like last week’s THE FAST BUCK, James Atlee Phillips’s novel SUITABLE FOR FRAMING concerns treasures looted during World War II. That’s where the similarities end, though. In SUITABLE FOR FRAMING, the things everybody is after are fabulously valuable paintings, rather than jewels. And SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is much better written than THE FAST BUCK.

The narrator in this novel is Jesse Barker, a journalist who gets finagled into joining a scheme to smuggle some paintings out of France following World War II and sell them to a Mexican general Barker happens to know. Most of the book takes place in the Mexican mountain town of Hidalgo, and Phillips paints a very vivid picture of this setting. As anybody who has read very much in this field will expect, the plot falls apart and becomes a maze of double-crosses, and of course there’s a beautiful woman involved, and Barker gets hit on the head and knocked out several times. Plus you get a colorfully eccentric (and really evil) villain, Mexican wrestlers, spooky scenes set in graveyards, and a considerable amount of action.

I’ve always liked Phillips’ novels about espionage agent Joe Gall, which he wrote under the name Philip Atlee, although the plots in them sometimes get so complicated that I can’t keep up with them. I also really like his early novel PAGODA, which introduces Joe Gall when Gall was still a pilot, rather than a spy. SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is a little lighter weight than those books but shares many of their virtues: crisp prose, good descriptions, and hardboiled action. One thing that annoyed me was Phillips’ habit of paraphrasing what his characters are saying, rather than just quoting the dialogue, but I sort of got used to that technique after a while. As a rule, though, I don’t like that. I liked the book overall, though, and I think if you’ve read and enjoyed Phillips’ other novels, you’ll enjoy this one, too.

(This post first appeared on October 3, 2008.)

Review: Hell Range in Texas - J.E. Grinstead

Recently I read some pulp stories by J.E. Grinstead that I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up a novel by him and give it a try. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is a 1958 paperback from Avon that was published originally under the title LAW OF THE TRAIL as a 1940 hardback by Dodge Publishing, one of the lending library publishers. This is probably an expansion of Grinstead’s novella “The Law of the Trail Herd”, which appeared in the September 1926 issue of the pulp THE FRONTIER. The Avon paperback I read (that’s my copy in the scan) says that it’s revised, but I don’t know what that revision consisted of. It’s possible Grinstead just went back to the pulp version after adding material to make it longer for the hardback edition. That’s pure speculation on my part, however, just the sort of thing that makes sense to me.

This story takes place in Texas (of course) in the days following the Civil War when the cattle industry is just getting started in the state and herds have started being driven up the trails through Indian Territory to the railhead in Kansas. The setting is a little unusual, though, in that the action takes place along the Little River in central Texas, rather than in West or South Texas like most Westerns. I’ve driven across the bridge over the Little River just south of Cameron, Texas, many times, and I’ve always thought it was a scenic stream and would make a good setting for a Western. That’s what Grinstead has done.

Most trail bosses in Western fiction are the protagonists, or at least sympathetic characters, but not Shag Sanders in this novel. He’s the bad guy in the first half of the book, stealing cattle from local ranchers as he heads north and buying rustled stock cheaply from outlaws. Old cattleman Montgomery Jackson (who, just as you suspect, has a beautiful daughter) is determined to put a stop to this, leading to a gun battle with Sanders and his crew shooting it out with the cowboys from Jackson’s spread.

However, one of Sanders’ men, young and gun-handy Frank Carleton, goes over to the other side and throws in with Jackson and his bunch, becoming a staunch ally in Jackson’s clash with a rival rancher who works with the crooked trail drivers. Matters are complicated by the fact that Jackson’s beautiful daughter is supposed to marry the rival rancher’s son.

You might also suspect that all this is going to lead up to a big showdown, and you’d be right. Along the way, Grinstead gives us plenty of colorful characters and Old West dialogue without getting too heavy-handed about it.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, but my memory was playing tricks on me and I was absolutely wrong about that. However, he was a newspaperman in Texas in the early 20th Century, owning and publishing the newspaper in Kerrville, Texas, a hundred miles or so southwest of where this novel is set, and he was also involved in politics. No doubt he knew quite a few old cattlemen who had been around during the era about which he wrote in his fiction. Because of that, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Grinstead’s work that I enjoy.

However, based on this novel, he may be one of those writers who’s better at shorter lengths. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is pretty slowly paced, and there’s not as much action as there might have been. The action that’s there is sometimes not very well-written, either. Late in the book, there’s a long chase scene/gun battle that really drags and is hard to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s always a possibility.

I give this novel thumbs-up on the setting, characters, and dialogue but found it disappointing because it didn’t capture my interest and drag me along in the story the way I like for fiction to do. I’ll certainly continue to read Grinstead’s stories when I come across one in a Western pulp, and I’ll probably enjoy them. I’ll even check my paperback shelves sometime and see if I have any more of his novels. But I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Cariboo Trail (1950)

You remember in BLAZING SADDLES when Bart says to the townspeople of Rock Ridge, “You’d do it for Randolph Scott,” and the townspeople take off their hats, put their hands over their hearts, and respond in hushed reverence, “Randolph Scott!” Well, I’m just like those settlers. I love Randolph Scott movies.

Which is why I was surprised when I came across one that I don’t recall ever hearing of, let alone watching. THE CARIBOO TRAIL was released in 1950 and finds Scott playing Montana rancher Jim Redfern, who drives a trail herd into Canada with his partner Mike Evans (played by Bill Williams, who, a few years later, would star in the TV show THE ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON, one of my early favorites). Redfern wants to establish a ranch and open up Canada to the beef industry, but Evans is more interested in hunting for gold. They run into an old prospector known as Grizzly (the immortal George “Gabby” Hayes) but also encounter some hardcases (Jim Davis and Douglas Kennedy among them) working for a villainous town boss played by Victor Jory. The only one in town who doesn’t seem to be under Jory’s thumb is a beautiful saloon owner played by Karin Booth.

You’ve all see enough Westerns to know how this set-up is going to play out. There’s nothing in the workmanlike script by Frank Gruber (another old favorite of mine) that’s going to surprise you, but it’s well-constructed and provides plenty of opportunities for action as well as a little romance and pathos, the latter provided by a fine performance from Bill Williams, whose character loses an arm due to injuries suffered in a stampede and become embittered. Scott is as stalwart and likable as ever, and I’ll watch and enjoy Gabby Hayes in anything. He’s my all-time favorite Western sidekick, and this was his final movie. Victor Jory is suitably smarmy and evil, and a very young Dale Robertson shows up as a cowboy.

Many of the reviews of this movie on IMDB complain about the cheap Cinecolor process and the photography, and the quality is pretty inconsistent. However, the movie doesn’t look bad, and parts of it actually look pretty good. There’s some spectacular scenery. Its biggest flaw, as far as I’m concerned, is a terribly staged fight scene between Scott and Kennedy in which none of the so-called punches are even remotely convincing. I’m actually surprised they let the scene go through like that. But that’s an aberration and the rest of the action is fine.

Overall, THE CARIBOO TRAIL is a pretty minor film, I suppose, but it has its moments that worked really well for me and reminded me of why I love Westerns so much. If you’re a Randolph Scott and/or Gabby Hayes fan, it’s certainly worth watching.

Review: Crown Vic 2: If I Were a Rich Man - Lee Goldberg

CROWN VIC 2: IF I WERE A RICH MAN is the second volume in Lee Goldberg’s new series featuring ex-con and former professional car thief Ray Boyd. Ray wanders the country driving an old Crown Victoria interceptor that’s been decommissioned as a police car, making money when and how he can—often, but not always, illegally—and looking for just enough adventure and excitement to keep life interesting.

In this novella, Ray is on the hunt for a fortune in diamonds stolen in a robbery years earlier. He was in prison with one of the men who pulled off the heist. Legend has it that the guy hid the gems somewhere, and they’ve never been found. The problem is that the thief is an older man, he’s been released from prison, and he’s now in an assisted living center, suffering from dementia, so he may not even remember where he cached the diamonds. But if he does, Ray is going to find them and get his hands on them himself.

However, Ray’s plans are complicated by a beautiful young woman and a little matter of blackmail that ultimately may endanger his life.

Goldberg really keeps things racing along in this yarn. There are a couple of twists I should have seen coming but didn’t, and that’s a tribute to Goldberg’s skill in maintaining a breakneck pace. And Ray Boyd continues to be a fascinating character. He’s not a nice guy, at all. He reminds me a little of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker, except that Parker has some sort of moral compass that Ray seems to lack completely. In fact, this guy is so terrible you have to ask yourself how anybody could make him the protagonist of a series. But despite that, in the end you find yourself rooting for Ray to succeed, or at least I do. And that’s a tribute to Goldberg’s talent, too.

I don’t know if there are more Ray Boyd stories in the works, but I hope so. For now, CROWN VIC 2: IF I WERE A RICH MAN is available in e-book and paperback editions. I really enjoyed it, and if you like hardboiled crime yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, November 1937

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, but it's intriguing. And they definitely want you to that there's a Charlie Chan story in this issue, since it's mentioned twice. However (and that's a big however), it's not a lost tale by Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers, who died four years earlier in 1933. No, this story featuring Charlie Chan was written by journeyman pulpster Edward Churchill. Now, I usually enjoy Churchill's work and this may well be a good story, but I have to wonder if publisher Ned Pines cut a deal with Biggers' estate to publish a new Chan story, or if he just did it anyway. We'll probably never know. At any rate, it's the only non-Biggers entry in the series until the 1970s, when several different authors wrote Chan stories for CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Which, come to think of it, was owned and published by Leo Margulies, who worked as editorial director for Ned Pines. Hmmm. Anyway, elsewhere in this issue are stories by T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite Western writers who also did mysteries and detective yarns, Robert Sidney Bowen, and Ray Cummings. That's a talented bunch.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, December 1934

WESTERN ACES usually had good covers, like this one by Rafael DeSoto that appeared on the magazine's second issue. The authors inside are a mixture of the well-known and the obscure. L.L. Foreman, Philip Ketchum (writing as Carl McK. Saunders), Orlando Rigoni, Larry A. Harris, and Clyde A. Warden (writing as Les Rivers) were all prolific, solid Western pulpsters. Eugene R. Dutcher, Leon V. Almirall, and Francis P. Verzani are less well-remembered, but that doesn't mean their stories aren't good. I don't own this issue, but that cover sure would have caught my eye if I'd been browsing the newsstand back in 1934. If I'd had a spare dime, there's a good chance I would have bought it.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Fast Buck - Ross Laurence

THE FAST BUCK is one of those books that drops you right down in the middle of the action and lets you catch up as you go along. Joe Chicagano, also known as Joe Chicago, is a down-on-his-luck prizefighter who gets involved with the Mob following World War II. He’s not much more successful as a hood than he was as a boxer, and as this novel opens, he’s regaining consciousness on the floorboard of a car being driven by a beautiful woman he calls Legs, because that’s all he can see of her as he comes to. He’s been beaten up and as the mysterious woman shoves him out of the car into the gutter, all he knows for sure is that somebody stole ten thousand dollars from him, and he’s going to get it back no matter what it takes.

Then he discovers that the police think he died in a fiery car crash the night before. When he starts trying to figure out what happened to him and find out who took his money, people he talks to have a habit of being murdered in circumstances that make the cops think he’s the killer. Joe’s not the smartest guy in the world and he knows it, but he’s extremely stubborn – and he wants his money back.

From here the author really piles on the complications, packing several competing groups of mobsters, stolen gems that were looted during World War II, numerous murders, boxers, and actors into not much more than 40,000 words, if that. The headlong pace of this book is its real strength, along with the occasional good line and some vividly sordid descriptions of various lowlifes and their environment.

Don’t mistake this for some sort of lost classic, though. It’s not. The writing, for the most part, is too unpolished and awkward for that. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Ross Laurence wrote only this one book. I wondered at first if the name was a pseudonym for an author better known under some other byline, but I don’t think so. THE FAST BUCK really reads like a first novel, with flashes of real talent struggling to get out through the amateurish writing. If anyone knows more about the author, I’d be really interested to hear it. I wouldn’t rush out to find a copy of this book, but if you run across it, it’s worth reading for the unrealized potential you can see in the author, if for no other reason.

(Reaching all the way back to September 26, 2008, when this post first appeared in a somewhat different form. It doesn't seem like it's been nearly 17 years since I read that book.)

49 Years Ago Today

Review: The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume Five - Will Murray

Will Murray is back with the fifth volume of stories in his series The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. While I consider myself a Holmes fan and have been for more than 60 years, there is such a vast amount of Holmes pastiche out there that I really haven’t explored the field that much. I never miss these collections by Will Murray, though. They always ring true to the characters and never let me down.

As Murray mentions in his foreword, this volume collects ten of the more traditional Holmes stories he’s written, without any overtly supernatural aspects or crossover appearances from other classic characters. These are straightforward mystery yarns done in grand style. Holmes (with Dr. Watson’s assistance, of course) tackles the intriguing problem of a suit of armor that seems to walk around on its own without any inhabitant, clashes with a new rival who sets himself up as the anti-Holmes and advises criminals on how to get away with their crimes, and deals with a threat from a couple of past cases. He solves several medical mysteries, one of which threatens his own life, and battles with a phantom that haunts the fog-shrouded London streets. Dr. Watson acquits himself well in these cases and proves quite helpful to Holmes more than once.

These are just wonderfully entertaining stories, and I think any Sherlock Holmes fan will enjoy them. This may or may not be the final volume in the Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. Murray has a few more unreprinted Holmes stories but would have to write more to fill out another volume. I can’t help but hope that he does so. In the meantime, this volume is available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions, and I give it a high recommendation. 

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Man From Nevada (1929)

THE MAN FROM NEVADA is another silent Western starring Tom Tyler that was released in 1929, right after THE LAW OF THE PLAINS, which I wrote about last week. Both of those movies are included on a new DVD and Blu-ray release from Undercrank Productions.

Several members of the cast are the same in this one, as are the director (J.P. McGowan), the screenwriter (Sally Winters), and the cinematographer (Hap Depew). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they shot THE LAW OF THE PLAINS one week and THE MAN FROM NEVADA the next week. Tom Tyler plays rancher Jack Carter, whose neighbor is a rather shiftless sodbuster with a beautiful daughter (Natalie Joyce) and three sons, two of whom are scrappy adolescents and the other is a toddler. An evil cattle baron played by Al Ferguson has his eye on the sodbuster’s ranch and plans to get his hands on it in a swindle assisted by his crooked land recorder brother. Stalwart Tom Tyler is having none of that, of course, so the villain and his henchmen (one of them played by legendary stuntman and stunt coordinator Cliff Lyons) frame him for rustling and try to get the sheriff to arrest him. Chases, fistfights, and shootings ensue.

McGowan, who also had an acting role in the previous film, stays behind the camera this time and keeps things charging along in very fine fashion. There’s an excellent stunt early on where Tyler’s character stops a runaway wagon carrying the helpless toddler, and while I couldn’t be absolutely certain, I think he performed it himself. The script stretches credibility every now and then but has some fine dramatic moments and a very satisfying showdown at the end. Tyler has a natural screen presence that allows him to dominate every scene he’s in, and an actor I’m not familiar with, Bill Nolte, does a fine job as the comedy relief sidekick, as he does in the previous film.

This is another fine restoration job from Undercrank Productions with a top-notch new score from Ben Model. Depew’s photography looks great. At one point, I believe THE MAN FROM NEVADA was considered a lost film. I’m glad they found and restored it, because I really enjoyed it. The same outfit has done a set of two silent Tom Mix Westerns. I’ve ordered it from Amazon and look forward to watching them.

Review: Misfit Lil Hides Out - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

Misfit Lil returns in MISFIT LIL HIDES OUT, the fourth book in the excellent series by Chap O’Keefe (Keith Chapman). This one was published originally in hardback by Robert Hale in 2008, reprinted in large print by Ulverscroft in 2009, and now available in e-book and trade paperback editions. I always enjoy a visit with Misfit Lil, and this novel certainly lives up to expectations.

It begins on a rather grim note as a war party of renegade Apaches who have jumped the reservation massacre some settlers. Misfit Lil witnesses this atrocity and is able to help one of the potential victims, the wife of a soldier at the nearby fort, escape with her life.

This trouble brings a couple of obnoxious cavalry officers from back east to the fort. They’re there to take charge of the effort to round up the renegades, but instead, they quickly make enemies of some of the locals, including Lil. When one of them winds up dead, she’s blamed for the murder and has to take off for the badlands with both a sheriff’s posse and the cavalry in pursuit. Lil has to deal not only with those threats but also the Apaches, who are still on the loose and looking for more victims.

Chapman weaves these plot strands together with expert skill, leading to a final showdown that verges on the apocalyptic in its intense action. This is a great scene that also reveals a few surprising twists.

As a bonus, Chapman includes an article about female protagonists in Western fiction. Altogether, it makes for a very entertaining package and another outstanding adventure for the Princess of Pistoleers. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns with a slightly gritty edge, you need to make the acquaintance of Miss Lilian Goodnight.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 10, 1943

This issue of SHORT STORIES is a bit of an oddity in that the cover by A.R. Tilburne doesn't feature a red sun, although there is a blob of red just above the muzzle of that nice-looking 1911. I like the cover quite a bit, even without a red sun. The line-up of authors inside this issue is really strong: H. Bedford-Jones, E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Richardson Pierce, James B. Hendryx, H.S.M. Kemp, and lesser-known Berton F. Cook and Harry Bridge. Hard to go wrong with any issue that includes HB-J, Price, Pierce, and Hendryx.

UPDATE: Yes, I suppose that could be the sun on the left, partially obscured by the foliage, but I didn't take that darker area to be a leaf. I think maybe Tilburne should have made that a little clearer. On the other hand, maybe if I was holding the actual pulp in my hands, it would be obvious. I don't mind admitting when I've missed something. I figured adding this mea culpa might be better than rewriting the whole post.
 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, November 1933

This is a pulp that I own. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover painting is by R. Farrington Elwell, and the Table of Contents lists its name as “Last Stand”. Elwell did a number of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, and they’re pretty good. I read some of the stories in this one, but not all of them.

This issue leads off with the first installment of a serial by Walt Coburn, “Feud Valley”. Coburn is one of my favorite Western authors, but I happen to own a copy of the novel FEUD VALLEY and I intend to read it one of these days, so I skipped this part.

Next up is a story by J.E. Grinstead, another authentic cowboy author who is becoming one of my favorites, too. This one has the odd title “Pudd’n’ Foots”. It’s about a drifting cowpoke with big feet and seemingly no talent for ranch work at all. When he signs on with a new spread, he’s the object of ridicule by most of the crew, although two of the men do take a liking to him. That doesn’t stop them from poking fun at him, too, though. I wasn’t sure about this one—you know I’m not generally a fan of comedy Westerns and that sure seemed to be where this yarn was heading. But then part of the way through it takes a sharp turn into dark territory and follows that up with some dramatic, very well-done action. Funny name or not, I wound up really enjoying “Pudd’n’ Foots” and need to read more by Grinstead.

I tend to dislike animal stories even more than comedy Westerns, so “The Big Bull of Five Rivers” by George Cory Franklin, which has its protagonist an elk, wasn’t really to my taste. I wound up skimming this one.

I feel kind of bad about it, but “Shanty Loses a Battle” by Norrell Gregory suffered the same fate. This lighthearted story is about a couple of cowboys trying to raise money so that an old ranch woman can build a new house. I had so much trouble working up much interest in it that I wound up losing track of the plot. This is another one that’s just not for me.

I’m just not having much luck with Western pulps these days, am I? But next up in this one is “Muzzle Flame”, a novelette by the usually dependable J. Allan Dunn. No comedy here, as it starts out (consider yourself warned) with some brutal action, including the range hog villain callously killing a dog. With my soft spot for dogs, I almost said, “Nope, that’s it”, but I kept reading. The fight is over water rights in this one, and Dunn manipulates the plot in really expert fashion, heaping up trouble on his protagonist until you wonder how the poor guy is ever going to get out of it, but at the same time having things proceed in a logical, believable way. And the action scenes are top-notch. I wish the bad guy had missed the dog and sent it scurrying off howling, but other than that, this is a really, really good story.

Finally, we have “Picketwire Drills a Well”, one in a series of tall tales narrated by a cowboy known as Picketwire Pete. Pete has developed a breed of giant cattle, you see, big enough to knock a railroad car off the tracks by rubbing against it, and finding water for his herd of giant cattle is a problem because they can drink a river dry in a matter of minutes . . . If you’re thinking this sounds like a Pecos Bill yarn, you’re right. I don’t know if those folk tales had any influence on author J.W. Triplett, but it certainly seems like they might have. This is another one where I didn’t make it to the end.

Even though I’ve complained about some of the stories, this issue is still a vast improvement over that issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN I read last week. I’m confident that the Coburn serial is good, and the stories by Grinstead and Dunn are both very good. Even the stories I didn’t like and didn’t finish seem to be competently written and other readers might enjoy them a lot more than I did. They’re just not the sort of yarns that resonate with me. If you happen to have this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, don’t hesitate to give it a try. I’m glad I read what I did out of it.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Tavern - Orrie Hitt

THE TAVERN was published in 1966, very late in Orrie Hitt's career. It also has some personal meaning to me, because I had a copy of this one before the fire but never got around to reading it. It may have been the only Orrie Hitt novel I owned at that time. I might have had one more, but I can’t remember for sure. For some reason, copies of his books just never showed up in the used bookstores around here.

This one revisits many of Hitt’s usual themes but also has some interesting differences. The protagonist is Hal Mason, a young man just out of high school who goes to work as a bartender at Mike’s Place, a rundown tavern just over the county line from the county where Hal and his friends live. You see, the drinking age in the county where Hal lives is 21, while in the next county, where Mike’s is located, it’s 18. So naturally, all the kids go across the line to Mike’s to get drunk. As usual in a Hitt novel, that’s not the only line they cross.

Hal’s youth and relative inexperience set him apart from most of Hitt’s protagonists, but he’s still worldly enough to be juggling the standard three women: Wanda, the good girl (one of many Wandas in Hitt novels); Gert, the slut with a good heart; and Tina, the stripper who’s married to Mike, the owner of the tavern. Of the three, Hal falls hardest for Tina, who is, of course, exactly the one he shouldn’t get involved with. Eventually, blackmail and murder rear their ugly heads.

Hitt has done all this many times before in his books, but the character of Hal makes THE TAVERN an interesting novel. He considers himself a heel-in-training, so to speak, but despite a few slips, he’s such a decent kid at heart that this book might almost be titled ANDY HARDY GETS LAID. Which brings up another point: other than the blonde’s outfit on the cover and the fact that Hal drives a Renault, there’s no sense that this book is set in the Swinging Sixties. It might as well take place in the Forties or Fifties, which gives it a certain nostalgic charm.

Other than an ending that seems a little rushed, as if Hitt realized he’d made his word count, THE TAVERN is a pretty good book, very readable and fast-paced. At this point, Hitt didn’t have many books left in him – his final novel was published in 1967 – and he seems to have mellowed slightly, but this novel still has plenty of drive to it. If you run across a copy, I recommend that you grab it. THE TAVERN is well worth reading, and I’m glad I replaced the copy I lost and finally read it.

(It doesn't seem like I've been reading Orrie Hitt novels for more than 15 years, but there's indisputable proof of that since this post first appeared in a somewhat different form on August 12, 2010. It's pretty clear that I'd been a Hitt fan for a while when it appeared, too. The photo below appeared the next day, August 13, 2010, with a link to a newspaper article about Hitt that doesn't seem to be available anymore. I love the picture, though. I look at it, and I just can't help liking the guy. It's time to read something else by him. THE TAVERN isn't currently in print, but plenty of his other novels are.)