A Rough Edges Rerun Review: No Wings on a Cop - Cleve F. Adams (and Robert Leslie Bellem)

Like SHADY LADY and CONTRABAND, NO WINGS ON A COP is another novel published under Cleve F. Adams’s name that was actually expanded by Robert Leslie Bellem from an Adams pulp story into a novel. Bellem and Adams were good friends, and I seem to recall reading that Bellem wrote those novels as a favor to Adams’s widow. Of course, I imagine Bellem got a cut of the money, too. If I’m wrong about any of that, I hope someone who knows more about the situation will correct me. Also, I’m not sure which Adams story served as the basis for this book. It might be “Clean Sweep”, from the August 24, 1940 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, which, according to the Fictionmags Index, features police lieutenant John J. Shannon, the hero of NO WINGS ON A COP. If anyone knows for sure, again please let us know in the comments.

With that bit of background out of the way, how is NO WINGS ON A COP as a novel? Pretty darned good, that’s what it is. When the story opens, Lt. Shannon’s boss and good friend, Captain Grady, has already been murdered, and the killing has been pinned on gambler Floyd Duquesne, who evidently had been paying off Grady for protection. Shannon doesn’t believe that his friend was crooked, of course, and sets out to find the real killer. Almost as soon as he begins his investigation, though, somebody plants a bomb in his car. Shannon survives the explosion, but his left arm is broken, so for the rest of the book he’s going around with his arm in a cast and a sling, which proves pretty inconvenient at times but ultimately comes in handy on at least one occasion.

All the action in the book takes place in less than twenty-four hours, and it’s a whirlwind pace, as you might expect. Shannon clashes with the acting chief of police (the regular chief is out of town), gets kicked off the force, gets hit on the head and knocked out, trades banter with his girlfriend, who’s a beautiful model, has a couple of shootouts with hired killers, has a beautiful redheaded stripper try to seduce him, and runs up against an assortment of crooked cops, corrupt politicians, big-time gamblers, and dangerous hoodlums. It’s all great fun, with a complex plot that Shannon finally sorts out at the end. I’ve been reading this sort of hardboiled detective novel for more than forty years now and still get a big kick out of a good one, which NO WINGS ON A COP certainly is.

Bellem’s writing is as smooth and fast and enjoyable as ever, and knowing the background of the book’s authorship gives it an added level of humor. There’s a mention of a cab driver reading an issue of the DAN TURNER, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE comic book, some of the characters sit around and drink Vat 69, Turner’s favorite hooch, and Bellem even writes himself into the book as a character, bank officer Robert B. Leslie: “The guy was a middle-aged man with slightly wavy hair, a thickening middle and a mustache of which he seemed inordinately vain.” Although Adams might have been responsible for some of that in the original story, I don’t know. He and Bellem were friends, after all.

NO WINGS ON A COP was originally published by Handi-Books in 1950 and later reprinted by Harlequin. As far as I know, it’s been out of print for more than fifty years now, and it ought to be a prime candidate for reprinting by one of the small presses. This is one of those books that sat on my shelves for years without me getting around to reading it, then was lost in the fire. I replaced it not long ago and decided that I’d better get it read. I’m glad I did. Highly recommended.

(This post appeared originally on April 16, 2010. Since that time, NO WINGS ON A COP still hasn't been reprinted. One of these days . . .)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: I'll Love You - Joe Sample

Man, this is really a restful, relaxing song. Just what I need on a night like this. 

Review: Rancho Bravo #1: Calhoon - Thorne Douglas (Ben Haas)

Last week I reran a review of a Ben Haas novel from some years back, and that put me in the mood to read another Western by him. For decades, I’ve been meaning to read his Rancho Bravo novels, a five-book series published by Fawcett in the Seventies under the pseudonym Thorne Douglas. I know an omen when I see one, so I dug out my copy of CALHOON, the first book in the series.

Lucius Calhoon comes to Texas right after the Civil War. A former Confederate cavalry captain, he’s lost the plantation he owned in South Carolina and also lost his right hand to torture he was subjected to in a Yankee prison camp. The man responsible for that torture was a young Union officer named Gordon Weymouth. Weymouth is supposed to be in Texas, at a town in the South Texas brush country along the Nueces River. Unlike many former Confederates, Calhoon doesn’t head for Texas to make a fresh start. He’s there for one reason and one reason only: to kill Gordon Weymouth.

And of course, things don’t work out that way. Calhoon rescues a former slave from a lynching attempt and befriends a flat broke rancher who has a big spread of chapparal and thousands of mostly wild longhorns. The rancher, Henry Gannon, is going to lose the ranch to the corrupt Reconstruction judge the Yankees have put in charge of the area, who just happens to be Gordon Weymouth’s father. Calhoon throws in with Gannon and the former slave, Elias Whitton, and decides to help them achieve their dream of driving Gannon’s cattle to West Texas and establishing a ranch there, in the middle of Comanche country, to be called Rancho Bravo. The local commander of the Yankee occupation forces, Captain Philip Killraine, is sympathetic to their cause, as is his beautiful sister Evelyn.

Unfortunately, that may not be enough to allow the partners to stand up to the political corruption and greed of the Weymouths, father and son, and the violence of the brutal Regulators who work for them.

CALHOON is a flat-out superb Western novel. Haas manipulates his plot skillfully, piling up trouble and more trouble on his heroes. Lucius Calhoon, as the protagonist of this book, comes in for the most character development, and he’s a fascinating individual, very demon-haunted and not even all that likable at times, but always sympathetic to the reader. The other characters are interesting, as well, including the villainous Weymouths. And of course, there’s plenty of the great action you’d expect in a Ben Haas novel. He was one of the best there ever was at writing both close combat (fistfights and knife fights) and epic, large-scale battles.

I galloped through this book and enjoyed every page of it. I think it’s one of the best Ben Haas novels I’ve ever read. And it’s really just the opening chapter in a much bigger tale. I suspect I’ll be reading the second book in the Rancho Bravo series very soon. CALHOON is available in an e-book edition from the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing, and so are the rest of the books in the series.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Chaperone (2018)

We’re fans of the TV show DOWNTON ABBEY, so when we came across this DVD at the library that said, “From the writer and director of DOWNTON ABBEY”, we figured it might be worth watching. As it turns out, Julian Fellowes wrote the screenplay, but it’s based on a novel by Laura Moriarty. And while DOWNTON ABBEY is so very British, THE CHAPERONE is pure Americana.

This movie opens in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921, as 16-year-old Louise Brooks is about to head off to New York to study at a famous dance studio. The thing is, she needs a chaperone to go with her. A local woman played by Elizabeth McGovern (Lady Grantham, Lord Grantham’s American-born wife on DOWNTON ABBEY) volunteers for the job. They head off to New York for various romances, scandals, and dramatic revelations that verge on the soap operatic. As a longtime fan of soap operas, that’s fine with me.

And I enjoyed this based-on-a-true-story drama, too. The pace is leisurely, and the tone is genteel for the most part, although some more sordid parts of life crop up every now and then. The acting and the production values are very good. I think the movie captures the time period quite well.

Although there’s a framing sequence set in the 1940s, the main story ends before Louise Brooks becomes a big star in silent movies and her career then falls apart for various reasons. It bothered me a little that there’s absolutely no mention in THE CHAPERONE that her final film was OVERLAND STAGE RAIDERS, one of the entries in the Three Mesquiteers series with John Wayne as Stony Brooke, Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith, and Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin. It probably won’t come as a surprise to any of you that that’s actually the only Louise Brooks movie I’ve ever seen . . .

Review: Above the Fog - Erle Stanley Gardner (Flyers, February 1930)

I suspect I’ve been reading Erle Stanley Gardner longer than any other author. It would have been 1963 or ’64 when I checked out my first Gardner novel from the bookmobile. It was one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool series published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, and the bookmobile clerk probably shouldn’t have let a ten-year-old check it out, but he knew I was already reading above my grade level, so to speak. And I’ve continued to read Gardner’s work, at least two or three books a year, sometimes more, ever since. I’ve never read anything by him that I didn’t enjoy, either.

That trend continues with “Above the Fog”, a novelette published in the February 1930 issue of the little-remembered aviation pulp FLYERS. Dave Flint is a pilot who flew in the Great War, but as the story opens on a foggy dawn, he’s working at the Oakland airport with a buddy from the war who laments that they don’t have any action or excitement in their lives anymore.

Then a beautiful woman comes flying out of the fog, accidentally drops her purse before she flies off again when she realizes she’s being pursued, and Dave sets out to track her down, return her bag, and help her with whatever trouble she’s in. This lands him in a day-long whirlwind of fistfights, shootouts, and high-flying dogfights as he attempts not only to locate the girl but also to solve a murder and find a missing millionaire.

Gardner never lets the pace slow down for more than a moment or two as he heaps trouble and danger on Dave Flint’s head. The characterization may not be very deep, but who cares? This novelette moves. And Dave is a likable and fairly smart guy. Gardner’s descriptions of flying and the weather achieve a sort of rough-hewn poetry in places. He was a great storyteller and a better writer than he often got credit for.

I enjoyed “Above the Fog”. It’s available to download as a PDF on the Age of Aces website, along with a lot of other great aviation pulp fiction. If you’re a Gardner fan, you’ll probably want to read this rarity.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10 Action Adventures, January 1939

10 ACTION ADVENTURES appeared for only one issue in 1939, despite this being listed as Volume 1, Number 3. The newsstands must have been just a little too crowded for it to find its audience, because it looks like a pretty good adventure pulp. The cover is by Norman Saunders, and inside are stories by E. Hoffmann Price (with his name misspelled on the cover), Arthur J. Burks, Carl Rathjen, Lurton Blassingame (Wyatt's brother and better remembered as a literary agent), William J. Langford, and house-names Paul Adams, Ralph Powers, Rexton Archer, Cliff Howe, and Clint Douglas. I have no idea who wrote the house-name stories, but Price is always a possibility. I wonder if Ace Magazines, the publisher, even intended for 10 ACTION ADVENTURES to continue past this one issue, or if it was some sort of clearing house to get rid of some inventory. Chances are we'll never know, but if anybody is aware of the circumstances, I'd love to hear about it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, July 18, 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The excellent cover by R.G. Harris illustrates a scene from the lead novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, “Tommy Rockford’s Coffin Clew”.

In this installment of Tompkins’ long-running series about the young railroad detective who carries a pair of gold-plated handcuffs, Rockford arrives in an isolated Arizona settlement on a stormy night in pursuit of a notorious train robber. However, when he gets there he discovers that his quarry has already been brought to justice, drilled in a gunfight with the local sheriff. Then the sheriff himself turns up dead, and Tommy has to solve his murder. This is one of those stories where the big plot twist is pretty obvious, but that doesn’t stop Tompkins from spinning it into a very entertaining yarn with his usual skill. I was a little disappointed in the last Tommy Rockford story I read, but not this one. It’s well-written, atmospheric, and suspenseful. Also, I didn’t figure out the “coffin clew” of the title, so that’s one final surprise Tompkins saves for the story’s last paragraph. Fine work in this one.

Hal Davenport wrote a lot of stories under the various WILD WEST WEEKLY house-names, including more than 20 novelettes in the Billy West and Circle J series as Cleve Endicott. His story in this issue, “Six-guns Say No”, is a stand-alone published under his own name. It’s a range war yarn as a young rancher fights to defend the waterhole on which his spread depends from a bunch of no-good crooks trying to steal it. This story is almost all action, and while there’s nothing in it we haven’t seen many, many times before, Davenport does a good job of storytelling and comes up with an entertaining tale.

Samuel H. Nickels also wrote prolifically under house-names for WILD WEST WEEKLY, but under his own name he authored almost 140 short stories about a pair of young Texas Rangers named “Hungry” Hawkins and “Rusty” Bolivar. In this issue’s Hungry and Rusty yarn, “Rangers’ Rescue”, our intrepid pair set out to find a rancher’s son who’s been kidnapped by outlaws. This is another tale that’s almost all action. This is the first Hungry and Rusty story I’ve read. I enjoyed it and found them a very likable pair of protagonists. Definitely wouldn’t mind reading more of these.

Guy L. Maynard was another regular house-name scribe but also wrote several popular series under his own name, the longest-running of which featured a character called Señor Red Mask. He wrote a dozen stories featuring a redheaded cowboy, trail driver, and adventurer known as Flame Burns. Some legendary historical Old West characters appeared in these as well, much like the Rio Kid series. In this issue’s novelette, “Death Riders of Dodge”, Flame is in Dodge City, having just delivered a herd of cattle he brought up the trail from Texas. He’s set upon by outlaws and robbed of the payoff for that herd, and the rest of the story concerns his efforts to get the money back and avenge the death of a friend in a shootout. He gets some help in this from none other than Calamity Jane, who bears only a passing resemblance to the historical Calamity Jane. There’s one mention of her nursing the sick during an epidemic, and other than that she’s strictly the fictional version that’s shown up in so many movies, TV shows, and novels. This is the first thing I’ve read by Maynard, as far as I know, and when I read it, I wasn’t very impressed by it. It seemed a little too simple and juvenile. It’s sticking with me more than I expected, though. I’ll have to read more by Maynard to form a worthwhile opinion of his work.

“King of Colts” is by Charles M. Martin, who sometimes wrote as Chuck Martin. It’s a vengeance yarn, as a young rancher sets out after the three outlaws responsible for the death of the grandfather who raised him. That’s all there is to it, but Martin writes in a terse style that I enjoy, and since he was an actual cowboy, like Walt Coburn, his work has a strong sense of authenticity. Also like Coburn, Martin wound up taking his own life by hanging, which is a shame. He was a pretty darned good writer.

There are some assorted features and one other piece of fiction in this issue, the novelette “Whizz Fargo Springs a Murder Trap” by George C. Henderson. This is one of six linked novelettes about Whizz Fargo that were fixed up into the novel WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER. I happen to own a copy of that novel, so I skipped the story in this issue, preferring to read it in the novel version. Which I’ll get around to soon, I hope. I’ve read some stories by Henderson in the past and enjoyed them, as far as I recall.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Tompkins’ Tommy Rockford story is definitely the highlight. The other stories are all perfectly readable and entertaining, but they didn’t really make a strong impression on me. Having said that, I’m glad I read it and believe it’s worth your time if you happen to own a copy of it.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Alaska Steel - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

This is the second volume in Ben Haas’s outstanding series about soldier of fortune Neal Fargo. It opens in Hollywood in 1914, where Fargo is working temporarily as an actor, of all things, playing a villain in a silent Western movie directed by Thomas Ince. Ince is the only real-life character to make an appearance in this novel; the hero of the picture is fictional, as is a beautiful actress Fargo meets.

Ince wants Fargo to continue making movies and claims that he can be a big star, but Fargo isn’t interested in make-believe. Having lived a life of adventure, he needs the real thing. So when the actress, Jane Deering, asks him to go to Alaska and find out what happened to her husband, who disappeared there several years earlier while prospecting for gold, Fargo agrees without hesitation. He’s less enthusiastic about the idea of Jane coming along with him to look for the missing man, but she convinces him.

Naturally, things don’t go well, and Fargo and Jane wind up in all sorts of danger in the gold fields of the untamed Yukon country. There are vigilantes, a mysterious killer, blizzards, and assorted mushing around on dog sleds and snowshoes. As usual, Haas spins his yarn in tough, hardboiled prose without a wasted word to be found. He’s one of the best pure action writers I’ve ever run across. This one shows a few signs of hurried writing, but the story sweeps along at such a swift pace I didn’t really care. ALASKA STEEL is a prime example of a short, gritty adventure novel, and like all of Ben Haas’s work that I’ve ever encountered, it’s well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared on April 23, 2010. In the years since then, ALASKA STEEL has been reprinted in an e-book edition by Piccadilly Publishing, along with the other Fargo books by Ben Haas. The whole series gets a very high recommendation from me, even though I actually haven't read all of them, even at this late date. I need to get on that. Also, the copy pictured in the scan is the one I read, and I can tell from the price sticker on it that it came from the Used Book Warehouse in Rockport, Texas, which still exists but is in a different building now since its original location was heavily damaged by Hurricane Harvey. I spent a lot of very pleasant hours browsing through the place and still miss it.)

Review: Cornered - Louis King

Louis King got his start in show business as an actor in silent films and then became a director, going on to direct almost a hundred movies and TV episodes. He specialized in Westerns and adventure pictures. I’m bound to have seen some of the TV Westerns he directed in the Fifties. He wrote one novel, the crime/suspense yarn CORNERED, which was published originally as half of an Ace Double in 1958 and has just been reprinted by Black Gat Books in paperback and e-book editions.

Steve Grogan is a cop, a detective who kept on working even after he married an heiress who died giving birth to their daughter and left him a wealthy man. Money doesn’t mean much to Grogan, though. He only cares about the law—and about that daughter, a three-year-old named Betsy.

So when Grogan is the only one who can testify against a shadowy mob boss and put the guy away for murder, he takes off with Betsy and goes into hiding when it becomes obvious that the mobster will try to strike at him through the little girl. He has a couple of friends helping him, another former cop and a woman who was a carnival sharpshooter. They lie low at a motel in some unnamed desert city—Las Vegas? Reno?—but the mobster has allies, too, and he’ll stop at nothing to track down Grogan and keep from testifying any way possible, including murder.

CORNERED is a good story with some clever twists along the way. Not jaw-dropping twists, maybe, but the sort that make you smile and nod your head in appreciation. Grogan is a well-developed protagonist with some actual depth, and his mobster nemesis is really creepy. The prose is pretty straight-ahead stuff, the sort of writing you’d expect from a no-nonsense movie director who would bring in his pictures on time and under budget, but it’s very effective storytelling.

I got caught up in this book and was really flipping the pages toward the end. CORNERED is a top-notch suspense novel and well worth reading.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Butter (2011)

I never even heard of this quirky comedy about the cutthroat world of competitive butter carving in Iowa, but the cast convinced me to give it a try. Jennifer Garner is usually worth watching, and Hugh Jackman has a minor role. I’m not a fan of Olivia Wilde or Ty Burrell, but I don’t have anything against them, either. The concept seemed offbeat enough that it might be interesting.

And BUTTER is interesting. But it has a tone problem. Most of the time it seems to be trying for heartwarming Americana, but then it takes several dark, crude turns that are really jarring. What kind of movie is this, anyway? I’m not sure even the people who made it could answer that. But I have to admit, I stayed awake all the way through it, and I didn’t hate it. If you’re in the mood for an odd, obscure movie, it might do the trick.

If you want a much better small town dark comedy, though, watch 1971’s COLD TURKEY, which is also set in Iowa, by the way. I haven’t seen that in many years, but I remember it as being very good.

Review: Buckskin Man - Tom W. Blackburn

In the early Sixties, there was no bigger Davy Crockett fan than me. I watched the two Disney “mini-series” (what they amounted to, although the term didn’t exist yet) with Fess Parker as Davy every time they aired. I read and reread the juvenile novelizations of them, which I checked out from the bookmobile. I had a coonskin cap (bought in one of the local stores and quite possibly not the real thing) and a genuine coonskin cap made by my uncle from the pelt of a raccoon he shot. And not once during that whole era did I wonder even for a second who actually wrote those TV shows that made me such a fan.

The answer is Tom W. Blackburn.

Thomas Wakefield Blackburn was a very prolific pulpster, writing hundreds of stories for the Western pulps in a career that started under his own name in 1938. Before that, but I don’t know exactly when, he got his actual start in the business by working as a ghost for Ed Earl Repp, as numerous other Western pulp authors did. In the late Forties, he moved into writing novels, screenplays, and TV scripts, including the Davy Crockett episodes for Walt Disney. He even wrote the lyrics for the theme song, which I’m sure some of you are hearing in your head right now. (“Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the Wild Frontier!”)

Well, that’ll be stuck in my head the rest of the day. And yours, too, more than likely. You’re welcome.

Anyway, to get around to the actual subject of his post, while I’d read a few of Blackburn’s pulp stories and thought they were very good, I’d never read one of his novels until now. I started with BUCKSKIN MAN, first published as a paperback original by Dell in 1958. Although it’s set in 1847 toward the end of the mountain man era and several of the main characters are mountain men, this isn’t a fur trapping novel. Rather, it’s about a trade war in Santa Fe and along the Santa Fe Trail back to St. Louis. Jim King, a former trapper, has established a store in Santa Fe, but he’s burned out by a vicious competitor who works for Edouard Duval, an evil tycoon back in St. Louis. Jim tries to recoup his losses by striking back against Duval and his minions. Along the way he acquires a mysterious, sharpshooting ally and clashes with a beautiful young woman with an agenda of her own. While all this is going on, a dangerous conspiracy is brewing in Santa Fe that may plunge all of New Mexico Territory (recently taken over from Mexico by the United States) into a bloody war.

BUCKSKIN MAN is more of a historical novel than a traditional Western. Blackburn does a great job of taking some actual events and spinning a compelling fictional yarn around them. Jim King is a stalwart hero, Toni Bandelier (great name!) is a fine heroine, the villains are suitably despicable, and the mountain man supporting characters are colorful. Blackburn captures the setting well and keeps the pace moving along nicely. My only complaint about the writing is that the ending seems a little bit rushed.

Overall, I really enjoyed BUCKSKIN MAN and am eager to read more of Blackburn’s novels. This one was reprinted several times by Dell, there were a couple of large print editions, and it’s currently in print in both e-book and trade paperback editions. It’s a top-notch historical novel and I recommend it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Weird Tales, May 1942

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

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

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

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

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, March 1948

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail - Fred Blosser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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