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.)

Review: Crown Vic - Lee Goldberg

I’m not sure how this book slipped past me when Lee Goldberg published it a couple of years ago, but I’ve seen several mentions of it and its sequel recently and figured it was time for me to read it. CROWN VIC is a collection of two novellas featuring Ray Boyd, an ex-con and former professional car thief who drifts around in a black-and-white Crown Victoria that was once a police car, not looking for trouble, mind you, but usually finding it anyway.

The first novella is called “Ray Boyd Isn’t Stupid”, and he proves that when he takes a job as a handyman at a lakeside resort and winds up involved with the beautiful but amoral wife of the place’s middle-aged owner. It seems he treats her badly and has a lot of money stashed, and things would be so much better if Ray would just get rid of the guy for her . . .

This is, of course, the plot of countless 1950s noir novels published by Gold Medal, Dell, Avon, etc. But unlike the protagonists of those books, Ray isn’t stupid and turns the whole thing on its head—or at least he tries to. But Goldberg is pretty tricky with the plot of this one, springing twist after twist. It’s very well-written and very, very entertaining.

The second novella, “Occasional Risk”, finds Ray stopping for a few days at a rundown motel in Arizona. Every reader of noir novels knows that nothing good ever happens at rundown motels, especially when a beautiful blonde with trouble dogging her heels checks in. Goldberg draws some pretty specific comparisons between Ray and Jack Reacher in this one, and the comments are not only accurate but also pretty funny. The plot doesn’t have quite as many twists but still carries the reader along in fine fashion.

I read both of these novellas in one sitting each, which is pretty unusual for me these days. That’s how good they are. Ray may not be the most admirable character around, but he does make for compelling reading. This one, which is available on Amazon in e-book, audiobook, and paperback editions, gets a high recommendation. There’s a sequel out already and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Law of the Plains (1929)

I’m familiar with Tom Tyler mostly as the hero of the CAPTAIN MARVEL and THE PHANTOM movie serials, plus a few Three Mesquiteers entries playing Stony Brooke, and assorted parts as villains and supporting characters. I wasn’t aware that he starred in dozens of silent Westerns during the Twenties. Undercrank Productions has just released a couple of them on a DVD and Blu-ray collection, THE LAW OF THE PLAINS (1929) and THE MAN FROM NEVADA (also 1929). I recently watched THE LAW OF THE PLAINS.

As this one opens, Tyler plays Dan O’Brien, formerly an American Marine who has settled down and owns a ranch in an unnamed South American country, where he lives with his young son Dan Jr. A couple of renegade Americans take advantage of the chaos caused by a revolution to steal the ranch and kill O’Brien, who dies in his son’s arms.

Years later, Dan Jr. (also played by Tom Tyler) has grown into a stalwart cowboy who continues to work on ranches in South America. A trail drive brings him back to the ranch where he grew up, which is still being operated by the two villains who stole it. Dan arrives in time to save the beautiful niece of one of the villainous partners, who’s about to be married off to the other bad guy. Recognizing Dan as the son of the man they murdered in order to get their hands on the ranch, the varmints set out to get rid of him. All this plays out just like a traditional Western. There’s only an occasional indication that it takes place in South America.

I think silent Westerns are great fun and I always enjoy watching them. THE LAW OF THE PLAINS is definitely a cut above average. The restoration done by Undercrank Productions from a copy held by the Library of Congress is just superb. The film looks great, very close to what it must have looked like when it was brand-new. There’s a reel missing in the middle, but a couple of title cards fill in what happened, so the story carries on without any trouble following it. The accompanying musical score is a new one, not the original, composed and performed by Ben Model, and it’s excellent as well and really fits what’s happening on the screen.

Tom Tyler does a good job as the hero, doesn’t overact, and looks great as a cowboy. Natalie Joyce is the girl and I wasn’t as fond of her, but to be fair, she really doesn’t have much to do other than be menaced by the bad guys. And speaking of the bad guys, one of them is played by J.P. McGowan, who also produced and directed the film, and he does a great job as a character described in a title card as “depraved in mind and body”. Sure, he’s a little over the top, but it seems like he’s having a fine time being evil, and that’s contagious. Al Ferguson is the other main villain, and the great stuntman Cliff Lyons plays a henchman and coordinates all the stunt work.

Many of the same people worked on the other film in this set, THE MAN FROM NEVADA, so I’m looking forward to watching it. If it’s as much fun as THE LAW OF THE PLAINS, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.

Review: Man Chase - Joseph Chadwick

Dave Macklin is a man with plenty of trouble on his hands. He’s the president of a small electronics company that needs to expand but can’t get a bank loan in order to do so. The company is also the target of a hostile takeover by a larger rival outfit eager to gobble it up and take advantage of some vital research done by Dave’s scientist partner. On a personal level, Dave’s wife is an alcoholic who has just gotten back from rehab, swearing that she’s cured, but is she really? Then there’s the beautiful redheaded receptionist at the plant who has her eye on Dave, not to mention the equally gorgeous owner of the rival company who inherited it from her late husband. Yeah, between business problems and beautiful babes, Dave’s got quite a juggling act going on.

That’s the set-up of MAN CHASE, a 1961 novel by Joseph Chadwick, who happens to be one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. Published originally in paperback by Beacon Books, this novel has been reprinted in e-book and paperback editions by Cutting Edge Books. I guess you could call it a hardboiled corporate soap opera. Although there’s a private detective and some blackmail, it’s not really a crime novel. But it’s very fast-paced and well plotted as Chadwick manipulates the business and personal elements to pile a whole heap of trouble on Dave Macklin’s head.

This would have made a good early Sixties movie with, say, Jeff Chandler as Dave, Dorothy Malone as the rival business owner, and Ann-Margret as the sultry receptionist. For a novel published by Beacon, there’s not much sex, only a couple of scenes and they’re pretty restrained. It would have been easy enough to fade out before things got too risque.

I really enjoyed MAN CHASE. Dave is a good protagonist. He can be kind of a jerk at times but isn’t really a heel, just a decent guy at heart with a lot to deal with. The plot takes a slightly unexpected turn here and there, always a good thing, and works its way to a satisfactory conclusion. Chadwick was better as a Western writer, but he was a solid pro who could turn out a book like this, too, and do an excellent job of it. He wrote at least one other book for Beacon under his own name and several under the pseudonym Jim Layne. I may have to see if I can get my hands on some of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, September 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently (sort of—more on that below). That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by A. Leslie Ross. I would have known that even if Ross hadn’t been credited on the Table of Contents. That’s a Ross hat! I always like his covers on pulps and paperbacks, and this one is no exception. I think it’s fine.

The lead novella, “Lone-Wolf Foreman”, is bylined Mat Rand, and it really is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel. Mat Rand was a house-name used frequently in Columbia Publications pulps, and the author of this one hasn’t been identified. It has some decent plot elements: a big ranch owned by a beautiful young woman, a villainous foreman who can’t be trusted, a stalwart mining engineer, a fabulously valuable mine that’s actually a swindle (or is it?), and a colorful old codger. Unfortunately, the writing is just terrible. We get page after page of repetitive dialogue that serves no real purpose except to fill up pages, a few clunky action scenes, and narrative that has to be reread to try to figure out what’s going on. I stuck with this one for the first half of the story hoping it would get better, but it never did and I skimmed the rest, reading the last four or five pages to get some sense of closure. But all that got me was one of the limpest, least dramatic endings I’ve ever read. I worry sometimes that I’m too easy on the pulps I read and like them just because they’re old, but then I run across a yarn like this and realize that bad is bad, no matter when it was published, and I can still recognize that. This is maybe the worst Western pulp story I’ve ever read.

“Lone-Wolf Foreman” is long enough that there are only two short stories backing it up, and they had nowhere to go but up. “Satan’s Bullet Trio” by Charles D. Richardson Jr. is about three outlaws who pretend to be lawmen in order to rob a money shipment from a bank. Not surprisingly, the scheme doesn’t work out exactly how they expect it to. This is a pretty well-written story, but a couple of plot twists stretch credibility a little too far.

“Candidate for Boothill” by T.W. Ford wraps up the issue, and it’s by far the best of the three. In this story, an easy-going young cowboy gets on the bad side of an arrogant rancher and winds up being framed for a stagecoach holdup and shooting a marshal. The action takes place in one frantic, breakneck night as the protagonist tries to escape the posse that’s after him and clear his name. Ford was a pretty consistent writer and a good storyteller, and while this yarn is really nothing special, I found it pretty entertaining.

So, is this the worst Western pulp I’ve ever read? Given the length of the Mat Rand story and how bad it is, I’d have to say that’s right. If you happen to have a copy, I’d advise admiring the A. Leslie Ross cover, reading the T.W. Ford story, and then putting it back on the shelf. They can’t all be winners.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Ringmaster of Doom - Brant House (G.T. Fleming-Roberts) (Secret Agent X, November 1935)

When you saw the title RINGMASTER OF DOOM and the by-line Brant House, you probably thought, “Hey, a Secret Agent X novel about the circus!” I know that’s the first thing that went through my mind. Well, as it turns out, this is a Secret Agent X novel, all right, from the November 1935 issue of the pulp magazine of the same name, but there’s no sign of a circus. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good pulp yarn.

This one finds New York City being terrorized by a series of robberies and kidnappings being carried out by brutal, misshapen fiends who look like Neanderthal men. (And speaking of Neanderthals terrorizing modern-day America, I believe there’s a Spider novel by Norvell Page that features the same sort of menace.) Naturally, Secret Agent X has to investigate, and he starts at a fabulous society party being hosted by one of the rich men targeted for kidnapping. While he’s there he has his first violent encounter with one of the beast-men and also runs into a beautiful, redheaded, evil female spy he first crossed swords with during the Great War. From there it’s one breathless adventure after another as the Agent battles the schemes of the mysterious mastermind who calls himself Thoth, after the Egyptian god of the dead, and even wears an ibis-headed mask to make himself look like Thoth.

You know by now whether or not you love this stuff or think it’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. And you know which camp I fall into. You’ve got your Neanderthals serving as henchmen for a criminal genius. You’ve got said criminal genius lashing his prisoners with an electric whip. You’ve got Secret Agent X escaping death-trap after death-trap by the skin of his teeth. And finally you’ve got a battle royal in a network of abandoned sewers along the East River that’s being flooded. There’s not much time to take a breath in this one, and that’s good, of course, because it is wildly, unabashedly, and wonderfully goofy.

But no circus. That setting was a staple of pulp yarns. I don’t know if any of the Secret Agent X novels takes place in a circus, but it would have been a good setting for the Agent to have an adventure. As it is, RINGMASTER OF DOOM is a lot of fun.

(This post originally appeared on August 6, 2010. Since then, this novel has been reprinted in Volume 5 of SECRET AGENT "X": THE COMPLETE SERIES, published by Altus Press. It's still available in a handsome trade paperback edition from Amazon.)

Review: The Joy Wheel - Paul W. Fairman

Eddie Kiley is just a normal 16-year-old guy growing up in Chicago in 1926. His dad is a salesman, his mom is a housewife, and he has an older sister he squabbles with. One of his uncles is a cop, and another is a drunk. He spends his time going to school, hanging around with his friends (some of whom are his cousins), and thinking about girls, especially the beautiful but unattainable Mimi Taylor.

Eddie is the narrator/protagonist of THE JOY WHEEL, a 1954 novel by Paul W. Fairman published originally by Lion Books and just reprinted by Black Gat Books. The story follows Eddie for a year or so as he learns about life, falls in with shady company, wrestles with his conscience, uncovers family secrets and tragedies, and generally just grows up. There’s plenty of crime in this book, as Eddie gets a job working around bookies and gangsters and even inadvertently witnesses a murder, but it’s not really a crime novel. Likewise, although Eddie’s relationships with several different young women are very important, it’s neither a romance novel or a softcore novel.

Instead, THE JOY WHEEL is a coming-of-age novel that’s a little on the gritty side, and I think it’s a great one. Paul W. Fairman is best remembered for his work as an author and editor in the science fiction field—and his reputation there is a little mediocre, to be honest—but he was also a journeyman writer who turned out mysteries, Westerns, movie novelizations, and TV tie-in novels. I haven’t read a great deal by him, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read and consider his SF to be pretty good.

But THE JOY WHEEL is so good it took me very much by surprise. The characters are great, Eddie’s narrative voice is fun to read, and Fairman really had me turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. I wish he had written more novels like this.

Maybe he did. I have a couple of his mysteries and one Western but haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. Very late in his career, Fairman also wrote two historical romance novels under the name Paula Fairman (although you won’t find any mention of that on-line, for some reason), then died while writing a third one which a friend of mine finished and then continued ghosting as Paula Fairman for twenty or so more books. I have the two that Paul Fairman wrote and hope I get around to reading them, and more by him, one of these days. Meanwhile, I give THE JOY WHEEL a high recommendation. You can get it on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Cliffhanger (1994)

I’ve been a Sylvester Stallone fan for nearly 50 years now. Livia and I saw ROCKY either while we were still dating or right after we got married, I don’t remember which, and I’ve just liked the guy ever since. His current TV series, TULSA KING, is one of our favorites. But I’ve missed some of his movies along the way, including CLIFFHANGER. Until now, of course.

Stallone is a mountain rescue ranger in this one, and early on, a tragedy occurs for which he blames himself. But don’t worry, there’s only a little angst. He’s about to walk away from his job, his best friend, and his girl, when a bunch of bad guys pull off a ridiculously complicated mid-air heist of a hundred million dollars, contained in three cases of used thousand dollar bills. But the money cases are lost during a mid-air transfer, falling onto a snow-covered mountain, and the plane carrying the bad guys crashes nearby (with most of them surviving), and now Stallone and his friends have to corral the bad guys and keep them from getting away with the loot.

Lots and lots of action ensues, including fistfights, shootouts, and plenty of mountain climbing. Many of the reviews of this movie on IMDB refer to it as DIE HARD ON A MOUNTAIN, and that’s about the best description of it. Yeah, the script, co-written by Stallone, is predictable and stretches suspension of disbelief nearly to the breaking point on numerous occasions, but the cast and director Renny Harlin make it work.

Speaking of the cast, this movie is full of actors I like. John Lithgow is the leader of the bad guys and chews the scenery with great enthusiasm. One of my absolute favorite character actors, Rex Linn, is another villain. Michael Rooker from THE WALKING DEAD, looking impossibly young, is Stallone’s buddy and fellow mountain climber. The great Bruce McGill shows up briefly as a Treasury agent. Beautiful Janine Turner is Stallone’s girlfriend. Most of you probably remember her from NORTHERN EXPOSURE, but she’ll always be Laura Templeton from GENERAL HOSPITAL  to me. (By the way, her sister Jackie on GH was played by Demi Moore.) Ralph Waite from THE WALTONS is a helicopter pilot.

I had a really good time watching CLIFFHANGER. Is it a great film? No, it’s not, but it’s a solid action movie and I’m glad we finally got around to watching it.

Review: Knight of Darkness: The Legend of The Shadow - Will Murray

Will Murray has written more non-fiction about The Shadow than anyone else, and whatever he wants to write about the character and his adventures, I’ll gladly read because it’s always entertaining and informative. Such is the case with KNIGHT OF DARKNESS: THE LEGEND OF THE SHADOW, the latest volume of Shadow scholarship from Murray.

This book collects a wide assortment of articles about The Shadow written by Murray at various times in his career. There are several behind-the-scenes looks at the creation of the pulp character, including an examination of exactly how the series was plotted by author Walter B. Gibson, editor John Nanovic, and Street & Smith executive Henry Ralston. I’ve read a bunch about The Shadow over the years, much of it by Murray, but I learned some things I didn’t know from these articles.

Murray also writes about Gibson’s very prolific career in comic book scripting and his work with various famous magicians. Other articles take a look at the different movie incarnations of The Shadow, from the Victor Jory serial all the way up to the Alec Baldwin movie in the Nineties. The radio show comes in for extensive discussions, as well, and I’m always interested in reading about that version since it was actually my introduction to the character. Murray covers all the comic book versions, most of which I remember reading. Well, not the ones in the Forties, although I have read some reprints of them. But I sure remember those from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.

As always, all these articles are well-written and great fun to read. In addition to that, there are dozens of superb illustrations by Michael Wm Kaluta, the artist most associated with the Shadow comic books, and the great Frank Hamilton, whose fine work graced the pages of pulp fanzines for many years. This is an excellent volume all around and I had a great time reading it. It’s available on Amazon in a handsome trade paperback edition. I think there’s at least one more volume of Shadow non-fiction to come from Murray, and I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, June 1945

Is that a great big cat, or are those little-bitty spacemen? I don't know, but it's a striking cover by Robert Gibson Jones anyway. Several of the usual suspects are on hand in this issue of AMAZING STORIES, including Richard S. Shaver, Chester S. Geier, Berkeley Livingston, Frances M. Deegan, Don Wilcox, and surely the best-known name in the issue, at least as far as we remember them today, the great Edmond Hamilton. There's also a short story by William Hamling, who would go on to be the publisher of the Fifties digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as hundreds if not thousands of pseudonymous soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, and many other authors who became famous in other fields. It never hurts to recall that Hamling was a science fiction guy starting out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review (Plus Bonus Rerun Comments!): Shootout at Picture Rock - Joseph A. West

(First, here's my original post, which appeared on August 5, 2010)

I made the email acquaintance of Western author Joseph A. West a while back, and since I try to read books by people I know, I picked up his 2006 novel SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK. Set in 1877, the book’s protagonist is Deputy U.S. Marshal John Kilcoyn, who works out of an office in Dodge City that he shares with Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson. One of Kilcoyn’s old enemies, a former lawman turned outlaw, comes back to haunt the marshal by kidnapping Dodge City’s doctor and the doctor’s beautiful daughter, who, as it happens, Kilcoyn intends to marry. With the outlaw holding his hostages for ransom, Kilcoyn sets out to rescue them, along with Bat Masterson and a young Irish photographer who is new to the West.

Well, that’s enough plot for a book right there, you say. But no, Kilcoyn is also being hunted by a renegade Cheyenne war chief because he killed the chief’s son in battle. The marshal also has to deal with a family of crazed, perverted sodbusters who make a business of robbing and killing travelers, somewhat like the infamous Bender family. Oh, and did I mention that while all this is going on, there’s also a killer blizzard bearing down on Kansas?

I had a great time reading this book. West has the knack of piling more and more problems on his hero until the reader really has to wonder how he’s going to get out of it. SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK has a nice epic feel to it, even though the actual scale of the story isn’t really that large. There’s plenty of action, the characters are well-developed (including an interesting portrait of Bat Masterson, one of my favorite real-life Western characters), and there are some nice twists relating to who lives and who dies (not everybody you’d expect). This is an excellent traditional Western, and lucky for me West is a fairly prolific author, having written more than thirty novels so far with more to come. I plan to read more of his books very soon.

(And I did read more of his books and enjoyed them, both under his own name and under a couple of different house-names. Joe West was a good guy and a fine writer. When this review first appeared, he responded in the comments, which I'll paste below, followed by a couple of my comments.)

Joe: 

James, thank you for the kind words. You do me great honor.

SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK began its life as the 7th novel in my GUNSMOKE series, but my publisher and Universal couldn't agree on financial terms. Finally my editor said: "The hell with it, we'll publish the book as a stand alone." Then, with many a merry quip, he added: "Big hurry, Joe. Change the names and send it back to me yesterday."

Of course, there was a lot more involved than simply changing Matt Dillon to Kilcoyn. I had to saw the novel apart then rebuild it, the deadline hanging over my head like the proverbial sword.

In the end, poor, ink-stained wretch that I am, I got the job done and Shootout was the result.

Ah, I love the publishing business so much, just sitting here thinking about it brings a tear to my eye.

Me:

Joe,

Thanks for the story behind the story. Now that you mention it, I can see how this one began life as a Gunsmoke novel, but that thought never crossed my mind when I was reading it. You did a good job turning it into a stand-alone. Back in the early days of our careers, my wife and I had to rewrite a hundred thousand word novel literally overnight. This was long before computers, so we had to retype all 400 pages of the manuscript in about sixteen hours. We had only one typewriter, so we took turns at it, typing as fast as we could and rewriting as we went along. Finished at dawn, slept for a couple of hours, then got up, took the pages to have them photocopied, and overnighted them to New York.

Yes, you've got to love the publishing business.

And me again:

I may have told this story here before, but when I finished the final draft of my first novel, Livia and I took the manuscript to a drugstore that had a coin-operated photocopy machine and fed nickels into it for a couple of hours as we copied every page, one at a time. I feel nostalgic about those days, but I wouldn't go back to them.

(SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK is out of print, but affordable used copies are available on Amazon.)