Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

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

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

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

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

Review: Overboard - George F. Worts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It absolutely is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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