Review: Night Never Ends - Frederick Lorenz (Lorenz Heller)

Lorenz Heller’s NIGHT NEVER ENDS uses the classic noir novel set-up: down on his luck photographer Luke Fogarty takes a job at a struggling photography studio run by George and Belle Buckner. George and Belle are not happily married. George drinks too much, is a terrible photographer, and is gradually running the business into the ground. Belle is his beautiful, long-suffering wife, and when Luke goes to work for them, sparks fly immediately between the two of them. Most of the time, you’d think you knew where this story was going, and most of the time you’d be right.

But not in this case. NIGHT NEVER ENDS, which was published originally as a paperback original by Lion Books in 1954 under the pseudonym Frederick Lorenz, takes a different tack. There are some lurid secrets in the background of these characters, and Heller reveals them pretty early on, which ratchets up the tension between them. Although several crimes take place in this book, it’s not really a crime novel. It’s more of a mainstream domestic drama, but it’s so well-written it kept me up later than usual, flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

Stark House has just reprinted this one as half of a double volume with Heller’s THREE MUST DIE!, which I read and reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I think I liked NIGHT NEVER ENDS even more. Heller’s characters are always well-developed and interesting, and he had a great touch with memorable lines that do a fine job of capturing the setting and the era. This latest double volume from Stark House gets a high recommendation from me. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Review: Sometime Lofty Towers - David C. Smith

I’ve known David C. Smith for about thirty years. We met in Cross Plains at the first Robert E. Howard Days get-together I ever attended. He’s been a top author of sword-and-sorcery fiction for decades, having co-authored the Red Sonja novels and pastiches featuring Bran Mak Morn and Black Terence Vulmea, as well as numerous novels set in his own created world of Attluma. The original edition of his novel SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS came out a few years ago, and the book has just been reissued in a beautiful new edition by Brackenbury Books. This is one of Smith’s novels I hadn’t read, so I was glad to be able to back the Kickstarter for the new edition and read it.

The protagonist of SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS is a retired mercenary soldier named Hanlin, who, years earlier, was part of a force that made war against the kirangee, people native to the western part of Attluma. Now, an ambitious aristocrat named Lady Sil is mounting an expedition to try once again to conquer the kirangee, and she wants Hanlin to be part of her army, along with one of his old friends Thorem. Hanlin wants nothing to do with this and refuses to sign on with Sil. Instead he starts back toward his homeland in the far northwestern reaches of the continent, wanting only to live out his life in peace, but of course, he winds up being drawn into Sil’s war anyway, only this time around, he’s fighting on the other side.

The plot of this novel bears some resemblance to both AVATAR and DANCES WITH WOLVES, but for my money, it’s considerably better written than either of those movies. All the characters are very well-developed, and Hanlin is an intriguing, compelling protagonist, very conflicted in his emotions but driven to do the right thing, if only he can figure out what that is. This is very much a shades-of-gray story with few outright heroes or villains. Also, unlike most sword-and-sorcery fiction, it’s told in a deliberate, richly detailed, literary style that delves as much into the mind as it does action.

But that doesn’t mean SOMETIMES LOFTY TOWERS skimps on the action. It definitely doesn’t, and there are some great battles and satisfying showdowns. There’s plenty of blood and thunder to be found here. Smith’s voice is a distinctive one, and I found myself swept along in my reading of this novel and thoroughly enjoying it.

Now, about that new edition . . . As a backer of the Kickstarter for this project, I received both print and e-book editions, and the digital copy arrived first. I intended to read it, but then the print book showed up in the mail. It’s the traditional mass market size (you know, the kind the regular publishers are in the process of doing away with; after all, what’s 85 years of history?), and it has purple page edges. I swear, it’s almost like holding a Lancer book from the Sixties, except this edition is sturdily made and probably won’t fall apart in five years, the way Lancers had a tendency of doing. Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing, and I had to read that edition instead of the e-book, and I give an enormous amount of credit to the folks at Brackenbury Books for doing such a great job with it.

If you want to read this—and if you’re a sword-and-sorcery fan, I give it a very high recommendation—you can order it directly from the publisher. SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and it reminds me there are other novels by David C. Smith I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. I really need to do that.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Raiders, April 1940

A recent discussion on the WesternPulps email group about author T.W. Ford prompted speculation about whether he and Eric Rober, another prolific author of air war and sports stories for the pulps, were indeed the same person. According to pulp editor Robert A. Lowndes, they were, and Rober was the real name, although there’s some confusion whether it was Eric Rober or Ford Rober. There’s an Eric Rober buried in Newhall, California, but the Find-a-Grave website doesn’t give birth or death dates and you can’t read them on the photo of his tombstone. According to Lowndes, Ford died in 1952.

With no luck on that research, I decided to at least read some of Eric Rober’s stories and compare them to those of Ford’s. As it happens (which it would if they were the same person), both of them often had stories in the same issue, the first one of which I came across on-line being the April 1940 issue of the air war pulp SKY RAIDERS, which you can find here. The excellent cover is by A. Leslie Ross, an artist I don’t really associate with air war or aviation pulps, but it’s a good one. Ross is one of my favorite cover artists on Western pulps and paperbacks.

This issue leads off with “Slave of the Sky King”, a World War I novelette under the Eric Rober name. The Sky King is a German ace, an aristocrat with crippled legs who glories in soaring through the sky even though he’s hobbled on land. But when his son, also a pilot, is killed in a dogfight, the Sky King goes insane. Fate brings him into contact with a trio of American aces known as the Horsemen, and things take an even stranger turn when one of them becomes the Sky King’s prisoner. This is a terrific yarn full of angst and psychodrama and dogfights. The characters are excellent and the aerial action is vivid and well-written. A little over-the-top, maybe, with its melodramatic plot twists, but I really enjoyed this one.

Normally I read a pulp straight through, but in this case, I skipped right to “Screwball of the Skies”, a short story under the T.W. Ford byline. This is about a Canadian pilot serving with the R.A.F., a farmer in his pre-war life who cares only about playing his fiddle and will dare any danger to protect the instrument. It starts out like it’s going to be a fairly lightweight story but then turns pretty dark halfway through. It’s well-written and entertaining, but there’s not nearly as much to it as there is to “Slave of the Sky King”. But the real question I was trying to solve is whether those two stories are the work of the same writer. I feel pretty strongly that they are. The styles match up almost perfectly, and both stories contain references to planes “sledding” through the sky during dogfights. Maybe that’s a common term in air war pulp stories; I haven’t read nearly enough of them to be anywhere close to an expert. But I don’t recall encountering it before. Even so, that’s hardly definitive proof. I need to read more by Ford and Rober to get a better idea.

Now on to the other stories, since I downloaded this issue anyway. “The Rainbow Ace” is by prolific pulpster William J. O’Sullivan and is also set in the early days of World War II. An American pilot pretends to be British so he can join the R.A.F. and get revenge for his father, who was killed by the Nazis during a vacation in Germany several years earlier. This is a good story, and it’s also a good example of how American pulp writers struggled to find ways to have Yank protagonists in their stories when America’s official entry into the war was still a couple of years away.

I don’t know anything about Metteau Miles except that he published less than two dozen stories in his career, most of them aviation yarns. His story in this issue, “Wings of Clay”, is a World War I tale about a young American pilot, the brother of a downed ace, who wants to avenge his brother’s death. Unfortunately, he suffers from crippling fear every time he goes up in his crate. Miles does a good job with this plot and comes up with a satisfying resolution. This is another enjoyable story.

Jack Straley is another obscure pulp author who published eighteen aviation and detective stories between 1932 and 1940. His story in this issue, “Bullets Fly Faster”, is about the Germans disrupting an espionage scheme to smuggle vital information across the lines. It’s reasonably entertaining, although it’s very easy to figure out what’s really going on.

“Quiet on the Maginot” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for Casey Sumfer (as he’s listed on the table of contents)/Sumter (as he’s by-lined on the story itself). Was that a pseudonym or simply a writer who sold only one story? No telling. The story itself isn’t bad. It’s another “Yank in the R.A.F.” yarn set in the early days of World War II. In this case, the Yank is actually a Southerner from Mississippi who writes letters to his pappy back home, the Cunnel, bemoaning the lack of action along the Maginot Line. Which, of course, then erupts in a huge battle. That’s all there is to it, but the writing is decent even if the story doesn’t really amount to much.

The final story in this issue is “Paper-Made Ace”, by David C. Cooke, a forgotten pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, detective, and sports yarns for various pulps. This is another R.A.F. story in which a newspaper reporter hypes up a British flyer in an attempt to encourage enlistment. The pilot doesn’t know what’s going on, though, which leads to complications when he finds out. This is a decent tale helped by the fact that the reporter has a secret Cooke doesn’t reveal until late in the story.

This is the only issue of SKY RAIDERS I’ve ever read and quite possibly the only one I ever will read, but I enjoyed it. The Eric Rober novella is definitely the best story in the issue, but all of them were entertaining. I consider this a good beginning to my efforts to figure out if Rober and T.W. Ford were the same person.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Novel and Short Stories, March 1939

I really like the dramatic cover on this issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES. I think it's by J.W. Scott, but as always when it comes to art, I could be wrong about that. I'm not familiar with the author of the lead novel, James Dorn, but he appears to have been very prolific over a two-year span from 1939 to 1941, turning out two dozen stories, mostly novellas and novelettes, during that period. Then nothing. Such things always make me wonder what happened to cut short what appeared to be a promising career. Or was James Dorn a house-name? Likely we'll never know. Ken Jason, definitely a house-name, also appears in this issue, as do Ed Earl Repp and Mojave Lloyd. I don't own this issue, and the copy in the scan from the Fictionmags Index has some water damage, but it looks like a mighty fine Western pulp anyway.

Half a Million Words and Counting

Some of you probably remember how I used to write a million words a year. I did that for 17 straight years, in fact, and usually posted on the blog when I reached that milestone. Then, a few years ago, for various reasons, the streak came to an end. Since then, however, I’ve never done less than half a million words a year, and since that seems like a worthwhile accomplishment, I thought I’d mention that I hit that mark yesterday.

I’ve also made noises about retiring on numerous occasions, but I came closer than ever before to doing that for next year. My age is starting to catch up to me, health-wise. It wouldn’t be actual retirement, of course. I’d still write books, but only ones that I intended to self-publish, nothing with contracts and deadlines involved. But when I mentioned that to the editor on the ghosting job I’ve been doing for many years now, she prevailed on me to do a few more books next year, and then Gary Goldstein, a good friend for more than 35 years and the editor who has bought more of my books than anybody else, became the editorial director at Dusty Saddle Publishing and asked me to write a few books for him, and I couldn't say no. So I went from the prospect of semi-retirement to having contracts and deadlines at two separate publishers next year. That adds up to, you guessed it, about half a million words. So I guess I’ll press on for a while yet. My current novel is the 432nd I’ve written, and I’d sure like to get to #450 . . .

Review: Eye Witness - George Harmon Coxe

Kent Murdock, ace news photographer for the Boston Courier-Herald, is sent on an assignment to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, supposedly to get some photos of the local university’s new head footfall coach, who is a longtime Boston sports hero. But this is just an excuse to get Murdock there, because his real mission is a personal one: he’s supposed to facilitate a reconciliation between a wealthy Boston lawyer who’s a friend of Murdock’s editor and the lawyer’s niece, who once interned at the Courier-Herald and is a friend of Murdock’s. It seems that the young woman is estranged from her uncle, who controls the trust fund she’s going to inherit, because a couple of years earlier she married a shady character the uncle disapproves of. She’s come to realize now that the marriage is a failure, and before she gets a divorce, her uncle wants her to forgive him for his meddling in her life.

Complicated enough for you? Just wait.

No sooner does Murdock get in his hotel room before a shady agent who handles nightclub entertainers barges in. That unexpected visit is followed by a beautiful blonde piano player. Murdock also gets mixed up with a seedy, down-on-his-luck private eye, a gangster who owns the nightclub where the blonde plays, a cheating wife and her gun-toting husband, and assorted other colorful characters, none of whom can be trusted. Then there’s the matter of the murder that takes place in Murdock’s hotel room. The cops are convinced at first that he’s the victim, but then when it turns out he’s not, they peg him as the killer!

EYE WITNESS was published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950, reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1956, and remains available today in an e-book edition. It falls just about in the middle of George Harmon Coxe’s long-running series about Kent Murdock, a series that’s arguably Coxe’s most successful work. I say arguably because Flashgun Casey, Coxe’s earlier, more hardboiled news photographer character, appeared not only in numerous pulp stories in BLACK MASK and a handful on novels but also was adapted into a radio series and a short-lived TV series in the early days of television. But just from the standpoint of novels, Murdock was certainly Coxe’s most popular creation.

And deservedly so. I’ve read quite a few of the Murdock novels and always enjoyed them. Coxe was a contemporary of Erle Stanley Gardner, and his books remind me of Gardner’s with their very complicated plots and tough but not overly hardboiled tone. One difference is that Kent Murdock usually isn’t two or three steps ahead of the reader the way Perry Mason and Donald Lam always were. Murdock seems to figure out the mysteries at about the same pace as the reader does. He always nabs the killer, though, and does so in a very entertaining fashion.

I had a fine time reading EYE WITNESS. It’s not the best book I’ve read in the series, that’s still THE JADE VENUS, but it’s a very good one and well worth your time if you’re a fan of well-plotted, medium-boiled mystery yarns. It’s a shame they didn’t make movies starring John Payne out of the Murdock books. I think he would have been perfect in the role.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 15 Story Detective, April 1950

John D. MacDonald is the biggest name in this issue of 15 STORY DETECTIVE, and of course, he wasn't as big a name in March 1950, when this issue was on the stands, as he soon would be as one of the leading author of paperback original novels from Gold Medal and other publishers. His first novel, THE BRASS CUPCAKE, was also published in 1950, but I don't know what month it came out. MacDonald was a well-regarded pulpster, though. The second biggest name is Norman Saunders, who painted the cover for this one, and as always with Saunders' work, it's eye-catching and crowded with action. The other authors in this issue include J.L. Bouma, best remembered for his Western novels, Ejler Jakobsson, Donn Mullaney, and a bunch of guys I'd never heard of.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, November 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m pretty sure the cover art is by H.W. Scott. This issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN contains only two pieces of fiction, which makes it something of an oddity.

We all know that the stories billed as novels in the pulps nearly always weren’t. They were usually novellas or even novelettes. But “The Gallows Brand”, T.W. Ford’s Silver Kid yarn in this issue actually is long enough to be called a novel. Taking up 75 pages of fairly small, double-columned print, I figure it’s at least 40,000 words. I like Ford’s writing, and I like his character, the drifting gunman/adventurer Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver trappings on his all-black attire, including a small silver skull that adorns the chin strap of his hat. So I was eager to plunge into this one.

The opening is intriguing. An outlaw and gunman known as Slow Joe Thorne is hired by the local justice of the peace to kill the Silver Kid. The judge claims that an enemy of his has hired Strant to kill him. And this is, in fact, true. Strant has accepted the job, but he doesn’t mean to carry it out. His guns aren’t actually for hire. He just wants to get to the bottom of the murder plot and isn’t aware that he’s also the target of a similar scheme.

But before any of that can really get underway, the Kid and Slow Joe wind up being thrown together as allies (neither of them being aware of the other’s true identity) and wind up fighting a gang of masked killers known as the Hangman Bunch, who always warn their impending victims with a drawing of a gallows with a body hanging from it. They always string up the men they kill, even if those unfortunate fellows wind up being shot first.

This is a complex plot, although it’s fairly easy to spot what’s really behind it. The Silver Kid is a very likable protagonist, Slow Joe is a great supporting character, and the villains are suitably despicable. There are plenty of well-written action scenes along the way.

However, if you sense a “but” coming, you’re right. This is a case where the story’s length actually works against it. There’s a lot of aimless riding around, and some of those action scenes, well-written though they are, don’t do anything to advance the plot. Don’t get me wrong: “The Gallows Brand” is a good story and I enjoyed reading it, but I have a feeling it would have been terrific as a novella.

The other piece of fiction in this issue is Roe Richmond’s novelette “Clean-Up”. This one is about a pair of U.S. Marshals, one an old veteran, the other a baby-faced kid who’s deadly fast with his guns, who are assigned to clean up a town being run by several outlaw bosses who have teamed up to take over. This story is almost non-stop action, and after a while I started to wonder if anybody was going to survive to the end, the way the bodies were falling. Richmond’s work is kind of hit-or-miss for me, but I enjoyed this one.

This is a good issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN, although if you don’t like T.W. Ford or Roe Richmond, you’re out of luck. I actually prefer Western pulps that feature a wider variety of stories, even when the lead novel really is novel-length, as in the various Thrilling Group pulps like TEXAS RANGERS, THE RIO KID, THE MASKED RIDER, etc. But this was a nice change of pace.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Fright - Cornell Woolrich

I’ve been a Cornell Woolrich fan ever since I encountered reprints of some of his pulp stories in EQMM and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties. I’ve read many of his short stories and novelettes and enjoyed them all, but only a couple of his novels, the justly-famous THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and DEADLINE AT DAWN, which I also enjoyed. I’ve just read the Hard Case Crime reprint of Woolrich’s novel FRIGHT, originally published in 1950 under the pseudonym George Hopley.

FRIGHT is one of Woolrich’s historical suspense novels, set in 1915 and 1916, and he does a fine job of recreating that era without going overboard on the historical details. The very strait-laced attitudes of the time period play a part in the plot, too, helping to drive the protagonist to do the things he does. It’s difficult to go into detail about that plot without giving away too much, but let’s just say there’s blackmail, murder, paranoia, more murder, doomed love, more murder, and tragedy galore. Pretty much the essence of noir, in other words, and all told in smooth, if slightly old-fashioned prose that keeps the reader turning the pages. Yes, the coincidences and lapses in logic that Woolrich is notorious for can be found in FRIGHT, but as usual the writing and the raw emotional torment he inflicts on his characters more than make up for any flaws. There are passages in this book that I found genuinely disturbing, and I’m usually not easily disturbed by fiction. FRIGHT is one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time.

It’s also one of the best, and I have a feeling that it just might start me on a Woolrich binge. I don’t know if my heart can take it, though.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 22, 2007. At that time, the Hard Case Crime reprint of FRIGHT was fairly recent. That edition, pictured above, is out of print and used copies have gotten fairly expensive. However, the novel is available in a different e-book and paperback edition, and it's still well worth reading even though it did not, in fact, start me on a Woolrich binge.) 

Review: Woe to the Vanquished - Edwin Truett (Edwin Truett Long) (RED STAR DETECTIVE, June 1940)

“Woe to the Vanquished” is the second novel featuring Dr. Thaddeus Clay Harker, traveling medicine showman and top-notch criminologist and detective, and his assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones and the beautiful Brenda Sloan. It was published in the June 1940 issue of RED STAR DETECTIVE with a great cover by Emmett Watson. RED STAR DETECTIVE is the retitled pulp that ran for one issue as DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, where the first Doc Harker novel, “Crime Nest”, appeared. As this story begins Doc, Hercules, and Brenda aren’t involved in a case, they’re just on their way to the next stop where they’ll set up and sell the world-famous Chickasha Remedies that are Doc Harker’s stock-in-trade.

But then they run into a meeting of the Valiants of the Flaming Circle, a black-robed Ku Klux Klan sort of organization that firebombs and destroys a school run by a man they consider a Bolshevik. Doc and Hercules wind up being arrested and changed with murder. Crime and chaos ensue. Doc has his hands full sorting everything out and uncovering the truth about what’s really going on. Obviously, not everything turns out the way it appears at first.

The Doc Harker novels were written by prolific pulpster Edwin Truett Long under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. Long was born in Missouri but spent most of his life in Texas, and according to Tom Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the Altus Press volume that collects all three of the novels, “Woe to the Vanquished” takes place in and around a thinly disguised Wichita Falls, Texas. That by itself is enough to make it of interest to me.

I’ve become an Edwin Truett Long fan. He was not the most rigorous plotter in the world, but his stories are fast-moving, full of action, blessed with colorful, interesting characters, and have occasional touches of humor. He was just a good yarn-spinner, and it’s a shame that his service in World War II as a cryptographer in Burma left him with medical issues that took his life in 1945 when he was only 44 years old.

DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. I’ve read two of the three novels now and really enjoyed both of them, so I don’t hesitate to give this collection a high recommendation if you like off-beat, fast-paced pulp adventure and detective stories.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956)

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I like war movies, and I watched a lot of them on TV when I was a kid. But somehow, I never saw D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE. Now that I’ve watched it, I can kind of understand that. The title should have drawn my attention, but maybe I sensed that this film is only indirectly about D-Day and is barely a war movie at all.

What it is, in fact, is a romance movie told mainly in flashback. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. The story opens on a ship the night of June 5, 1944, as a combined special force of American, British, and Canadian troops are headed for Normandy to carry out a commando raid in the hope of knocking out a big gun overlooking the beaches where the regular troops will land a few hours later. Commanding the force is a British officer played by Richard Todd. One of the American officers is played by Robert Taylor. And there’s a connection between them because, you see, they’re both in love with the same girl they met, at separate times, a couple of years earlier in London. Cue the flashbacks.

The movie spends a lot more time on the relationship between Taylor and Dana Wynter, who plays the young English woman, than it does on Wynter’s romance with Todd. We also get a couple of subplots about Wynter’s father, a brigadier general who was wounded at Dunkirk but wants to get back into action, and Taylor’s commanding officer, who’s also gung-ho to the point of recklessness because he wants a promotion. Wynter’s father is played by the great British character actor John Williams, and Taylor’s commanding officer is played by the always top-notch Edmond O’Brien.

After a lot of well-done romance and British homefront scenes, we finally shift back to Todd, Taylor, and the rest of the commandos landing and going after the German gun emplacement, and for ten or fifteen minutes, D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE actually is a war movie, and decently done, too, although the filming is staged on a very small scale so we can’t see how few people are actually involved. This isn’t a cast of thousands, by any means. But it’s an exciting and satisfying battle.

Followed by a terrible and unsatisfying ending. No spoilers here, but I didn’t like it.

The movie looks good, in a mid-Fifties, major studio way, and the cast is also a good one. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Taylor. He’s one of the most dour-looking leading men I’ve ever seen. That works okay when he’s playing, say, a world-weary gunfighter in a Western, but it’s hard to like him in this move. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a character who’s basically a heel all the way through. I like Richard Todd and he’s plenty stalwart when he has to do something, which isn’t often enough. And Dana Wynter, good grief, she was a beautiful woman! And she turns in a decent performance, too, in a role where it would be easy to be too overwrought. The supporting cast features Jerry Paris in a fairly meaty role, and if you look quick, you can spot Dabbs Greer and Parley Baer, too.

It's probably a good thing I never tried to watch this when I was a kid. All the smooching and violin music would have had me switching the channel or heading outside to play. Watching it now, I thought D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE was a somewhat okay movie for what it is, but for war movie fans, it’s probably best for completists.

Review: Three Must Die! - Dan Gregory (Lorenz Heller)

Dinny Powell, the narrator/protagonist of Lorenz Heller’s novel THREE MUST DIE!, is a former journalist who’s living a quiet life as the publisher of a shopping guide in the small city of Rocky Hill, New Jersey. One peaceful Sunday afternoon, he’s out fishing in a creek with a couple of buddies of his, one a lawyer and the other a banker, when they hear a terrible car crash nearby and hurry to investigate. When they arrive on the scene, they find that the richest man in the county has been killed in the wreck, and the man’s lawyer is wandering around in a daze. A few minutes later, the members of a teenage motorcycle gang show up, too, and Dinny gets in a little scrap with one of them.

The wreck turns out to cause serious problems for Dinny, because a briefcase belonging to the rich guy’s lawyer should have been in the car but is missing, and in that briefcase is the brand-new will made by the tycoon. The cops think Dinny has the will, everybody affected by it thinks Dinny has the will, and so does a mysterious blackmailer who’s willing to kill to get what he wants.

THREE MUST DIE! is an excellent medium-boiled mystery that was published as a paperback original by Graphic Books in 1956 under the pseudonym Dan Gregory, the only time Heller used that name. The cover art is by Roy Lance. There are enough twists in the plot to keep things interesting, but Heller’s strong suit was his characters, and they’re all well-rounded and compelling, especially Dinny. His on-again, off-again romance with the girl who works on the shopping paper with him and wants to become a famous reporter is really well-handled. As a mystery, the clues are all there and I figured out who the killer was before I got to the end, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the very suspenseful climax.

THREE MUST DIE! has just been reprinted by Stark House in a very nice double volume with another of Heller’s novels, NIGHT NEVER ENDS. It’s available in e-book and paperback, and I give it a high recommendation. Lorenz Heller is just a thoroughly entertaining writer of crime and mystery fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 25, 1933

That's a nice evocative cover by Frederick Witton, an artist whose work I'm not familiar with, on this issue of SHORT STORIES. It's dated December 25, and Christmas Day was on Monday in 1933 (yes, I looked it up), so the unsold copies of this one were probably pulled off the stands on Tuesday that week. Although who wouldn't want a pulp with stories by H. Bedford-Jones, James B. Hendryx (a Corporal Downey yarn), William Merriam Rouse, George Allan England, Hapsburg Liebe, Clifford Knight, and Berton E. Cook? Well, it was the depths of the depression, after all, so I'm sure there were a lot of people who didn't have a quarter to spare, but enough people kept buying SHORT STORIES to keep it in business for a couple of decades and more after this.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

They played some snippets from this song on a recent episode of THE SIMPSONS. Yes, I still watch THE SIMPSONS. I liked it, didn't recognize it at all, and so I had to look it up. I'd heard of The Traveling Wilburys, of course, but I'm not sure I ever heard any of their music. But after listening to this one all the way through, I love it. Some of the lyrics speak to me, as they say. The ones about being old, of course, but how you should keep going to the end of the line. That's my plan.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

Review: The Daughter of Genghis Khan - John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien)

The narrator/protagonist of David Wright O’Brien’s novella “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is Dr. Cliff Saunders, an American physician who is part of a humanitarian mission aiding the Nationalist Chinese during their war against the Japanese. Since the January 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, the pulp in which this yarn originally appeared as the subject of H.W. MacCauley's dramatic cover, was actually on the newsstands during December 1941, that means the story was written well before the attack on Pearl Harbor during the period in which the United States was technically a neutral nation.

But neutrality doesn’t mean much during the chaos of war, so when Japanese forces overrun the field hospital in which Saunders and beautiful redheaded nurse Linda Barret are working, they’re both taken prisoner. At least they’re not executed outright. In fact, the Japanese officer in charges wants to deliver them to a neutral area where they’ll be safe. However, before that can happen, a group of Mongol bandits counterattack, and Saunders and Linda find themselves taken to an isolated village in the mountains that’s ruled by a beautiful young woman who claims to be the daughter of Genghis Khan. Not a descendant, mind you, but the actual daughter of the great Mongol conqueror.

That claim is part of the slight fantasy element in this story. It had to have some sort of off-trail bent to the plot, since this was FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, after all, but for the most part, “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is a pretty straightforward World War II yarn, as Saunders and Linda are forced to choose a side in the bloody conflict between the Japanese and the Mongol bandits. It’s pretty easy to figure out which side they’ll wind up on, of course, but that doesn’t detract from the breakneck action and the colorful characters and setting. This story reminded me a little of Milton Caniff’s immortal TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, and that’s a good thing.

David Wright O’Brien’s writing career was a short one. His first story was published early in 1940, and he was killed while serving in the Army Air Force in 1944 when the bomber he was in was shot down over Berlin. But he published dozens of stories during that handful of years, most of them in the Ziff-Davis pulps AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. I think it’s safe to say he was a rising star in the science fiction and fantasy fields. “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” was published under his pseudonym John York Cabot because there were two more stories by him in that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, one under his real name and one under his other pseudonym Duncan Farnsworth. (O’Brien was the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, the legendary editor of WEIRD TALES.) I’ve read several of his stories and really enjoyed all of them so far. His prose is clean and fast-moving with a very nice touch for action.

You can find the issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES containing this story here, and it’s available in other places on the Internet, as well. I need to read more by O’Brien, and I hope I manage to do so soon.

Review: One For My Dame - Jack Webb

ONE FOR MY DAME was published originally in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Avon (with a truly terrible cover) in 1964. It’s is the second novel in the recent double volume of Jack Webb’s stand-alone mystery and suspense yarns published by Stark House. I really enjoyed the first half of this book, THE DEADLY COMBO, so I had high hopes for ONE FOR MY DAME, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Rick Jackson is the owner of a pet shop in Los Angeles and leads a peaceful life with his pets, a goofy Great Dane, a hyperactive spider monkey, and a foul-mouthed mynah bird. However, Rick’s life takes a decidedly non-peaceful turn when he stops in a local watering hole one evening for a drink and finds himself sitting next to a very beautiful but very drunk redhead. He takes her back to his apartment over the pet store, but Rick is a fundamentally decent guy and doesn’t take advantage of her condition. He lets her sleep it off instead, and the next morning he puts her in a cab. He figures that’s the last he’ll see of her.

But it may be the last anybody sees of her, because she goes missing, and as it turns out, she’s the daughter of a prominent politician who’s been investigating the Mob. And Rick, as one of the last people to see her, suddenly has cops and gangsters both on his tail, as everybody wants to get their hands on something important the girl had in her possession. Rick’s problem is that he doesn’t know what it is or where it might be, but that’s not going to stop people from trying to kill him.

Hey, I can think of at least two series about hardboiled, two-fisted accountants, so why not a hardboiled, two-fisted pet store owner? Especially considering the fact that Rick has some pretty dark stuff in his background, as we find out while events unfold in this novel. ONE FOR MY DAME is one of those books that goes along in a pretty breezy, light-hearted fashion—until suddenly it doesn’t. And it’s a testament to Webb’s ability as a writer that both elements work extremely well. This is a fast-moving, very entertaining novel that I really enjoyed. THE DEADLY COMBO/ONE FOR MY DAME is available in e-book and paperback editions, and if you like smart, well-written crime fiction, I give it a high recommendation.