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.)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Golden Dawn - Carlos Dengler

 

Sometimes on a dark night of the soul, you need music that's soothing. Or at least I do.

Review: Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author - Willard M. Oliver

I never get tired of reading about Robert E. Howard and his work. I’ve read several biographies and books about his writings and countless articles on those subjects. So I am definitely the target audience for ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR, the massive new REH biography by Willard M. Oliver published by the University of North Texas Press in hardcover and e-book editions. (It doesn’t hurt that I’m a graduate of UNT, or as it was known when I went there, North Texas State University.)

I really enjoyed the other biographies I read, even the deeply flawed DARK VALLEY DESTINY by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin. It was the first real REH bio, and a friend of mine helped the de Camps with the research. Plus we didn’t really know at the time about much of the stuff they got wrong or misinterpreted. Anyway, before I wander off in the weeds . . .

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR will likely be considered the definitive REH biography from now on, since it’s exhaustively researched, extensively footnoted, and brings together in one place all the information that’s available about Howard’s life, plus adding some things that I’ve never come across before in nearly 60 years of being a Howard fan. Academically, I just don’t see how anybody could ever top this volume.

However, I’m not an academic. I’m a guy who likes Howard’s yarns and have ever since I spotted the Lancer edition of CONAN THE USURPER in Barber’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth lo, those many years ago. And I feel a strong kinship toward Howard dating back to the moment I opened that paperback with its purple-edged pages and read in L. Sprague de Camp’s introduction that Howard was from Cross Plains, Texas—a town I’d heard of all my life because both sides of my family come from the same general area in west central Texas. I mean, here was a guy from a little town in Texas who forged a career as a writer when everything seemed stacked against him, and that was exactly what I wanted to do!

So what I look for in a biography of Robert E. Howard is a sense of who he was, what he did, how and why he did it (as much as it’s possible to figure out the why), and the same feeling I get when I stand in the Howard House in Cross Plains and look into that tiny room where Bob lived and worked . . . and this new book delivers on that. It delivers on that magnificently, in prose that’s clear, straightforward, sometimes poignant, and very compelling.

I haven’t been to Cross Plains for Howard Days in a number of years and I’ve never met or been in contact with Will Oliver, so I say this not as a friend of his but as a long-time reader and fan of Howard’s work.

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR is the best book I’ve read this year. For Howard fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

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

I’ve enjoyed many of the action movies written and/or directed by Luc Besson, but I hadn’t come across this one until recently. Besson co-wrote it with Robert Mark Kamen (the guy who wrote the original Karate Kid movie), and it has a pretty simple premise: in 1994, a ten-year-old girl in Bogota, Colombia, sees her parents murdered by killers working for a cartel crime boss. She grows up and becomes a professional assassin (played at that point by Zoe Saldana) who only kills targets who actually have it coming. She’s really working to get revenge on the cartel boss responsible for her parents’ murder, who by now has moved to the United States and become an asset for the CIA. The fine character Lennie James is the FBI agent who’s on Saldana’s trail.

It's a standard but workable plot, but really it’s only there as a framework for almost non-stop action scenes. Gunfight, chase, parkour, parkour, parkour, gunfight, chase, more parkour. The thing is, it’s all very stylishly filmed, and even though it’s over the top (plenty of “Sure, why not?” moments), the cast manages to sell it. Saldana is sexy and athletic, Lennie James does a good job as the dogged investigator, and the bad guys are suitably despicable. Is that enough for a couple of hours of entertainment? It was for me.

Review: Misfit Lil Fights Back - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

I’m a long-time fan of Keith Chapman’s Western novels about Misfit Lil, also known as Miss Lillian Goodnight. I recently read the third book in the series, MISFIT LIL FIGHTS BACK, originally published by Robert Hale Ltd. in 2007 under Chapman’s Chap O’Keefe pseudonym, reprinted in large print by Ulverscroft in 2008, and now available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon with a cover by Michael Thomas that really captures the character.

Misfit Lil is an Arizona rancher’s daughter who was a tomboy growing up. She prefers wearing buckskins to fancy dresses and is happiest riding the range and getting into adventures. Her father sent her to a finishing school in Boston to try to turn her into a lady, but it didn’t take. Even though she’s semi-estranged from her father, she stays true to her nature when she returns home and can usually be found getting mixed in one ruckus or another. She can outride, outshoot, and outfight most men, but she’s definitely female and has a crush on army scout Jackson Farraday, who considers himself too old for her and resists her advances.

In MISFIT LIL FIGHTS BACK, all hell is breaking loose in Arizona Territory. Cattle are being rustled, rifles are being smuggled to renegade Apaches, corruption runs deep at the local Indian Agency, and a pair of hired killers show up looking for a young man who’s involved with the local madam and a flashy gambler. Lil has a couple of shootouts early on which get her neck-deep in this whole mess. She’s convinced all of it is connected and is determined to uncover the truth—if her investigation doesn’t get her killed first.

Chapman’s books are always fast-paced, but this one is a whirlwind! Lots of action, a twisty but logical plot, and great protagonists in Lil and Jackson Farraday. Chapman just keeps piling on the problems until it seems like it’s going to take a real slam-bang climax to straighten everything out, and then that’s exactly what he gives us.

I really enjoyed reading this book. If you’re a fan of traditional action Westerns, I give it a high recommendation and hope that there’ll be more Misfit Lil novels in the future.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, January 1945

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: The Last Pale Light in the West - Ben Nichols

 

I love raspy-voiced singers and world-weary songs like this. They resonate pretty strongly with me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Fiction Magazine, August 1938

I don't know who did the cover artwork on this issue of WESTERN FICTION MAGAZINE. There's a signature on the painting, but I can't make it out. As always, if anyone can identify the artist, I'll greatly appreciate it. But what I do know is that it's yet another appearance of our favorite Western pulp cover trio: the Stalwart Cowboy, the Angry Redhead (she's not totin' a gun in this one, but she is showing a nice amount of leg in that saddle), and the Wounded Old Geezer. Inside this issue are stories by the always dependable Ed Earl Repp (aided, perhaps, by an unknown ghost) and Orlando Rigoni, plus house-name Rex Evans, and another pulpster unknown to me, Dick Robson, who was reasonably prolific for a while, turning out two dozen stories in a short-lived career from 1937 to 1940.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Malay Woman - A.S. Fleischman

A.S. Fleischman doesn’t waste any time dropping the reader right into the middle of the action in this novel, published originally by Gold Medal in 1954. The narrator, Jock Hamilton, is an American running a rubber plantation in Sumatra, and as the book opens, he’s already on the run for the murder of his wife, who he appears to have killed in a drunken black-out because of her habit of cheating on him. Jock himself doesn’t know whether or not he’s guilty, but he’s trying to avoid the cops anyway. He heads for the plantation of an old friend of his who has a rubber plantation in Malaya. On the boat heading upriver, he becomes involved with a beautiful Australian widow who has a couple of professional killers after her. She claims to have no idea who could want her dead, but she accepts Jock’s help in getting away from them. Then, arriving at the plantation, Jock finds his old friend married, and the friend’s beautiful wife has a straying eye that lands solidly on Jock. There’s also the matter of Communists insurgents who have targeted the foreign-owned plantations.

Well, with all these complications, you know Fleischman is going to keep the action perking along nicely, and MALAY WOMAN doesn’t disappoint in that respect or any other. The writing is fast and hardboiled, and the local color is handled very nicely. There are plenty of details, but the book never gets bogged down in them and they don’t get in the way of the action. Jock is one of a long line of Gold Medal heroes who are likable but not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, and even though he’s a little dense about what’s really going on, you can’t help but root for him. All of it leads up to an action-packed and very satisfying ending.

Not long after this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 23, 2010, MALAY WOMAN was reprinted by Stark House in a double volume with DANGER IN PARADISE, which I really need to get around to reading. If you like hardboiled mystery/adventure novels, do yourself a favor and pick up this book, which also includes the usual excellent introduction by David Laurence Wilson and a brief intro by A.S. Fleischman himself. It's still available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Oooh-Ahh (Catalina) - Mindi Abair

 

I really like Mindi Abair's music, and this one is perfect for the middle of the night when a guy's spirits need a little lift.

Review: The Tripods #3: The Pool of Fire - John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

THE POOL OF FIRE is the third and final book in the Tripods Trilogy by British science fiction author John Christopher, whose real name was Samuel Youd. You’ll remember from the previous two books, THE WHITE MOUNTAINS and THE CITY OF GOLD AND LEAD, that aliens known as the Masters have invaded and conquered Earth, mentally controlling everybody over the age of 14 and regressing society to a vaguely medieval state. But there are pockets of resistance, one of them joined by our narrator/protagonist, young Will Parker from England.

Will is one of the few agents of the resistance to infiltrate one of the Masters’ cities and find out anything about them. In the previous book, he discovered they’re working on something that will put all of humanity in mortal danger. In THE POOL OF FIRE, the humans come up with a plan to fight back while they still have a chance, and once more, Will is in the thick of things, despite the fact that he’s still a teenager.

This volume of the trilogy drags a little in the middle while that plan is being developed, but it kicks in and rushes to not one but two big climaxes, both of which are well-written and quite moving with several stand-up-and-cheer moments. However, the wrap-up after that feels a bit rushed to me, and the ending is not especially satisfying.

It seems like I’ve given mixed reviews to all three of these books, but don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the Tripods Trilogy and am glad I read them. I especially like the fact that Christopher told his story in three relatively short novels instead of eight or ten (or more) 150,000 word behemoths like you find so often in modern science fiction and fantasy. The Tripods Trilogy is a very well-loved series, and I think I might have responded more positively to it if I had read the books when I was a teenager. Some books are just better if you encounter them at the right time. But even so, if you’re a fan of classic science fiction, I think these books are well worth reading. THE POOL OF FIRE, like others in the series, is available on Amazon in print and e-book editions.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

That’s right. Somehow, I’ve managed to spend more than 70 years on this planet, and I’ve never seen CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON—until now.

This is another movie where there’s no need at all for me to talk about the plot. You’ve all seen it. So here are some things that struck me about this one.

This is a really well-made movie. The photography, the music, the Gillman suit, even the acting (which is sometimes not stellar in movies like this) are all top-notch. Those underwater scenes with Ricou Browning as the Gillman are just beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, Julie Adams in a seemingly endless assortment of skimpy outfits, including that iconic white one-piece swimsuit, is just breathtaking. What a lovely woman. And she turns in a decent performance, too.

Richard Denning is a good villain, although he’s not terribly villainous, just opposed to the other characters’ ideas. I like Denning. He played Mike Shayne in a one-season TV show based on Davis Dresser’s novels, and from what little I’ve seen of it, he was pretty good in the role.

One of the natives who’s killed early on by the Creature is played by Perry Lopez, who, many years later, was one of the two cops who harassed Jack Nicholson’s character in CHINATOWN. He was the less sympathetic of those two, not the one who says, “Forget it, Jake, it’s . . . Chinatown.”

Is this considered a horror movie? I always thought it was, but to me it seems to have more in common with Fifties science fiction movies like THEM! and TARANTULA.

Those are some of the things that occurred to me while I was watching this one. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the heck out of it and wondered how in the world I managed not to see it all these years. I’m glad I finally did, because CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is just a terrific movie.

Review: Celtic Adventures - D.M. Ritzlin, ed.

My ancestry is mostly British (which I assume includes some Scots, too) and Irish, so I’ve always had a fondness for Celtic heroes. The latest collection from DMR Books, CELTIC ADVENTURES, offers a fine assortment of such heroes, too.

After an informative and entertaining introduction by Deuce Richardson, the book opens with the poem “The Druids” by Kenneth Morris, an author whose name is familiar to me, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything by him until now. It’s an atmospheric poem that does a good job of setting the stage.

“The Devil’s Dagger” by the well-regarded writing team of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur and Farnham Bishop is set in 13^th Century Scotland and finds a young soldier trying to solve the seemingly impossible murder of one of the King’s officials. If he doesn’t, the father of the girl he’s fallen in love with will be executed for the crime. There’s some great action in this one including a lengthy swordfight that covers a lot of ground in the castle where the majority of the story takes place. I really like the way Brodeur and Bishop wrote. This is the first thing I’ve read by them, although I have a copy of their acclaimed novel IN THE GRIP OF THE MINOTAUR and need to get around to reading it. “The Devil’s Dagger” first appeared in the September 3, 1918 issue of ADVENTURE.

One of Robert E. Howard’s many Celtic heroes was Conan the Reaver, an Irish pirate who shared the same name as a certain Cimmerian. “People of the Dark”, from the June 1932 issue of STRANGE TALES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR, is actually one of Howard’s “past lives” yarns, in which a modern-day man bent on murder takes a fall in a cave, knocks himself out, and winds up reliving a break-neck adventure that happened to one of his ancestors (the above-mentioned Conan the Reaver). It’s a great story, too, full of action as Conan and a couple of companions battle a genuinely creepy race of little people who live underground (another common element in Howard’s work). I had read this one several times before, but it had been a while so I thoroughly enjoyed it all over again.

“The Harping of Cravetheen” is by-lined Fiona MacLeod, which was actually a pseudonym for William Sharp, another author unfamiliar to me. It appeared originally in a collection called THE SIN-EATER, published in 1895. It’s a very well-written tale about romance, a young woman forced to marry a man she doesn’t want to, feuding families, infidelity, and violent death, along with a supernatural element and some harp music. I think. To be honest, half the time I wasn’t sure what was going on in this one. It’s worth reading for the sheer beauty of the language, but it wasn’t really to my taste, either.

“A Claymore for the Clan” is by Donald Barr Chidsey, one of my favorite pulp authors, and appeared originally in the July 1948 issue of ADVENTURE. Told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, it’s another tale of blood feuds and desperate sword battles. Chidsey, equally at home with hardboiled contemporary crime yarns and fast-paced swashbucklers like this one, is always worth reading, and this story barrels along in very entertaining fashion.

Clyde Irvine’s story “The Horror in the Glen” first appeared in the April 1940 issue of WEIRD TALES. A Scottish warrior avenges the murder of his family by a rival clan, but not before being banished for seven years to a supernatural realm and acquiring eldritch powers. This is another well-written story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Irvine’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up and found that he published 18 stories during the early Forties, most of them adventure yarns in JUNGLE STORIES. I’ll have to keep an eye out for his work.

The highlight of this collection (other than REH) is “Grana, Queen of Battle” by John Barnett. This was published as a complete novel in the October 11, 1913 issue of THE CAVALIER, but it’s actually a series of six linked short stories about a beautiful female pirate in Ireland during the Elizabethan era. Grana can handle a sword when she needs to, but she usually outwits her opponents. After inheriting a castle and ships from her father, a famous pirate, she deals with mutinies, English tax collectors, treacherous Spaniards, and rival pirates. Finally, she’s captured by the English and sentenced to hang. This leads to a smashing climax that manages to be very satisfying while still hitting a slightly bittersweet note. I don’t know anything about John Barnett, but this is a terrific yarn.

This volume concludes with a poem by Robert E. Howard, “Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhi Mar Or”. I don’t know what that translates to, but the poem itself is dramatic and strikes an excellent ending note to this collection.

CELTIC ADVENTURES is available in paperback and e-book editions on Amazon, with an excellent cover by Jim FitzPatrick, and I give it a high recommendation if you’re a fan of fine adventure stories. Up above, I mentioned that my ancestry is mostly British, but the part that’s not? That’s Scandinavian, so naturally, I like Viking tales, too! And DMR Books just happens to have published a book called VIKING ADVENTURES, as well as a four-volume collection of Arthur D. Howden-Smith’s famous pulp series about Swain the Viking, so I have a pretty good idea about some of the books I’m going to be reading in the reasonably near future . . .

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Foreign Legion Adventures, October 1940

FOREIGN LEGION ADVENTURES was a short-lived reprint pulp from Munsey. This is the second and final issue. I don't know who did the cover art. Obviously, these stories are all Foreign Legion yarns, and some of the big names in the genre are here: Theodore Roscoe, F. Van Wyck Mason, and J.D. Newsom. There's also a story by Houston Day, a fairly prolific pulpster I'm not familiar with. All the stories in this issue originally appeared in various 1930s issues of ARGOSY. I don't know whether ARGOSY or ADVENTURE published more Foreign Legion stories. The number of them in each magazine is probably pretty close. And all the ones I've read have been very good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, February 1952

Here's another Wanted Poster cover, this one by Sam Cherry. GIANT WESTERN was one of the Thrilling Group Western pulps, although it didn't last as long as most of them. The lead story in this issue is by Clifton Adams writing as Clay Randall, so I'm sure it's good. Philip Ketchum, another consistently good author, is also in this issue, along with a couple of writers I'm not familiar with, Lee Priestly and Sam Carson, both of which appear to be real names. I expected Sam Carson to turn out to be a house-name, but it's not, according to the Fictionmags Index. I don't believe I've ever read an issue of GIANT WESTERN. I don't own this one, and it doesn't appear to be available on-line, although PDFs of several other issues can be found at the Internet Archive.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Tongking! - Dan Cushman

Dan Cushman wrote extensively for the Western pulps and in fact was responsible for creating the last Western hero pulp, THE PECOS KID. Cushman wrote five Pecos Kid novellas for the magazine, all of which were reprinted by Leisure in paperback. He also wrote original paperbacks for Gold Medal and Dell and was still turning out hardback Western novels for Walker during the Eighties. But he's equally well-remembered for adventure novels set in Africa, the South Seas, and the Far East, including this one.

TONGKING! was published in 1954 as half of an Ace Double (with a great cover by Rafael deSoto) and is very much of its time. The protagonist is down-on-his-luck American soldier of fortune Rocky Forbes, who finds himself broke in Bangkok, not a good situation. He falls in with an old ally/enemy, the smuggler Fatto Kolski (who seems to be modeled pretty blatantly on Sydney Greenstreet). Kolski has a plan to smuggle some guns to anti-communist guerrillas in China, but in order to pull off the scheme, he needs Forbes to pretend to be a dead man.

This is just the beginning of a very twisty plot that involves American spies, British spies, Chinese spies, a beautiful Spanish torch singer, a beautiful American missionary, double crosses, triple crosses, murder, tramp steamers, and shootouts with Thompson submachine guns. If all those plot elements don’t perk your interest, I don’t know what would. The pace never lets up for very long, the local color is very well-done, and Rocky Forbes manages to be a likable hero while at the same time remaining an unrepentant heel. TONGKING! is an updated version of the sort of pulpish international intrigue and adventure stories that were published in BLUE BOOK during the Thirties.

In an interview with George Tuttle that was first published in PAPERBACK PARADE and recently reprinted in SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, the first collection of Cushman’s Armless O’Neil stories that originally appeared in the pulps JUNGLE STORIES and ACTION STORIES, Cushman himself offers a fairly low opinion of TONGKING! I hate to disagree with the author, but I found this novel very entertaining, definitely enough so to make me want to read more of Cushman’s adventure novels. If you have it on your shelves but have never read it, you should take it down and give it a try. If you run across a copy of the Ace Double for a reasonable price, as I did, grab it. That great cover alone is worth something.

(This post originally appeared on July 9, 2010, in a somewhat different form. TONGKING! doesn't appear to be in print, but used copies are out there on the Internet and are only moderately expensive. As for some of the other Cushman yarns mentioned above, all five of the Pecos Kid pulp novels are available on Amazon in three volumes: THE PECOS KID (e-book, paperback), THE PECOS KID RETURNS (e-book, paperback), and NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL (e-book, paperback). Altus Press published a second volume of Cushman's Armless O'Neill pulp stories, completing the series. It's called SWAMP FETISH, you can pick it up on Amazon, and the introduction is by none other than yours truly. The first Armless O'Neill collection, SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, is still available as well. Cushman continues to be one of my favorite authors, and I need to read something else by him soon.)

(UPDATE: Actually, TONGKING! has been reprinted in a trade paperback edition that's available on Amazon. Many thanks to the reader who pointed this out!)

Review: The Face of Evil - John McPartland

John McPartland died young and wasn’t very prolific, only a dozen novels during the Fifties, a couple of them published posthumously. But his work was well-regarded and movies were made from several of his books. The fine folks at Black Gat Books have just reprinted his novel THE FACE OF EVIL, originally published by Gold Medal in 1954 with a cover by Ray Johnson, a great cover artist but not one I particularly associate with Gold Medal. I’d read and enjoyed several of McPartland’s novels, so I was eager to give this one a try.

The narrator/protagonist is Bill Oxford, a former newspaperman who works for a public relations agency in Los Angeles. However, Bill’s real job is as a fixer, a guy you can call on to get you out of a jam—or get one of your enemies into one. His specialty is framing political or business figures for some sort of crime and then blackmailing them into doing what his employers want. As this novel opens, he’s been sent to Newport Beach to stop a crusading lawyer from revealing damaging information about a candidate for public office. McPartland never delves deeply into the specifics of any of this, and he doesn’t need to. It’s enough for us to know that Bill is a pretty shady guy who’ll stoop to just about any dirty trick to accomplish his ends.

Unfortunately for Bill, he still has a tiny shred of decency in him, and it’s about to be tested when he falls in love with the widow of his target’s ex-law partner and also has to deal with the reappearance in his life of a young woman he did dirty several years earlier.

The action in this book takes place in about twenty-four hours, and it’s roughly divided between Bill wrestling with his conscience, dealing with various hitches in his plan, trying to figure out the romantic triangle in which he finds himself, getting mixed up in brutal fistfights, and going on the run from the law. It’s all very well-written, and McPartland spins his yarn at a breakneck pace that really had me flipping the pages. And I honestly didn’t know how he was going to resolve Bill’s various dilemmas, which is always nice.

Speaking of resolutions, I have to admit there are a couple of late plot developments that strike me as deus ex machina, which slightly lessens the impact of this novel. But it’s still very, very good despite that, with great characters, a vividly realized setting (Newport Beach during what’s now known as Spring Break, although McPartland never uses that term), and plenty of action and drama. I had a great time reading THE FACE OF EVIL, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction from the Fifties, I give it a high recommendation. It's available from Amazon in print and e-book editions. There’s a lot in this one I feel like I’m going to remember for a while.

TV Series I've Missed Until Now: Cranford (2007-2009)

Not gonna lie, we like us some high-class British historical drama. Yeah, they’re generally soap operas, but everybody dresses so nice and talks so fancy.

And so it is with CRANFORD, made by the BBC in 2007 and based on a series of novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. Technically, it has two seasons, but the first has only five episodes and the second consists of two movie-length episodes. So, seven episodes overall that cover a couple of years’ time in the 1840s in the small English village of Cranford, located in Cheshire. (I’d have to look that up to know where in England that is, and I’m not that ambitious.)

This is definitely a soap opera. We’ve got unrequited love, doomed love, disease, death, ambition, rotters, noble doctors, a heroine who wants to be a writer, scandal, and the inexorable changes wrought by time. It’s very well-made and well-acted, with scripts (all by Heidi Thomas, the main writer on CALL THE MIDWIFE, another show we like) that range from pretty darned funny to really sad. Everything that happens is pretty predictable, and I was extremely annoyed when the show came to an end and left a major plotline unresolved. All I can think is that they planned to address that in the next season and didn’t know the show was coming to an end.

Mostly, though, CRANFORD is a series where you spend a lot of time going, “Hey, it’s that guy from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Jim Carter, who played Carson the butler on that show and is Captain Brown, a retired military man in charge of building a railroad here. Carter is one of those guys who has a great voice and I like just listening to him talk) and “Hey, it’s Lady Mary from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Michelle Dockery, who also has a great voice) and “Hey, it’s Loki from the Marvel movies!” (Tom Hiddleston, who’s a very good guy here) and “Hey, it’s Doctor Who!” (Jodie Whittaker, whose run as the Doctor I’ve never seen and never will) and “Hey, it’s Doc Martin’s aunt!” (Eileen Atkins from one of our favorite British series, DOC MARTIN) and “Hey, it’s Judi Dench!” (too many things to list).

Despite what you might think from my sarcasm, I really enjoyed CRANFORD. I wish they had made more seasons. I’m not going to read the books, mind you, but I’d have been happy to watch more of the TV version.

Review: Crime Nest - Edwin Truett Long (Detective Dime Novels, April 1940)

I’d read a number of pulp stories over the years by Edwin Truett Long, writing under various pseudonyms and house-names, and I always enjoyed them. But I’ve become more interested in him and his work since discovering that he lived for a while on the west side of Fort Worth and is buried on the east side. One of these days, I’m going to drive over to the cemetery and find his grave. But for now, I’m trying to read more of his stories. This time, it’s “Crime Nest”, from the April 1940 issue of DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, which was published under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. This is the first of three novels featuring Dr. Thaddeus C. Harker, one of the more offbeat characters from the pulp era.

Doc Harker, as he’s often known, is a traveling medicine show huckster, tooling around the country in a bright red coupe and pulling an equally red trailer in which he concocts his cure-all, the world-famous Chickasha Remedy. However, that’s just a cover for his true activities. Doc Harker is actually a brilliant scientific criminologist, and his passion is solving murders and other crimes with the help of two assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones, who handles the strongarm stuff, and the beautiful Brenda Sloan, whose specialty is infiltrating gangs and gathering intelligence. In “Crime Nest”, our intrepid trio of detectives heads for Abbottsville, a resort town in Texas (although Long never specifies the state) famous for its hot springs. Abbottsville is loosely based on the real town of Mineral Wells.

They’re there in answer to a plea for help from one of Doc’s old friends, who sends Doc a letter explaining that a cabal of criminals from New York and New Jersey have moved in and taken over the town. Doc intends to break their hold on the place and bring them to justice, but the situation gets more complicated when there’s a grisly murder the first night after they arrive.

From there it’s mostly breakneck action with a little detective work thrown in as Long packs in a lot of plot in the span of not much more than 24 hours. More murders, a missing fortune, beautiful women, shootouts, clouts over the head, and lights that go out just as Doc is about to spring a major revelation—we get all that good stuff and more. Long wasn’t a meticulous plotter, but he usually wrestles all those colorful characters and fast-paced action into scenarios that make sense, mostly.

I really enjoyed this yarn and had a grand time reading it. It’s the kind of stuff I grew up on and I still get a kick out of it. One interesting note: the character who sends for Doc Harker is named Arthur Wallace, which just happens to be the name of a pulpster who contributed scores of stories to the Spicy pulps, as did Long. There’s been some mystery as to whether Wallace was a real name or a house-name. Based on Long using the name in this novel, I suspect he was a real guy and that he and Long were friends. That’s only a hunch, though. Maybe somebody will uncover the facts someday.

My friend Tom Johnson was a fan of the Doc Harker series and reprinted all three novels as small-press chapbooks many years ago. I owned all of them but never got around to reading any of them. More recently, Altus Press has reprinted the series in a handsome volume called DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES, with an introduction by none other than Tom Johnson, who provides more biographical information about Long than I’ve found anywhere else. This is where I read “Crime Nest”. The collection is available in paperback and e-book editions, and if you enjoy offbeat pulp detective yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 17, 1934

This is the first appearance of the Park Avenue Hunt Club on the cover of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, with only the second story in the long-running series. And to be honest, in this cover by Lejaren Hiller, an artist I hadn't heard of, the guys look more like villains than the heroes they actually were. Judson Philips, the author of that series and many others, and Edward Parrish Ware are the only authors I recognize in this issue. The others who contributed stories are Herbert O. Yardley, Augustus Muir, and Milo Ray Phelps. The Park Avenue Hunt Club stories have been reprinted in a couple of expensive hardcovers that are no longer available. I'm hoping we'll get some affordable trade paperback and/or e-book editions at some point. The ones I've read are really good.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, June 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover artwork is by Sam Cherry, who did nearly all of the TEXAS RANGERS covers during the Fifties and always did a great job. This one illustrates, sort of, the opening scene of this issue’s novel.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s a Big Four of authors who wrote Jim Hatfield novels under the house-name Jackson Cole: A. Leslie Scott, the creator of the series; Tom Curry; Walker A. Tompkins; and Peter Germano, the author of this issue’s novel “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. Germano, who also wrote a lot of very good novels under the name Barry Cord, was the most hardboiled of the bunch. His prose is terse and fast-moving, and there’s no “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. While I love the standard Western pulp dialogue, I like this approach, too. (Roe Richmond actually wrote more Hatfields than Germano, but I don’t like his novels so I don’t count him as a major Hatfield author.)

Germano really packs a lot of plot and characters into “The Outlaw Nobody Knew”. The mysterious bandit boss of the title has kidnapped the governor’s son in an attempt to keep his brother from being hanged. Hatfield has only six days and the narrowest of leads to find the boy. His search takes him to a mining town in West Texas. At the same time, a young former carnival tightrope walker shows up in town on a quest of his own. Also on hand are a shady gambler/saloonkeeper, assorted gunmen, a hotel owner who quotes classic Greek literature, and an old desert rat prospector who thinks he’s actually a sea captain. There’s so much going on that it’s actually a little hard to keep track of at times, but Germano keeps the story racing along anyway until it arrives at a twist ending that isn’t really that much of a surprise but is very effective anyway.

There’s an oddity about this one in that Hatfield dresses differently than he usually does, sporting a long black frock coat, a string tie, and a flat-crowned black hat. That just happens to be what a character is wearing in an interior illustration which also features another character who looks like Wild Bill Hickok. And Germano specifically mentions that the local marshal resembles Wild Bill Hickok. My hunch is that this illustration existed before the story was written, and Germano made the descriptions match it. No way of knowing, of course, but I’m always suspicious about such things. What’s important, though, is that “The Outlaw Nobody Knew” is a good solid Hatfield novel, not one of the top rank but well worth reading.

Robert Virgil published only four stories, according to the Fictionmags Index. “Rancher’s Woman” in this issue is the first of those. And it’s a really good one, a well-written Western noir about a middle-aged rancher, his younger, beautiful, restless wife, and the world-weary hired hand who signs on. This is the stuff of countless Gold Medal novels, but Virgil distills it down to a few pages and then gives us a surprising, very effective ending. I know I have at least one of his other stories and may go ahead and read that issue soon.

Ben Frank was the pseudonym of a writer named Frank Bennett, who wrote mostly humorous Westerns for the pulps. He had a long series about an old-timer known as Doc Swap, and another about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. I’m not a fan of either of those series. Frank’s story in this issue, “The Champ of Cottonwood County”, is a stand-alone, and while it’s a comedy, it’s not as silly as some of his that I’ve read. It’s a romantic comedy, at that, about a hapless rancher trying to woo the girl of his dreams while ignoring the fact that a female friend of his is prettier and more suitable in every way than the girl he pines after. There’s also a robbery, a fugitive outlaw, an overbearing rival rancher, and a little bit of action before things come to a predictable conclusion. It’s fairly well-written and mildly amusing, and for a Ben Frank yarn, I thought it was pretty good.

I’m a big fan of the cavalry novelettes Steuart Emery wrote for TEXAS RANGERS, and he did quite a few of them. The one featured in this issue is ”The Shooting Sawbones”. The protagonist, John Rawdon, is about to graduate from West Point when an accident leaves him with a permanent bum knee. He can’t serve as a combat officer, but he can become a medical officer, which he does. His first post is an isolated fort in Arizona Territory, and wouldn’t you know it, a series of unusual circumstances leaves Rawdon in command of the fort just as a horde of hostile Apaches show up to attack it. There’s also a girl—there’s always a girl—who, in this case, is the daughter of a bitter retired officer who hates army doctors. Sure, I knew most of what was going to happen in this one, but Emery can really write and his military stories have a definite air of authenticity. Plus his characters often don’t turn out exactly the way you think they will, and he can surprise me now and then with a plot twist. “The Shooting Sawbones” is a very entertaining story and I look forward to reading more of Emery’s work. He wrote hundreds of stories, going back to 1919, many of them aviation and air war yarns in the Twenties and Thirties. I need to sample some of those.

D.S. Halacy Jr. wrote dozens of stories for the pulps and the slicks in several different genres, including Westerns, mysteries, and sports stories. His contribution to this issue, a short-short titled “Family Affair” is about a U.S. Marshal corralling an outlaw, with a twist ending that’s pretty obvious. This is a minor but well-written story that doesn’t pack as much punch as it thinks it does.

Peter Fernandez is another author who published only a few stories, half a dozen according to the Fictionmags Index. “Apache Alibi” is about a shipment of gold on a stagecoach and the various would-be thieves plotting to get their hands on it. Like “Rancher’s Wife”, this is pure Western noir and is about as bleak as they come. It’s a good story, but it’ll leave you feeling a little grubby.

W.J. Reynolds wrote about 120 stories, most of them Westerns, in a career that covered the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and a little way into the Seventies. “The Devil Walks Loudly” is about a braggart who tries to make himself into a fast gun, an effort that seems doomed to failure from the start. This story is hurt a little by the fact that there’s not a single likable character in it, but it moves along and works fairly well. Reynolds is worth reading, but this one isn’t one of his best stories.

There’s an installment of S. Omar Barker’s “Sagebrush Savvy” column, in which he answers questions from readers (supposedly; who know whether they’re legit or not) and I always enjoy these. Barker was an entertaining writer.

This is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. While some stories are better than others, they’re all worth reading and several of them are very good. The pulp era was starting to wind down by this point, but there was still plenty of good reading to be found among the ones that survived that long.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Loser Friendly - Jake Cassidy

New Pulp Publishing is a new small press producing primarily e-books (although printed copies are available, too), in a variety of genres. As their website puts it: “New Pulp Publishing is dedicated to delivering blistering novella length fiction in the crime, suspense, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and western venues.” Their first book, LOSER FRIENDLY, has just been released and features Miami recovery agent Jake Cassidy (a name the author of the series is also using as a pseudonym). Jake seems to be a bit of a cross between Travis McGee and Mack Bolan. He lives on a boat (a yacht, not a houseboat) and for a fee, recovers things that people have lost, usually to some bad guys. But he also has a lot of heavy weapons and is very proficient in their use. Despite those influences, Jake takes on his own character and is a very likable hero and narrator, tough but not flawless, just enough of a smart-ass to be funny, and a good guy to have on your side when you’re in trouble.

In LOSER FRIENDLY, he starts out doing a favor for an old girlfriend and finds himself trying to rescue a would-be Hollywood screenwriter who has run afoul of some mobsters. They want a script the writer has written even more than they want the guy himself, and Jake winds up having to recover it, too. Occasionally the story pauses to take a breath, but for the most part it’s very fast-paced action and very effectively written, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The author behind the Jake Cassidy name is a prolific writer who has been published in a wide variety of genres (it’s not, repeat not, me; I don’t have anything to do with New Pulp Publishing except as a satisfied reader). I had a great time reading LOSER FRIENDLY and look forward to the next book in the series.

(I felt a real rush of nostalgia when I came across this post, which was first published on July 3, 2010. Everything about it is reminiscent of the early days of the Kindle boom, when e-book publishing was really the Wild West, Amazon was a boomtown, and there was plenty of money to be made. It was a far cry from the business it is today, a lot less slick maybe, but still a lot of fun. I think I knew at the time who was behind New Pulp Press and who Jake Cassidy really was, but I've slept since then, as the old saying goes. New Pulp Publishing put out one more book as far as I can tell, the sword and sorcery novel THE COLOSSUS OF MAHRASS, which was written by Mel Odom under the name R.J. Salter. Was Mel also Jake Cassidy? Maybe if he's reading this, he'll let us know. I could email him and ask him, of course, but what's the fun in that? There was another Jake Cassidy novella in the works called TWICE SHY. The cover for it is on New Pulp Publishing's website, which is still on-line although it hasn't been updated since 2011. And LOSER FRIENDLY is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. The e-book is even on Kindle Unlimited!) 

Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.