Review: Faith and a Fast Gun - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

FAITH AND A FAST GUN is another adventure of hard-luck range detective Joshua Dillard, who’s in Del Rio to visit the grave of his late wife when he finds himself drawn into a clash between the daughter of a murdered rancher and the cattle baron responsible for the man’s death. Faith Hartnett’s brother Dick won a herd of longhorns from ruthless rancher Lyte Grumman, who rules Del Rio with an iron fist, then left with the cattle on a trail drive to Montana. Faith wants to head north, too, and rejoin her brother, but Grumman wants to prevent that. Even though it’s not Joshua’s trouble, he decides to help Faith get away from Grumman and be reunited with her brother.

Well-written though it is, with good characters and some nice hardboiled action, this is a pretty standard beginning for a Western novel. But old pro Chap O’Keefe (actually Keith Chapman, as many of you already know) is just luring the reader in before springing some great twists in the plot. Those twists don’t come fast and furious, as they do in some books. The sense that something isn’t quite right builds at a more deliberate but very effective pace, picking up steam as the storyline moves from Texas to Montana and winds up in a stunning climax that’s more like something out of Greek tragedy than a traditional Western.

This is a fine novel, with O’Keefe working solidly in the tradition of noirish Western authors such as Lewis B. Patten, H.A. De Rosso, and Dean Owen. Joshua Dillard is a very appealing, tough but flawed hero, and the other characters are drawn vividly as well. If you’re a Western fan and haven’t tried a Chap O’Keefe novel yet, you really should.

(This review was written about an earlier edition of this novel, but nothing has changed except that there's a new edition with an excellent cover and a fine bonus article "No Trail to Fortune" that discusses some of the editorial resistance FAITH AND A FAST GUN got from its original publisher, Robert Hale, as well as the ever-changing and challenging landscape of writing and publishing. I'm always interested in anything Keith Chapman has to say on this subject, since he's been in this crazy business longer than almost anyone. This is one of the best of the Joshua Dillard series, and I highly recommend it. It's available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon, as well as all the other platforms, and you can find links to those here.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, March 1939

Hubert Rogers provides a nice deep sea diving cover for this issue of STREET & SMITH'S DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE. Inside are well-known authors Erle Stanley Gardner (with a Lester Leith novella), Steve Fisher, and William G. Bogart, along with lesser known (at least to me) Edmund M. Littell, Chris Sieyes, and Carl Clausen. Of all the ESG characters I've read, Lester Leith is probably my least-favorite. However, I'm not sure I've ever read any of the stories except the one in Ron Goulart's iconic anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS, so that's hardly a fair trial. I ought to see if I can hunt up a few more Leith yarns and give them a try. I own a few issues of DETECTIVE STORY (not this one) but I don't believe I've ever read any of them. I probably ought to do that, too. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Winter 1944

I featured this issue of FRONTIER STORIES several years ago, but I’ve since acquired a copy and just read it. Unfortunately, that copy is completely coverless, including the spine, but I’m not a fan of that Sidney Reisenberg cover anyway and all the pages are complete and easily readable, so I’m all right with that. Once again, the scan is from the Fictionmags Index, but my comments below are new.

Les Savage Jr. is one of my favorite Western writers. His mountain man novella “Queen of the Long Rifles” leads off this issue. That title is somewhat deceptive, and I suspect editor Malcolm Reiss may have come up with it. The story features a strong female character in Mira Phillips, the daughter of a trading post owner in the Big Horn Mountains during the fur trapping era. The actual protagonist is Batteau Severn, a French-Canadian trapper who clashes with a ruthless New Englander trying to take over the fur trade. This winds up as an out-and-out war between the two factions, which provides Savage with the opportunity for plenty of big, sweeping action scenes, as well as some brutal fistfights and one-on-one showdowns. This is a terrific story, full of excitement and a vividly portrayed, historically accurate setting. Batteau is a tough and very likable hero, Mira is a fine heroine, there are several top-notch sidekicks, some thoroughly despicable villains, and several surprisingly poignant moments. Savage could just write the heck out of a yarn like this. I loved it.

Tom W. Blackburn was also a consistently excellent Western author. His novelette “Devil’s Cache” starts with a freighter following the trail of whoever stole four of his horses. Not very far along, though, the story takes an abrupt turn and appears momentarily that it’s about to turn into a lost race yarn. That’s not how things play out, but the plot is still fairly off-beat for a Western pulp tale. This one is very well-written and I enjoyed it a lot, too.

Sometimes reading a pulp is educational. “Red Reckoning” is about a stagecoach trying to make it across the country to San Francisco before a ship can sail around South America and reach the same destination. An enormous wager is riding on the outcome. The protagonist is a frontier scout hired to help the stagecoach make the journey safely. Naturally, there’s a lot of trouble and treachery along the way, as well as romance with the daughter of the stagecoach line owner who made the bet. It’s a well-written yarn that moves along at a nice pace. I had never heard of the authors, Frankie-Lee Weed and Kelly Masters, so I did a little research on them, and that’s where the educational part comes in. My first thought was that they might be a husband-and-wife writing team, but nope, turns out they were just occasional writing partners who had much more prolific careers on their own. Kelly Masters published a few stories under his real name, but most of his work, which consisted mainly of slick magazine stories and boys’ adventure novels, was published under the pseudonym Zachary Ball. A couple of his novels were adapted as episodes of the original Walt Disney TV show. Frankie-Lee Weed published quite a few stories in the Western romance and love pulps under her real name, as well as the pseudonym Saliee O’Brien. Under the O’Brien name she went on to publish numerous historical romance novels in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I remember seeing those books when they were new. So both authors went on to bigger (not necessarily better) things but got their start in the pulps.

Curtis Bishop was a Texas newspaper reporter who followed the rodeo circuit while also writing scores of Western and sports stories for various pulps, along with a number of juvenile sports novels and some well-regarded Western novels. I haven’t read much by him, but everything I’ve read has been very good. So I expected to enjoy “Turning Trails”, his novelette in this issue set in Texas during the days right after the Civil War. It starts off strong with a former Confederate officer having left his home and headed west after the war, as many actually did. He arrives in San Antonio and gets mixed up in the clash between the beautiful blond owner of a nearby ranch and the brutal, corrupt Reconstruction authorities who run things in Texas at this point. Then it becomes a trail drive story as the protagonist tries to help the young woman get a herd of cattle across the Red River into Indian Territory before the crooked sheriff can seize them. Bishop writes with a nice sense of time and place, but this story goes off the rails in the second half as he makes a number of geographical errors (I mean, I understand dramatic license, but that only goes so far, especially when you’re a Texan writing about Texas), and the plot twist that fuels the story’s resolution stretches willing suspension of disbelief ’way past the breaking point. I just didn’t accept that things could ever happen that way—and I’m a guy who has no problem with, say, Jim Hatfield’s almost super heroics. So this story, despite having some good stuff in it, wound up being a major disappointment.

This issue wraps up with the novella “The Conestoga Pirate” by another of my favorite authors, Dan Cushman. It’s an important story in Cushman’s career because it introduces his series character, the good guy outlaw Comanche John, although in this story and the next one in the series, he’s called Dutch John. This story was reprinted in the Leisure Books collection NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL, but since I have the original pulp version, that’s what I read. I hadn’t read any of the Dutch/Comanche John stories until now, although I think I own them all in one form or another.

Something about “The Conestoga Pirate” struck me as familiar right away, and a glance at the story intro in NO GOLD ON BOOTHILL explained why. Cushman used parts of this novella in his later novel NORTH FORK TO HELL, which I read several years ago, although he dropped Dutch John from that version. In this one, Dutch John is more of a supporting character, although an important one. The protagonist is young Wils Fleming, who, along with the old-timer Bogey and the disreputable gunfighter/outlaw Dutch John, encounter a wagon train full of immigrants being duped by a group of villains pretending to be guides and scouts. This leads to drama, gunplay, ambushes, and attempted lynchings. It’s a good, fast-moving story, with a little bit of an off-kilter tone, as many of Cushman’s stories have. He wrote a lot of Western and adventure stories for the pulps that were firmly in those traditions yet just a little different at the same time. It took me a while to understand that and appreciate his work, but as I said above, he’s now one of my favorites. I guess I need to read the rest of the Comanche John stories and novels.

There are also two Western history articles in this issue, one about the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum by Harold Preece and one about the Bannock War by Fairfax Downey. As usual, I just skimmed these. I like Western history and have read a bunch of it, but when it comes to pulps, I’m there for the fiction. And despite my ultimate disappointment in Curtis Bishop’s novella, this is an excellent issue of FRONTIER STORIES overall, with outstanding yarns from Savage, Cushman, and Blackburn. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Blonde in Lower Six - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX is Carroll & Graf’s second volume of Ed Jenkins stories reprinted (mostly) from the pulps, and I wish there were more of them. As far as I know, however, this is it for Ed Jenkins collections.

The Phantom Crook is back in three novelettes that originally appeared in BLACK MASK in 1927, being pursued by the underworld and the police alike, although as far as Ed is concerned, there’s not much difference between the two. If anything, most of the cops Ed encounters are more crooked and corrupt than the criminals they’re supposed to pursue. Ed’s still a hardboiled kind of guy, gleefully sending off his enemies to be caught in their own traps, running around Chinatown in various disguises, making hair’s-breadth escapes, befriending tong leaders, and fending off the attentions of two beautiful young women, because, after all, it wouldn’t be fair to them if he let them fall in love with a crook who has all hands against him. These yarns strike me as being a little more melodramatic than the ones in the previous collection, DEAD MEN’S LETTERS, but they’re still very entertaining.

Then you have the title story, “The Blonde in Lower Six”, which is a different sort of animal. Set in 1943 but published in ARGOSY in 1961 – and I’d love to know the story of how that came about – it’s a full-length novel that’s almost completely devoid of the Phantom Crook melodrama. Instead Ed acts more like an unlicensed private eye as he helps out an old friend from Chinatown in a case involving wartime espionage, embezzlement, characters pretending to be other characters, and at least three murders. The plot is so complicated I sort of lost track, but by the end I think I pretty much had everything straight. Vintage Erle Stanley Gardner plotting, in other words, and told in a very terse, tough style that reads really fast. I loved it, even though I couldn’t always keep up with what was going on.

My only quibbles aren’t with Gardner but rather with Carroll & Graf. On a book called THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX, why would you use a cover illustration of a girl who’s definitely not a blonde? And if you read this collection, be sure to read the stories reprinted from BLACK MASK before you read the title story, which, although it comes first in the book, is actually more of a sequel to the pulp yarns. I have no idea why they were arranged that way for publication.

I highly recommend both DEAD MEN’S LETTERS and THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX, and if any publisher wants to reprint some more Ed Jenkins stories, I’d read them without hesitation.

(This post originally appeared on August 15, 2008. Like DEAD MEN'S LETTERS, THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX is long out of print, but it must be a lot more scarce because all the copies I saw for sale on-line are pretty expensive. If you already have it on your shelves, though, it's well worth reading. As far as I know, these two collections are still the only Ed Jenkins stories that have been reprinted. Maybe one of these days we'll get some more of them.)

Review: The Lotus and the Dragon - Brent Towns

Brent Towns has been highly successful writing Westerns, men’s adventure novels, hardboiled private detective yarns, and World War II action tales. Now he’s moving into yet another genre, the epic historical adventure novel, with his latest release, THE LOTUS AND THE DRAGON.

Taking place in Australia in the 1870s and ’80s, THE LOTUS AND THE DRAGON is narrated by Jack Crowe, a tough, hardbitten protagonist who starts out as a bounty hunter. After being unjustly convicted of a crime, he’s sent to an isolated sheep station to work off his sentence. When that is finally behind him, he starts a freight business, only to run afoul of violence and tragedy again and start a vendetta against a renegade police officer that will last for years.

The rather episodic plot of this novel follows Jack through stretches involving mining, riverboating, and romances with several beautiful women who may or may not be trustworthy. Encounters with various enemies result in him being beaten up, shot, nearly drowned, and left for dead more than once. Those enemies include not only corrupt policemen and politicians but also bushrangers, whoremongers, slavers, and an American business tycoon who ruthlessly takes over the Australian riverboat trade.

THE LOTUS AND THE DRAGON is one tough, gritty book. The action never lets up for long, and Jack Crowe takes enough punishment for several novels but is resilient enough to keep fighting all the way to an ending that’s crying out for a sequel. If you’re a fan of Wilbur Smith and Bernard Cornwell, you really need to check out this novel. It’s the same sort of epic, sweeping adventure and is very well-done. THE LOTUS AND THE DRAGON is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available from Wolfpack Publishing on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, June 16, 1934

As I've said before, mid-Thirties ARGOSY is one of my favorite pulps. It might be my top favorite if not for the abundance of serials. I love the covers by Paul Stahr, though, and you can't beat the assortment of authors. In this issue, you'll find stories by W.C. Tuttle, Theodore Roscoe, F.V.W. Mason, Frank Richardson Pierce, and Eustace L. Adams, top writers, all of them, as well as the lesser-known Sinclair Gluck and Tip Bliss. Never having read anything by Gluck or Bliss, they may top-notch, too, for all I know. The serial installments are by Pierce, Adams, and Mason, so if I were to read this issue (I don't own a copy), I would probably skip those stories, which knocks out a considerable chunk of wordage, but I'm sure I would enjoy the others.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Western Book Magazine, August 1950

Norman Saunders provides his usual action-packed cover on this issue of COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE, and as an added bonus, we get another appearance of that iconic trio: the stalwart cowboy (you can tell he's stalwart, he's wearing a red shirt), a beautiful redhead (looks more frightened than angry, but she's definitely gun-toting, although her iron is still pouched), and a beleaguered old geezer (not wounded but in recent danger of being lynched, by the looks of it). And isn't the old geezer a dead ringer for Sam Elliott? Saunders was prescient. There are only three stories in this issue, but they're by good authors: Frank P. Castle, Rod Patterson, and John Callahan. Appears to be well worth reading. I don't own a copy and scans don't appear to be on-line, but I can admire the cover.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Dead Men's Letters - Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner is a long-time favorite of mine. One of his Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books as A.A. Fair, SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS, is one of the first adult mysteries I remember reading, and that was so long ago I checked it out from the bookmobile that came out to our little town every Saturday from the public library in Fort Worth, a practice that ended in 1964 when our town opened its own small library. (I also checked out THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE from the bookmobile, the first Mike Shayne novel I ever read. I believe I read other Shaynes and some more A.A. Fair novels from there, as well. But I digress . . .)

Gardner was a very prolific author for the pulps before he ever achieved fame and fortune as the creator of Perry Mason, spinning yarns about a multitude of series characters. One of them was Ed Jenkins, also known as the Phantom Crook, who appeared in scores of stories in BLACK MASK. Despite being branded a criminal, Jenkins was really a good guy who preyed mostly on other criminals, usually when they tried to blackmail him or frame him into helping them, when all the time, of course, they’re planning to set him up to take the fall. Ed always finds a way to turn the tables on them, though.

Six Ed Jenkins novelettes, originally published in BLACK MASK in 1926 and ’27, were reprinted by Carroll & Graf in l990 in a volume called DEAD MEN’S LETTERS. Several of these stories are linked together, a common practice in the pulps of that time. (Hammett’s RED HARVEST and THE DAIN CURSE were both “fix-up” novels put together from linked novelettes.) What surprised me in reading this book was how good the writing is. Gardner’s prose is a little dated and melodramatic in places, but for the most part it’s as clear and sharp as anything being written today. And in places it approaches a sort of terse poetry unlike what you find for the most part in his Perry Mason and A.A. Fair books. Ed Jenkins is about as hardboiled a character as I’ve encountered in Gardner’s work, chuckling after he sends off one of the bad guys to be riddled by machine gun fire in an ambush intended for him by another gang of crooks. As usual, the stories are packed full of plot, and Ed is always two or three steps ahead of not only his enemies but the reader as well.

If all you know of Gardner’s work is Perry Mason, Donald Lam, Bertha Cool, or DA Doug Selby, give DEAD MEN’S LETTERS a try. There’s another collection of Ed Jenkins stories from Carroll & Graf, THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX, and I intend to read it soon.

(This post first appeared on August 1, 2008. DEAD MEN'S LETTERS is long out of print, but affordable used copies can be found without much trouble. For once, I followed through on my stated intention to read something soon, and I'll be rerunning my review of THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX next Friday. I hope those of you who are long-time readers of the blog aren't getting tired of these reruns. Enough time has passed that some of them seem like new to me, but then, I don't have the greatest memory in the world, either.)

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Dreamland (2020)

I had never heard of this movie, but the description sounded promising: a Depression-era crime yarn set in the Dust Bowl-blighted Texas Panhandle, with Margot Robbie playing a beautiful bank robber who encounters the teenage stepson of a deputy sheriff.

There are two ways a movie like this can go. Either you get a raucous, AIP/Roger Corman-style, Seventies drive-in epic complete with boobs, chase scenes, Tommy-gun shootouts, and lots of bluegrass music, or you get a leisurely paced, beautifully photographed, moody film reminiscent of Terence Malick’s BADLANDS (a movie I liked a lot, by the way).

Well, DREAMLAND goes the moody, leisurely paced route for the most part, although there are some decent chase scenes and gun battles. The slowly developing relationship between angsty Eugene Baker (Finn Cole, an actor I’m not familiar with) and fugitive Allison Wells (Robbie) after he finds her wounded in his family’s barn takes up the lion’s share of the movie. There are a few flashbacks to fill in the background of both characters. Eugene’s younger half-sister provides voice-over narration from the perspective of twenty years later. Allison wants to escape to Mexico, and of course it’s easy for her to persuade Eugene to help her. Eventually they take off together, banks get robbed, and the law, including Eugene’s deputy sheriff stepfather, pursues them.

The on-line reviews for this one are definitely mixed, with a lot of bad reviews and a few really glowing ones. I can’t give it a full-fledged recommendation, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The cast, which includes Travis Fimmel (Ragnar from VIKINGS) as Eugene’s stepfather, does a good job. The photography is excellent. The movie was filmed in New Mexico, not the Texas Panhandle, and sometimes you can tell that, but it’s not too distracting. I didn’t spot any anachronisms, but I wasn’t watching too closely for them, either. At least there was nothing blatantly wrong. (That sounds like I’m damning with faint praise, and I don’t intend it that way.)

DREAMLAND is no lost classic, but I think it’s worth watching. And I’ve left what I liked best for last: Eugene is a big reader of crime and detective pulps, and issues of BLACK MASK and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY are not only featured prominently on-screen, they even play a part in the plot. What’s the last movie you could say that about?

Review: Stripper! - John Dexter (Robert Silverberg)

I’ve probably read more soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg than by any other author except Orrie Hitt, so I’m glad Stark House keeps reprinting them. Their latest double volume is STRIPPER!/NEVER AN EVEN BREAK, and I’ve just read the first of that pair.

STRIPPER! is one of Silverberg’s soft-core novels originally published under the house-name John Dexter rather than his usual Don Elliott pseudonym. The Nightstand Books edition came out in 1960. A revised version was reprinted in 1973 under the title ONE BED TOO MANY and the pseudonym Jeremy Dunn. This was one of the so-called Reed Nightstand editions where the sex scenes were rewritten by some unknown editor to be even more graphic than the originals while leaving the rest of the story alone. The Reed Nightstands are okay if you can’t find the originals, but in the ones I’ve compared (which doesn’t include this one), the first versions were better.

Okay, with that bibliographic digression out of the way, STRIPPER! is the story of Diana DeLisle, the stage name of Donna Hallinger, a young woman from a small town in Maryland. She’s a beautiful redhead in her early twenties who has just been promoted to doing a solo act in one of a chain of strip clubs owned by notorious gambler/gangster Johnny Lukas. Her boss at the club is Mack Gardner. And one of the regular customers is clean-cut young Ned Fawcett. Diana, who is also the narrator of this book, winds up sexually involved with all three of those men and also has actual romantic feelings for both Johnny and Ned. But since this is a book full of crime and criminals, it’s no surprise that she also winds up in a dangerous web of scheming being spun by the evil and ambitious Mack Gardner.

Silverberg tells this tale in his usual smooth, fast-moving prose that’s a great blend of dialogue and action, interspersed with a few flashbacks to give us something of Diana’s history. The sex scenes are plentiful and fairly graphic, but Silverberg does a fine job of integrating them into the plot. Let’s face it, those scenes are a large part of why these books existed, but most of the authors made something more of them, and Silverberg was one of the best.

STRIPPER! does have a late twist that’s pretty easy to predict, and I didn’t find the ending quite as satisfying as in some of the other soft-core books by Silverberg that I’ve read, but I still raced through the novel and had a fine time reading it. Silverberg is one of the most consistently entertaining authors I’ve found, and I’m always happy to read anything he’s written. This double volume is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions, and if you’re a fan of these wonderful examples of mid-century erotica (I forget if it was Silverberg or Lawrence Block, another prolific author in the genre, who called them that), I recommend it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Pirate Stories, May 1935

PIRATE STORIES was a short-lived adventure pulp edited and published by Hugo Gernsback. This is the fourth of only six issues. The cover is by Sidney Reisenberg. Two of the authors inside are prolific and well-respected pulpsters: J. Allan Dunn and Nels Leroy Jorgensen. I hadn't heard of any of the others, who include Norman White Jr., Jack Covington, and Jaques Edouard Durand. This is Durand's only credit in the Fictionmags Index. I wonder if he was really J. Allan Dunn. Nothing to base that on, just a stray thought.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, January 1949

I don't own this pulp, but like most of the Western pulps from Popular Publications, this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES has a good bunch of authors inside and an eye-catching cover. My hunch is that Robert Stanley painted it, but I'm not sure about that. Walt Coburn leads things off, as he so often does, and also on hand are Roe Richmond, Tom Roan, William R. Cox, Eli Colter, James Shaffer, Harold F. Cruickshank, Spencer Frost (whose name isn't familiar to me), and Richard L. Nelson, who's interesting because that's a pseudonym of William L. Hamling, much more famous as an author and editor and the publisher of the science fiction digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well the founder of the soft-core empire that included Nightstand Books, Midnight Reader, etc., books written by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter, Ben Haas, Harry Whittington, and many other legendary authors under assorted pseudonyms and house-names.

Review: Guns of Tascosa - Ryan D. Fowler

Bounty hunters Frank Nolan and Ed Cole find themselves pinning on tin stars for the first time in their adventurous lives as they agree to be the co-marshals of Tascosa, a wild new town in the Texas Panhandle. The respectable citizens are living in fear of outlaw Brett Harding and his gang, and they turn to Nolan and Cole to deliver some law and order and make Tascosa a decent place to live. The new lawmen try to rally the town behind them, but there may be more hidden dangers in Tascosa than the two long-time trail partners are aware of.

GUNS OF TASCOSA is a traditional Western in the very best sense of the term, with stalwart heroes, despicable villains, a little humor and romance, and plenty of well-written action. Author Ryan Fowler, a prolific writer under his own and other names, spins his yarn with a breakneck pace and well-developed characterization.

And then, part of the way through the book, he springs a plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all. This is always a huge bonus as far as I’m concerned because I love it when a book surprises me. Fowler also brings a sense of gritty authenticity to this tale. It’s easy to see that he knows and loves the Texas Panhandle. This is excellent reading for fans of classic Westerns, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available on Amazon.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Eagle (2011)

Given my fondness for historical adventure movies, I’m surprised I never saw THE EAGLE, a 2011 film about ancient Romans versus ancient Britons, another favorite plot element for me. Channing Tatum is the new commander of an outpost in northern Britain who carries a family shame: his father was one of the officers in the infamous Lost Legion, the Ninth Legion that marched even farther north and vanished, their disappearance prompting the construction of Hadrian’s Wall.

Now there are rumors that the golden eagle standard carried by the Ninth has been seen being used in religious rites by the savages north of the wall, and so Tatum’s character decides to find and retrieve it, accompanied only by a slave (Jamie Bell) he’s saved from being killed by a gladiator.

Plenty of running, riding, and swordfighting ensue. THE EAGLE is a bloody, violent movie, but the gore isn’t overdone. It uses ’way too much quick-cut editing during some of the fight scenes, a cinematic technique I really dislike, but there’s enough regular action to more than make up for that, and the movie captures a sweeping, epic feel at times that really works for me. There’s a scene involving the surviving remnants of the Ninth that’s great, almost a stand-up-and-cheer moment.

I like Channing Tatum. He usually plays a lovable goofball and does a good job of it. He plays his role in THE EAGLE absolutely straight and turns in a decent performance, although he’s overshadowed a little by Jamie Bell as his morally conflicted sidekick. Donald Sutherland and Dakin Matthews play ancient Romans and are fine as always.

This is kind of an odd movie for me, because in tales like this, my natural sympathy tends to fall more on the side of the Britons than the Romans. But by boiling the focus down to just a few characters, the overall conflict doesn’t matter as much, so I had no trouble rooting for the Romans this time.

THE EAGLE is a well-made film that I thoroughly enjoyed. If you enjoy historical adventure movies, I think it’s well worth watching.

Review: South of the Border - Edwin Truett Long (Red Star Detective, August 1940)

“South of the Border”, which appeared in the August 1940 issue of RED STAR DETECTIVE, is the third and final novel in Edwin Truett Long’s unfortunately short-lived series of mysteries featuring Dr. Thaddeus C. Harker. Doc Harker, as you may remember, travels around the Southwest with his medicine show, driving a big red car and pulling a trailer from which he peddles the world-famous Chickasha Remedies, but this is actually just a cover for his activities as one of the world’s top criminologists and detectives. His two assistants, beautiful Brenda Sloan and burly, bald-headed former circus strongman Hercules Jones, help out with both the medicine show and battling the various criminal schemes Doc Harker uncovers.

As this yarn opens, the three of them are enjoying a well-earned vacation in Nuevo Laredo and taking in a bullfight at the local bullring. But of course, Doc’s curiosity and nose for trouble gets them involved with a private detective and a couple of beautiful blondes who apparently are mixed up in something shady. Then a bullfighter falls in love with Brenda, a sleazy reporter working for a crusading newspaper publisher sticks his nose in, the blondes and the private detective disappear, a Mexican gangster and his henchmen show up, a murdered bellhop is found in Doc’s hotel room, and off we go at a gallop that never really slows down.

As you can tell, Long was definitely of the “Throw stuff at the wall and see if enough of it sticks” school of plotting. In this one, we get all of the above, plus a gang war over a white slavery ring and a beautiful, mysterious brunette who keeps trying to kill the Mexican gangster. Does it all work? Well, let’s not ask inconvenient questions. Is the story a lot of fun to read with its breakneck pace, snappy banter, and colorful characters? It sure is. “South of the Border” is the best of the three Doc Harker novels, the first half being especially strong before getting a little muddled as Long tries to fit everything together.

It’s a real shame that Long passed away only a few years later after contracting an illness while serving as a codebreaker in Burma during World War II. If he had lived and written longer, I think there’s a good chance he would have developed into a better plotter, and we might have gotten dozens of screwball, action-packed mystery novels from him. As it is, we have a handful of novels and scores of short stories, and I’ve never read one that I didn’t enjoy. “South of the Border” is well worth reading. It was reprinted, along with the other two Doc Harker novels, by Altus Press in DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES, which is available from Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, August 1933

I don’t actually own that many detective pulps (although a 1931 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY was the first actual pulp I ever owned), so when I’m in the mood to read one, I often head for the Internet Archive. That’s where I recently read the August 1933 issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE. I don’t know who painted the cover. While it’s not a great one, it’s certainly not bad.

Ed Lybeck is a mostly forgotten writer these days. A few years ago, Altus Press published a collection of the four stories he wrote for BLACK MASK, which I read and thought was excellent. Lybeck wrote the lead novella in this issue, “Coins of Murder”, in which a Secret Service agent with the unlikely name Everard Kynaston literally stumbles over a case involving murder, a Chinese tong, and a scheme to destroy the American economy by flooding it with a previously unknown supply of gold. The plot is pretty weak, the criminal mastermind might as well be wearing a big sign on his back that reads CRIMINAL MASTERMIND, and the story reminds me a little of some of Sax Rohmer’s later Fu Manchu novels without being anywhere near as good. However, Lybeck’s lean, gritty prose is fun to read, and the opening pages of this yarn are particularly effective. This isn’t as good as the stories Lybeck wrote for BLACK MASK, but it’s worth reading if your expectations aren’t too high.

“The Corpse From Chicago” is a novelette with an intriguing opening: a hotshot gangster from the Windy City is murdered while sitting in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, surrounded by people, and yet nobody saw who killed him. A tough police detective gets the case and the story is almost non-stop action after that as he uncovers a war between two gangs of crooks trying to take over the marijuana racket. I’d never heard of the author of this one, James H.S. Moynihan, but he published almost a hundred detective and gang stories in various pulps during the Thirties and Forties. This one is okay. I’m not sure the plot completely makes sense, but Moynihan’s terse prose races right along nicely.

“The Giordano Mob” actually is non-stop action, as private detective Ed King goes after the gangsters responsible for the death of a young operative who works for the same agency. King is known as the Speed Demon, for some reason, and refuses to use a gun or knife, relying only on his fists as he battles the bad guys. This story is part of a series of his adventures written by a forgotten pulpster named Barry Brandon. Other than King’s canine sidekick, there’s not much memorable about this one. The plot’s just too thin to amount to much.

“Picture Frame” by H.M. Appel is an actual murder mystery built around photographic tricks and an isolated cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan where a group of men have an informal gun club devoted to skeet shooting. One of them winds up dead, of course, and it’s pretty obvious the killer can be found among the other three. This is the sort of short, bland yarn that showed up frequently in the mystery digests of later decades such as EQMM and AHMM. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not very compelling.

Perley Poore Sheehan was a prolific, well-regarded author of adventure fiction in the pulps, but he also wrote detective yarns, including a series about a masked crimefighter known as Doctor Coffin, who was actually a retired Hollywood character actor who also owned a chain of undertaking parlors. I think there were 15 of these novelettes, some of which have been collected, but I’d never read any until “The Chicken King” in this issue. And it really has me scratching my head, because this tale of Doctor Coffin battling the head of “the poultry racket” is just terrible. The plot makes no sense, and the writing, other than a few outbursts of lurid violence, is bland and boring. This is the next-to-last story in the series, and it reads as if the author were tired of it. I really ought to try some of Sheehan’s other work, because he couldn’t have been this bad all the way through his career.

Allan K. Echols is remembered mostly as a Western writer, but he wrote crime, detective, and Weird Menace stories, too. “The Murder Trail” in this issue is about a would-be crook who decides to hold up a gambling den in Harlem. Everything goes wrong, and the fellow has to go on the run, after which things just get worse and worse. This is a fairly good story that reminds me of Cornell Woolrich’s work, without being as well-written. It’s bleak as all get-out, with a relentless sense of doom that Echols captures well.

Arthur J. Burks was another very prolific pulpster who wrote just about every genre except Westerns. “The Gun” in this issue is a short story about a hitman. It’s well-written, effective, but doesn’t end quite as dramatically as it might have. This may be the first thing I’ve read by Burks, and it wouldn’t excite me about reading more by him, but his work has a pretty good reputation and I’m sure I’ll try something else by him.

The issue wraps up with “The Crimson Blade” by “John L. Benton”, a well-known Thrilling Group house-name, so there’s no telling who actually wrote it. A scene in the story matches the cover illustration, which makes me think the painting came first and one of the regular authors wrote the story to match. In this one, a cop investigates the murder of a society doctor who’s rumored to be pushing dope to wealthy women. It appears that a low-class junkie killed the doctor, but the cop believes the guy was framed and sets out to prove it. This is a solid little yarn that’s well-written. The plot might have been better with another twist or two, but it works okay.

Overall, I can’t really recommend this issue. I found a couple of the stories almost unreadable, and the best ones were no more than okay. Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, but the same month this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE was on the stands, BLACK MASK featured stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel (a Donahue story), Raoul Whitfield, Roger Torrey, Norvell Page, and Donald Barr Chidsey, while DIME DETECTIVE had stories by T.T. Flynn, Frederick Nebel (a Cardigan story), Leslie T. White, and John Lawrence. Next time I’m in the mood for a detective pulp, I’ll probably go for one of those titles.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, February 1945

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. The dramatic cover is by Sam Cherry, who never painted a bad one.

“Guns of the Haunted Hills” is another fine Jim Hatfield novel by Leslie Scott writing as Jackson Cole. In this one, Hatfield is sent to the San Benito Valley in Texas’s Big Bend country to tackle some trouble brewing there, but in a nice twist, one reason Cap’n Bill McDowell gives him the job is get him away from some mysterious assassin who has been sending ominous drawings of a rattlesnake to Hatfield, before making an attempt to blow him up with a message doctored with explosive. It’s an odd touch for a Hatfield novel, but Scott makes it work.

The trouble in San Benito Valley centers around a coal mining company that has moved in, bringing a lot of Eastern European miners to dig out the coal. The local cattlemen aren’t happy about this, except for one young rancher, and a range war is brewing between him and the local cattle baron. The railroad is building a spur line into the valley as well, complicating matters even more. Hatfield barely shows up before somebody is trying to kill him. Are the attempts on his life connected to the job that’s brought him here, or has his mysterious enemy followed him to the Big Bend?

As usual, there’s quite a bit of trouble for Hatfield to untangle, and also as usual, Scott puts his mining and railroading background to good use. I don’t know how accurate his geology is, but a fella could learn a lot about a lot of things by reading these stories. I’m just out to be entertained, though, not educated, and Scott never fails to deliver on that score. I raced right through “Guns of the Haunted Hills” and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Due to wartime paper restrictions, this is one of the thin issues of TEXAS RANGERS, so it has only three short back-up stories. “Sweet Are the Uses of Sorghum” is a semi-humorous, entertaining tale by Allan K. Echols about an encounter with a Mexican café owner and a bank robber. E.E. Halleran, an author whose work I’m usually not fond of, contributes “Lawman’s Chance”, about a local star packer regarded as a big dummy who gets to use his detective skills to solve a murder. I liked this one all right. Ben Frank (real name Frank Bennett) is the author of two humorous series I don’t like at all, Doc Swap and Deputy Boo Boo Bounce, but his story in this issue, “Singing Bullets”, is a traditional Western yarn about a good-guy outlaw known as The Dodge City Kid catching a killer and clearing a friend’s name. This is the first of a short, four-story series, and I liked it a lot better than the other stories I’ve read by Frank. It reminded me a little of the Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt comic book stories, and I was always a big fan of those series.

This is a good issue overall, not surprising because although TEXAS RANGERS evolved over its 21-year run, I think it stayed consistently good. The mid-Forties issues are excellent with Leslie Scott and Tom Curry at the top of their games, soon to be joined as regular authors on the series by Walker A. Tompkins. Well worth reading if you have this issue on your shelves. It’s on the Internet Archive, too, if you’d prefer to read it there.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Sandstorm - James Rollins

Talk about your mixed emotions. I was predisposed to not like this book: it’s too long, and the author is too successful. (Writers are just as prone to sour grapes as anybody else.) On the other hand, James Rollins is a veterinarian in real life, or at least used to be, and seems like a nice guy, so it’s hard to envy him for his success. And he’s admitted in interviews that he’s a big fan of the Doc Savage novels, my all-time favorite pulp series, so in that respect I was predisposed to like the book. The verdict: I liked it. Quite a bit, actually.

It opens with an explosion at the British Museum that destroys a display of Arabian artifacts, but it’s not the terrorist attack you might expect. Instead, it’s a natural occurrence caused by the convergence of an electrical storm and something hidden inside one of the artifacts. This sends a large and varied cast of scientists, explorers, billionaires, and spies racing off to Oman in a quest to find a lost city buried under the sands before the natural catastrophe that’s developing threatens the continued existence of the entire world. Of course there’s action aplenty along the way, as well as a smidgen of soap opera.

I hardly ever even attempt to read a book that’s almost 600 pages long anymore, and when I do I usually make it thirty or forty pages and then decide that I don’t like it well enough to stick with it for the five or six days it’ll take me to read it. Usually there’s nothing really wrong with the book; it just doesn’t compel me to make that investment of time. That never happened with SANDSTORM, though. I was able to stay with it without any problem . . . although it wouldn’t have broken my heart if it had been a hundred pages shorter. Still, there’s a lot of plot in it, and Rollins seems to be very good about planting things that don’t pay off until two or three hundred pages later. He also writes decent action scenes and has good characters. Things get a little far-fetched now and then; Rollins leads the reader right up to the edge of saying, “Oh, come on!”, but doesn’t quite get there. And he winds up with at least semi-plausible scientific explanations for everything.

I liked this one enough so that I’ll certainly read more by Rollins, and if you like big, epic adventure novels, I think his books are worth a try.

(This post originally appeared on June 24, 2008. SANDSTORM is the first novel in James Rollins' Sigma Force series, and despite the good things I say about it, I haven't read any of the others. I own several of them, however, and still intend to get back to the series. Whether I will or not . . . Well, I wouldn't bet a hat on it, but it could happen. SANDSTORM is still available in an e-book edition, but not in print, as far as I can tell.)

Review: Day of the Buzzard - T.V. Olsen

Val Penmark, a crusty old rancher out for vengeance, and Jason Drum, a young cowboy who wants to recover the money his family depends on, are a two-man posse chasing a gang of bank robbers through the badlands of southern Arizona in DAY OF THE BUZZARD, a 1976 novel by T.V. Olsen published originally by Fawcett Gold Medal. A couple of women wind up involved in the chase, as well as an Apache war party, and you can tell right from the start that this is going to be a really gritty, hardboiled Western yarn.

Considering that he was regarded as a top-notch Western writer for many years, I’ve read surprisingly little by T.V. Olsen. Years ago I read one of his paperback novels and remember not liking it much. Since then I’ve read a few of his pulp stories and thought they were pretty good. But DAY OF THE BUZZARD is the first Olsen novel I’ve read since high school, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

This one is really good, with Olsen doing a fine job of capturing the blazing heat and arid terrain of the setting. For some reason, I don’t associate his work with the Southwest, but he nails it here. None of the characters are particularly likable, even the two protagonists, but they’re all interesting. The outlaws are suitably despicable, especially the gang’s leader. The action scenes are well-done, and Olsen creates some genuine suspense.

I raced through this novel, and it left me very interested in reading more by T.V. Olsen. At one point, Leisure reprinted DAY OF THE BUZZARD in a double volume with Olsen’s novel RUN TO THE MOUNTAIN. Amazon owns the rights to all those old Leisure books now, and that double volume is still available in e-book and paperback editions. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of hardboiled Westerns, with the caveat that since it came out in 1976, the language and sex scenes are a little more graphic, although not Adult Western level.

Review: The Kissed Corpse - Asa Baker (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser was the kind of writer I really admire and have tried to be in my career, a guy who was willing and able to turn his hand to different kinds of fiction and do all of them well. In the late Thirties, he was writing Western novels, spicy romances, and of course mysteries. He’d already had some success with MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER, published under the pseudonym Asa Baker, set in El Paso, Texas, Dresser’s home town, and starring special police detective Jerry Burke. In 1939, he published his second Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE, which Carlyle House brought out in hardcover.

Asa Baker isn’t just the pseudonym Dresser used on these books. Baker is also a character in them, a Western and mystery novelist who’s pretty obviously a stand-in for Dresser himself. He tags along with his friend Jerry Burke and narrates the stories of Burke’s investigations. In THE KISSED CORPSE, though, it’s Baker who turns up a murder and gets Burke involved.

He’s staying at a friend’s cabin in a canyon just outside El Paso. Millionaire oilman Raymond Dwight has an estate in the same canyon. Also not far away is the bungalow where former soldier of fortune Leslie Young lives with his beautiful wife Myra. Baker discovers that the oil tycoon is a peeping tom, spying on a sunbathing Myra Young through a telescope. Unfortunately, Myra’s husband makes that same discovery, and not long after that, Baker discovers his body while walking through the canyon.

Since this is a Davis Dresser novel, things are nowhere near as simple as they appear to be starting out, though. It seems that the Mexican government has taken over Dwight’s oilfield properties below the border, and he’s trying to put together a shady deal to recoup the loss. There are mysterious notes and threats and a seedy hacienda below the Rio Grande where the beautiful leader of a Mexican nationalist group holds secret meetings. There’s a beautiful, ambitious female reporter poking around who may or may not have been romantically involved with the murdered man. The oilman has a hard-drinking, gorgeous teenage daughter. Throw in a little blackmail, too, and Jerry Burke will have his hands full untangling the whole mess.

With its dangerous nighttime visit to the mysterious hacienda below the border, THE KISSED CORPSE has a rather pulpish feel starting out, but for a long stretch, it settles down and becomes almost an English country house type of mystery, with a bunch of suspects at a fancy estate and the dogged detective interrogating them. It’s a millionaire’s mansion in the Franklin Mountains, but the idea is the same. There’s some moving around later on, but eventually all the suspects come together again so Burke can reveal the killer and explain everything.

Dresser was a master of this sort of blend between the traditional and hardboiled mysteries. I don’t think he has the plot nailed down quite as well in THE KISSED CORPSE as he would in the Mike Shayne novels he wrote over the next decade, but it works well enough. Jerry Burke is a good character, too: a former cowboy, Texas Ranger, intelligence operative during World War I, soldier of fortune, and cop. Asa Baker is a likable narrator. Dresser spins his yarn in fast-moving prose that mostly has a breezy feel to it, although things can get rough now and then.

The same year this novel came out, Dresser also published DIVIDEND ON DEATH, the first book in the Mike Shayne series, and although he worked on other things besides Shayne over the next couple of decades, he never went back to Jerry Burke. I think the Shaynes are much better overall, but I wouldn’t have minded a few more Jerry Burke novels, too. Both books featuring him are pretty entertaining. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER was reprinted twice under the Brett Halliday name. THE KISSED CORPSE got a single digest paperback reprint under the Asa Baker pseudonym. It is, however, available these days in an e-book edition under the Halliday name, and if you’re a Mike Shayne fan, I think you’ll enjoy both of the Jerry Burke novels, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Adventure Stories, September 1944

This issue of SPEED ADVENTURE STORIES sports a fine cover by H.J. Ward and a pretty strong line-up of authors. Tom W. Blackburn, best remembered as a top-notch Western author, of course, leads things off. I don't own this issue so I don't know if Blackburn's yarn is a Western, but I'm sure it's good regardless. Also on hand are Dale Clark, Stanley Vickers, house-name Clark Nelson, as well as Victor Rousseau with three stories, one each as by V.R. Emanuel (his actual initials and last name), Clive Trent, and Hugh Speer.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, February 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. Although there’s no cover credit on the TOC page and it’s unattributed on the Fictionmags Index, I suspect it’s the work of Arthur Mitchell. It looks like one of his paintings, and he did a lot of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE during this period.

The lead novella, “Gun Smoke on the Pecos”, is the third and final story in the Roaming Reynolds series by Charles M. Martin. I haven’t read the first one, but I read the second one a while back and liked it fairly well. In this story, Roaming Reynolds and Texas Joe, a pair of drifting cowboys/gunfighters/adventurers, return to their home country in West Texas and immediately find themselves mixed up in a range war. The plot is very much by-the-numbers, right down to the rancher the boys are working for having a beautiful daughter, and Martin’s heavy-handed pulp cowboy lingo and narrative style wear thin pretty quickly. If I’m being honest, and I try to be here, this is a rather mediocre story. And yet . . . the numerous action scenes work really well, the setting rings true, and Martin does a good job of playing up the epic, mythological clashes between Roaming Reynolds and the evil gunfighter on the other side. When they face off at the end, I could hear Ennio Morricone music welling up inside my head. So this novella has that going for it, anyway, and ultimately, that was enough for me, but you might feel differently.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors. His story “Headboard Tally” in this issue packs quite a bit of plot in a few thousand words. It’s a revenge yarn, as a cowboy tries to track down the four men responsible for lynching his brother, but as it opens, he’s already killed three of the four and doesn’t know the identity of the final man. He finds out in what turns out to be a pretty far-fetched coincidence, but Olmsted writes well enough I’ll cut him that much slack. For a story that’s mostly bleak and dark, this one turns out to have a heartwarming element to it, as well. It worked for me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

James P. Olsen, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as James A. Lawson, was a consistently good author, with many stories that tend toward over-the-top action. For that reason, “Malachi Murphy—Cowboy” is something of an oddity among Olsen’s work in that it’s a quiet little slice-of-life story about an old cowboy spending the winter at an isolated high country line camp. Not much happens, but it’s well-written and the title character is an interesting one.

I’ve read quite a few stories over the years by Hapsburg Liebe, real name Charles Haven Liebe. While his work is usually enjoyable, I’ve never considered myself a fan of his stories. “Bullet” is about a teenage boy whose father is an outlaw. When Bullet’s pa and another owlhoot rob a bank and are caught, it’s up to Bullet to save them from being lynched. This is a well-written, cleverly plotted story, one of the best from Liebe that I’ve read.

Darrell Jordan is best remembered for almost a hundred stories he wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, but he also turned out a few detective and Western yarns, including the novelette “Range War Nemesis” in this issue. The protagonist, young cowboy Brad Bannon, wants to repay the man who grubstaked his father twenty years earlier, but that effort lands Brad in the middle of a range war, and the fact that he’s a dead ringer for a notorious gunman complicates the issue. This isn’t a bad story and there are some nice action scenes, but the plot is pretty muddled and hard to keep up with. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Jordan before. I ought to try one of his aviation stories.

Sam H. Nickels wrote the long-running Hungry and Rusty series in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as a lot of stand-alone stories under his own name and various house-names. His stories appeared outside of the pages of WILD WEST WEEKLY from time to time, too, as in this issue with “When the Sheriff Lied”. This is a pretty good action yarn with a protagonist who pretends to be an outlaw and winds up saving a lawman’s life. The reason behind the deception isn’t very surprising, but the story works effectively.

Ralph Condon was a life-long newspaperman who wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Thirties and Forties. “Red Trail” is about a cowboy and his grizzled old sidekick trying to track down a herd of stolen horses. It’s almost all action and fairly well-written, nothing special but entertaining enough.

There’s also a story by S. Omar Barker in his Boosty Peckleberry series, and that’s another one I don’t read. Just not a fan of humorous tall tales, I guess.

Overall, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE I’ve read, with most of the stories falling into the readable but unmemorable range. The ones by Olmsted and Olsen are the best, but I wouldn’t put either in the top rank of those authors’ work. I believe I’ve now read all the issues of ALL WESTERN that I own and I probably won’t seek out any more.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Team Zero - Chuck Dixon

Some of the first comic books I remember reading are an issue of OUR ARMY AT WAR that I read at a cousin’s house and an issue of G.I. COMBAT I bought at Tompkins’ Drug Store when it was on Main Street in an old wooden building that’s now well over a hundred years old and still there. [It's now a very good burger joint.] The drug store is long gone, though, along with its soda fountain and spinner rack of funny books. However, I digress. My point is that I’ve been a fan of war comics for almost fifty years [more than sixty years now, good grief], so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed a recent trade paperback from DC/Wildstorm reprinting their Team Zero mini-series from a couple of years ago.

When Image Comics first came on the scene in the mid-Nineties, I read quite a few of the titles in their Wildstorm imprint, which is now part of DC, of course. My favorite was DEATHBLOW, and I also liked a character called Grifter who appeared in their WILDC.A.T.S. title. Both Deathblow and Grifter appear in the World War II yarn TEAM ZERO . . . but not the same Deathblow and Grifter. No superheroics here. This is a straight-out war story following a specially-assembled team of commandos dropped far behind enemy lines in the waning days of the war to snatch up the German rocket scientists at Peenemunde before the Soviet army can get its hands on them. It’s exactly the sort of assignment that in another comics era would have been given to Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos (and what a great comic book that was for a lot of years). The soldiers recruited for this mission are given code-names that would later figure prominently in the Wildstorm Universe – Deathblow, Grifter, Backlash, Claymore, etc. – but with one exception, they’re not the same characters. That tenuous connection to what comes later chronologically isn’t really important to the reader’s enjoyment of this story; TEAM ZERO can be read as a complete stand-alone.

It’s written by Chuck Dixon, who was one of my favorite comics authors during the Nineties with his work on AIRBOY and THE PUNISHER. There’s plenty of action in the story, a few plot twists, and plenty of blood ’n’ guts, as you’d expect from a war comic. I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it to any comics fans out there.

(This post, which appeared originally on June 10, 2008, is a good example of how the world is an odd place, and the Internet has made it even more so. When I wrote this review, I was just a long-time fan of Chuck Dixon's work. These days, I consider him a good friend, and I've even been privileged to edit a few novels in his very popular Levon Cade series. The trade paperback edition of TEAM ZERO that I read back in 2008 is out of print, but e-book editions of the six comic book stories it collects are available on Amazon and I still highly recommend them if you're a fan of gritty, well-written war yarns.)

Review: The Gun Man Jackson Swagger - Stephen Hunter

These days, I’m always a little leery when a big name in some other genre decides to write a Western. It’s not like the old pulp and paperback days when writers moved back and forth between genres all the time. On the one hand, any very successful author who writes a Western almost has to have a genuine fondness for them. You can bet the publishers aren’t clamoring for Westerns from their big-name thriller writers. On the other hand, whether they really like Westerns or not, that doesn’t mean they’re suited to write them. Maybe that’s just a skill set they don’t have.

But if any modern-day thriller author seems cut out to write a Western, it would be Stephen Hunter, who has made a career out of writing books about laconic heroes who are capable of great violence, usually with guns. And that’s just what he’s done in THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER.

This novel goes back another generation in the Swagger family, the fictional clan that has starred in most of his novels over the years. It’s 1897, and a grizzled old cowboy who just calls himself Jack shows up at the Crazy R ranch in southern Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. The owner of the spread, Colonel Callahan, is no more honest than he has to be, and he employs a group of hired gunmen to take care of any dirty work benefiting the ranch or the railroad that’s building a line through the region. The colonel and the railroad are in cahoots, and he also has a connection with a corrupt Federale officer below the border. Once Jack demonstrates his skill at handling a rifle, the colonel hires him, but Jack’s not really looking for a job. He has another reason for coming to the Crazy R.

And you’ll figure out what that reason is pretty easily as Jack navigates through all the danger and treachery surrounding him. I mean, we know who he really is, it’s right there in the title. But it’s still very entertaining to watch him go about it, manipulating people and events to uncover the information he needs and then taking action to achieve his ends. Nobody these days writes as well about guns and gunfights as Hunter, and Jack is a very sympathetic protagonist, managing the neat trick of being mythic and realistic at the same time.

My only real complaint is that Hunter is maybe just a little too leisurely in getting where he’s going. The best way I can think of to put this is to say that THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER is probably around 70,000 words long (actually a little on the short side for a New York-published hardback by a big name), while Ben Haas would have written the exact same story at about 50,000 words. It’s easier to forgive such an ambling pace when an author writes as well as Hunter does.

I’m also not that fond of the ending, but hey, that’s just me.

I suspect this may be a one-and-done for Hunter when it comes to writing Westerns, but I could be wrong about that. I’d certainly be willing to read more if he ever decides to write them. I think he loves and respects the Western, and overall he does a very good job, with some top-notch action scenes and great dialogue. I give THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and hardcover editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, July 1937

Man, Frederick Blakeslee could really pack a lot into an air-war pulp cover! Nine planes (assuming I didn't miss any), plus a bunch of ack-ack bursts in the air and bombs going off on the ground. I think this scene does a great job of conveying the controlled chaos of aerial combat in World War I. Inside, this issue features three authors I associate more with Westerns: Orlando Rigoni, Claude Rister, and William O'Sullivan. Also on hand are aviation pulp stalwarts Robert Sidney Bowen and Darrell Jordan, house-names William Hartley and Larry Jones, and Fred Flabb, which I suspect is this little-published author's real name, because it doesn't sound like what you'd come up with as a pseudonym.