Review: American Treasure Hunters #4: The Missing U-Boat Enigma - Andrew M. Dare (Travis J.I. Corcoran)

One of the real pleasures of my reading this year has been discovering the American Treasure Hunters series. These young adult mystery/adventure novels are very much influenced by the Rick Brant, Hardy Boys, and Three Investigators series, and while their aim may be to help get boys reading again, they’re perfect for older readers like me with fond memories of those earlier books.

In the latest entry, THE MISSING U-BOAT ENIGMA, our three heroes, Ben Prescott, Porter Rockwell, and Latch McRae, discover a sunken German U-boat from World War II along the shore of North Carolina. The one-two punch of a tropical storm followed by a hurricane has uncovered the vessel, and of course Ben, Porter, and Latch have to explore it. In doing so, they discover a badly damaged Enigma code machine, and that plunges them into an effort to decode some German radio messages in which the code has never been cracked. Naturally, the shadowy, sinister organization with which the guys have clashed before wants to stop them before they uncover a secret that’s been hidden since 1942.

Well, I tell you, this stuff is right up my alley. I raced through this book and loved it. Ben, Porter, and Latch are great protagonists. Ben is supposedly the brain, Porter is the athlete and handles the heavy action, Latch is the gadget and gizmo guy. But they’re all very smart and use that intelligence as much as they use any of their other abilities.

There isn’t as much action in this novel as in the previous books of the series. Most of the focus is on the historical mystery, which is fine with me because it’s a really fascinating one. When they do have to face off with the bad guys, those scenes are handled very well.

Travis J.I. Corcoran is the author behind the Andrew M. Dare house-name on this novel, and he does a superb job with it. He’s written some well-regarded science fiction novels, some of which I already own. I need to get around to reading them. In the meantime, I give THE MISSING U-BOAT ENIGMA a high recommendation. It's available in e-book and hardcover editions from Amazon, or better yet, you can buy it directly from the publisher. I’ll be looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, July 1947

It's still morning where I am, so rather than skip it this week, here's a dramatic cover by Peter Stevens on the July 1947 issue of ADVENTURE. This appears to be a pretty good issue. It features Steve Frazee's first published story, a Caradosso story by F.R. Buckley (I've got to try this series sometime), and stories by George C. Appell, James Norman, Duane Decker, and lesser-known authors Fred Lane and Henry Norton. ADVENTURE may have been past its prime by the late Forties, but it was still a pretty darned good pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, October 1947

It's been a while since I featured an A. Leslie Ross cover. This is a pretty good one. This issue of WESTERN TRAILS has an excellent bunch of authors inside, too, starting with J. Edward Leithead, who has two stories (as usual), a novelette under his name and a short story as Wilson L. Covert, his most common pseudonym. Other authors include Wayne D. Overholser, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Glenn Low, the ubiquitous Joe Archibald, Theodore J. Roemer, and one unknown to me, Spencer Frost. Leithead, Overholser, and Gardner are always worth reading, Low usually is, and Archibald has grown on me, goofy though he can be. If I owned this one, I wouldn't hesitate to read it.

Review: A Game of Flesh - John Trinian

Nick Pascal is a gigolo. He may call himself a male escort, but his real business is romancing and bedding rich, lonely women, usually older. He lives in San Francisco and is doing very well for himself, but he hasn’t forgotten his childhood as a poor Polish boy and the son of a drunk in a small Northern California town. Despite those memories, he’s put all that behind him and life looks pretty good . . . until a rich, powerful gangster decides that Nick is just the guy to carry out a crooked, dangerous job for him.

A GAME OF FLESH was John Trinian’s first novel, published as a paperback original in 1958 by Bedside Books, a middle-of-the-pack hardboiled sleaze publisher. I don’t know who did the cover on that edition, but Black Gat Books is reprinting it with a nifty George Gross cover. That edition will be out tomorrow.

I’ve been aware of John Trinian’s books for many years, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of them until now. I’ll have to do something about that, because A GAME OF FLESH is pretty darned good. Over the first half of the book, as Nick Pascal gets enmeshed deeper and deeper into a web of criminals, Trinian also gives the reader several flashbacks that fill in the backstory of Nick’s younger years and how he drifts into his current profession. Then the narrative picks up momentum as layer after layer of the plot gets revealed, and it’s a well-constructed, fairly clued puzzle, at that, more so than you sometimes get in books like this.

Like most noir novel protagonists, Nick is out for the big score, and he’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is. The question is whether his ambition and his recklessness will catch up to him in the end. Trinian creates a considerable amount of genuine suspense as we keep flipping the pages to find out.

Trinian, which was not the author’s real name, also adopted the name Zekial Marko, which he used to write scripts for various TV detective series after publishing seven novels in just a few years in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I believe now that this one has been reprinted, all seven are available again, the others in Stark House Press double editions. I have those around here somewhere. Time to dig them out. For now, I give A GAME OF FLESH a high recommendation for noir fans. I raced through it and had a really good time reading it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective, April 1939

This is a pretty eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it's a reminder that every adventurer should have a top hat as well as a pith helmet. Look at the authors inside this issue of DIME DETECTIVE, though: Raymond Chandler, T.T. Flynn, John Lawrence, Fred MacIsaac, and Dale Clark. That's almost an all-star lineup. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second October Number, 1957

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by Sam Cherry, one of the few I’ve seen by him that’s signed. The colors on my copy are kind of washed out and there’s a chunk out of the cover, but I’m glad to have it anyway.

I’ve written before about how RANCH ROMANCES during the Fifties is one of my favorite Western pulps, and this issue is a good example of why that is. It starts off with the novella “Hired Killer” by Ray Gaulden, one of the most dependable hardboiled Western writers of the Fifties and Sixties. Hired gun Blain Damaron returns to his hometown on a job. He’s supposed to find and kill a man who murdered a rich man’s son. Damaron carries out this assignment right away, but for some reason, he finds that he can’t leave his old stomping grounds. There are too many people he knows, too many old enemies who are out to take over the whole area. A range war is brewing, and the sheriff asks Damaron to stay on and wear a deputy’s badge. He’s very reluctant to do so, but really, it’s pretty obvious what he’s going to wind up doing.

The plot may be pretty standard stuff, but as usual, Gaulden elevates it with good characters and terse, top-notch prose. He expanded this story into the novel DAMARON’S GUN, published as a paperback original by Signet in 1958 under the pseudonym Wesley Ray. I’m pretty sure I have a copy of that book, but I’ve never read it. I may have to do that, once this version has settled a little in my brain.

Ben Frank’s work is hit-or-miss with me, mostly miss, to be honest, because I just don’t find his comedy Westerns very funny. But his story “The Man Who Came Back” in this issue isn’t a comedy, and it’s excellent. A young rancher is badly injured in a tornado and is laid up in the hospital for a long time. He’s lost everything, and he’s not in great shape physically. Can he start over again, despite the fact that a neighboring rancher is trying to crowd him off his range? Maybe he can, with the help of a pretty young schoolteacher who has some trouble of her own in her past. Frank, whose real name was Frank Bennett, does a fine job with this one and I really enjoyed it.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Walker A. Tompkins’ Westerns for almost sixty years, starting with the paperback reprints of some of his Jim Hatfield novels when I was in high school. His novelette “Blizzard Pass” in this issue is a very solid tale about the sheriff of a settlement high in the Rocky Mountains that gets cut off from the outside world for four or five months every winter when the pass that’s the only in or out is blocked by snow. In this story, just as the blizzard that will cut the town off is moving in, the lawman gets word that an escaped outlaw is headed that way. He’s faced with the prospect of having a vicious killer on the loose with no way for potential victims to escape from him. Tompkins does a fine job with the claustrophobic aspects of this story. The twist ending is pretty easy to see coming but is well-handled. This story probably would have been better at a longe length so Tompkins would have had the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense even more, but as is, I still found it very entertaining.

“Wagontrain Woman” by Barbara Bonham is an actual romance story about a woman whose husband is killed in an Indian attack while they’re heading west as part of a wagon train. One of the men traveling with the train loses his wife in childbirth. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen, but even so, this is a gentle, well-written, poignant story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Bonham published a couple of dozen stories during the Fifties, mostly Western romances, and I found this one to be a very nice change of pace from the usual leather-slappin’ and powder burnin’. (Don’t get me wrong. As a general rule, the more gunplay, the better when it comes to Western pulp yarns.)

Norman Wells wrote half a dozen stories published in RANCH ROMANCES during the late Fifties. That’s all I know about him. His story “Border Hunt” is in first person, something of a rarity in the Western pulps, and he does a good job with it. It’s about a young man trying to track down the Apache renegade who killed his brother. His search is complicated when his widowed sister-in-law shows up. This is a pretty well-written, reasonably entertaining story that ultimately doesn’t have much to it.

“Vengeance Station” is an early story by T.V. Olsen, who really didn’t write that much short fiction compared to his career as a prolific Western novelist. This one opens with the young protagonist set afoot in the desert in West Texas, pursued by twin brothers from a family that has a long-standing feud with his. He manages to reach a stagecoach station where the man who runs the station has a beautiful daughter. But the young man’s enemies catch up to him, and gritty action ensues. Olsen was a really fine author of hardboiled Westerns, and I kind of regret that I spent a long time avoiding his work because I didn’t care for the first novel of his I read, many years ago. But on the other hand, that gives me a lot of good books to read now. “Vengeance Station” is a very good story, although I think Olsen’s stuff works better at longer lengths.

There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE WAITING GUN by John S. Daniels, who was really Wayne D. Overholser. This was published under Overholser’s name, but not until after he had passed away. I have a copy of the novel version and might get around to reading it one of these days.

This is a really good issue of RANCH ROMANCES, which means it’s a top-notch Western pulp. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s very much worth reading.

Review: Pickman's Model - H.P. Lovecraft

It seemed like reading a story by the old gentleman himself would be the best way to cap off this week, and since a commenter on one of the earlier posts mentioned “Pickman’s Model”, I thought that might be a good choice. WEIRD TALES published this story by H.P. Lovecraft in the October 1927 issue, and it’s been reprinted many, many times since then.

The narrator of “Pickman’s Model” is a man named Thurber, who seems to be a well-to-do gentleman of Boston. He’s having drinks with a young friend of his named Eliot, and during the course of the evening, he explains why he no longer associates with the well-known artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman, it seems, is a hugely talented artist, but the subjects of his paintings are so grotesque and bizarre that he’s become increasingly shunned in Boston society.

The highlight of Thurber’s story is a recounting of the time Pickman took him to a rented house in a poorer section of town that he uses as a private gallery and studio. Pickman takes Thurber into the basement, and what they encounter there leads Thurber to believe that Pickman isn’t just painting his pictures from imagination. He’s actually witnessed some of the terrible things he’s captured on canvas.

That’s really all there is to “Pickman’s Model”. Like most of Lovecraft’s work, it’s all atmosphere and creepiness and vague but horrifying concepts. It’s well-written and draws the reader in. I just can’t help but wish that something actually happened in it.

I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be as big a fan of Lovecraft’s work as many are. I suspect I came to it too late. Bill Crider once told me that the best time to discover Lovecraft is the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was close to fifty years past that.

By the way, I can certainly see how this story might have been the inspiration for Robert Barbour Johnson’s story “Far Below”, which I wrote about a few days ago, and that makes me glad I read it.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the stories I’ve read this week. Look for more reviews of Mythos-inspired fiction in the days to come. Now that I’ve started those anthologies, I’d like to read more of them.

Review: The Faceless God - Robert Bloch

Mentioning Robert Bloch put me in the mood to read something by him, and “The Faceless God”, originally published in the May 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES and also available in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, was handy.

There are SPOILERS BELOW, so beware.

This starts out with a very graphic and disturbing torture scene, as a smuggler and criminal tries to extract the location of a potentially valuable find in the Egyptian desert from an old man. The thing is the head of a statue that was buried in the sand sometime in ages past, but the constantly shifting dunes have uncovered it. Getting wind of the discovery, the crook wants the statue for himself, figuring that it’s bound to be worth a lot of money. The old man can’t hold up under the torture and finally reveals the statue’s location before dying.

This is basically the story’s prologue, and in the hands of, say, Robert E. Howard, “The Faceless God” would have been a corking yarn, as one of REH’s adventurer heroes would have gone after the statue, too, and clashed violently with the bad guy before the statue—which turns out to be that of an ancient Egyptian elder god—enters the fray in bloody and dramatic fashion.

But that’s not what happens. The bad guy goes after the statue, finds it, and terrible things ensue. Needless to say, it’s all very well-written. Bloch was a great storyteller. It’s just that he chooses not to tell much of a story here.

I’m a firm believer in reviewing the story the author wrote, not the one I wish he had written, so I feel bad saying I found “The Faceless God” to be a disappointment. As I said, the writing is excellent, and on that basis alone, I’m glad I read it, and it certainly won’t keep me from reading other stories by Bloch in the future. This one is a bit of a misfire for me, but it might not be for you. If you haven’t read it and want to give it a try, it’s been reprinted numerous times, most notably in the Bloch collections YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER, THE OPENER OF THE WAY, and MYSTERIES OF THE WORM.

Review: The Salem Horror - Henry Kuttner

Say you’re a writer, an author of very popular light romances, and your publisher is pressuring you to finish the new book, and you’re having trouble with it, so you need a nice quiet, peaceful place to work. What do you do?

You rent a house in Salem, Massachusetts, that once belonged to an evil witch who was hanged several hundred years earlier when the mob discovered that her body wouldn’t burn at the stake, and before she died she cursed the town and nobody’s been able to live in the house for very long ever since. Of course that’s what you do. Sure, why not?

That’s the set-up of Henry Kuttner’s story “The Salem Witch”, which appeared originally in the May 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which has a striking cover by Margaret Brundage, by the way. Kuttner is a long-time favorite of mine. He was one of those authors who could write in several different genres and handle them all extremely well. The stories of his from WEIRD TALES that I’ve read have all been excellent, and “The Salem Horror” is no exception. The protagonist of this yarn pursues a rat into the basement of the old house, where he proceeds to find a hidden room that has to be the old witch’s sanctum where she invoked dark rituals. Naturally, the guy decides this would be a fine place to write and finish his novel at last. Who cares if he starts having bizarre, disturbing dreams about a giant black blob rampaging through the town and slaughtering people?

This story also introduces occult detective Michael Leigh, who returns in the next issue of WEIRD TALES in a story that’s a collaboration between Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Unfortunately for him, that’s the end of his series. I may have to find that one and read it, too, since Bloch is another favorite of mine. In the meantime, I read “The Salem Horror” in the aptly named THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK from Wildside Press, which you can find in an e-book edition on Amazon. I really enjoyed this one, and I suspect I’ll be reading more from that collection very soon.

Review: Spawn of the Green Abyss - C. Hall Thompson

I once owned the November 1946 issue of WEIRD TALES. I remember that Boris Dolgov cover. However, I never got around to reading it. But continuing with my sudden and unexplainable interest in Cthulhu Mythos stories (gee, that sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it?), I moved on in the anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED to read the novelette “Spawn of the Green Abyss” by C. Hall Thompson.

C. Hall Thompson is best remembered, if he is at all, as a Western writer, but he published four well-regarded stories in WEIRD TALES. “Spawn of the Green Abyss” is narrated by Dr. James Arkwright, a former brain surgeon and now a convicted murderer who’s waiting for his execution. Thompson lets us know right away that Arkwright killed his wife and her unborn baby, but of course, there’s more to it than that, and slowly, in clearly Lovecraft-influenced prose, he peels back the layers of what really happened.

Arkwright, you see, suffering from the stress of his medical career, takes a break from it by renting a cottage in a small town on a peninsula extending into the Atlantic from the New Jersey shore. Out at the point of that peninsula is a creepy old house where a creepy old man lives, along with his beautiful daughter. Naturally, Arkwright becomes obsessed with the house and the old man, and he falls in love with the daughter, as we all knew he would. She is, in fact, the wife he’s in prison for murdering.

I’m sure a lot of you have already read this story, and those of you who haven’t won’t have any trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in it, but the fun is in getting there and Thompson clearly relished the journey. Along the way, the reader gets a lot of chilling, haunting images and a bit of sea-going adventure, to boot.

“Spawn of the Green Abyss” is another excellent story, and I’m glad I got on this little binge. I’m intrigued by the idea that the same guy who wrote this dense, atmospheric yarn was primarily a Western writer. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else by Thompson, but I may have to remedy that.

Review: Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson

Reading Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm” the other day put me in the mood to read more like that, so I dug out my copy of the S.T. Joshi-edited anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED: GREAT TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS and read “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, which appeared originally in the June/July 1939 issue of WEIRD TALES.

In Joshi’s introduction, he says that in 1953, readers of WEIRD TALES voted “Far Below” as the best story ever published in the magazine. Well, no, not hardly, in my opinion, for reasons I’ll get to. But it is a very good story in some ways.

The whole thing is some nameless narrator who’s a writer talking to a friend of his, a former doctor and scientist, in some sort of bizarre control room buried deep below the streets of New York in the subway system. It seems that, unknown to the general public, monsters roam through a certain section of the subway in the middle of the night, and the New York Police Department has set up special squads and listening posts (of which this is one) to monitor their activities and protect the subway riders from them.

That’s a great concept, and as the doctor-turned-cop explains all the background to his friend, there are some wonderfully creepy bits, so vivid that they linger in the mind. But when you get right down to it, other than a little twist at the end, that’s all “Far Below” is: a concept. Very well written, to be sure, but nothing happens. That’s why it’s far from the best story ever published in WEIRD TALES as far as I’m concerned.

But am I glad that I read it? Absolutely! As I said, it’s very well-written, and I enjoy being creeped out from time to time. This’ll do it, that’s for sure. You can find used copies of A MOUNTAIN WALKED on-line, but they’re pretty pricey. Or you can hunt up a PDF of that issue of WEIRD TALES. Either way, I recommend “Far Below”, and I figure I might just delve a little deeper into the Mythos this week.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, September 13, 1930

I always enjoy seeing a good-looking redhead on a pulp cover, and Paul Stahr supplies one on the cover of this issue of ARGOSY. There are some fine writers inside this issue, too, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Theodore Roscoe, Eustace L. Adams, J. Allan Dunn, J.E. Grinstead, Harold de Polo, R.F. Starzl, Art J. Purcell, and Joseph Ivers Lawrence. Some of those names are considerably more familiar than others, of course, but they had to be pretty good to sell to ARGOSY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 7, 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The beautifully painted and rather sedate (by WILD WEST WEEKLY standards) cover is by Tom Lovell. That’s Sonny Tabor, long-running series protagonist and the hero of the lead novelette in this issue.

Sonny Tabor, for those of you who don’t remember, is a young outlaw who was unjustly forced onto the owlhoot trail, but now he’s the most wanted man in Arizona Territory. In “Sonny Tabor’s Oregon Boot”, he’s captured by the law after suffering minor wounds in a shootout. To insure that he doesn’t escape, he’s locked into the Oregon Boot of the title, a special shackle that makes walking very difficult. But does that stop Sonny for very long? What do you think? Of course he gets away, but then he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a scheme by outlaws to take over a couple of ranches owned by a pair of brothers. Sonny, despite being on the wrong side of the law, is really a good guy, so naturally he risks his own freedom to protect the innocent and deal out justice to the real evildoers. Author Paul S. Powers, who wrote this series and others under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, was great at spinning these fast-moving, action-packed yarns, and I always thoroughly enjoy them. Sonny really has problems piled up on him in this one, but he comes through, of course. I also found myself wondering if Stan Lee ever read WILD WEST WEEKLY, because Kid Colt seems very much influenced by Sonny Tabor.

George C. Henderson was a pretty good but now completely forgotten Western pulpster. He has two stories in this issue, the first being “The Jail Break at Big Horse” under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin. In it, two outlaws escape from custody. One of them is a hardened rustler and killer, the other a young man new to the owlhoot trail. The older man takes the younger one into his gang, but eventually the law is bound to catch up to them. This one has a twist ending and I saw part of it coming, but not all of it, and any surprise is a welcome bonus. Other than a slightly rushed ending, this is an entertaining yarn with some well-written action.

The Whistlin’ Kid is actually range detective Pete Prentiss, and he stars in a very long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY published under the house-name Emery Jackson. J. Allan Dunn wrote more of them than anyone else, although Guy L. Maynard and Ronald Oliphant contributed to the series, too. Dunn wrote this issue’s “The Whistlin’ Kid Plays Injun”, in which Prentiss, who hunts rustlers, is mistaken for one himself and almost strung up, and when he gets out of that mess, he disguises himself as an Indian to track down the real outlaws. Dunn was an old pro who always turned in a competently written story with some nice action, but there’s really not much to this one and I’d say it’s one of the weaker stories by him that I’ve read.

I’m a fan of T.W. Ford’s work, but I’ve also known for a long time that he could be inconsistent. His novelette in this issue, “Vengeance of the Peacemaker”, reads like it’s part of a series, but as far as I can tell, this is the only appearance of drifting adventurers Ben Hobbs, known as the Peacemaker, and his sidekick Poison Hellson. The two of them save a young cowboy from being gunned down by a crooked gambler who’s an old enemy of the Peacemaker’s, and that catapults them into a Save the Ranch story in which circumstance makes them wind up working with the rustlers, at least for a while. But you know they’ll straighten everything out eventually. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing seemed a little rushed, to the point that I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I stuck with it and wound up liking it okay, although I wouldn’t rate it as high as most of Ford’s Silver Kid stories, the series for which he’s best remembered.

I’ve become a fan of the Shorty Masters series by Allan R. Bosworth, who was one of the best writers to contribute to WILD WEST WEEKLY. Mule driver Shorty, along with his gunslinging partner Willie Weatherbee, also known as the Sonora Kid, also run afoul of cattle thieves in “Rustlers on Wheels” and are mistaken for outlaws themselves, which seems to be kind of a probably unintended theme of this issue. Naturally, they figure out a way to clear their names and corral the real rustlers. It’s a well-written tale with touches of humor and plenty of action, another good entry in a consistently good series.

George C. Henderson makes his second appearance in this issue, this time under his name, with the novelette “Crazy Q’s Gunpowder Jamboree”. Unfortunately, this is part of a series of linked novelettes that amounts to a serialized novel, and so much of it depends on what has gone before that I never could get into it and wound up not finishing it. Henderson was pretty good, as I mentioned above, and I’m sure if I had all six parts, I would enjoy reading about the adventures of Buckaroo Boone and the other cowboys from the Crazy Q ranch. I’ll pass for now, though.

There are some features and a comic strip, all of which I just glanced at, as usual. For the most part, I’m just interested in the stories, and this issue, none of them rise above the level of pretty good and some are fairly weak, making this a slightly below average issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY in my opinion. The stories by Paul S. Powers and Allan R. Bosworth are well worth reading, though.

Review: The House of the Worm - Mearle Prout (Weird Tales, October 1933)

Since I read and reviewed Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” earlier this week, my friend Fred Blosser suggested I read “The House of the Worm” by Mearle Prout, which appears in the same issue of WEIRD TALES as the opening installment of Hamilton’s serial. That sounded like a good idea to me.

We don’t know much about Mearle Prout. He was born in 1911, possibly in Texas, died in 1964, and apparently spent most of his life in Oklahoma. He published four stories in WEIRD TALES, starting with “The House of the Worm” in the October 1933 issue and then three more, one each in 1937, 1938, and 1939. “The House of the Worm” was the most successful, going on to be reprinted six times in various magazines and anthologies. I had never run across it until now, though.

The narrator of this story is a young man named Art. He’s a writer, possibly a pulp writer, although that’s never specified. His roommate and best friend is a bank clerk named Fred. We never learn any more about these two young fellows than that. They take a break from their jobs to go on a hunting trip to a secluded valley in the Ozark Mountains (not far from Prout’s home in Oklahoma), but when they reach their destination, they find that all the vegetation in the valley is dying and the place has a loathsome stench about it. (You know you’re reading a WEIRD TALES story when there’s a loathsome stench involved somewhere.) They camp there anyway, and both guys have terrible nightmares involving worms and decaying corpses. Or were they nightmares?

Well, things go from bad to worse, as they have a habit of doing. Some sort of unearthly death and decay begins to spread out from the Ozarks. The army and a horde of scientists seem powerless to stop it. We’ll see what a couple of good old boys with a tractor, some barrels of kerosene, and a few cases of dynamite can do, by golly!

All kidding aside, this is an absolutely terrific story. It’s considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but that connection is pretty tenuous. Prout’s style is definitely Lovecraft-inspired, but his prose isn’t as dense as Lovecraft’s and there’s considerably more dialogue and action. Nor do his protagonists sit around and stare at the scary stuff until they go insane. Like Robert E. Howard’s heroes in his Mythos stories, Art and Fred may gaze in horror at first, but then they haul off and kick some Elder God ass.

If you want to read this story, you can find a PDF of that issue on the Luminist Archives, and it’s probably available on various other sites, as well. I really enjoyed “The House of the Worm”, and I’m going to see if I can find Mearle Prout’s other stories.

UPDATE: Thanks to Deuce Richardson for pointing out that "The House of the Worm" can also be found in TALES OF THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS, edited by Robert M. Price, pictured above, which is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions on Amazon.

Review: Mort Künstler: Covered, Volume 1 - Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, eds.

The men’s adventure magazines are very well remembered for their great covers, and for my money, no artist was ever better at painting those covers than Mort Künstler, who produced scores of them, usually signing his own name to them but occasionally using the pseudonym Emmett Kaye. Künstler’s absolute mastery of the genre is amply demonstrated in MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1, the latest beautiful volume from the Men’s Adventure Library and #new texture.

Editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle lead off with a lengthy, informative, and very entertaining interview with Künstler before diving into the meat of the book, more than 100 full-page, full-color reproductions of covers Künstler did for various men’s adventure magazines, mostly FOR MEN ONLY but other magazines, too. These are just gorgeous and prove that Künstler could paint almost any kind of action and adventure scene, from war to Western, from jungle thrills and man against nature to hardboiled crime. Interspersed with these covers are sidebars about the history of the men’s adventure genre and background about each of the magazines featured.

I’ve mentioned before how I used to see those magazines on the racks at the drugstores and grocery stores where I bought comic books and paperbacks, and I always wanted to buy some of them. I was especially drawn to FOR MEN ONLY for some reason, so I’m very happy to see it featured in this volume. In looking through the covers Künstler did in the late Sixties, some of them looked familiar to me, but I honestly don’t know if I was actually recalling them from those days or if nostalgia was just kicking in. I do know that I love looking at them now and remembering those times.

For what it’s worth, I never bought an issue of FOR MEN ONLY or any of those magazines until I was in college in the Seventies, and by that time, they were a mere shadow of what they had been in earlier days. I was an expert at smuggling paperbacks with racy covers into my house, but a full-sized magazine was more of a challenge than I wanted to take on.

But I digress, as I often do. MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1 is a terrific book, and if you’re interested in men’s adventure magazines or just in great artwork, I give it a very high recommendation. The best way to buy it is directly from Bob Deis. The softcover edition and the deluxe hardcover edition are both available. You can get them on Amazon as well. Wherever you buy them, you’re getting some great artwork, I can guarantee that.

Review: The Vampire Master - Edmond Hamilton

I’m a long-time fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction, and I do mean long-time since I was reading the paperback reprints of his Captain Future novels almost sixty years ago. But I knew he wrote some horror stories as well, and since I’m trying to read a little horror fiction this month, I opened my copy of THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR to read the title yarn, the novel-length “The Vampire Master”, which was serialized in WEIRD TALES from October 1933 to January 1934 under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson.

“The Vampire Master” is an occult detective story, with the protagonist being Doctor John Dale, a noted investigator into the eerie and strange. The narrator is his secretary and assistant Harley Owens. Doctor Dale is headquartered in New York City, and as the story opens, he and Owens are being visited by a physician from a town in upstate New York, in the Hudson River valley, concerning a woman who has recently died from a strange malady resembling extreme anemia. Now the woman’s daughter seems to have come down with the same condition. Why, it’s almost like something is draining the blood from their bodies!

Well, we all know where this is going. Doctor Dale doesn’t beat around the bush. A vampire is to blame for what’s happening, and before you know it, they’re all off to the small town to wage war against the evil of vampirism.

Please don’t mistake those comments for snark. Is “The Vampire Master” a very traditional story? Yes, it is. Every bit of vampire lore in it comes straight from DRACULA, both the book and the movie, the latter of which had come out only two years earlier. Of course, Hamilton was influenced by it. This is a very straightforward tale, and like a traditional Western, it rises or falls depending on how well the author makes use of those familiar elements.

I’m happy to report that for the most part, Hamilton does a pretty good job. As the menace of the vampires widens and claims more and more victims, there are some genuinely creepy scenes. The Vampire Master, who has returned to the Hudson River valley after being run out two hundred years earlier, is a suitably despicable villain. There are no sympathetic vampires here. They’re all thoroughly evil, although some through no fault of their own.

There are two flaws in this story, starting with the fact that it’s too long. Stretching the plot out to novel length means that events start to get a little repetitious before it’s over. And the second problem is that for a famous occult detective, Doctor John Dale is strangely ineffective. His plans to combat the vampires never work and he and his allies suffer defeat after defeat until they finally triumph. Maybe Hamilton was just trying to show how dangerous the Vampire Master is, but I kept thinking, dang, Jules de Grandin would have wrapped this up a lot quicker, before quite so many people died.

And speaking of Jules de Grandin, the issue of WEIRD TALES in which the first installment of the serialized version appears sports one of the most iconic, instantly recognizable covers in pulp history, the Bat-Woman by Margaret Brundage. Also in that issue are a Conan story by Robert E. Howard (“The Pool of the Black One”), a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn (“The Mansion of Unholy Magic”), stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a Cthulhu Mythos story by an author I’d never heard of, Merle Prout. Yep, just another day at the newsstand for WEIRD TALES.

Don’t let my mild criticism scare you off from reading “The Vampire Master”. Hamilton’s fast-moving prose is a pleasure to read, as always, and as I mentioned, there are some really nice creepy scenes and a sense of gathering doom. He wrote another story featuring Doctor John Dale, “The House of the Evil Eye”, and I intend to read it before the month is over. In the meantime, the collection THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, published by Haffner Press, seems to be out of print, but used copies can be found for a reasonable price. If you want an e-book edition of “The Vampire Master” without the other stories, that can be had on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Complete Stories, July 15, 1932

I don't know what's going on in this cover by Edgar F. Wittmack, and I'm not sure I want to know. But I know there are some good authors in this issue of STREET & SMITH'S COMPLETE STORIES, including T.T. Flynn, a White Wolf story by Frederick C. Davis, writing under the name of the series creator Hal Dunning, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, inconsistent but often very good, C.S. Montanye, likewise, and an author unknown to me, Jack Hulick. Unusual it may be, but that cover is certainly eye-catching, and Flynn and Davis are enough to make an issue worthwhile by themselves.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Giant Western, June 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t know who did the cover, but I’m not fond of it. It seems too drab and murky to me. But in this case, since the stories inside looked promising, I didn’t really care that much about the cover. It was just good to get a chance to read a Western pulp again after being away from them for a while.

I’m a long-time fan of William Hopson, although I’ve always found his work inconsistent. He wrote some great books, some not very good ones, and a lot in between that were still entertaining. The lead novel in this issue of GIANT WESTERN is one of those rare cases where a pulp novel actually is novel-length. And in fact, “Cow Thief Empire” was published as a hardback novel by Arcadia House, also in 1953. It might have been expanded some for book publication, but my hunch is that it wasn’t, at least not in any significant way. The pulp version is long enough to have been an Arcadia House Western.

But what is it about, you ask? Stony Burns, a rancher who has a spread in Indian Territory on land leased from the Indians, rides down into the Texas Panhandle to the ranch where his late father worked. When he got word of his father’s death, Stony decided to visit the ranch and put up a gravestone. But when he gets there, he immediately clashes with the beautiful young woman who inherited the ranch and winds up making an enemy out of the ranch manager, as well. The stove-up old cowboy who serves as the ranch cook has a beautiful daughter, too, and before you know it, we have a tension-filled romantic rectangle that results in several brutal fistfights.

This is far from being a Western romance, though. Before you know it, a Comanche war party jumps the reservation and follows the buffalo south through the Panhandle, and “Cow Thief Empire” turns into an Indian fighting yarn, with Stony Burns and the young woman who owns the ranch holed up in an isolated line shack, trying to survive a blizzard and an attack by that war party. Up until then, Stony has hated the girl, but now he sees her in a new light.

But wait, the cook’s daughter is captured by the Comanches, and Stony has go after her, joining up with a cavalry patrol to do so, and “Cow Thief Empire” becomes a cavalry vs. the Indians story. If that’s not enough, an army of rustlers descends on the Panhandle after the Indian threat is dealt with, and those rustlers are led by an old enemy of Stony’s, which makes “Cow Thief Empire” (finally, the title fits) a Save the Ranch tale, with some Texas Ranger action thrown in to sweeten the pot.

Whew! You get the idea. “Cow Thief Empire” has the same sort of epic sweep and kitchen sink plotting as TO TAME A LAND, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel. L’Amour was a better writer overall than Hopson, and Hopson’s Texas geography is a little shaky at times, but although I wasn’t sure at first, I wound up really enjoying “Cow Thief Empire”. I love big, sprawling Westerns like this, and Hopson keeps things moving along briskly. The characters are interesting, and they actually evolve over the course of the story. The protagonist, Stony Burns, is pretty unlikable at the start. In fact, he’s downright rotten, but he grows into a sympathetic hero. This isn’t the best novel I’ve read by William Hopson, but it’s right up there. (My two favorites by him, for what it’s worth, are THE RANGE CAT and GUNFIGHTER’S PAY, and I go back and forth on which one is better.)

Thomas Calvert McClary published hundreds of Western, detective, and adventure stories in the pulps and digests in a long career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Sixties. His story in this issue, “Frontier Post”, published under the name T.C. McClary, is a cavalry yarn, as you might guess from the title. The captain in command of the post has to deal not only with a horde of Blackfeet on the warpath but also an overbearing Senator on an inspection tour of the West. It’s not a bad story, but the writing isn’t very good and I struggled a little to get through it. I haven’t read a lot by McClary, but I think this is the weakest story of his I’ve encountered.

I don’t know much about Marc Miller. “A Bride Comes to Dry Gulch” was his first published story, and he went on to do about a dozen more Western and detective stories for various pulps. This is a mail order bride story, as you can guess from the title, and it’s told in the sort of folksy, humorous, first-person narration that often doesn’t work for me. I actually liked this story better than I expected to, but it’s not really that funny and it comes to a very abrupt ending, as if it’s just the first part of what should have been a longer story.

G. Davisson Lough is one of the pseudonyms of Glenn Dale Lough, a West Virginia writer whose career started in the Western and detective pulps in the mid-Forties, but who is best remembered today as the author of dozens of softcore novels, most of them for lower-rung publishers, under the names Glenn Low and John Furlough. I’ve read several of his novels and enjoyed them. I think “The Damned Die Old”, his novelette in this issue, is the first Western by him that I’ve read. It has an unlikely protagonist, a cowardly misfit who takes on the job of delivering the ex-wife of an outlaw who escaped from prison to a ghost town where the fugitive plans to take his revenge on her. Or does he? There’s also a fortune in hidden loot in play, as well as numerous other hardcases who want to get their hands on it. Lough drops the reader down right in the middle of this complicated plot. He tends to play up basic emotions in his work, so there’s plenty of lust, greed, and brutality in this one, but some admirable traits emerge from the characters as well, even the unlikely ones. The writing is gritty and raw and works very well. This is a terrific story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Lough’s fiction has a distinctive voice, and I really need to read more of it.

I don’t know anything about Fred Delano except that he published a few stories in various Western pulps in the mid-Fifties. “The Glass Ball” in this issue is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who decides to go after the reward on a bank robber because some clever deduction has clued him in on the thief’s identity. It’s an okay story, not at all surprising in its resolution but decently written.

Caddo Cameron, whose real name was Charles Richard Beeler, was a prolific contributor to the Western and general fiction pulps from the mid-Thirties to the early Fifties. His novelette “A Devil on the Cattle Trail” in this issue is his last published story. It’s about a trail drive and a young wrangler who gets a reputation as a hoodoo, or jinx. The actual protagonist is one of the cowboys who sticks up for the youngster. I don’t know anything about Beeler’s background, but I’ve read several of his stories and the air of authenticity about them always strikes me. I suspect that like Walt Coburn, J.E. Grinstead, Chuck Martin, Eugene Cunningham, and others, he worked as a cowboy at some point in his life. This story lacks a dramatic resolution, but it’s a very likable yarn despite that. 

With so much of this issue being taken up by Hopson’s novel, the overall quality sort of has to rise and fall with it, and it’s a good one so I’d say this is a pretty good issue of GIANT WESTERN. The story by Glenn Lough is also excellent and the others are all right, with McClary’s cavalry yarn being the weakest. If you have a copy on your shelves, it’s worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Hide Hunters - Lewis B. Patten

Unlike most of the Lewis B. Patten novels I’ve read, this one is based on a historical incident, the epic battle between thirty or forty buffalo hunters and hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne warriors under the command of Quanah Parker at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. I think it’s a rule that every Western author has to write an Adobe Walls book sooner or later. It’s such a good, dramatic story, with the buffalo hunters, including Billy Dixon and a young Bat Masterson, standing off what should have been an overwhelming force of Indians.

In this novel, Patten creates a few fictional characters and gives them reasons to be at Adobe Walls when the attack takes place. Would-be buffalo hunter Jess Burdett rescues beautiful Edith Clinger from her abusive husband, who of course follows them to Adobe Walls bent on reclaiming his wife and having his revenge on Burdett. For some reason, a lot of Patten’s heroes wind up in love with other men’s wives, and that’s the case here. He usually has some sort of violent death conveniently befall the husband, freeing the woman to wind up with the hero, but the resolution isn’t quite so neat in this book.

As always with Patten’s work, there’s a good deal of moral ambiguity, plenty of terse prose, and some hard-nosed action scenes in THE HIDE HUNTERS. He gets the history right and does a fine job of portraying the battle itself, so the reader winds up with a very good blend of fact and fiction. I enjoyed this one enough that I’m tempted to read his Custer book, THE RED SABBATH, another historically-based novel.

(It'll come as no surprise to most of you that I haven't, in fact, read THE RED SABBATH in the years since this post first appeared on October 9, 2009. But I still might someday. There's no reprint of THE HIDE HUNTERS currently available, but used copies are out there in the wild and not too expensive.)

Review: Commando #5603: The Buffer - Brent Towns

A while back I read J.E. Macdonnell’s World War II naval adventure novel THE BUFFER and really enjoyed it. Recently I noticed that an issue of COMMANDO, the British series of digest-sized graphic novels about war, also has an entry called THE BUFFER, and it was written by one of my favorite authors, Brent Towns. Well, you don’t have to hit this old boy over the head. I immediately grabbed the Kindle version of that issue and read it, too.

The characters and story are completely different, of course, no relation to Macdonnell’s novel. In this version, the Buffer is Michael O’Rourke, a chief petty officer on the Australian destroyer Norse. O’Rourke has issues with his temper, and whenever the Norse is in port, he’s constantly getting into fights and thrown into the brig by the MPs. He’s a top-notch sailor, though. When the destroyer encounters a Japanese submarine while patrolling and is sunk, O’Rourke and one other sailor are the only survivors. Other members of the crew would have made it if the sub hadn’t surfaced and killed them all with machine gun fire.

O’Rourke and his companion make it ashore on an island where they’re found by an Australian coastwatcher. A team of Australian commandos come into play, too, because they’re on the island to carry out a vital mission. Unfortunately, O’Rourke’s volatile temper endangers not only that mission but all of their lives. Can he get control of himself long enough to keep from costing them everything?

I’ve said it before, but man, Brent Towns knows how to spin a yarn. The pace in this one is almost non-stop, but in the midst of all that action he also manages to create some compelling characters. The art is by Paolo Ongaro and does a good job of keeping the story rocketing along. THE BUFFER is half naval adventure, half jungle warfare, and Towns and Ongaro capture both very well. I had a great time reading it, and if you’re a fan of fast-moving World War II fiction, I give it a high recommendation.

By the way, while I was there I bought all the other issues of COMMANDO scripted by Towns that I hadn’t already bought and read, so there’ll probably be more of these reviews coming up in the near future.

#437

I just sent novel #437 to my editor. I'm creeping closer to 450. This is only my fifth novel this year, a far cry from the old days but still pretty productive. And I'm already making plans for next year. I may be old, but I still have some pages left in me.

Review: A Crooked Mile - L.D. Whitney

Some years I try to read some horror fiction during October for Halloween, and other years I just ignore it. This year I’m kind of in the mood for some spooky stuff, so when I came across this new novella from L.D. Whitney, I didn’t hesitate to give it a try. I enjoyed the prehistoric adventure novella I read by him a few weeks ago, so I had high hopes for A CROOKED MILE.

Set in the early years of the Twentieth Century, this yarn is narrated by the editor of the weekly newspaper in Wilmarth, Nebraska, a small farming and ranching community. It seems there’s a long-running boundary dispute between the owners of two adjoining homesteads, and one of them has hired a surveyor to try to settle the matter. Now that surveyor has disappeared while out on the plains mapping the boundary, and the local sheriff’s deputy sets out to investigate and try to find the missing man. That investigation leads to some strange happenings, several violent deaths, and an explanation—if you can call it that—that’s downright otherworldly.

This is a really good story. Whitney’s prose has a deliberately Lovecraftian tone to it without being a slavish imitation, and he does a fine job of capturing the feeling of the setting and time period. A CROOKED MILE proves that the windswept plains of Nebraska can be just as creepy as New England. I’d love to see more like this from Whitney, who demonstrates that he’s just as adept at horror as he is at adventure fiction. This story is available in an e-book edition on Amazon, and I give it a high recommendation. It’s a very good start to my horror reading this month.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, February 1941

I always think of Emmett Watson in relation to his covers for various Munsey pulps, but he did some work for other houses, too, such as this cover for THRILLING ADVENTURES. It's not one of his best, but it's okay. And the contents look pretty good, too. The lead story is by my old editor and mentor, Sam Merwin Jr. It's always nice to see Sam featured on a cover. Also on hand are Louis L'Amour (with a Turk Madden yarn), Ray Cummings, Rolland Lynch, Whit Ellsworth (before he was the editor of all the Superman titles at DC), and a couple of lesser-known authors, Jack Terry and Clay Perry, who appear to have no connection other than the fact that their names rhyme.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Speed Western Stories, November 1945

I'm pretty sure the cover on this issue of SPEED WESTERN STORIES is by H.W. Scott. There's a little bit of a signature visible at the very bottom of the cover, and from what I can see, I think it matches Scott's signature. And the painting just looks like his work to me. He was the first one I thought of before I spotted the portion of a signature, so maybe I'm letting that influence me. But in the long run, it doesn't really matter, does it? It's a pretty good cover no matter who painted it. Inside this issue are stories by Laurence Donovan, Giff Cheshire, Charles Handley, and house-names Paul Hanna and Max Neilson. Probably some entertaining ones, too. 

Review: Beagle Scented Murder - Frank Gruber

I enjoyed that Frank Gruber novel I read a couple of weeks ago so much that I wanted to read something else by him. It’s unusual that I revisit an author so quickly, but it happens. I picked up BEAGLE SCENTED MURDER, published originally in hardcover by Rinehart in 1946 and reprinted in paperback in 1973 by Belmont Tower under the title MARKET FOR MURDER. Neither of those titles really fit the book, in my opinion, but as for the novel itself . . . man, I loved it.

This is the second of three books in a short series featuring Los Angeles private detective Otis Beagle and his assistant, Joe Peel. Beagle and Peel are, to put mildly, somewhat shady. They’re not above bending the law to promote cases they can take, such as in this novel where Peel approaches a previous client, a man who was a victim of the ol’ badger game, and convinces him that he needs the agency’s services again. Beagle and Peel are just looking for a fast buck, of course, but what they get instead are a couple of murders, trouble with the law, and violent encounters with various gangsters. Joe Peel gets knocked out twice. Otis Beagle gets taken for a ride. Naturally, there are several good-looking dames involved, too.

This is exactly the sort of book I grew up reading and loving, and it reminds me of two other series that are long-time favorites. The pairing of Otis Beagle and Joe Peel is very reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but even more so of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. The writing isn’t as good as Rex Stout, and the plotting isn’t as complex as Erle Stanley Gardner, but BEAGLE SCENTED MURDER comes close in both respects. The main difference is that this book is written in third person rather than first, but other than that, Joe Peel really reminds me of Donald Lam. He does nearly all the heavy lifting in solving this case, despite the fact that Otis Beagle owns the agency.

Another thing I enjoyed about this novel is that part of the plot revolves around a rare dime novel. Now, I’m not much of a dime novel reader and I don’t collect them at all, but I know enough about them to know that Gruber was very familiar with the subject. I didn’t spot any mistakes, and the various comments about collectors put a smile on my face more than once.

In case you can’t tell, I had an absolutely great time reading this book. It’s not in print, and copies of the hardback seem to be pretty uncommon. You can find the paperback, and it’s only moderately expensive. If you ever run across either edition, I’d say grab it. And if you already have a copy on your shelves and haven’t read it yet, I give it a very high recommendation. I’m going to have to read the other two books in the series soon.

Review: Misfit Lil Robs the Bank - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

I’m a long-time fan of the Misfit Lil series by Chap O’Keefe (who’s really our old friend, writer and editor Keith Chapman, of course), so it’s a real pleasure when I come across one that I haven’t read before. MISFIT LIL ROBS THE BANK was published originally in hardcover by Robert Hale as part of the Black Horse Westerns series in 2009. It was reprinted in a large print edition by Ulverscroft in 2010, and now it’s available again in e-book and paperback editions.

Lilian Goodnight’s friend and mentor, army scout Jackson Farraday, is out of town guiding a scientific expedition, so there’s no one around to provide wise counsel when Lil takes up with reckless, hotheaded cowboy Lucky M’Cline. Their misadventures get them in trouble with the law, and some of the upright citizens of Silver Vein, Utah (including a young woman who’s jealous because she thinks Lil took Lucky away from her) convince her father, rancher Ben Goodnight, to turn her over to the care of a French physician visiting the area, Dr. Francois Guiscard. Guiscard, you see, is famous for using hypnotism and other new-fangled treatments to cure females of hysteria and other psychological ailments. Dr. Guiscard, it is hoped, will be able to cure Lil of her troublemaking ways.

I think we all know what’s going to happen here. Guiscard isn’t the brilliant doctor he pretends to be, although he is a master hypnotist. Lil winds up in more trouble than ever and back behind bars, charged with bank robbery and murder. She and Lucky have to break out of jail and track down the real villain to clear Lil’s name.

One of the great things about Keith Chapman’s Westerns is that his writing has a distinctive voice. Nobody else would write these books exactly the way he does. As a result, he always comes up with great characters and plots that spin traditional elements in fresh and compelling ways. MISFIT LIL ROBS THE BANK races along in a fast, entertaining fashion, and I had a great time reading it. If you’re looking for an enjoyable, somewhat offbeat Western, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ace G-Man Stories, October 1942

This issue of ACE G-MAN STORIES features a striking cover by Rafael De Soto. The lead story is a Suicide Squad novelette by Emile C. Tepperman. I've read several stories in this series and really enjoyed all of them. Kerrigan, Murdoch, and Klaw make quite a team, and Tepperman's stories are always fast moving. Another top-notch writer, Day Keene, has a story in this issue, and rounding things out are yarns by lesser-known but prolific pulpsters Don James, Harry Lee Fellinge, and Edward S. Williams.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, March 1944

Smoking isn't good for you, especially when you have to pause in the middle of a gunfight to roll a quirley. This fine, slightly humorous cover is by Sam Cherry, who always delivered the goods. There are some good authors in this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES. William R. Cox has two stories, one as himself and one under the name Joel Reeve. Also on hand are C. William Harrison, Theodore J. Roemer, Al Storm, James Shaffer, M. Howard Lane, and four house-names: Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and Logan C. Claybourne. Often when I'm stuck for the name of a minor character in a manuscript, I'll use a pulp house-name or pseudonym. Or I'll mix and match the real names of pulp authors. Obscure little references like that always entertain me, help keep me sane, and help keep the pages rolling along.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Dirt Farm - Orrie Hitt

The protagonist of this fine yarn is Butch Hagen, a former carnival worker and truck driver who really prefers working on farms. He’s been shacking up in a small town with another former carny, the beautiful stripper Lucy Ellis, when he finds work on the very misnamed Friendly Farms, owned by brutal Clay Billings. Butch leaves Lucy to go work on the farm, where he finds that Billings has a beautiful niece named Candy. There’s another farmhand who has a beautiful redheaded girlfriend named Sherry, and on the next farm over there’s a hot-to-trot farmer’s daughter named Mae who happens to be a little underage . . .

Well, if you’ve read very many of these softcore sleaze novels, you’ll know how most of these plot elements are going to intertwine. And if you’re read much of Orrie Hitt’s work, you’ll find some of his familiar themes in DIRT FARM. But there are several things about this one that make it an excellent novel and well worth reading. For one, Hitt’s writing is really smooth and fast in DIRT FARM. He was a master at keeping the reader flipping the pages and this book is a prime example of that. For another, he throws in a noirish crime element reminiscent of James M. Cain and then proceeds to milk it for all the suspense it’s worth. Despite the predictability of some of the plot, I really didn’t have any idea how this book was going to end, and that’s rare. And finally, Hitt was among the best ever at writing about the desperation that fills most people, even the seemingly successful ones. Everybody in a Hitt novel wants something, needs something, is missing something. A lucky few find whatever it is that they’re seeking, but plenty of others don’t.

DIRT FARM isn’t as personal a book as some of Hitt’s other novels, so you don’t get his digressions about censorship and government, and not much about morality. But it reads like the wind and tells a compelling, if slightly formulaic, story. I had a great time reading it and recommend it for fans of hardboiled sleaze in general and Orrie Hitt in particular.

(This post originally appeared on August 31, 2009. I'm a little surprised that in the years since, DIRT FARM hasn't been reprinted. It's a good one.)