Review: Jangar! Beastlord of Muu Book 1: Slaves of the Mind Mage - L.D. Whitney

First of all, if I’d seen a book called JANGAR! BEASTLORD OF MUU, BOOK 1: SLAVES OF THE MIND MAGE on the paperback spinner rack when I was a kid, I’d have been all over that sucker. I’d have grabbed it, hurried up to the counter with a handful of quarters to pay for it, and as soon as I got home, I would have headed to one of my regular reading spots to tear into it.

I wouldn’t have been disappointed, either.

This is actually an e-book novella, not a paperback, and I’m a long, long way past being a kid (at least physically), but I had a fine time reading this yarn anyway. Author L.D. Whitney drops us right down in the middle of the action, a technique I always enjoy, as our hero, the stalwart Jangar, who’s a human raised by panthers, rescues Yala, a nearly naked runaway priestess who’s about to be sacrificed by a bunch of beast-men to a lizard god that bears a distinct resemblance to a tyrannosaurus rex. Then, while fleeing through the jungle from the beast-men, Jangar and Yala encounter another threat that turns rather Lovecraftian before it’s all over. As you can guess, Whitney packs enough good stuff into this tale that the pace never has a chance to slow down for more than a breath or two, which is just the way I like it.

That breakneck pace doesn’t allow much time for world-building or back-stories, either, but that’s all right. Whitney gives us enough of both to know what’s going on without any trouble, and since SLAVES OF THE MIND MAGE is just the first in a series of Jangar novellas, I’m sure he’ll flesh things out just fine as we go along. I also like the fact that he gives Yala equal time in the story, too. Despite the title, it’s her story as much as his, and she’s a good character. The cover by Mike Hoffman, the editing, and the production are all top-notch.

In addition to the obvious Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs influence, in his foreword Whitney credits Steve Dilks, a very good contemporary sword-and-sorcery author, and Lin Carter for inspiring him to write this series. I can see some Gardner Fox influence, as well. I enjoy the work of all those authors, so it’s a cinch I’d like this one, too.

Now for a brief rant: many times I’ll see something on Facebook about a new novel that’s supposed to be inspired and influenced by the pulps. That usually intrigues me enough to go to Amazon and check it out. Often, the cover looks good, the description does indeed sound very pulpish, and then I look down and see “Print Length – 437 pages”.

No. Absolutely not. A series might run to 400+ pages or even more, but a single story? Again, no. That’s enough to tell me the author probably doesn’t understand pulp after all. Undoubtedly, that’s not always true and I’m painting with too broad a brush, and I’ve probably missed some good yarns because of feeling that way, but I can’t help it.

Then I look at the print length on SLAVES OF THE MIND MAGE. 56 pages, according to Amazon. Yep, L.D. Whitney gets it. And he’s going to get my money for the rest of the books in this series. I've already bought the second one, and it's waiting on my Kindle.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Air Stories, January 1930

I really need to read more by George Bruce. The one novella I read by him was excellent. He's the headliner in this issue of AIR STORIES, but there are plenty of other good authors in this one as well, such as Frederick C. Davis, Arthur J. Burks, James P. Olsen, Andrew A. Caffrey, Jack Smalley, and Gil Brewer (not the hardboiled crime author, but rather his father, the author of the immortal "Gorilla of the Gasbags"). I've developed a fondness for aviation pulp, but sadly, there's just not enough time in the day to work in everything that interests me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, November 1948

The Popular Publications Western pulps usually had the roughest, toughest-lookin' hombres on their covers, in contrast to the clean-cut, stalwart types who showed up on most of the competition's covers. This varmint is a prime example of that. Picking your teeth with a knife while wearing a hat with a bullet hole in it (Injury to a Hat alert!) and blood drips from your forehead where a slug grazed it, all while looking completely nonchalant . . . He may be a bad guy, but you can't help but admire how cool he is! The lineup of authors in this issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE is pretty admirable, too. Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden), Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, Talmage Powell, and Ray Townsend are the biggest names, solid, dependable pulpsters, all of them. Also on hand are Max Kesler, Kenneth Fowler, Clint Young, and James Propp. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Hell to Pay - J. Lee Butts

I’ve known Jimmy Butts for several years and have read and enjoyed some of his house-name Westerns, but I’d never read one of the novels under his own name until now. The subtitle of HELL TO PAY is “The Life and Violent Times of Eli Gault”, and that’s a pretty good description of the book. It’s a first-person account of a Texas badman, the son of a crazed itinerant preacher who winds up killing his father in self-defense. Eli doesn’t necessarily set out to become an outlaw and a murderer, but circumstances continue forcing him in that direction.

Then he meets up with a gunfighter named Cutter Sharpe, who becomes a sort of surrogate father to him, teaching him how to handle a gun (for which Eli has a natural talent) and also how to play poker, which becomes Eli’s principal means of support. Eventually Eli and Sharpe go their separate ways, and Eli continues drifting. He even tries to settle down and lead a law-abiding life at times, going so far as to become a deputy marshal at one point, as well as joining a cattle drive to the railhead in Kansas, but sooner or later trouble crops up again and Eli’s natural tendency is to shoot his way out of it.

Butts really delivers the goods in this novel: colorful characters, headlong narrative drive, and plenty of gritty action, all told in a stripped down, distinctive style that reminded me of the hardboiled crime writer Paul Cain (FAST ONE, SEVEN SLAYERS). Eli Gault is a great character, reminiscent of Jim Thompson’s Lou Ford. He’s as friendly and likable as he can be, until it comes time for him to gun down somebody else in cold blood. His story builds up to a powerful ending, and after finishing it, I can say definitely that I’ll be reading more by J. Lee Butts. If you enjoy hardboiled Westerns, HELL TO PAY comes highly recommended by me.

(As often happens, despite my good intentions I haven't read any more novels by J. Lee Butts since this post originally appeared on August 23, 2009. I own copies of most of them, mind you, and I still plan to get around to reading at least some of them. One thing I didn't elaborate on in this review is that Jimmy's style really was distinctive, to the point you couldn't mistake his work for that of anybody else. This caused him a problem because after he had written a number of Longarms, the series got a new editor who didn't understand or like the way Jimmy wrote and tried to get him to change it. This effort was not successful. All it succeeded in doing was running Jimmy off from the series, which was a shame. Jimmy passed away, rather unexpectedly, as I recall, in 2022, having written several volumes of Western non-fiction in addition to his novels. HELL TO PAY is no longer in print, but affordable used copies are easy to come by. It's still one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read.)

Review: Bronze Star: The Damnation of Harley Brogden - Mike Baron

Mike Baron is one of those writers whose work I read and enjoyed long before we became friends on-line. His work as a comic book scripter in the Eighties, Nineties, and beyond is legendary. In the past decade he’s turned to writing novels, producing the great private eye series Biker, the hilarious Florida Man novels, and some top-notch horror thrillers. He’s also turned his hand to Westerns, and I’ve just read the first in his new series Bronze Star, THE DAMNATION OF HARLEY BROGDEN.

Not surprisingly, the protagonist of this novel is Harley Brogden, a former Confederate soldier who turned irregular and rode with Quantrell’s Raiders. The war is over now, and Harley earns his living providing meat to the army. He also likes to gamble, though, and a poker game goes wrong when the son of the richest man in the territory takes offense at losing and goes for his gun. Harley beats him to the draw and kills him, but even though he survives this shootout, he knows the man’s father and an army of hired guns will be after him, seeking vengeance.

Having no choice but to take off for the tall and uncut, Harley rides across the border into the western reaches of Canada, where he winds up in a town full of eccentric characters, many of them immigrants from Croatia. Some of them possess odd powers. There’s a silver mine nearby, but it’s not being worked anymore because something evil lives inside it and has claimed numerous lives. Harley makes friends and starts a romance with the widow who runs the local boarding house, but before he can settle down to any sort of life, he has to deal with the supernatural menace hanging over the town. Oh, and the vengeful cattle baron and his hired gun-wolves show up, too, of course.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of most Weird Westerns. In too many of them, the author knows how to write horror or knows how to write Westerns, but not both. That’s not the case in THE DAMNATION OF HARLEY BROGDEN, which is excellent in both respects. Not that I expected anything less from Mike Baron. He brings his own unique touch to everything he writes, and nobody in the business today comes up with better protagonists. Harley Brogden is a complex character, deadly proficient when it comes to violence but at the same time possessing a likable, gentle touch with those he befriends, especially animals and children. Haunted by some of his past actions, he’s genuinely trying to become a better man, and most of the time he succeeds. You still don’t want to make an enemy out of him, though.

I had a very good time reading this novel and give it a high recommendation for Weird Western fans. I think most traditional Western fans would enjoy it, too. I’m pretty sure there are sequels on the way, but for now, you can pick this up in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon. It’s another winner from Mike Baron.

Review: Twenty Plus Two - Frank Gruber

I’m a long-time fan of Frank Gruber’s work, but I’d only read some of his Western novels, a couple of his early mystery novels, some of his pulp mystery stories—most notably, the Oliver Quade stories collected in BRASS KNUCKLES—and his memoir THE PULP JUNGLE, which grew out of his introduction to the Quade collection. I hadn’t read any of his later mystery novels. This seemed like a good time to remedy that since Black Gat Books is about to reprint his 1961 novel TWENTY PLUS TWO, published originally in hardcover by E.P. Dutton and then reprinted in paperback that same year by Bantam. It was even made into a movie that year, starring David Janssen and with a screenplay by Gruber, which I haven't seen.

The protagonist of TWENTY PLUS TWO is Tom Alder, who’s not a private detective, although he functions pretty much like one and has contacts with detective agencies all over the country. Instead, he tracks down missing heirs and takes a cut of whatever they inherit. But as this book opens, he’s not looking for an heir. He’s taking an interest (for reasons that will be explained later in the book) in the murder of a woman who works for various movie stars answering their fan mail, running their fan clubs, etc.

That murder investigation isn’t all Alder has on his plate. A swindler and ex-con wants to hire Alder to find his younger brother. A beautiful woman who’s a friend of one of Alder’s old flames goes missing. In some odd way, all these cases seem to connect to the disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a young mobster more than twenty years earlier.

As experienced readers of these kind of novels, we’re all going to expect those plot elements to tie together eventually, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that they do. However, Gruber piles on enough complications and coincidences that eventually the reader has to do some pretty serious willing suspending of disbelief. “Sure, why not?”, if you will. Despite that, is the plot of TWENTY PLUS TWO too far-fetched? Well, no, I don’t think so. The resolution is logical and holds together, and who’s to say it couldn’t have happened that way? I don’t think Gruber cheats and conceals things from the reader, either. It’s all there to be figured out, as Tom Alder does.

The book races along, too. I was flipping the pages pretty quickly in the second half, eager to see what was going to happen. Gruber’s prose isn’t fancy, but it’s very effective when it comes to telling a story.

Gruber moved in pulp writing circles in New York and movie and TV circles in Hollywood (he created several Western series I watched as a kid), and I’ve read that he wasn’t very well-liked by some of his contemporaries, although he remained good friends with a few such as fellow pulpster Steve Fisher. He was a really good yarn-spinner and turned out top-notch stories and novels for a long time. I think I need to read more of them. In the meantime, the Black Gat paperback of TWENTY PLUS TWO will be out in early October. It’s one of the best mystery novels I’ve read this year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Blue Book Magazine, May 1931

Yikes! This great cover by Laurence Herndon illustrates the first installment of the serialized novel "The Land of Hidden Men" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which just happens to be one of the Burroughs novels I've never read. I have to get busy and catch up on some of this stuff. This issue isn't top-heavy with big-name authors, but there are still some very good pulpsters on hand including Seven Anderton, Clarence Herbert New (with a Freelances of Diplomacy story), Rollin Brown, Armand Brigaud (a JUNGLE STORIES stalwart later in his career), and Conrad Richter, whose work appeared in the pulps occasionally even though he was better known for his stories in the slicks and, later on, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Also on hand were some writers unknown to me: Ewing Walker, William F. Sturm, Henry LaCossitt, Albert Dorrington, Wilbur Hall, and Arthur K. Akers. What's this, an issue of BLUE BOOK without a single H. Bedford-Jones story, let alone two or three under his various pseudonyms? I thought that was against the law! 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Fall 1942

A common scene on Western pulp covers was to have an owlhoot standing in front of a wall on which was tacked a wanted poster bearing his likeness. The cover by Mat Kauten on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN is a good example of that. I like this cover a lot. The contents look pretty interesting, too. After appearing exclusively in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to early 1941, T.W. Ford's character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid, began appearing in Columbia Western pulps in May of '41. Except for a couple more stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY that were probably already in inventory there, from that point on Strant only showed up in various Columbia pulps, including this one. I don't know the circumstances of the move. It could be that Columbia offered more money (highly unlikely!) or the editors at Street & Smith told Ford, "Please don't send us any more of those Silver Kid stories" (the more likely explanation). Whatever the reason, I've read Silver Kid yarns from both eras of his career and always enjoyed them. Also on hand in this issue are Archie Joscelyn, Ed Earl Repp, Lee Floren, A. Kenneth Brent, Kenneth P. Wood, G.C. Ogle, and house-name Cliff Campbell.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Nothing Personal - Jason Starr

Until this book, the only thing I’d read by Jason Starr was BUST, his Hard Case Crime novel written in collaboration with Ken Bruen, which I liked quite a bit. NOTHING PERSONAL is one of Starr’s earlier novels, and it’s good enough to convince me that I need to read more of his work.

This book is about two couples in New York, the white-collar David and Leslie Sussman and the blue-collar Joey and Maureen DePino, and the way all their lives intersect in unexpected and tragic fashion. Leslie and Maureen are best friends from childhood. David is being stalked by a woman from his office with whom he’s been having an affair. Joey is a compulsive gambler up to his eyeballs in debt who has a loan shark’s goons after him. You know when things start out this bad, they’re only going to get worse . . . but the trick is in how they get worse.

I don’t mind admitting I thought I had this book figured out. I knew what was going to happen. Only I didn’t. Starr kept coming up with different but perfectly logical ways to take his story, so that every time I started to nod knowingly to myself, he yanked the rug out from under me again. That’s good stuff and kept me flipping the pages even as the events unfolding grew darker and darker. I love it when a book takes me by surprise. NOTHING PERSONAL is a fine novel, and now I have to go find more of Jason Starr’s books.

(I did read a couple more Jason Starr novels after this post appeared on July 14, 2007, and I'll probably rerun the reviews of them, too, in time. This novel is still in print in e-book and paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands.)

Review: Too Like the Lightning - Dana Chambers (Albert Fear Leffingwell)

A while back I read and very much enjoyed SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU, the first novel in the Jim Steele series by Dana Chambers, whose real name was Albert Fear Leffingwell. In the same double volume with that book, the fine folks at Stark House Press have also reprinted the second Jim Steele novel, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, and as it turns out, it’s even faster-paced than the first one.

You may recall that at the end of the previous book, our radio-scriptwriter-turned-detective narrator/protagonist was going to be married to his old flame, the beautiful bronze-haired Lisa. Well, as TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING opens, Lisa is dead, or at least presumed dead, in the crash of a missing airplane. Instead of being in bed with his wife, Steele wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. He has holes in his memory, and oh, yeah, there’s a dead guy in the bathtub.

The author explains all this pretty quickly. Or does he? It seems that Steele, in the middle of mourning for Lisa, has been recruited as an intelligence agent by the U.S. government to help get to the bottom of an evil plan by German and Japanese spies to sabotage American bombers. This book was first published in 1939, so there’s a lot of worried speculation about how there are going to be bombing raids along the East Coast and a German army will invade from Mexico. The blonde and the dead guy are tied in with Steele’s assignment, of course.

But in short order, things get more complicated than that. One of the agents Steele is working with gets blown up by a bomb. He gets sapped, shot at, captured by bad guys—or are they?—escapes, finds vital information, hides vital information, calls in the FBI—or are they?—and makes several startling discoveries, each of which changes everything. Leffingwell doesn’t help clarify things by constantly skipping scenes in order to drop us back down in the middle of the action.

All of that makes it difficult to keep up with what’s going on in TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING. However, in the end everything does come together and make sense, and getting to that point is a lot of fun. This book is packed to the gills with witty banter, and Steele’s narration is so swift and breezy, you can’t help but be entertained by it. The ending is quite satisfying, too.

I don’t think I liked this one quite as much as the first one in the series, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to fans of offbeat wartime espionage thrillers. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions. Stark House has already reprinted the next two books in the series, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Now Available: The Legend of Johnny Colt #3: Staked Plains Slaughter

The railroad has finally reached the Texas Panhandle, but not everyone is happy about it—in fact, there are some very bad people willing to slaughter a lot of folks to keep the railroad from advancing. Johnny Colt has faced down many killers before, but this mission might be his most dangerous--and last--assignment yet. When he crosses paths with a kill-crazy gang led by the murdering devil Billy Six-Ears, his undercover mission turns into a violent and blood-soaked fight for his life. With deadly gunfire erupting from all sides, Johnny Colt must rely on all his courage and sharpshooting skills to escape with his head still intact and bring these outlaws to justice…the kind of justice that swings from the end of a rope.

On the Staked Plains, death can come from anywhere. In this unrelenting, brutally violent fast-paced Western, Johnny Colt must once again put his life on the line to bring law and order to a terrifyingly violent American frontier, where bullets are cheap…and life is cheaper.

Bestselling western veteran author James Reasoner once more brings his gritty, take-no-prisoners depictions of the West in STAKED PLAINS SLAUGHTER.

PRAISE FOR JAMES REASONER:

"James Reasoner is a master of the Western. You can always depend on his work to excite and entertain." —Joe Lansdale

(This is one of the fastest-paced books I've ever written, and that's saying something. Johnny Colt's uncle, Texas Ranger Captain Esau "Brimstone" Parker, also known as the Hellfire Ranger, gets to play a pretty big part in this book. I love these characters and have really enjoyed writing the three books so far. I hope some of you wlll pick it up and enjoy it as well. The e-book edition is here, and it's available in a paperback edition, as well. Spread the word, and I'll greatly appreciate it!)

Review: The Adventures of Coffin Kirk - Arch Whitehouse

With my fondness for, shall we say, offbeat pulp stories, how in the world did I miss this series? The Coffin Kirk stories by Arch Whitehouse are unlike anything else I’ve ever read from the aviation/air war pulps. Thankfully, Age of Aces Books has reprinted them in THE ADVENTURES OF COFFIN KIRK, a very handsome trade paperback volume. (Warning: There are SPOILERS below.)

The first story, “Vultures’ Vortex”, is from the October 1937 issue of FLYING ACES. It mostly just serves as a set-up for the rest of the series as it introduces crack pilot Brian “Coffin” Kirk, so-called because of his expressionless, “dead-pan” face. When Kirk was a kid, his father was an allied intelligence agent working undercover in Berlin, and Kirk was there with him. Having witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of a vicious international arms cartel known as the Circle of Death, Kirk vows to avenge his father’s death someday, and now, with the clouds of war gathering once again in Europe and the Circle of Death still active, he launches his quest, aided by his faithful mechanic and tail gunner Tank. Now, here’s the thing about Tank, and yes, this is a SPOILER, but it’s revealed pretty early on in this first story: Tank is actually an extremely intelligent, highly trained gorilla who befriended Kirk when the boy hid out from his father’s murderers in the Berlin Zoo. Tank even talks! Well, not really. Kirk is actually a ventriloquist, but he uses the illusion of Tank speaking to fool the bad guys. Whitehouse establishes all this in the first story, which also features Kirk and Tank getting captured by some Circle of Death agents but escaping.

The duo don’t return until the June 1938 issue of FLYING ACES, which features the story “Sky Guns of Singapore”. Kirk and Tank are in the Far East in this one, trying to foil a Circle of Death plot to destroy a new British naval base and also wipe out Singapore with poison gas. Even though our heroes are successful, of course, the body count in this one almost rivals a Spider or Operator 5 novel. Those Circle of Death guys are really evil!

“Scourge of the Steel Eagles”, from FLYING ACES, October 1938, is a direct sequel to the previous story. Trying to fly back to Europe from Singapore, Kirk and Tank are attacked by some mysterious planes and forced to crash-land in the jungles of Borneo near an extinct volcano. After they find a village full of natives who have died from some unknown cause, they observe some of the planes that shot them down apparently flying into the side of the volcano. I’m not going to bother putting a spoiler notice because it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here: in a plot that could have cropped up years later in a yarn featuring James Bond, Napolean Solo and Illya Kuryakin, or Amos Burke, Secret Agent (how’s that for obscure?), the Circle of Death has a hidden airbase inside the volcano, from which they intend to spread poison gas all over Southeast Asia. But not if our boys Kirk and Tank have anything to say about it, right? I’m impressed by the way Whitehouse manages to cram a novel’s worth of plot and a high body count into these novelettes.

Kirk and Tank are still in the Far East in “Clue of the Breda Brood”, from the April 1939 issue of FLYING ACES. In fact, they’re still flying over Borneo, as hardly any time has passed since the conclusion of the previous story. Once again, their plane (a stolen Heinkel bomber this time; Whitehouse knows planes and doesn’t mind telling you all about them) is forced down. This time they find some hidden hangers full of Bredas, a Belgian plane I’d never heard of. The Bredas are instrumental in another chemical weapons attack by the Circle of Death, and this time Kirk teams up with a group of daredevil RAF pilots to foil it.

“Balloons for a Breda” appears in the August 1940 issue of FLYING ACES, and despite more than a year’s gap between stories, once again it’s a direct sequel to the previous story. There’s less aerial action in this one as it’s more of an espionage story with Kirk and a beautiful female intelligence agent teaming up to keep a Japanese spy from getting his hands on some vital defense plans. The plot isn’t as over the top as the earlier stories in the series, which is both good and bad. You don’t want to see an author writing basically the same story over and over again, but at the same time, I sort of missed the high stakes in what is a more grounded (no pun intended) yarn.

Almost a year goes by before we see Kirk and Tank again in the June 1941 issue of FLYING ACES, but despite that gap, “Fate Flies the Breda” picks up almost immediately after the end of the previous story. Our heroes are still trying to get those defense plans to an American admiral in Singapore when they’re shot down (yes, again) on an island where their survival depends on Tank being able to successfully impersonate a Nazi agent who’s pretending to be a Dutch official. Whitehouse really knows how to stretch a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. But once again, our boys defeat the villains, and as the story ends, they’re back in the air, headed toward Singapore.

We can only assume they got there safely, because with this story, the Coffin Kirk series comes to an end. It’s a wild one, you can say that for it. The plots are repetitive, but the sheer audaciousness of the whole series carries the stories along successfully. Kirk is an okay hero, but Tank is just a great character, full of personality and honestly the more effective of the pair. He saves the day time after time. If you’re a fan of aviation/war pulp yarns and don’t mind a little goofiness, I highly recommend THE ADVENTURES OF COFFIN KIRK. I had a really good time reading it, and it’s not like anything else you’re likely to read any time soon, I can guarantee that.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Action Stories, May 1929

This issue of ACTION STORIES comes from the days when the magazine featured other kinds of adventure fiction along with Westerns. The cover featuring a tough-looking Foreign Legionnaire is by H.C. Murphy Jr. The story it illustrates is by Francis James, a pseudonym for James A. Goldthwaite, a prolific pulpster who wrote a lot of adventure, detective, Western, and Weird Menace stories. Speaking of prolific, Walt Coburn, Theodore Roscoe, T.W. Ford, and Eli Colter are on hand as well, as is Andrew A. Caffrey, the least-known author in this issue. It looks like a good one.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Top-Notch Western, August 1938

This issue of TOP-NOTCH WESTERN has a decent cover by H.W. Scott. The lead novella is by Norton L. James. I've read speculation that that's a pseudonym for Ray Nafziger, but it's never been confirmed and probably never will be. We do know for sure that Brad Buckner, who also has a story in this issue, was actually Ed Earl Repp. Repp doesn't have a story under his real name in this one, so I'm not sure why he used the Buckner pen-name. Also on hand are Rolland Lynch, a prolific Western pulpster who's forgotten these days, the even more obscure James W. Egan and Frank H. Richey, and house-name John Cannon. Not a top of the line Western pulp despite its name, but probably worth reading. I don't believe I've ever seen an actual issue of TOP-NOTCH WESTERN.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: I Should Have Stayed Home - Horace McCoy

(This post originally appeared on June 19, 2009, and it seemed like a good time to rerun it because one of my favorite publishers, Black Gat Books, has just brought out a well-deserved reprint of it.)

Cullen Gallagher mentioned this novel a couple of weeks ago on his blog, and since I happened to have a copy on hand, I thought I’d go ahead and read it. I’d never read any of McCoy’s novels before, although I’ve read several of his pulp stories and enjoyed them. Also, I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME is dedicated in part to Joseph T. Shaw, the famous editor of BLACK MASK, so I figured it might be worthwhile.

Which it certainly is, although it’s not a crime novel at all. A few minor crimes take place, but they’re hardly the focus of the book. Instead it’s a Hollywood novel set in the Thirties, narrated by Ralph Carston, a young would-be actor from Georgia who’s determined to make it big in the movies. As the book opens, he’s working sporadically as an extra and living, platonically, with a bit-part actress named Mona Matthews. Ralph makes the acquaintance of a wealthy widow known for throwing lavish Hollywood parties, and despite being rather naïve, he knows that she can help him advance his career if he goes along with what she wants, which is him.

Along with Ralph’s affair with the widow, the plot features a big star who turns out to be a lesbian, an interracial couple, some nights spent in jail, a suicide, and lots of boozing and sex. What makes I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME worth reading is McCoy’s bleak, fast-paced prose. The plot may be melodramatic, but the writing is pure hardboiled, with a grim, fatalistic tone that makes the book qualify as noir, as well. I’ll definitely have to get around to McCoy’s other novels, and in the meantime, if you like Hollywood novels, this one gets my recommendation.

(I second my own recommendation. You can find the Black Gat edition here.)

One More Reason I Love the Internet

This comment from Joseph Grieco was on my blog this morning, on a post from last year in which I reran my 2008 review of this novel:

It was a pleasure and a surprise to find your review of The Fast Buck. Your observations about this novel and its author hit home. You asked if anyone knew more information about the author. The book was written by my uncle, Joseph Rositani, under the pseudonym Ross Laurence. He used other names in his poems, short stories, articles and essays for magazines; but TFB was the first (and I believe only) Ross Laurence novel. As you might have guessed, he grew up in the gritty, Italian neighborhoods of Chicago. Though formal education beyond high school was cut short by the Third Army infantry/Europe/WWII, he was an energized writer until his tragic death as a passenger in a Los Angeles auto accident when he was about 40...I think that was 1960? While big money as a writer wasn't in the cards, he was a big deal in our family: our first writer...inspiring several of us to enter careers in which writing is central to our professions and our generational success. Thanks for covering his book.

Thank you for commenting, Joseph! I'm very happy you found the post about your uncle's book and could tell us about him. I love making contact with the friends and relatives of writers who have entertained so many of us in years past. It's a shame he passed away at such a young age. I think he could have had a fine career as a mystery novelist.

Review: Bullets on the Wind - D.B. Newton

Winter is closing in, and the last thing Jim Bannister is looking for is trouble. He’s already on the run from the law, unjustly convicted of murder, and toting around a $12,000 bounty on his head that has put a pair of killers on his trail. The last thing he needs is to get caught in a tangle of violence involving a wealthy cattle baron, his beautiful and much younger wife, her not-to-be-trusted brother, and a blackmailing saloon owner. But that’s where Bannister winds up anyway, trying to stay alive when there are folks who want him dead on all sides.

BULLETS ON THE WIND is the second novel in the Jim Bannister series by D.B. Newton, published originally as a paperback original by Berkley in 1964 and available these days in e-book and paperback editions from Piccadilly Publishing. I’ve been a fan of Newton’s work for a long time, and I really enjoyed the first novel in the Bannister series, ON THE DODGE. This one continues that streak. It’s an excellent hardboiled Western with lots of gritty action and a plot with enough twists to be interesting. Jim Bannister is a fine protagonist, and the young rancher he befriends is a top-notch supporting character. In another very nice touch, the cattle baron isn’t the villain in this book. Although a little rough around the edges, he’s actually a pretty sympathetic character.

I thoroughly enjoyed BULLETS ON THE WIND, and if you’re a fan of traditional Western novels, it gets a strong recommendation from me. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the Jim Bannister novels.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, October 1946

I think I'll start using this Malvin Singer cover as my author photo. There's a certain resemblance, and that's the way I feel a lot of days when I'm trying to write. By this point in its run, ADVENTURE featured a mix of well-known authors and others whose names aren't really familiar to me. This issue includes Sidney Herschell Small with a Koropok story (I have the collections of that series but have never read them), Nard Jones, who wrote some well-regarded historical novels and historical non-fiction, veteran pulpster Kenneth Perkins, Ted Stratton, who wrote paperbacks as Terry Spain, and Dave Grubb, who as Davis Grubb wrote the popular novels THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and FOOL'S PARADE, both of which were adapted into movies. Also on hand are R.G. Emery, Douglas F. Young, and Henry John Colyton, the authors who fall into the unfamiliar category for me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulps: Western Trails, March 1937

The cover on this issue of WESTERN TRAILS is by Ray Quigley. I don't know anything about him except that he painted a dozen or so pulp covers in the late Thirties and early Forties. The lineup of authors in this issue is a good one: L.P. Holmes, Carl McK. Saunders (really Philip Ketchum), Van Cort (really Wyatt Blassingame), Clyde A. Warden (with a Bert Little story), Robert E. Mahaffey, Andor de Soos (who did about 15 stories for various Western and gang pulps in the late Thirties), and Kenneth P. Wood. I've read and enjoyed all those authors except de Soos and Wood.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Midnight Room - Ed Gorman

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of serial killer novels. You can trust Ed Gorman to give you something different, though, even when he’s writing about a serial killer. Because he doesn’t just write about the person who’s murdering teenage girls in a small Midwestern city. In THE MIDNIGHT ROOM, he also gives you the team of police detectives looking for the killer, their friends and families, the family of a girl who has disappeared and is believed to have been abducted by the killer, the politicians, the news media, the ex-con looking for revenge, and the burglar who discovers the killer’s true identity . . . and decides to try his hand at a little blackmail.

Yes, there’s a lot packed into this book. The wonder of it is that while the plot never slows down for long, Ed also manages to include enough details to make all these characters come to vivid life. I think that may be one of the secrets to why his books are so good. In too many contemporary thrillers, the reader never learns much about the characters beyond what they need to know for the plot. In too much literary fiction, the author provides such an abundance of information about the characters that nothing ever happens; there’s no room for anything else. But Ed strikes a perfect balance in his work between the characters and the plot.

And speaking of plot . . . I thought I knew what was going to happen in this book, but then Ed surprised me not once but twice, changing the game part of the way through in a move that most writers wouldn’t even attempt, let alone pull off successfully. For me as a reader, being able to look at a book and say, “Huh. I didn’t see that coming,” is pure joy.

Obviously, objectivity goes out the window when I’m talking about Ed Gorman’s work, since he’s been one of my best friends for more years than I like to think about. Luckily, a lot of people who don’t even know him like his books. (That didn’t come out right, but you know what I mean.) Trust me on this. THE MIDNIGHT ROOM is really, really good, one of the best thrillers I’ve read in ages. Treat yourself and pick up a copy.

(And even though this post appeared originally on May 18, 2009, you can still follow the advice in the last line, because THE MIDNIGHT ROOM is still available in an e-book edition. I miss Ed. As I've mentioned before, he's partially responsible for me still being in this business, because numerous times when it looked like I was about to be out of work, Ed somehow knew and the phone would ring and he'd ask me to ghost a book for him or point me at somebody else who needed a book written. Not only that, he was just a great guy, and we could spend hours on the phone talking about anything and everything. We'll not see his like again. I say that about all too many people these days.)

Review: Verdugo's Vendetta - James J. Griffin

U.S. Marshal Vic Verdugo returns in VERDUGO’S VENDETTA, the second book in the traditional Western series by James J. Griffin. Verdugo, who was a deputy marshal assigned to Fort Griffin, Texas, in the first book, gets a promotion in this one and becomes the chief marshal for a vast, untamed district that includes the southeastern part of New Mexico Territory and the far western reaches of Texas, including El Paso.

Unfortunately, Verdugo’s supervisor in this new role is an arrogant, by-the-book federal judge who has some unsavory secrets in his past. A clash with a murderous family of outlaws and rustlers complicates things even more. Luckily, Verdugo has some competent deputies to help him, chief among them William Cloud Gatherer, a half-Paiute lawman who works very well with Verdugo.

You could call this book a frontier police procedural, because there’s not really a main plot that runs through the entire book. It’s more a series of cases worked by Verdugo and Cloud Gatherer, although the trouble with the vicious Benson clan does take up much of the second half and leads to a satisfying conclusion. What makes it work is Griffin’s skill in depicting the setting, as well as his sure hand with indomitable protagonists and despicable villains. Vic Verdugo is a very likable hero, and William Cloud Gatherer is a great supporting character, as is Verdugo’s horse Topper. The action scenes are plentiful and suitably gritty.

Griffin has been writing Western novels for a long time and has a legion of fans. VERDUGO’S VENDETTA should please all of them. I certainly had a good time reading it. It’s available from Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

Review: Six White Horses - James Robert Daniels

Several years ago, James Robert Daniels published his first novel, THE COMANCHE KID, and accomplished a rare feat: he wrote a classic Western novel first time out of the gate. He followed that with a sequel, JANE FURY, that was almost as good. His third novel, SIX WHITE HORSES, will be released tomorrow, and I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy. I was hoping it would live up to the tradition of excellence Daniels has already established.

I’m happy to report that it does.

The narrator/protagonist of SIX WHITE HORSES is James Quinn, a Texas Ranger who became a lawman after fighting in the Civil War and then heading west to try life as a cowboy. Packing a star hasn’t necessarily been an improvement, however. When the book opens, he’s in pretty bad shape, having suffered serious bullet and knife wounds in the process of apprehending the notorious outlaw Cole Twist. But Quinn manages to make it to Corpus Christi (a town I know pretty well, by the way, and it rings true in Daniels’ version) with Twist as his prisoner. Twist gets locked up in the local jail, and Quinn lands in the hospital, where he meets the beautiful Quaker nurse/schoolteacher China Smallwood.

Quinn’s recuperation, his romance with China, his efforts to track down the rest of Twist’s gang, and the struggle to keep the colorful and charismatic but thoroughly evil owlhoot behind bars make up the rest of the novel. As in his previous books, Daniels makes good use of the traditional Western elements, but he raises SIX WHITE HORSES to a higher level with vivid, finely polished writing and compelling characters. James Quinn has a great voice, and you can’t help but like and root for him.

SIX WHITE HORSES may not be quite as good a book as THE COMANCHE KID—as I said, that one’s a classic—but it is a superb Western, and I give it a very high recommendation. It’ll be available tomorrow in e-book, paperback, and audio editions, but you can pre-order any of them now.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Top-Notch, March 1933

This issue of TOP-NOTCH has a good cover by John Coughlin, an artist I associate more with DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, whether that impression is correct or not. The lead novella is by an author whose name wasn't familiar to me, R.E. Dupuy. But a little investigation revealed a pretty interesting story. Richard Ernest Dupuy was a newspaper reporter who served as an artilleryman in World War I, then stayed in the army and made a career out of it. But he had sold a few pulp stories before the war and took it up again in the late Twenties, placing a story in WEIRD TALES but concentrating on war and adventure yarns for various pulps. That came to an end when World War II began and Dupuy became the Director of Public Information at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, where he reported directly to General Eisenhower. It was Dupuy who announced to the world via radio when the invasion of Normandy began on D-Day. Pretty good for an old pulpster. After the war, Dupuy retired as a colonel and wrote military history books. I've never read anything by him, as far as I recall. There are only three other pieces of fiction in this issue of TOP-NOTCH, all of them by authors who wrote a lot of Westerns: Galen C. Colin, J. Allan Dunn, and Walker A. Tompkins, who has one of his Ozar the Aztec/Lost Race novelettes in this issue under the house-name Valentine Wood. Dunn, of course, wrote a lot of other genres besides Westerns, but he was a stalwart in that field. Quite a few issues of TOP-NOTCH can be found on-line, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, January 1950

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I think the cover is by Sam Cherry, although I’m not as sure of that as I sometimes am, and I find it pretty interesting. In all the books I’ve written, I don’t recall ever writing a shootout that involves a windmill. It doesn’t strike me as being a very good place to take cover, but maybe this hombre didn’t have any choice.

Range detectives Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith are on hand, as usual, as the issue opens with W.C. Tuttle’s novelette “A Mixture of Mavericks”. The boys are assigned to a case where they’re supposed to settle a dispute over unbranded yearlings, but they wind up with another sort of “maverick”: a baby. And that baby is part of a case involving a mine payroll robbery, a kidnapping, and some fistfights and shootouts. Yep, it’s the old “heroes get stuck taking care of a baby” plot. I’ve used it myself. It nearly always works. It does so in this story, which is funny and action-packed, as well as pretty well-plotted. This is a strong entry in a consistently strong series.

Most of the stories by Lee Bond that I’ve read were parts of series, but “The Desert Builds a Noose” in this issue is a stand-alone, which finds a sheriff trying to discover the truth about the murder of an old prospector. This is a good story, and I like the title. The only problem I had with it is that I found the ending a little muddled, but that could always be just me.

I don’t know anything about John C. Ropke except that he published about 30 stories between 1950 and 1955 and nothing after that. A mixture of Westerns, sports stories, and jungle adventure yarns. “Boomerang” in this issue is a rodeo story about brothers who are both bronc riders. The younger brother is jealous of his older brother’s success. This starts out like a YA story in which lessons are learned. Well, lessons are learned, all right, but it turns a lot darker along the way, which was not what I expected. It’s well-written and packs a punch, enough so that it makes me interested in reading something else by Ropke.

“Devil in the Cook Shack” is by Robert J. Hogan, author of the G-8 series. Hogan did quite a few Westerns, too, and I tend to like his work. This one is a more lighthearted yarn about a young man from the East who inherits his grandfather’s ranch. It’s not really a tenderfoot-makes-good story like you might expect, though. Although the protagonist isn’t an experienced cowboy, he’s spent enough time on the ranch in the past that he’s not totally lost, either. The ranch cook has a man-crazy teenage sister who plays all the ranch hands against each other. There’s also a swindling horse buyer and a gunslinging gambler. It’s a mildly amusing blend of romance and action, a minor effort from Hogan but enjoyable enough.

“Sure Sign of Trouble” is by Donald Bayne Hobart, one of my favorites, and finds a young rancher in conflict with his older neighbor. The twist in this story is pretty easy to spot, but it’s interesting because the final shootout takes place with the protagonist on a windmill platform, just as depicted on this issue’s cover. When that happens, I always wonder if the publisher already had the cover painting and the editor asked the author to write a story to fit it. Hobart is a good enough writer that even though there’s not much to this story, it’s still entertaining.

The last novelette by Nels Leroy Jorgensen I read wasn’t very good, so I was a little wary heading into “Gunflame Survey”, which wraps up this issue. It’s not bad, though. The protagonist is a tough, two-gun surveyor who’s blackmailed into carrying out a phony survey for a land-grabbing villain. Things don’t play out exactly as the bad guy intends, though. Some of the writing is pretty rushed and awkward, and since Jorgensen had been in the business since 1923, I can only surmise that his talents deteriorated some with age. I know all too well how that can happen! Anyway, this story has some decent action and an interesting plot, even if the writing is inconsistent.

I was a little disappointed that there’s no Navajo Tom Raine story in this issue, since I’ve grown really fond of that series, but a top-notch Tombstone and Speedy yarn makes up for a lot. None of the other stories are exceptional, but they’re all entertaining. This one’s worth a look if you have a copy.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Spade & Archer - Joe Gores

Joe Gores’ SPADE & ARCHER is a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – private eye novels ever written. I have to admire anyone who would even attempt such a thing, let alone an author who could pull it off successfully. Thankfully, Gores does.

He starts with what I think is a brilliant decision to structure the novel in the form of three linked novellas, harkening back to Hammett’s novels RED HARVEST and THE DAIN CURSE. SPADE & ARCHER is a little different, of course, because its component parts were written to be published together, instead being published first as separate stories in BLACK MASK. Also, the time span of SPADE & ARCHER is longer than what you usually find in novels that were actually cobbled together from pulp yarns, since the three parts take place in 1921, 1925, and 1928. The first part begins with Sam Spade in Tacoma, working for the Continental Detective Agency (that’s right, he’s a Continental Op), but it’s not long before he moves to San Francisco and opens his own one-man agency, hiring a seventeen-year-old girl named Effie Perrine as his secretary. He investigates the theft of a small fortune in gold coins from a ship that arrives in San Francisco and also locates the runaway teenage son of a wealthy banker.

Those two plotlines crop up again in the second part, set four years later, which finds Spade investigating the death of another banker that might be natural causes, might be suicide, or might be murder. Gores continues weaving together strands from the first two parts in the concluding section, in which Spade takes on a partner, an old detective acquaintance named Miles Archer who happens to be married to a woman who was in love with Spade before he went off to fight in World War I. The newly-formed Spade & Archer agency investigates the theft of a large amount of cargo from the San Francisco docks, while Spade on his own tries to track down a quarter of a million dollars in buried treasure. Gores winds up tying everything together in a complex plot worthy of the pulp era.

That faithfulness to the roots of the hardboiled PI genre is this book’s greatest achievement, as far as I’m concerned. Other than a greater amount of frankness about the fact that Spade is sleeping with Iva Archer and with some of his female clients, SPADE & ARCHER really could have been written and published in the 1920s. Some authors these days, if they were trying to write a prequel to THE MALTESE FALCON, probably would have felt compelled to coarsen the language and make the sex and violence more graphic. Not Gores. He’s content to spin a pulp yarn and does a magnificent job of it.

Some readers are opposed to the concept of pastiches in general, and I can understand that. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to feel that way, however, since I’ve always made a large part of my living writing about characters created by other people. I do believe, though, that an author writing a pastiche ought to at least try to stay faithful to the spirit of the original creation. That’s what Joe Gores has done in SPADE & ARCHER. I’m sure a lot of you have read this book already, but if you haven’t, it gets my highest recommendation. It’s a wonderful novel, and probably the best thing I’ve read so far this year. And it really, really makes me want to reread some Hammett.

(Despite my good intentions [road to Hell paved with, etc., etc.] I don't recall reading anything else by Dashiell Hammett since this post originally appeared on May 1, 2009. I have, however, read Max Allan Collins' terrific RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON and highly recommend it as well. SPADE & ARCHER is still available in e-book and paperback editions, and if you're a private eye fan and haven't read it yet, you should grab a copy and remedy that.)

Review: The Gray Man - Mark Greaney

I’ve had this book for a number of years, and being in the mood for a thriller, I finally got around to reading it. It’s the first book in a very successful series that also led to Mark Greaney writing several books in the Tom Clancy franchise.

The title character is Courtland Gentry, who was a CIA agent until the Agency turned on him and forced him into a life as a professional assassin. With the CIA after him as well as the enemies he’s made along the way, it’s a very dangerous profession, but he’s the best at it. He also has a strict code of honor and won’t take on any jobs that conflict with it. As far as he’s concerned, he’s eliminating the bad guys, one by one.

All this is already established when the book begins. In a quest for revenge, the brother of one of Gentry’s targets leverages a giant international corporation into using all its assets to go after him. Billions of dollars are at stake. Hundreds of professional killers want to take him out as he makes his way across Europe, but he has to survive in order to reach the Normandy region of France and rescue some kidnapped innocents. Much action ensues.

That’s the plot of THE GRAY MAN. It’s not complicated at all, basically just one long chase/shootout in various locations against various enemies. To make that work, you have to be a pretty darned good writer, and thankfully, Mark Greaney is. The pace is relentless, the action scenes are top-notch, Court Gentry is a great protagonist, and Greaney gives the supporting cast enough personality that we care about them. Yes, the action is over the top, and suspending disbelief when it comes to Gentry still being able to function despite all the punishment he takes is a bit of a stretch. But as I always say, squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right, and it works. I raced through this book and had a good time reading it.

That said, at a little more than 400 pages, I thought it was maybe a hundred pages too long. Greaney himself seems to think it might be a little padded, because late in the book he has Gentry musing about how so much of what he’s done on his trek didn’t accomplish anything. Also, in the spirit of fairness, I think I might be letting my age and my reading history influence me here. Greaney writes so well I think this would have been a fantastic 160 page paperback . . . but that’s not what the publisher paid him to write, is it?

So I’m glad I finally got around to reading THE GRAY MAN. There are 15 more books in the series, but they all appear to be 500-600 pages long. If I thought this one was too long at 400 and change, I’m not sure when or if I’ll be ready to tackle the next one. But if you enjoy longer books, and I know some of you do, and you’re a fan of modern thrillers but haven’t checked out the Gray Man series, I highly recommend that you do so. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions from Amazon.

Review: Queen's Own - George C. Appell

I’d read several Western pulp stories by George C. Appell and enjoyed them, and I own some of his Western novels that I haven’t read yet, but I didn’t know he had written any historical novels until I came across this one, which was published as a paperback original by Dell in 1955 and never reprinted as far as I know. The great George Gross cover caught my eye immediately, and I was intrigued enough to go ahead and read it.

The story takes place in India during the 1897 uprising by the Afridis and the Pathans against British colonial rule. The nominal protagonist is Captain Ian Macleod, a Canadian/Scots officer in the lancer regiment tasked with keeping the peace in part of the Northwest Frontier. QUEEN’S OWN really has an ensemble cast, though, with characters ranging from its commanding officer to a younger officer who’s rivals with Macleod, a beautiful half-caste dancer who’s a spy, her gun-running father, the beautiful young American woman who’s engaged to Macleod’s rival, and the leader of the uprising who wants to wipe out the British.

If you’re thinking this sounds like it would have made a good movie, you’re right. I can easily imagine it as a fairly big budget production in the Forties or Fifties. You can cast it in your head as well as I can, according to your own preferences, except for the commanding officer who has to be C. Aubrey Smith. I won’t budge on that one.

But I was talking about the book. Well, Appell was a good writer. I always thought his style was a bit more literary than most Western pulpsters, and he gives that free reign here, creating a very vivid setting and inhabiting it with complex, fully developed characters. The problem with QUEEN’S OWN is that there’s very little action in it. The first two-thirds of the book is almost all political intrigue and soap opera. It’s well-written, no doubt about that, but even so, I was waiting for something else to happen.

The final third of the book is much more eventful, but even there, a frustratingly large amount of the action occurs off-screen. However, the ending is pretty satisfying, the characters are interesting, and the historical background is handled well. The whole thing just needed a little more oomph, I guess you could say.

I’m glad I read QUEEN’S OWN, and I think that overall it’s worthwhile, but if you’re going to give it a try, you should know it’s not quite the sexy, action-packed, historical adventure that the cover promises.