Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1941

That's a great, action-packed cover by Norman Saunders on this issue of WESTERN TRAILS. Dean Owen is probably the best-remembered of the authors inside. Other pulpsters on hand in this issue are Cliff Walters, Jay Karth, Art Kercheval, Jack Sterrett, Duane Yarnell (who went on to write a couple of good hardboiled novels for Gold Medal in the Fifties), and one I haven't heard of, P.H. Branford. I'm sure it was an entertaining issue.

Forgotten Books: Murder Bait - Duane Yarnell

Barney Madigan returns home to the small town in the Ozarks where he was raised, planning to put in a fishing camp on some land he’s inherited next to a newly built lake. He left several years earlier to get away from an old flame who rejected his marriage proposal. Now that he’s back, who does he run into right away? You guessed it, that old flame—and she’s swimming naked in the new lake.

Before Barney barely has time to think about that, he realizes a guy in a speedboat is about to deliberately run over the girl in the water. Barney, being a good guy, naturally interferes in this murder attempt, and wouldn’t you know it, before he can even start to figure out what’s going on, his old flame has killed the guy who was trying to kill her, and she’s begging Barney to help her hide the body and solve the murder of her father. You know as well as I do how Barney responds to that.

Oh, and did I mention that the newly elected sheriff of the county is an old enemy of Barney’s, and the dead guy was engaged to a girl that Barney always regarded as his best pal, back in the days when he was chasing the unattainable lovely—who is now very attainable because she needs Barney’s help staying out of jail?

Yep, that’s the kind of book MURDER BAIT is. Everything happens in about 36 hours, and there’s a lot to cram into that time. Barney gets beat up, doped, shot at, nearly drowned, and pursued non-stop by not only the law but also the minions of the criminal mastermind operating behind the scenes of this sleepy little Ozark town. It’s a little like RED HARVEST, only set in Mayberry. There’s almost too much action at times, as the plot threatens to become ridiculously complex, but the author, Duane Yarnell, always pulls back just enough to let the reader catch his breath before plunging back into the breakneck craziness.

Duane Yarnell wrote dozens of stories for the sports pulps, as well as a handful of detective and Western yarns and a few juvenile sports novels, but in the mid-Fifties he also wrote two hardboiled crime novels for Fawcett Crest, MANTRAP and MURDER BAIT. I read and enjoyed MANTRAP a while back, but MURDER BAIT is a big step forward. This book is better paced and better plotted and maintains a sense of breathless tension from start to finish, along with providing plenty of gritty action scenes. There are some nice twists along the way. Several times, I thought I had everything figured out, only to have Yarnell spring another unexpected but logical surprise. I didn’t pin down the main villain until nearly the end of the book, although I suspected the right person more than once along the way.

Based on the improvement between MANTRAP and MURDER BAIT and how much I enjoyed both books, it’s a real shame Yarnell didn’t continue writing crime novels. But other than a few short stories in various mystery digests, MURDER BAIT is the end of his writing career, even though he lived another thirty years. I don’t know anything about him or why he stopped writing (if he stopped writing; maybe he just couldn’t sell anymore), but I would have liked to see another couple of dozen novels by him, published by Crest or Gold Medal or Ace or Dell. But we get what we get, and MURDER BAIT is a fine hardboiled novel. I give it a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: Mantrap - Duane Yarnell

Mark Fletcher is a two-fisted construction engineer who’s been on a tough job for the past couple of years, so he figures he’s earned a vacation in Florida. But when he finds himself snagged in a speed trap run by a corrupt, small town cop, his hot temper gets him in trouble and a beautiful but morally questionable redhead gives him a hand getting out of it. Unfortunately for Fletcher, the redhead winds up dead almost right away, and he’s in line to take the fall for her murder. Then, before the night’s even over, there’s another killing.

But they can only send Fletcher to the gas chamber once, right? And that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless he can untangle all the strands of a very complex plot and find the real killer. Luckily, he has the help of two more beautiful women, a rich, lonely blonde and the lovely brunette who runs the seedy motor court where Fletcher takes refuge. With seemingly everybody else on both sides of the law wanting him dead, Fletcher has his work cut out for him just staying alive.

Although published by sister imprint Crest in 1957, MANTRAP is firmly in the classic Gold Medal mold. There’s really nothing in it that regular readers of mid-century hardboiled crime novels haven’t seen many times before. The key is what the author does with those familiar elements, and in his debut novel for adults, Duane Yarnell puts together a very entertaining yarn. The characters are good, the plot is complicated enough that it’s a challenge to figure out (although all the clues are there), and the action is suitably gritty and tough. The first third of the novel is great. The pace lags a little in the middle third, maybe because Yarnell, a veteran pulp author, wasn’t used to working at this length. The final third picks up steam, though, and roars home impressively.

Yarnell was a prolific contributor to the sports pulps in the Thirties, Forties, and early Fifties, along with a few stories in the Western and detective pulps. He also wrote a few sports and outdoors novels for the juvenile market before turning out MANTRAP and one other crime novel, MURDER BAIT, for Crest. After that he published only a handful of stories in mystery digests and men’s magazines before vanishing from the fiction business, even though he lived until 1994. I’d never heard of him or his pulp stories or his crime novels until recently, but based on MANTRAP, I’d say he’s worth reading, even though the comparisons to Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane in the back cover copy of this book are a stretch. I already have a copy of MURDER BAIT, though, and plan to get to it soon. In the meantime, if you run across a copy of MANTRAP, it’s well worth reading.