Review: Apache Rising - Marvin H. Albert

First of all, check out the upper right corner of this cover: “A Whipcrack Western”. That’s right, this is the first book in a brand-new imprint devoted to reprinting classic hardboiled Western novels. It’s from the fine folks at Stark House Press, who have reprinted some Westerns in their regular Stark House books and in their Black Gat Books line. Now the Westerns have a line of their own, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Nor could they have picked a better book to launch Whipcrack Westerns. APACHE RISING by Marvin H. Albert was published originally by Gold Medal in 1957 and later reprinted by GM under that title as well as DUEL AT DIABLO, the title of the movie based on this novel. It’s been out of print for a long time, though, and it’s great to see it back. I had never read it, so I’m glad to get this chance.

Oddly enough, considering my history of watching Western movies, I’ve never seen DUEL AT DIABLO, so I went into this source novel with no real preconceptions. The protagonist is Jess Remsberg, a tough, seasoned civilian scout for the army who is searching for the man who raped and murdered his wife. That search takes him to southern Arizona Territory and involves him with a cavalry detail taking some wagons full of ammunition from one fort to another. There are rumors that an Apache war chief is about to bring his followers out of Mexico and start raiding again, and the army is getting ready to campaign against him.

At the same time, Jess’s quest is complicated by an American woman who was captured by the Apaches and held captive for a couple of years, only to be rescued by the army and brought back to her husband, who no longer wants her. And she wants to return to the Apaches and the baby she had with the war chief’s son. Both she and her estranged husband wind up traveling with the same cavalry detail as Jess, as does a gambler who’s a former Confederate soldier.

You may think this sounds a little like a frontier soap opera, and it could have been if not for Albert’s storytelling ability and his skill at creating morally complex characters. It helps that there’s plenty of tough, gritty action as the group gets attacked by Apaches numerous times, and the reader honestly doesn’t know who’s going to survive to the end of the perilous journey. This is a really suspenseful novel that had me flipping the pages swiftly to find out what was going to happen.

The Whipcrack Western edition of this book also includes a fine introduction by Eric Compton and Tom Simon, the guys behind the Paperback Warrior blog and podcast, who provide an entertaining, informative look at Albert’s life and career.

I’ve never read a book by Marvin Albert I didn’t enjoy, and APACHE RISING continues that history. It’s a superb hardboiled Western novel, and I give it a very high recommendation. The paperback edition will be out later this week, and it’s available for pre-order now. I assume there’ll be an e-book edition, too, once the book is released.

And I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the next Whipcrack Western will be.

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

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

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

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

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

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Where is Janice Gantry? - John D. MacDonald

It takes me a long time to read a book these days, a combination of being really busy, not having much time to read, and a rather scattershot attention span. But even though it took me about a week, I read John D. MacDonald’s novel WHERE IS JANICE GANTRY? and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I liked the narrator/hero in this one, Sam Brice, a former pro football player and insurance appraiser who lives in a small town on the west coast of Florida. Trouble comes into his life in the form of a young acquaintance of his who has escaped from prison and needs his help. Somewhat against his better judgment, Sam goes along with the request, and that sets in motion a series of violent events that include the disappearance of his former girlfriend, the Janice Gantry of the title.

The plot’s a little thin and probably won’t surprise many readers, but MacDonald’s ability as a pure storyteller is clearly in evidence here, pulling the reader along. I don’t doubt that under normal circumstances I would have finished this book a lot faster than I did, because when I did get a chance to read I got caught up in it and was really flipping the pages. The last fifty pages or so are very suspenseful. Well worth reading, I say.

(Wait a minute. This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 18, 2008, so that means I've been complaining about how long it takes me to read a book for at least 18 years now. Dang! I think I just need to get used to it. I'm a long-time fan of John D. MacDonald, and I plan to read the books of his that I've never gotten around to. Problem is, many of them I don't recall if I've read them or not. Oh, well, even rereads are worthwhile with JDM. This one is still in print and is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Wounded and the Slain - David Goodis

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, originally published by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime [in 2007]. This one even opens with the protagonist, James Bevan, contemplating doing away with himself, even though he’s on vacation at a luxurious Jamaican resort with his beautiful young wife. Bevan’s wife is his problem, though, since their marriage is one of the most corrosive you’re likely to encounter in fiction. Like other Goodis characters, Bevan seeks refuge from that unhappiness in booze, which leads him into an encounter with violence and death.

Then, yep, you guessed it, Things Get Worse.

THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN is somewhat unusual among Goodis’s novels, in that it takes place in Jamaica rather than Philadelphia or some other large American city. It veers away from the noir stereotype in another way as well, with many of the scenes taking place in hot, bright sunshine rather than dark alleyways. The interior of James Bevan’s mind is plenty dark on its own, though, and ultimately the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, are just as mean as those of Philadelphia or New York. The motivations of some of the characters may seem a little clichéd today, but Goodis’s writing still makes them ring true. The headlong pace carries the reader along to a very satisfying conclusion. All in all, and not surprisingly, this is an excellent novel and comes with a high recommendation from me.

(This post originally appeared on June 20, 2007. The Hard Case Crime reprint mentioned above is out of print, and you can actually find copies of the original Gold Medal edition for about half the price of the HCC edition. Either way, this book is well worth reading. Goodis, however, remains one of those authors I like a lot and want to read more of, but I don't seem to get around to it.)

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

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

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

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

Review: The Face of Evil - John McPartland

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

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

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

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

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

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Lawless Guns - Dudley Dean (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

The protagonist of this novel, Chase Iverton, has chosen a tough path for himself. Following the Civil War, Chase, a Texan who fought for the Union, returns to his ranch in the Big Bend county of West Texas, finds himself surrounded by former friends who now despise him as a turncoat, and makes things even worse for himself by marrying the daughter of his late father’s worst enemy. It’s no wonder that as the novel opens, a mob wants to tar and feather Chase. That’s hardly the worst thing that happens to him before LAWLESS GUNS is over, though.

Dudley Dean (real name Dudley Dean McGaughey, who also wrote Westerns as Dean Owen, Bret Sanders, and assorted other pen-names) was one of those authors who really liked to torment his heroes. This book is no different, as Chase Iverton has to deal with rustlers, Mexican revolutionaries, and a wife he may or may not be able to trust. McGaughey piles troubles on his head until it seems impossible for Chase to overcome the odds against him, but somehow, he’s tough enough to do so, even though he’s hardly the superheroic figure you find in some Western novels. McGaughey also throws in a plot twist or two that I wasn’t expecting.

McGaughey belongs in the same group of hardboiled Western authors who came to prominence in the genre in the Forties and Fifties: Lewis B. Patten, H.A. De Rosso, Giles Lutz, and William Heuman, to name a few. He could be as gritty as any of them, and the climax of this novel is pretty dark and harrowing, especially for a book published in 1959. There’s very little heroic about it, but it sure is effective.

I really admire McGaughey. For more than thirty years, he worked steadily in the paperback field, in addition to his Westerns turning out hardboiled mysteries as Dudley Dean, Owen Dudley, and Hodge Evens, plus the occasional movie novelization, TV tie-in, or hardboiled sleaze novel. If you haven’t read his work, LAWLESS GUNS would be as good a place to start as any, but really, I’ve never read a book under his various pseudonyms that I didn’t enjoy.

(This post originally appeared on June 4, 2010. McGaughey remains one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors.)

Review: The Wicked Streets - Wenzell Brown

I first encountered the work of Wenzell Brown in THE SAINT MAGAZINE in the Sixties, where he published a few espionage novellas about a secret agent named Mike Stranger. I don’t remember a thing about them except that I thought the sex scenes in them were pretty graphic for a digest mystery magazine in that era—which I, as a teenage boy at the time, certainly appreciated. I had no idea back then that Brown had had a successful career as a paperbacker, specializing in true crime volumes and juvenile delinquent novels.

But even though I’ve been aware of Brown and his books for many, many years, I don’t believe I actually read any of them until now. THE WICKED STREETS was published originally by Gold Medal in 1958 with a cover by Barye Phillips and has been reprinted recently by the fine folks at Black Gat Books with a cover by Howell Dodd.

The protagonist of this novel, if you can call him that, is Buzz Baxter, a young man from a good family who is definitely not a good guy. He’s left his home for the seedier parts of New York City, where he works occasionally as a jazz musician. His main line of work, though, is pushing heroin, a gig he got by turning in another pusher to the cops. That pusher, psychopathic knife artist Frank Nucci, is out of jail a lot sooner than Buzz anticipated, and now Nucci has a grudge to settle. This grudge endangers Diane Griscom, a beautiful teenage society girl who is in love with Buzz. He leads her along, but he’s really planning to use her in some sort of scheme aimed at her wealthy father.

Then another girl winds up naked and dead in Buzz’s bed, as they have a habit of doing in novels like this, and all his plans start collapsing. Nucci committed the murder, of course, but unless Buzz can cover it up, the cops will pin the killing on him. Danger closes in on all sides, not only for Buzz but also for the innocent Diane.

Brown does a good job in structuring the plot of this novel in a clever manner that continually ratchets up the tension on these characters. The writing is excellent and does an especially good job of creating a nightmarish world spinning further and further out of control. New York City has never been sleazier or more garish and threatening.

THE WICKED STREETS is another top-notch reprint from Black Gat Books and has made me realize that I’m going to have to hunt up more books by Wenzell Brown. In the meantime, this one is available on Amazon in both e-book and paperback editions.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: A Great Day for Dying - Jack Dillon

As far as I know, this is the author’s only crime novel, although he wrote a few other novels about the advertising business. Jack Dillon was a successful ad executive, responsible for, among others, the series of TV commercials for Polaroid that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Those of you of a certain age are bound to remember those commercials, since Garner was so affable and charming and Hartley was, well, so beautiful.

But to get back to A GREAT DAY FOR DYING. Don’t pay any attention to that Hemingway comparison on the cover. The only similarity I see is that the protagonist of this novel, Jimmy O’Niel, reminded me a little of Harry Morgan from TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Jimmy is a friend and former associate of mobster Red Christian, but he’s trying to live a respectable life and start a charter boat business in Puerto Rico. People don’t want to believe that he’s no longer involved in anything crooked, though, but the only shady thing Jimmy’s mixed up in is running guns to anti-Castro revolutionaries in Cuba.

Unfortunately for Jimmy, he gets drawn into one of his former boss’s schemes and winds up on the wrong side of the Syndicate. From there, things just get worse for Jimmy, up to and including several murders and a hurricane.

The clipped style of the prose and the realistic dialogue remind me more of Elmore Leonard, although Leonard started writing crime novels about the same time as this book came out, so I don’t think his work was any influence on Dillon. A GREAT DAY FOR DYING also reminds me a little of a James Patterson novel, because the chapters are short and there’s a mixture of first person chapters from Jimmy’s point of view and third person chapters featuring other characters. That’s a technique I normally don’t care for, but Dillon makes it work fairly well. I don’t know if he was the first to do it, probably not, but this novel surely has to be one of the early examples of it. The pace is fast, even though there’s really not a lot of action except for an occasional short burst, and there are a lot of good lines.

A GREAT DAY FOR DYING is a fine book, worth seeking out, and it’s certainly good enough to make it a shame Jack Dillon didn’t write any other crime novels. Recommended.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 7, 2010. I was surprised then that A GREAT DAY FOR DYING had never been reprinted, and it still hasn't. It seems like a prime candidate for somebody to bring back into print.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Home is the Sailor - Day Keene

HOME IS THE SAILOR is perhaps the quintessential Gold Medal novel. It has all the elements: the tough, somewhat dim hero who stays drunk for much of the story; the beautiful girl who may or may not be what she seems; the dead body that has to be disposed of; and finally the hero on the lam from the cops, charged with something that he didn’t do. Just when poor Swede Nelson thinks his situation can’t get worse, Things Get Really Bad. It all adds up to a fast-paced, maybe not entirely believable novel that’s a heck of a lot of fun to read. If anybody was ever to ask you, “What were those old Gold Medals like, anyway?”, you could do a lot worse than handing them a copy of HOME IS THE SAILOR.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 26, 2005, making it one of the earliest reviews that I've rerun. As you can see, my reviews were shorter and punchier back in those days! When I posted it, the Hard Case Crime reprint of HOME IS THE SAILOR had been published recently, and that was the edition I read, not the classic Gold Medal pictured above with the great blurb: "And Swede's troubles began." Now, as far as I can tell, the Hard Case Crime edition is also out of print, but copies of both versions can still be found for sale on-line for fairly reasonable prices. This is one of my favorite Day Keene novels, so if you haven't read it before, I think it's well worth your time.)

Gunsmoke Reckoning - Joseph Chadwick

Texas rancher Cole Mowbrey arrives in Montana on the trail of Matt Kerrigan, who ran off with Cole's sister and then abandoned her to die in a mining camp. He finds that his quarry has a stake in a big ranch, and Kerrigan and his partner are trying to run off all the smaller ranchers and homesteaders in the basin. So Joseph Chadwick’s novel GUNSMOKE RECKONING, published in 1951 by Gold Medal, is both a vengeance quest story and a range war story.

Those are, of course, very traditional plot elements for a Western, and we’ve probably all read books like this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The appeal of a book like this is in the execution, and Chadwick does a fine job of that in this book, manipulating his plot with great skill and achieving a headlong pace that kept me turning the pages past my usual bedtime, which, let me tell you, at my age is quite a feat of storytelling. He also handles the characterization with a sure hand, so that not everyone in this novel turns out exactly like you might think they would. There’s a romantic rectangle, as well, that’s done about as well as you can do that sort of thing.

Not long ago, I had some pretty harsh things to say about Chadwick’s contributions to the Jim Hatfield series in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS, but as unsuited as I think he was to that series, he’s a great Western writer in his stand-alone novels. GUNSMOKE RECKONING is the best of those I’ve read so far and one of the best traditional Westerns I’ve read in a long time. If you’re a Western fan, I give it a very strong recommendation. As far as I know, it was never reprinted after this 1951 edition with its great A. Leslie Ross cover. That’s my copy in the scan, by the way.

Mansion of Evil - Joseph Millard and George Evans

Having read and enjoyed IT RHYMES WITH LUST, I decided to try this other early graphic novel with a crime plot, MANSION OF EVIL, published by Gold Medal in 1950. It was written by veteran pulp and paperback author Joseph. Millard, who years later as Joe Millard wrote the Man With No Name paperbacks for Award Books, novelizations and original novels based on the Clint Eastwood movies. Those were my introduction to his work. I don’t think the art on MANSION OF EVIL has ever been credited officially to anyone, but the consensus of opinion seems to be that it’s by George Evans.

A newspaperman plays a major part in MANSION OF EVIL, just like in IT RHYMES WITH LUST. In this case, it’s reporter Larry Brennan, who’s engaged to beautiful young Beth Halliday. Beth works at an art gallery that’s about to put on an exhibition of paintings by reclusive artist Maxwell Haimes. When Beth meets Haimes, he kind of goes nuts, thinks her name is Laura, kidnaps her, and takes her to his isolated mansion (which comes complete with sinister housekeeper). It becomes obvious pretty quickly that Haimes isn’t completely insane and has some devious plan in mind that includes murder.

Meanwhile, Larry is convinced that something has happened to Beth and is searching desperately for her despite the fact that nobody else seems to take him seriously. The whole situation, which includes a race against time scenario, reminds me of stories by Cornell Woolrich that I’ve read. It also seems to me that there’s some Bruno Fischer influence at work here, too. Whether or not Millard was familiar with those writers, I don’t know, but in MANSION OF EVIL, he’s crafted a story that has similarities to their work.

The artwork isn’t as good as Matt Baker’s in IT RHYMES WITH LUST, but it gets the job done. So does Millard’s lurid, breathless script, although it sometimes reads like it was adapted from a radio serial. It’s over the top and often driven by coincidences, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Scans of the book are available in various places on the Internet, or you can pick up an actual e-book version on Amazon.

Hell Strip - Lee Richards (Lee E. Wells)

Art by Lu Kimmel

The year is 1851, and Texas Ranger Dave Fleming is gripped by gold fever. He resigns from the Rangers and heads for Panama, intending to make his way to California and find his fortune in the goldfields. Unfortunately, through a series of misadventures, Dave winds up stranded in that tropical hellhole and goes to work for Marie Hooper, a beautiful redheaded American who owns the biggest saloon, gambling den, and bordello in Panama City. He also makes a bad enemy in Krim Paletz, the owner of a freight line who may well be the mastermind behind the outlaw gang terrorizing the whole country.

Then another former Ranger arrives in Panama, an old friend of Dave’s named Ran Runnels. Runnels, a deadly gunfighter and manhunter, has been recruited by representatives of the American, British, and French governments to bring law and order to Panama, no matter what it takes. He immediately gets Dave to sign on as his second-in-command, and they set out to track down the leaders of Panama’s criminal underworld.

HELL STRIP is a terrific book, a fast-moving blend of Western, historical, and hardboiled crime in an unusual setting. The actual author behind the Lee Richards pseudonym is the old pulpster and paperbacker Lee E. Wells. I read one of Wells’ Rio Kid pulp novels some years ago and thought it was okay, but I wasn’t impressed enough to seek out any more of his novels. Clearly, based on this Gold Medal paperback from 1955, that was a mistake. It could be that Wells just wasn’t all that well-suited to write a pulp series character. That’s been true with other authors I’ve encountered. But he sure spins a great yarn here.

In addition to the intrigue and gunplay and strong, likable protagonist, there’s a well-done romantic triangle, some harrowing scenes in a Panamanian prison, and a vivid rendering of the exotic setting. Wells even gives the reader a slight plot twist late in the book that’s effective even if it’s not really surprising, and the ending is very satisfying. This would have made a great 1950s movie with Clint Walker playing Dave, Audie Murphy as Runnels, Rhonda Fleming as Marie, and maybe John Dehner as the sinister Krim Paletz.

Even though HELL STRIP doesn’t break any new ground other than the Panama setting, Wells did such a good job spinning his yarn that it doesn’t matter. I had a wonderful time reading this book. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s an inexpensive e-book edition of it available on Amazon. If you’re a fan of hardboiled Westerns, I give it a very high recommendation.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Murder on the Side - Day Keene

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on January 23, 2009. I failed to mention in it that the cover is by the great Barye Phillips.)

At the beginning of this novel, Larry Hanson is bored. He’s bored with his job because, while he’s trained to be an engineer and works at an engineering firm, he’s stuck in a desk job instead of being out building bridges and dams. He’s bored in his marriage to a cold, uncaring wife. He’s approaching middle age and fears that life has passed him by. So when his wife is out of town caring for her sick mother and his beautiful young secretary calls him in the middle of the night because she thinks she’s just accidentally killed her old boyfriend who just got out of prison, Larry thinks that maybe he’ll finally have a little excitement in his life.

And since this is a Gold Medal novel, you know that Larry’s about to get a whole lot more excitement than he bargained for.

It’ll come as no surprise to anybody who’s read more than a few of these books that Larry soon finds himself up to his neck in trouble, of the multiple murder, on the run from the cops, illicit sex, missing money, and deadly secrets variety. Like a lot of Gold Medal protagonists, Larry’s kind of a heel and not too bright, at least at first. The plot stretches credulity almost to the breaking point a few times, but Day Keene is such a skillful author and keeps things moving so fast that the reader doesn’t really care. I didn’t, anyway.

Chances are you’ll see most of the twists and turns coming in this one, but I’ve discovered that reading a Gold Medal novel is a lot like taking a Sunday afternoon drive: the pleasure isn’t so much in where you’re going, but rather in how you get there. I’m not sure that MURDER ON THE SIDE is a book you’d hand to somebody who’s never read a Gold Medal and say, “This is what they’re like.” You’d probably need a Charles Williams or Harry Whittington or Gil Brewer novel for that. To me Day Keene’s work never quite reaches the same level of sweaty intensity that you find in a book by those other authors. It’s still incredibly entertaining and just flat-out fun to read. Highly recommended.

The Irish Beauty Contract - Philip Atlee (James Atlee Phillips)

THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT is the fifth novel in Philip Atlee’s Joe Gall series of espionage adventures, or the sixth if you count PAGODA, an unofficial part of the series that’s the actual debut of the Gall character. I’ve read all the previous novels, and with the exception of PAGODA, the plots don’t make much sense, but the books are all very well-written.

I’m happy to report that THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT actually does make sense for the most part and gives us a coherent narrative that, thankfully, continues to be very well-written. Joe Gall, who lives on an isolated, mountaintop estate in Arkansas when he’s not working on a contract basis for the U.S. government as an intelligence agent, is in New Granada (a fictional but real-sounding country in South America) pretending to be a military attaché at the local U.S. embassy while he secretly keeps track of a suspicious character from the States who may have ties to communist rebels in the country. He’s also carrying on an affair with the beautiful wife of an Irish lord.

Then violent things start to happen. Shootouts, knife fights, double crosses, secret identities, and an encounter with a jungle emperor lead Gall to a lost city high in the Andes where a final mystery awaits. (And, I might add, the solution to that final mystery is pretty hokey, even for 1966 when this book was first published.) The action flows reasonably well and Joe Gall is a sympathetic if not really all that likable narrator/protagonist.

Philip Atlee was really Fort Worth’s own James Atlee Phillips, whose first novel THE INHERITORS was something of a scandal when it was published in the early Forties because of its unflattering portrait of Fort Worth high society at the time. I’ve never read it, and I ought to. He wrote a few other novels under his real name, but he’s remembered primarily for the Joe Gall books, which were pretty successful paperback from Gold Medal in the Sixties and Seventies. They’re still available as e-books, which is how I read THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT even though I own the paperback. I have the whole series in paperback, by the way, although they’re not easy to get to at the moment. So if I read more of them, which I probably will based on my enjoyment of this one, I’ll probably stick with the e-books. Although as all of you almost surely know, it’s hard to beat the smell and feel of an old paperback . . .

The Diehards - Dudley Dean (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

Brett Mackey, foreman of one of the largest ranches in the Big Bend, returns home after a cattle drive to find the area on the brink of a range war. Brett’s boss, cattle baron Port Riordan, had his eye on a neighboring spread whose owner had died. But a big eastern syndicate swooped in and bought the ranch out from under Riordan, then put ruthless Vance Bushard in charge of it. Bushard wants to take over Riordan’s ranch as well. To make matters even worse, Bushard also has his eye on the beautiful blonde Brett Mackey intends to marry. Put all these things together, and it’s bound to lead to shootin’.

Or not. Dudley Dean McGaughey, author of THE DIEHARDS, takes a very standard plot and puts a slightly different spin on it, delving deeper into the characterization of the people involved in it and less on the inevitable action. Make no mistake about it, that action is good, including several very brutal fistfights and a fair amount of gunplay. But this novel also features a lot of angst and brooding, which is okay if done well and McGaughey does a good job with it.

However, that focus on character slows down the story’s pace, and the other problem with THE DIEHARDS is related to that. This book has the most unlikable bunch of characters I’ve come across recently. Almost everybody in it is rotten in one way or another. Brett Mackey, the protagonist, is probably the most decent character, and even he comes across as stupid and gullible. The girl he’s in love with is incredibly annoying, and more than once, I wanted to grab Brett, shake him, and tell him to get on his horse and ride away while he had the chance. Some of the characters do become a little more sympathetic in the course of the book, but overall, it’s really, really bleak, which keeps me from putting it in the upper rank of McGaughey’s work.

McGaughey wrote Westerns as Dean Owen (his most common pseudonym), Dudley Dean, and Bret Sanders. He wrote crime novels as Owen Dudley and Hodge Evens and sleaze as Dean McCoy. Generally, I’ve found him to be one of the most dependable of the hardboiled Western writers of the Forties and Fifties. And THE DIEHARDS isn’t a total misfire. The action is excellent, as always, and the Big Bend setting is really good. If you’re a fan of McGaughey’s work, it’s worth reading. But if you’ve never read any of his books before, I sure wouldn’t start with this one.

Any Man's Girl - Basil Heatter

The girl of the title in this book is Lucinda Perky, a beautiful young blonde who lives at a fishing camp on Lake Okeechobee in Florida that’s run by her husband Russ. Unfortunately for Lucinda, she’s dead before the book even begins, raped and murdered, and her husband has been arrested for the crime.

Living not too far away are Dan Waxman, a scientist from New York who has come to Florida to try to perfect a new system of hydroponic farming, and his wife Martine (who goes by Marty), a lawyer who has given up her practice to accompany Dan to Florida. The Waxmans are acquainted with Russ Perky and his wife, and Marty decides she’s going to be Russ’s lawyer and defend him against the charge of murdering Lucinda. The rest of ANY MAN’S GIRL, a novel by Basil Heatter published originally by Gold Medal in 1961, revolves around Marty’s investigation into the case and her gradual uncovering of Lucinda’s past and several other suspects, all of it leading up to some extremely suspenseful scenes at the end that really had me turning the pages to find out what was going to happen.

Heatter, the son of radio commentator Gabriel Heatter, does a fine job cutting back and forth between his large cast of characters. Marty Waxman is the nominal protagonist of ANY MAN’S GIRL, but Heatter takes the reader inside the head of just about all the other characters involved in the story. This is a well-written book that does a fine job of capturing the setting and the people. Heatter does seem to be a bit biased against the South and Southerners, but I suppose given the time period and the fact that he was New England born and bred, that’s understandable.

This is a well-constructed suspense novel with some really nasty plot twists along the way. I never read anything by Heatter, although his name is familiar. I plan to give some of his other books a try. ANY MAN’S GIRL is being reprinted by Black Gat Books and is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s a really good yarn, and if you’re a crime fiction fan, it’s well worth reading.

Satan Is A Woman - Gil Brewer

I’ve read and enjoyed many books by Gil Brewer over the years, but for some reason, two of his earliest and most successful novels have sat unread on my shelves for quite some time now. So I took the arrival of Stark House’s latest Gil Brewer double volume to be an omen that I ought to go ahead and read them. I’m going to start with SATAN IS A WOMAN, which was Brewer’s second published novel. He had previously expanded a Day Keene pulp novelette into a full-length novel that was published as LOVE ME AND DIE under Keene’s name. My review of that one can be found here. SATAN IS A WOMAN was published by Gold Medal in 1951 with a great Barye Phillips cover and launched Brewer’s career under his own name.

Larry Cole, the narrator of this novel, is one of Brewer’s everyman protagonists. He owns a not-too-successful beachfront bar on the west coast of Florida, is a World War II veteran, and is trying to live a respectable life even though he comes from a family of criminals. His father was a mob gunman, his mother was a prostitute, and his older brother Tad has been mixed up in plenty of shady deals. When they were growing up, Tad tried to keep Larry on the straight and narrow despite his own activities. As the novel opens, Tad is on the run from a murder rap and hiding out at Larry’s house. He gets caught and sent to prison, and while Larry would like to get him a better lawyer and try to help him, there doesn’t seem to be any way for him to do so. The guilt Larry feels over this tortures him.

He's about to feel a lot more guilty, because one day a beautiful blonde named Joan Turner walks into his bar, and that starts Larry on a path that includes robbery and multiple murders. Larry wants to do the right thing, but he’s so caught up by love, lust, and circumstances that he seems doomed right from the start, in the finest tradition of noir novels.

Then, late in the novel, Brewer springs a really nifty plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all. It was a real “D’oh!” moment for me because everything is set up fairly, right out in the open, and with Brewer’s angst-ridden, breakneck style, I just went right past all the clues. I love it when that happens.

SATAN IS A WOMAN is one of the best-written Brewer novels I’ve read, with plenty of action and some poetic, poignant moments that are very effective. There’s also a long scene set in a rowboat on a stormy sea that gave a confirmed landlubber like me the galloping fantods. It’s wonderful stuff.

I can see why SATAN IS A WOMAN sold well and made Brewer a successful author right off the bat. It’s really, really good. I give it a high recommendation. The new Stark House reprint, along with Brewer’s all-time bestselling novel, 13 FRENCH STREET, will be out next month and is available for pre-order now. I’ll be getting to that novel very soon.

Take Me As I Am - William H. Fielding (Darwin Teilhet)

The latest Black Gat Books reprint, TAKE ME AS I AM, was published originally by Gold Medal in 1952, so you know with that pedigree it’s almost certainly a good book. The author is Darwin Teilhet, who wrote it under the pseudonym William H. Fielding. I’d only vaguely heard of Teilhet and have never read anything else by him. The cover art is very familiar from having been used for fake books in countless memes, but it’s a classic image and fits this novel very well. I feel like I should know the artist, but I don’t.

As so many hardboiled and noir novels do, TAKE ME AS I AM starts with a crime. And it’s the proverbial humdinger, an armored car robbery that’s violent, fast-paced, and very effective. The crooks, led by a guy named Monk, get away with what’s supposed to be a million dollars. Unfortunately, when they pass off the loot to an accomplice, a beautiful blonde named Alma who’s supposed to deliver it to the gang’s leader, they find that it’s only a hundred thousand. Somebody’s double-crossing somebody. (To quote Steven Wright: “They offer you a penny for your thoughts, but then you have to put your two cents’ worth in . . . Somebody’s makin’ a penny.”)

Anyway, on her way to meet the big boss and hand over the hot money, Alma picks up a hitchhiker, a brawny 18-year-old guy named Bill Evans who’s got his own demons chasing him. As they travel west from Iowa (where the armored car stick-up took place) through Nebraska, odd things happen. Bill runs into a couple of other beautiful blondes, one of whom winds up dead and the other one almost meets the same fate. Coincidences and plot twists abound. Bill, who is actually a fairly bright guy but out of his depth, winds up in the hands of the bad guys but gets away. By now Alma wants the stolen dough for herself and doesn’t care what she has to do in order to keep it . . . or does she? Could she actually be falling for Bill?

Steve Lewis reviewed this novel several years ago on his great Mystery File website and compared it to the work of Cornell Woolrich. I can see that. Woolrich was from the one-damned-thing-after-another school of mystery writing, too, and that’s certainly an apt description of TAKE ME AS I AM. The plot twists pile up and take unexpected turns. The writing isn’t quite as smooth and compelling as Woolrich’s work, but it kept me turning the pages, that’s for sure. I really enjoyed TAKE ME AS I AM and galloped through the last quarter or so of it, unable to put it down until I’d finished. Great hardboiled storytelling and a great cover add up to a high recommendation from me. It’s available in both print and e-book editions.

Gunfighter's Return - Leslie Ernenwein

Leslie Ernenwein was a prolific contributor to the Western pulps from the late Thirties to the end of the pulp era. He also wrote several dozen Western novels and had a successful career as a journalist. I read a couple of his novels many years ago and remember enjoying them, and recently I’ve read a few of his pulp stories and liked them as well. So I figured it was time to read another novel by him and picked up GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN, published originally by Gold Medal in 1950. That’s my copy in the scan. I feel like I should know the artist who did the cover, but I don’t, and there’s no signature that I can see.

This book has a terrific opening paragraph:

Durango died at noon. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even grunt. He just lay down and died.

I don’t know about you, but something that terse and hardboiled sure makes me want to keep reading. The Durango referred to is the leader of a revolutionary movement in Mexico who was betrayed to the federales by a cantina dancer. He and American gunfighter/soldier of fortune Jim Rimbaud are the only ones who escape an ambush by federal troops, and when Durango dies, Rimbaud is left on his own to make it back across the border to Arizona if he can.

It's no spoiler to say that he does so. The book’s title is GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN, after all. He finds himself back in the cowtown where he recuperated from a gunshot wound a couple of years earlier. There’s a girl there he’s interested in, a pretty redhead who runs a café. After his narrow escape, Rimbaud thinks maybe it’s time for him to give up helling around and settle down.

Yeah, we all know how well that always works out in Western novels, don’t we?

A range war is brewing, and in a nice twist, it’s connected to that failed revolution in Mexico. The man who saved Rimbaud’s life two years earlier is now on the run from the law, framed as a rustler. Rimbaud owes him and is the type who always pays his debts . . . and it doesn’t matter that the hombre he’s indebted to is also engaged to the girl Rimbaud wants for himself.

From this setup, Ernenwein spins an excellent hardboiled Western yarn with plenty of gritty action and a frankness about sexual matters that’s unusual for the era. There’s a large, well-developed cast of characters, a nice sense of time and place, and a pace that never lets up for very long. Jim Rimbaud is a tough but hardly superhuman protagonist. He suffers a lot of punishment in this book but manages to keep slugging away at his enemies.

This is one of the better Westerns I’ve read recently and really makes me want to read more by Ernenwein. Luckily, I have several of his books on my shelves and e-books of several more on my Kindle. If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I give GUNFIGHTER’S RETURN a high recommendation.