The Grave's in the Meadow - Manning Lee Stokes

Our narrator Dick Ludwell is a small-time reporter in Lake City (obviously based on Chicago but not Chicago, as that city is mentioned as well). Dick is an ambitious guy without an abundance of scruples, so he doesn’t see anything wrong with slipping a little info to the city’s mobsters now and then. But then one night he witnesses a hit on a boxer who refused to take a dive, and he knows his underworld connections won’t help him a bit. He’s marked for death, and he has to get out of town and hide out in a hurry.

The place he chooses for sanctuary is an abandoned farm that belonged to the late brother of Dick’s editor, who is also his best friend from childhood. Once he gets out in that rural environment, Dick encounters a variety of colorful characters, some of whom are not what they appear to be and all of whom have hidden agendas of their own.

Now, you’d think that would be enough for a book by itself, wouldn’t you? But Manning Lee Stokes, the author of THE GRAVE’S IN THE MEADOW, has other things in mind. It’s like he started writing this novel with the intention of springing a major plot twist every twenty or thirty pages. One of those twists about the middle of the book is so shocking that it had me turning back a page and going, “Wait . . . what?” And he keeps that up all the way to the end in this tale of murder, blackmail, bank robbery, and double-cross after double-cross. And the most amazing thing is that he makes all of it work. Everything hangs together, and the whole crazy yarn is spun in such smooth prose that I gulped it down in big chunks. THE GRAVE’S IN THE MEADOW is truly a page-turner, all the way to the satisfying ending.

I’ve seen books like this referred to as “one damn thing after another”, and that’s a pretty good description. In our house, when we’re watching some movie or TV show and there’s a wild, over-the-top, almost ludicrous plot twist, we always say, “Sure, why not?” Well, THE GRAVE’S IN THE MEADOW is a “Sure, why not?” book. But as I said, Stokes makes it work, and ultimately, that’s all that counts.

Stokes had a decent career in the Forties and Fifties writing mysteries, Westerns, and soft-core sleaze novels under his own name and as Kermit Welles, Kirk Westley, and Ford Worth. THE GRAVE’S IN THE MEADOW was published in hardcover in 1959 by Arcadia House and reprinted in paperback in 1961 by Dell. Arcadia House was primarily a library publisher, and because of that there’s no sex or bad language in this novel, but it manages to be pretty sordid anyway. A few years after it was published, Stokes went to work for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel and became one of Engel’s regular writers, turning out books in a number of different house-name series, including Nick Carter, Killmaster; John Eagle, Expeditor; the Aquanauts; and Richard Blade. I read all of Stokes’ Nick Carter books back in high school and enjoyed them, although at the time I had no idea he was the actual author, of course. He passed away in 1976.

I’d read so many good reviews of THE GRAVE’S IN THE MEADOW that I really thought it would be difficult for the book to live up to its reputation. But this is one of those rare cases where it actually does. This is a great suspense novel, one of the best books I’ve read this year, and would be a fine candidate for a reprint edition.

Forgotten Books: The Bronze Axe (Richard Blade #1) - Jeffrey Lord (Manning Lee Stokes)

I’ve written before about what I call front porch books—the sort of book I read when I was a teenager, sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of my parents’ front porch on summer days when it was too hot to play baseball. THE BRONZE AXE, the first book in the long-running Richard Blade fantasy adventure series, is definitely a front porch book. Which is not always a good thing and is, in fact, sometimes a mixed blessing.

First some background on the series, which was packaged by Lyle Kenyon Engel before he formed Book Creations Inc, the company I worked for many years later. I’m going by memory here, but I seem to recall reading in an interview with Engel that it was George Glay, the editorial director at Macfadden-Bartell Books, who actually came up with the concept of this series. Knowing how Engel worked, I imagine Glay said something like “How about a series mixing James Bond with Conan?”, since those were two very popular literary figures at the time. So Engel called up Manning Lee Stokes, one of the authors who regularly wrote books for him, and said, “I need a series mixing James Bond with Conan”, and then Stokes came up with everything else. I suspect that’s how it went, anyway.

But no matter what the details of its creation, the Richard Blade series really is James Bond meets Conan. Blade is a top agent in British Intelligence, working for a secret division of MI6 called MI6A, which is headed up by a spymaster known only as J. Blade is recruited as a test subject in an experiment being conducted by gnomish scientest Lord Leighton, who hooks him up to a supercomputer. The object of the experiment is to download all the information in the computer directly in Blade’s brain, but there’s a glitch and instead it hurls him into a parallel dimension that comes to be known as Dimension X, which has all sorts of different alternate Earths in it. (I gather that some of this is established in later books.)

In this book, THE BRONZE AXE, Blade winds up in an alternate history version of Bronze Age England, where he rescues a beautiful princess and runs afoul of a beautiful queen, a beautiful witch (the witches are known as Drus, obviously inspired by Druids), and another queen who’s not really beautiful, but Blade fools around with her anyway, as he does most of the women he encounters. When he’s not getting laid, he fights the Dimension X equivalents of Vikings and not surprisingly kills their leader so he can take over the dreaded sea raiders. Then Lord Leighton fixes the problem with the computer and manages to bring him back to good old England in the Swinging Sixties.

Stokes was one of the regular authors on the Nick Carter, Killmaster secret agent series also packaged by Engel, and I gobbled those novels down with great enjoyment in those days (definite front porch books). I didn’t know at the time who was writing them, but I didn’t care, either. Now, all these decades later, I find that Stokes’ prose hasn’t aged all that well, at least in this book. He can get awfully long-winded and pretentious at times.

However, there are also some really good action scenes in THE BRONZE AXE, some likable and interesting characters, and a surprising amount of humor, most of which actually works. If I had read this when it was first published in 1969, I suspect I would have loved it. Somehow I never saw it back then, though. Reading it now, I still got a considerable amount of enjoyment from it, despite being able to see its flaws.

A little more history on the series: Macfadden-Bartell published six Richard Blade books in 1969-72, all with pretty good covers by Jack Faragasso, but that seemed to be the end of the series. Then in 1973, Engel struck a deal with Pinnacle Books, which had grown enormously in the past few years due to the success of the Executioner, the Destroyer, and other men’s adventure series. Pinnacle reprinted the six books originally published by Macfadden-Bartell, this time with covers by Tony Destefano that I don’t like nearly as well, and then continued on with original novels until the series totaled 37 books. Manning Lee Stokes wrote the first eight, and Roland J. Green wrote all the books after that except for #30, which was written by Ray Faraday Nelson. Engel, or an editor who worked for him, talked to author Geo. W. Proctor about continuing the series, but that never came about. After Russian reprints of the early books were successful, a couple of Russian authors began writing their own sequels, so there are a number of unauthorized Richard Blade novels that have only been published in Russia and have never appeared in English.

I have the first three books and then maybe a dozen more scattered through the rest of the series. I enjoyed THE BRONZE AXE enough that I’ll probably try to round up the rest of the Manning Lee Stokes entries, but whether I continue beyond that is sort of doubtful since I’m not a fan of Roland Green’s work. I’m glad I read this one, though. It brought back enough of those old feelings to create quite a bit of nostalgia for those days. I wouldn’t go back there permanently, but I sure like to visit.