Forgotten Books: Night Calls the Green Falcon - Robert McCammon

I'm fudging a little this week since "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is a novella, not a novel, but it's been my favorite of Robert McCammon's work since I first read it 25 years ago, it's available by itself as an e-book, and when I reread it recently, it held up very well. So I thought I might as well say a few words about it and maybe inspire some of you to read it.

"Night Calls the Green Falcon" was first published in 1988 in the anthology SILVER SCREAM, edited by David J. Schow. I had a copy of that book but never got around to reading it. I did, however, read this story when it came out a couple of years later in McCammon's collection BLUE WORLD. That's a great collection, but "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is the real stand-out as far as I'm concerned.

Creighton Flint (real name Creighton Boomershine) is a washed-up actor, a former champion athlete from the Midwest who went to Hollywood in the early Fifties and starred in four movie serials during the fading days of that film genre, until a tragedy cut short his career. He played the masked crimefighter known as the Green Falcon and still has the costume from those serials, even though it's not in very good shape. Neither is Flint, who now lives in a rundown apartment house in a bad neighborhood in Hollywood.

A serial murderer known in the papers as the Flip-Top Killer has been preying on street people in the neighborhood, and when a friend of Flint becomes one of the victims, he sets out to track down the murderer. But he puts on the uniform of the Green Falcon to do so, which attracts unwanted attention and complicates Flint's quest for justice—which is also a quest to reclaim his lost celluloid heroism.

Things play out about like you'd expect in this novella, and McCammon opens it with a dream scene, a technique I don't like, but other than that it's very well written and the pace is absolutely relentless. More than that, and most of all, it's an unabashed love letter to serials, comic books, pulps, and all the other things that helped make so many of us what we are today, and I don't mind admitting I was a little misty-eyed when I got to the end. To quote a wise man from Alvin, Texas, I miss the old days, and I sort of miss 'em even more after reading "Night Calls the Green Falcon". McCammon's a fine writer and I still have several of his books that I haven't read yet, but I doubt if any of them will top this one for me.

Forgotten Books: Baal - Robert R. McCammon

Back in the Eighties, I was a big fan of horror writer Robert R. McCammon and read about half of his books. His werewolf novel, THE WOLF’S HOUR, is hugely entertaining, and his poignant and nostalgic novella, “Night Calls the Green Falcon” (which you can find in the excellent collection BLUE WORLD) is one of my all-time favorite stories by any author.

Then McCammon stopped writing horror and produced a couple of odd, unclassifiable novels, BOY’S LIFE and GONE SOUTH, which I liked but not nearly as much as I liked his other work. Then he retired from writing, and I never got around to going back and reading the earlier books of his that I’d missed.

Which brings us to BAAL, McCammon’s first novel, originally published in 1978, which I just read as the opening shot of my attempt to catch up on the unread McCammons. It’s the story of a cult leader, who may or may not actually be an ancient demon, and the three men who oppose his rise to worldwide power: an elderly professor of theology, a Russian/Eskimo hunter who claims not to be a shaman (although the other Eskimos say that he is), and a mysterious individual known only as Michael (no fair guessing who he really is, although of course you will, and of course, you’ll be right).

This book has some major problems, particularly with the pacing, which may well be because it was a first novel, after all. The entire first half is just set-up, and it’s pretty much of a slog to get through. One of the major characters isn’t even introduced until the final section of the book. So why am I recommending it? Because the plot finally gets going in the second half, and the last eighty pages or so are really good, giving the reader a taste of the full-throttle action that would dominate some of McCammon’s later novels. There are also several genuinely creepy scenes that are very effective, and the ending is a good, satisfying one.

In recent years, McCammon has come out of retirement with a couple of extremely long historical mysteries. I have both of them and will get around to them, though they may have to wait until I have more time to devote to reading. In the meantime, I plan to continue catching up on his earlier novels. I mean, good grief, Bill Crider recommended THEY THIRST, McCammon’s vampire novel, to me nearly thirty years ago, and I still haven’t read it. I need to remedy that.