Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, March 1943

I like this PLANET STORIES cover by Jerome Rozen, and inside this issue are stories by some excellent writers: Leigh Brackett, Nelson S. Bond, Carl Jacobi, Ross Rocklynne, Ray Cummings, and Milton Lesser (better known these days as Stephen Marlowe). This and a bunch of other PLANET STORIES issues can be read on-line here. Would that I had time to do so!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second July Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know the artist. I’ve said before that RANCH ROMANCES was a good Western pulp during the Fifties, and this issue is no exception. It leads off with “Stampede Valley”, a novella by J.L. Bouma, a prolific author of Western pulp stories and novels. Bouma used very traditional plots but handled them well. This one has a powerful rancher trying to crowd out the smaller outfits in the valley. The protagonist is a young cowboy who works for the cattle baron but comes to realize he’s on the wrong side. This is a well-written, enjoyable tale that seems a little rushed at the end, its only real drawback.

Bill Burchardt’s stories and novels are often set in Indian Territory. “The Deputy’s Daughter” finds one of Judge Parker’s deputy marshals using his own daughter as bait to catch an owlhoot. It’s not a terrible story, but the writing never really caught my interest and there’s not much of a payoff. I’ve enjoyed other Burchardt stories more in the past.

The novelette “Renegade’s Girl” finds two lawmen transporting a convicted killer by train over a snowy Montana landscape to the town here he’ll be hanged. The outlaw’s victim was the twin brother of one of the lawmen. This is an excellent set-up, and since the author is Walker A. Tompkins, one of my favorites, it’s no surprise that this is a taut, suspenseful yarn. Tompkins is always good, and he’s at the top of his game in this one.

There are three more short stories in this issue. “Sinner Man” by Talmage Powell is about a traveling preacher, his beautiful daughter, and a vengeance-seeking gunfighter. “Woman for a Hoeman” is a terrible title for a cattlemen-vs.-sodbusters story by Ed La Vanway. “To Brand a Maverick” is a rare Western by Milton Lesser/Stephen Marlowe under his Adam Chase pseudonym that’s about the son of an outlaw deciding whether to go straight or follow in his father’s footsteps. All are well-written, and all have rather limp endings that really dilute their effectiveness. But they’re all readable.

There are also some assorted features and short fact articles I didn’t read, as usual, as well as the third of four serial installments of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS, a novel by Joseph Chadwick under his pseudonym Jack Barton. I didn’t read the serial, either, but I have the Popular Library edition of the novel and I might get around to reading it one of these days. Chadwick is usually good. And this is a good issue of RANCH ROMANCES based on the stories by Tompkins and Bouma, even though the rest of the fiction is pretty forgettable. It also has some nice interior art by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

UPDATE: Here's the paperback edition of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS.

Blonde Bait - Stephen Marlowe

Stephen Marlowe is best remembered for his long-running series of paperback originals about private detective/international troubleshooter Chester Drum. But he also wrote science fiction under his birth name, Milton Lesser, and various pseudonyms, big historical novels late in his career as Stephen Marlowe, and numerous non-series noir and suspense novels, also as Marlowe. One of those stand-alones is BLONDE BAIT, originally published by Avon in 1959 with cover art by Ernest Chiriacka under his pseudonym Darcy. Stark House has just reprinted it under the great Black Gat Books imprint.

There’s at least one other noir novel entitled BLONDE BAIT, this one by Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg). I reviewed it more than ten years ago and had some reservations about it. But if ever there was a title that fit a genre, BLONDE BAIT is it. It goes together perfectly with noir. The blonde in this case is Bunny Kemp, a beautiful, unhappily married woman who pays a visit to a ski resort in upstate New York where our narrator, Chuck Odlum, is also unhappily married (to the resort’s owner) and runs the ski school there. Bunny and her husband have a secret, though, and once Chuck gets involved with her, things quickly spiral out of control and more than one brutal murder occurs. You know how it goes in noir novels.

I really enjoyed this BLONDE BAIT. Marlowe was a top-notch writer, skillfully mixing character, setting, and plot to create a fast-paced novel that careens along from one complication to another in a series of harrowing scenes. As Gil Brewer did in SATAN WAS A WOMAN, which I read recently, Marlowe uses nature to great effect, making the snowy setting almost a character in itself.

I’m glad Black Gat Books has reprinted this novel. It’s one I never came across, never even heard of as far as I recall. It’s an excellent yarn, and if you’re a fan of Fifties hardboiled noir, you shouldn’t hesitate to snap up this BLONDE BAIT. It's available in paperback and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Story Quarterly, Winter 1951

Hey, watch those hands, you guys! I thought at first this cover was by Earle Bergey, but it's not attributed to him anywhere that I can find. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's certainly suggestive and eye-catching no matter who painted it. This issue of FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY is mostly reprint, with only two new stories by Frank Belknap Long and Milton Lesser, best remembered as Stephen Marlowe. The reprints, from various issues of WONDER STORIES and WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the Thirties, are by Eric Frank Russell, Clark Ashton Smith, Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder), and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, Alan Connell and Siegfried Wagener (his only credit in the FMI).

Forgotten Books: The Second Longest Night - Stephen Marlowe

’Way back when I was in high school, I read one of the later books in the Chester Drum series by Stephen Marlowe, and I also read DOUBLE IN TROUBLE, the famous crossover novel that features both Chester Drum and Shell Scott, co-authored by Marlowe and Richard S. Prather. I thought both of them were okay, but I never felt compelled to read any more of the Chester Drum novels.

It’s a well-regarded series, though, so I finally decided after all this time to try another one. I started with the first novel in the series, THE SECOND LONGEST NIGHT, published by Gold Medal in 1955.

Chester Drum is a private eye, or confidential investigator, as he calls himself, in Washington D.C. In this novel, he’s hired by a senator (who happens to be his former father-in-law) to find out if the senator’s daughter (Drum’s ex-wife) actually committed suicide, as the official verdict has it, or if something more sinister happened. This leads him into a case involving murder, family drama, and international intrigue, and takes him to Venezuala for part of the book. (From what I understand, most of the novels take Drum to foreign countries.)

THE SECOND LONGEST NIGHT is very well-written, with vivid settings and some gritty action scenes. The characters are interesting, although Drum is a rather dour protagonist. He makes with a wisecrack every now and then, but mostly he’s as wooden as a stick. The fatal flaw in this novel is that the plot is so easy to figure out. The murderer might as well be wearing a blinking neon sign.

Because of that, I can give this book only a qualified recommendation. I liked enough about it that I’ll probably read another one in the series (I own most of them), but I won’t be in any hurry to do so.