The Wrap Up

This was a rough year personally in a lot of ways, and I’m sure hoping that 2018 will be an improvement, but the reading and the writing rolled on, as they have for decades now. That’s what I’m here to talk about today.

READING

I read 117 books this year, a slight increase from last year. Here are my Top Ten favorites, in the order in which I read them.

RIDERS OF THE NIGHT, Eugene Cunningham

FLASH CASEY—DETECTIVE, George Harmon Cose

LEO MARGULIES: GIANT OF THE PULPS, Philip Sherman

NEVER SAY NO TO A KILLER, Clifton Adams

THE LOST END OF NOWHERE, Gordon MacCreagh

SAY IT WAS MURDER, Stephen Mertz

KISS AND KILL, Richard Deming

AVALANCHE!, E.S. Dellinger

PLAY A COLD HAND, Terence Faherty

THE ART OF THE PULPS, Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse, Robert Weinberg, eds.

If you’re keeping score at home, you’ll note that my blog posts for a couple of these haven’t shown up yet, but they will soon. Also, one of them, SAY IT WAS MURDER by Stephen Mertz, hasn’t been published yet, but it’ll be out next spring from Rough Edges Press. Remember the title (like I’d let you forget!) because it’s a great private eye novel.

The older I get, the more I seem to retreat into the pulp era. Four of the books listed above first appeared in the pulps, and two more are about the pulps, at least partially in the case of the Margulies bio. But four of them are also new books, appearing for the first time in 2017, so I’m not a complete fossil yet. Still, more than a fourth of the books I read this year were either pulps, pulp reprints, or pulp-related. Another fourth were what I would consider vintage paperbacks or hardbacks. So I’m definitely beating ceaselessly into the past, boats against the current.

WRITING

I wrote a million words again this year, for the 13^th straight year. I have a tentative plan to try to hit a million two more times, then semi-retire and write about half a million words a year from then on. (I know, I know, we’ve all heard this before . . .) I spent enough years as a semi-starving freelancer that it’s difficult to turn down work, but I’ve begun to do that now and then. The million words this year included eight solo novels, six collaborations, and sizable chunks of two more novels. No short fiction at all in 2017, and only one of the novels, which probably won’t be out for a while, will have my name on it. But I haven’t worried about that in forty years and don’t intend to start now, as long as I can continue fooling everybody into believing I know what I’m doing and don’t have to take an honest job. I’m ’way too old for that. Many thanks to everyone involved in saving me from that terrible fate, from the editors and agents to the readers to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, who make it all possible to start with.

I don’t make resolutions, but I have the vague hope that I’ll have more time to read, watch TV and movies, and just generally enjoy life. I plan to attend Robert E. Howard Days in June, I may make it to a science fiction convention or two, and I’ll definitely continue going to hockey games when I can. (I’ve become a big hockey fan and have been known to pontificate about games that I’m watching, based on my vast experience of two whole years as a spectator and never having been on ice skates in my life . . .) The blog will continue, the WesternPulps group will continue (until Yahoo pulls the plug on all the groups, which I remain convinced they will, sooner or later), and I’m sure I’ll still spend too much time on Facebook. To all of you out there who make this stuff fun, my very best wishes and the hope that 2018 is kind to you.

Play a Cold Hand - Terence Faherty

A while back I read THE HOLLYWOOD OP, a collection of stories by Terence Faherty featuring private eye Scott Elliott. These ranged in time period from the Forties to the Sixties, and I thought they were great. I picked up copies of some of Faherty’s novels starring Elliott but you know me, attention span of a six-week-old puppy, so I never got around to reading them. However, I recently got my hands on an ARC of Faherty’s latest Scott Elliott novel, PLAY A COLD HAND, and read it immediately. And I’m very glad I did.

This one takes place mostly in 1974, although there’s a lengthy flashback to 1952 and a murder that took place in 1944 figures prominently in the plot. Elliott’s old boss, long retired from the private detective business, is murdered while trying to solve one last big case. In fact, the book opens with Elliott being called to the scene of the murder and talking to a friendly cop, for all the world like the opening of a Mickey Spillane novel with Mike Hammer and Pat Chambers.

However, that’s the only thing in PLAY A COLD HAND reminiscent of Spillane. This novel is much more in the Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald vein, all the way down to a late reference to a Chandler novel that provides a clue. The plot is properly convoluted, involving mobsters, a con game, a beautiful torch singer, movie stars, blackmail, black marketeering during World War II, and numerous secrets bubbling up from the past to cause trouble in the present.

To put it simply, this is a wonderful book. It’s set in 1974, as I said, and reads like it could have been written then. It passes the Front Porch Test with flying colors, right down to the masterful solution that had me smacking my forehead and looking back to see if the vital clues were really all there. And sure enough they were.

Don’t let anybody tell you they don’t write ’em like they used to. Sometimes they do, and PLAY A COLD HAND is a prime example. It’ll be out soon from Perfect Crime Books, and I give it my highest recommendation.

The Hollywood Op - Terence Faherty

A couple of years ago I read a story in ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE called “Unruly Jade”. The author was Terence Faherty, and the story, set in Hollywood in 1947, featured a private eye named Scott Elliott who worked for an outfit called Hollywood Security. I thought it was a great story, snappy and fast-paced and very pulpish, just the sort of thing that might have actually been published in BLACK MASK or DIME DETECTIVE alongside yarns by Day Keene and John D. McDonald and William Campbell Gault.


So I knew that I would probably like THE HOLLYWOOD OP, a collection of Scott Elliott stories from the great small press publisher Perfect Crime Books. For one thing, “Unruly Jade” was included in the collection, the first story, in fact, and for another, as a longtime fan of Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner stories, as well as Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, I loved that title. A cross between Dan Turner and the Op, maybe?


Well, no. The biggest influence on these stories seems to me to be Raymond Chandler, which I’ll get back to in a minute. With one exception, Faherty has arranged the stories in this volume in chronological order according to his protagonist’s life. Elliott, a former contract player at Paramount, returns to Hollywood after serving in World War II and becomes an operative for Hollywood Security when it becomes apparent that his acting career is over. Faherty follows him through the late Forties, the Fifties, and on up into the Sixties, painting a spectacularly vivid picture of Hollywood during that same stretch of years. The stories are evocative, complexly plotted, and very well-written. I’m a sucker for a private eye whose wisecracks cover up a sense of melancholy, and Elliott falls squarely into that category.


The book closes with the previously unpublished novella “Sleep Big”, and there’s that Chandler influence again. This story is set before World War II, when Elliott is still an actor instead of a private detective, but he becomes involved in a very complicated murder case anyway. This is a tribute to and pastiche of THE BIG SLEEP, and while even attempting such a thing is a pretty big task, Faherty pulls it off very successfully, even poking a little fun at himself along the way for his audacity.


If you’re a fan of private eye fiction, I can’t recommend THE HOLLYWOOD OP highly enough. You should go order a copy right now if you don’t have the book already. This is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.