Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western, April 1950

We're still dealing with medical issues here, but I'm trying to get things back on track as much as I can. What better way than with a rather risque cover from a Trojan Western pulp? I feel like I should know who did the lurid artwork on this SIX-GUN WESTERN cover. Joe Szokoli, mebbe? I just don't know. The lead novella by E. Hoffmann Price is actually a reprint from the January 1939 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Ray Gaulden, another consistently good writer, is also on hand, along with house-name Ralph Sedgwick Douglas, Frank Morris (who might well have been Mickey Spillane), and little-known Charles Getts and John White. I hope to read another Western pulp and write an actual review of it soon.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, October 1946

The cover on this issue of LEADING WESTERN is by H.W. Scott, an artist I generally like. This one is okay, but I'm not all that fond of the sketchy, unfinished look which was common on Western pulps in the late Forties and Fifties on covers by Scott and other artists. Inside are stories by some pretty good writers, including Philip Ketchum, Laurence Donovan, Giff Cheshire, Paul Craig (who was also Giff Cheshire), Norrell Gregory, and Harold R. Stoakes. The Trojan Western pulps, like those from Columbia, were low-budget, hit-or-miss affairs, but there are good stories to be found in them if you look. I don't own a copy of this one, but with those authors, I'd be willing to give it a try if I did.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

Since LEADING WESTERN was published by Trojan, making it a Spicy Pulp at least by association, you'd expect the covers to have attractive women on them, and the March 1946 issue is no exception. I don't know who painted this cover, but if I had to guess, I'd say H.W. Scott. The big galoot with the dangling quirly looks like his work. Inside this issue, the only author you've likely heard of is Giff Cheshire, whose story made the cover. The other writers on hand are Adolph Regli, Frank D. Compagnon, Henry Norton, and Mark Lish. Norton and Lish sound vaguely familiar to me, the other two not at all. I don't own this issue and wouldn't want to venture a guess as to its quality, but the cover is okay.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, January 1943

I don’t own this issue, or, for that matter, any issues of SUPER-DETECTIVE. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re usually pretty expensive when you do come across one. But when Radio Archives recently published an e-book edition of this issue, I picked it up because I wanted to read the Jim Anthony novel in it. The by-line on that novel is John Grange, but that was a house-name, and in this case, I knew that two excellent authors collaborated on the story: Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Anthony, here’s a little background. His father was an Irish adventurer, his mother a Comanche princess. He’s a millionaire industrialist with business interests all over the world, an amateur criminologist, a brilliant scientist, and a world-class athlete. He’s Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, and Jim Thorpe rolled into one. Veteran pulpster Victor Rousseau wrote the first dozen Jim Anthony novels in SUPER-DETECTIVE, Edwin Truett Long did the next three, and then friends and sometime writing partners Bellem and Ballard wrote ten more novels to finish off the series. “Murder Between Shifts” in this issue is the fourth entry by Bellem and Ballard. In Rousseau’s stories, he portrayed Jim Anthony as more of a globe-trotting adventurer, the Doc Savage part of the character. I’d read that Bellem and Ballard’s novels had more of a mystery angle, concentrating on Jim Anthony’s efforts as a criminologist. I was eager to read one and find out.

“Murder Between Shifts” finds Jim visiting Los Angeles with his pilot and sidekick Tom Gentry. Jim owns an aircraft plant there that’s doing vital work for the war effort, but there are rumors of trouble he’s checking out, and sure enough, when he tracks down the plant manager to a nightclub that caters to the swing shift workers, the man is murdered right in front of Jim’s eyes by one of the other plant executives. The thing is, the guy who pulled the trigger claims he’s innocent! Jim investigates, of course, which leads to attempts on his own life along with sensuous encounters with several beautiful babes. (SUPER-DETECTIVE was published by the same company that put out the Spicy pulps, so it’s a little more risque than some, although mild by our current standards.) Even though Jim is still the same tycoon/scientist/criminologist he is in the earlier novels by Victor Rousseau, “Murder Between Shifts” does read much more like a typical hardboiled detective yarn than Rousseau’s novels do. It’s well-written, clever enough, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It also features a cameo appearance by police lieutenant Dave Donaldson, from Bellem’s Dan Turner series, which put a grin on my face.

William B. Rainey, author of the short story “Don’t Get Killed Tonight”, was really Wyatt Blassingame, best remembered probably for his Weird Menace stories although he was a prolific pulpster who wrote a little bit of everything and wrote it well. “Don’t Get Killed Tonight” is part of his series about private detective Eddie Harveth, who works as a troubleshooter for nightclub and restaurant owners in New Orleans. It’s a good story in which Eddie gets framed for the murder of a beautiful dancer and has to go on the run from the cops as he tracks down the real killer. There’s nothing unusual or special about this story, but it’s competently written and moves right along. A tad on the forgettable side, though.

Randolph Barr was a house-name, and the real author of “The Shape of Death” is unknown, which is a shame because it really is a top-notch story featuring some fine hardboiled writing. A beautiful blonde living in a Florida trailer camp finds a dead man on her doorstep. Unfortunately, he’d made a pass at her a short time earlier in a nearby tavern, and she was heard to threaten him. The cops believe he followed her back to her trailer and she killed him, possibly in self-defense. The only one who believes she’s innocent is a young reporter who falls for her. The plot of this one is pretty traditional and even predictable, but it races along with plenty of good dialogue and excellent descriptions. I liked it a lot and wish I knew who wrote it.

The other stories in this issue are all unacknowledged reprints, a practice for which the publisher was notorious, beginning with “Carte Blanche for Murder” by Travis Lee Stokes, which was published originally as “Blonde Madness” in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES under the name Arthur Humbolt, which was also a pseudonym. The real author was Robert C. Blackmon, who wrote a bunch of detective yarns for various pulps, under numerous different names. It opens with its newspaper reporter protagonist discovering the murdered body of a beautiful blonde with her arms chopped off. Naturally, this ties in with the case of another blonde who was killed and had her legs chopped off. And our hero’s girlfriend is a beautiful blonde and has a connection with one of the suspects! As you can tell, this story is lurid and over the top and you know exactly what’s going on almost right from the start, but Blackmon delivers it in such breathless, enthusiastic prose that it’s enjoyable despite that.

Norman A. Daniels is the actual author of “Murder Stays at Home”, published in this issue under the name Max Neilson. It was published originally as “Murder at Lake Iroquois” by Charles Maxwell in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. This one finds a bunch of theater folks and artists partying at the island mansion of a wealthy producer, and of course one of them winds up dead, seemingly an open-and-shut case of a beautiful actress murdering a rival beautiful actress. That’s not how it turns out, and the murder method is actually pretty clever. Daniels was dependable and this story is good entertainment without being outstanding.

“Post Mortem” by Walton Grey was published originally in the August 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES as “Where is the Body?”, under the author’s real name, C. Samuel Campbell. It’s even more lurid and over-the-top than “Carte Blanche for Murder” as we have two police detectives running around a stereotypical old dark house complete with secret passages and a hulking monster who’s breaking people’s necks. This one is almost too silly for me to accept it, but it has its effective moments and I wound up reading the whole thing.

Looking back on the issue as a whole, it’s certainly entertaining. The Jim Anthony story and “The Shape of Death” by “Randolph Barr” are the highlights. I definitely want to read more of Bellem and Ballard’s Jim Anthony stories. Several of them, including “Murder Between Shifts”, are reprinted in SUPER-DETECTIVE JIM ANTHONY, THE COMPLETE SERIES: VOLUME 5 from Steeger Books. Not surprisingly, I’ve already ordered a copy. But if you want to sample the series, this e-book from Radio Archives isn’t a bad place to start.

Review: Killer's Caress - Cary Moran (Edwin Truett Long)

In 1936, Culture Publications, the publisher of the Spicy line of pulps, decided to branch out into hardbacks, using the same authors who filled the pages of their pulps. The result was a company called Valhalla Press, which managed to put out only two books before somebody decided it was a bad idea: PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER by Arthur Wallace (a name that may or may not have been a pseudonym, nobody seems to know) and KILLER’S CARESS by Cary Moran, who was actually a young writer living in Texas named Edwin Truett Long. PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER is a real rarity. I’ve never seen a copy in the wild and it can be found for sale on-line only now and then.

But KILLER’S CARESS is a different story. It’s been reprinted a couple of times, most recently by Black Dog Books. That edition is still available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon. I’ve had a copy for quite a while, and after seeing something about it on Facebook recently, I was prompted to read it.

The protagonist of this novel is gossip columnist Johnny Harding, who writes a popular newspaper column called Johnny-On-the-Spot. As such, he knows everybody from bartenders to bigshot politicians, from hat check girls to ruthless gangsters and gamblers. He has a beautiful redheaded assistant and a big lug of a driver. One evening when he’s headed out to make his rounds of the nightspots and hunt material for his column, he’s nearly rubbed out by a couple of hired killers. Later in the evening, he runs into the rich, sleazy playboy who has inherited the newspaper where he works. Said playboy has enemies all over the place including his estranged actress wife who’s trying to divorce him, a gambler and nightclub owner, the above-mentioned hat check girl, a news photographer he’s fired, and Johnny himself. The way the guy keeps getting threatened, you know he’s going to wind up dead and Johnny is probably going to be blamed for it.

But that’s not exactly what happens. Somebody winds up being murdered, all right, but it’s a friend of Johnny’s, and that sets him off on a whirlwind of action, detection, and seduction. Johnny’s furious quest to avenge his pal reminded me very much of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, although Johnny, while a tough little mug (I kept seeing a young Jimmy Cagney in my head), is no Mike Hammer. The fact that he has a pal on the homicide squad and a competent knockout of an assistant also reminded me of the Hammer novels, and I can’t help but wonder if Mickey ever read KILLER’S CARESS.

Eventually there are more murders. The pace seldom lets up, and Long crams a lot into a story that takes place in about 48 hours. Everything leads up to a great scene on a gambling ship that includes not only a gathering of the suspects and an explanation of who committed the crimes, but also features a big shootout as the cops raid the boat.

The plot is really complex, but it’s one of those that seems to make sense, especially if you squint your eyes a little and hold your mouth just right. The big appeal to me is Long’s breathless, breezy style, which he was already perfecting in dozens of stories for the Spicy pulps under various pseudonyms and house-names. I had a great time reading KILLER’S CARESS. It reminded me of the hardboiled yarns I grew up reading, and I give it a high recommendation.

I’m also very much interested in the career of Edwin Truett Long, especially since I found out that he’s buried in Fort Worth, about 20 miles as the crow flies from where I’m typing this. But more about him in another post sometime, when I’ve read more of his work.

Saturday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Western Stories, October 1945

I'm thinking the cover on this issue of SPEED WESTERN STORIES is by H.W. Scott, but as always, I could be wrong about that. It's a nice dramatic scene no matter who painted it. Inside are stories by three Trojan Publishing Corporation stalwarts: Laurence Donovan, Edwin Truett Long (as Luke Terry), and Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill). The other authors are three little-known but apparently real pulpsters, Felix Flammonde, Frank D. Compagnon, and Frederick W. Bales. Long died July 13, 1945, so this must have been one of his last stories. He's buried in Fort Worth and I've thought about going to see if I could find his grave. It might be nice to have a picture of me standing by the final resting place of such a prolific pulp author. But so far I haven't gotten around to it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Private Detective Stories, May 1939

H.L. Parkhurst provides the eye-catching cover for this issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES. "Intimate Revelations of Private Investigators", indeed! The cover story by Roger Torrey is a novella, and knowing Torrey's work, it's probably good. There's also a novelette by Edwin Truett Long writing as Dale Boyd, a novelette by Howard Wandrei writing as Robert A. Garron, and a couple of stories by forgotten pulpsters George Shute and James H.S. Moynahan. Quite a few issues of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES can be found on-line, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. Looks like an issue worth reading if you ever come across a copy. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fighting Western, June 1946

More proof, as if we needed it, of how dangerous it was to go to the barber shop in the Old West. I'm pretty sure this cover is by H.W. Scott, who did most of them for FIGHTING WESTERN during this era. Since this was a Trojan Publishing Corporation pulp, it's not surprising that a couple of the authors were also stalwart contributors to the Spicy/Speed pulps. E. Hoffmann Price is on hand with a Simon Bolivar Grimes story, and Victor Rousseau has two stories, one under his own name and one as by Lew Merrill. Prolific Western pulpster and genuine cowboy Chuck Martin is in these pages, too, and there's a Johnny Hardluck story by Branch Carter, apparently that author's real name. Who's Johnny Hardluck, you ask? I don't know since I've never read any of the stories about him, but Carter wrote nine Johnny Hardluck yarns, all of which appeared in 10 STORY WESTERN except this one, which happens to be the second in the series. I may have some of his 10 STORY WESTERN appearances; I'll have to check and see.