The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Most of you have heard about it. Some of you own it. A few of you have already blogged about it. But I got my copy of THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS the other day, and it’s wonderful. Over 1100 double-column pages of hardboiled crime fiction from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. I am, as we say down here in Texas, in Hog City. I plan to read a story or two from this huge volume between every novel I read, so it’ll take me a while to work my way through it, but I can practically guarantee that I’ll have a great time doing so. So far I’ve read the first two stories, “One, Two, Three” by Paul Cain and “The Creeping Siamese” by Dashiell Hammett. The Cain story, about a private eye trying to find a swindler, isn’t as terse and bleak as a lot of his work, but it’s just as complicated. It takes a full page – that’s two columns of pretty dense type – at the end of the story just to explain everything that went on in the first nine pages. Great stuff. The Hammett story is a minor Continental Op yarn, but the Hammett voice is there and entertaining as always.

Unlike some things, I can pinpoint, sort of, when I became a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction like the stories included in THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS. It was on a very foggy December evening in 1967, when I picked up a copy of the Pocket Books edition of the Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS at the Book Oasis in Fort Worth’s Seminary South Shopping Center. I was there with my mother, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I was aware of pulps before that, but only Doc Savage and the Shadow. When I read Goulart’s book, which included authors such as Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, Raoul Whitfield, John K. Butler, and Lester Dent, the stories immediately struck a chord in me that still rings as clear and true today as it did then. I’ve read a ton of hardboiled pulp mysteries in the past forty years, and a lot of work that was influenced by those stories, and I still love ‘em.

Today’s page count: 20. And the pages that I thought were terrible when I was writing them yesterday didn’t look so bad today. In fact, they were all right. They just needed a little polishing.

The Avenger Chronicles

My author copies of THE AVENGER CHRONICLES arrived today. This is a new collection from Moonstone Books featuring eighteen stories starring the pulp character whose relatively short-lived series (24 novels) was reprinted in its entirety in paperback by Warner Books during the Seventies. Those reprints were so successful that Warner published twelve new Avenger novels, all ghosted by Ron Goulart under the house-name Kenneth Robeson.

Goulart is back with a new story in THE AVENGER CHRONICLES. Other authors include Howard Hopkins (probably the world’s leading authority on the character), Bob Randisi, Gary Phillips, Will Murray, Paul Kupperberg, C.J. Henderson, Richard Dean Starr, Mark Justice, Joe Gentile, Mel Odom, Martin Powell, Win Scott Eckert, Tom DeFalco, Matthew Baugh, Clay and Susan Griffith, and Dan Wickline. You get not only a fine lineup of writers, but also some fine artwork, including two variant covers.

My story is called “Death in Clown Alley”, and I had a fine time writing it. Where else am I going to get to write about skeleton clowns raising havoc under the Big Top? One of the great joys of this business is that from time to time you get to write about characters whose exploits you enjoyed in your younger days. That happened to me with Mike Shayne, Longarm, Kolchak, and now The Avenger, all of whom entertained me long before I ever became a writer. I’m not old enough to remember The Avenger’s pulp run, but I bought and read all those paperback reprints in the Seventies. While The Avenger wasn’t my favorite pulp character (that honor goes to Doc Savage), I thoroughly enjoyed those original yarns, written by Paul Ernst under the Robeson house-name, and I appreciate the opportunity to add to his adventures.

Forgotten Books: Skyrocket Steele - Ron Goulart

I've been reading and enjoying Ron Goulart's novels for decades. He's best known for his science fiction, I suppose, but he's also written quite a few mysteries (including a good four-book series about a California private eye named John Easy), various novelizations and tie-in novels, and a few Westerns. He also edited the iconic anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS, which introduced a lot of readers of my generation to the great hardboiled detective authors from the pulps, and wrote several volumes of pulp and comic book history.

SKYROCKET STEELE is one of his science fiction novels I'd never read until now, and it's great fun. Although it's definitely SF, except for a few hints here and there that element doesn't really come into play until late in the book. Most of the way it's a funny, well-written account of making a science fiction movie serial called "Skyrocket Steele" in 1940. The protagonist is a young writer named Pete Tinsley who's been selling stories to the pulps for several years (he seems to have contributed mostly to the "Stimulating" line – STIMULATING WESTERN, STIMULATING SKY STORIES, STIMULATING ADVENTURE, etc. – a nice homage to the "Spicies"). Hired to help an experienced scripter come up with the screenplay for "Skyrocket Steele", Pete makes a very likable hero as he discovers some odd things going on around the production.

Throw in some Hollywood gangsters, a beautiful dancer named Boots McKay (great name), an equally beautiful redhead named Tracy Flinn who may or may not have some abilities that aren't quite normal, and some Nazi saboteurs, and you've got an excellent screwball adventure yarn that winds up with a burst of nice pyrotechnics.

This book came out in paperback from Pocket Books in 1980 with a cover by Carl Lundgren and has probably been out of print ever since, but it's well worth seeking out. I had a fine time reading it, and I suspect a lot of you would, too.

Ghosting

Lee Goldberg asks in his comment below, "So, James, what's your take on Michael Gruber telling everybody that he's been writing all of Robert Tanenbaum's books?"

I don't know the details of the contract(s) between Gruber and Tanenbaum, but if Gruber agreed that he wouldn't reveal he was writing the books, then he shouldn't have revealed it. I understand the frustration he must have felt -- I once ghosted a book that got glowing blurbs from big-name folks who never would have blurbed a book with my name on it -- but a deal's a deal.

Of course there are varying degrees of secrecy on these things. Some of my house-name Western contracts say that I can't publicly claim authorship but that I can use the books as professional credits within the industry. And things change over time, too. I've done books where my participation was a total secret at the time the book came out, but then later the author I was working for decided it was all right for me to claim the book. A lot of these deals are "secret" in name only, especially within the business. Most people knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Ron Goulart was writing those TekWar SF novels published with William Shatner's name on them. Goulart never came out and said as much, though, at least that I'm aware of. From what I've heard about Tanenbaum's recent books (I haven't looked at them), he thanks Gruber in ways that would make it obvious to people in the business that Gruber really wrote the books. Oddly enough, knowing about this whole controversy has made me more likely to read some of the Tanenbaum books, which I probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Forgotten Books: The Hardboiled Dicks - Ron Goulart, ed.

Like it was yesterday, I remember it: a very foggy December evening in 1967. I was 14 years old, and when my mother went to Seminary South with my older brother and my sister-in-law, I tagged along. Seminary South was the first major shopping center in Fort Worth, built in the mid-Sixties as an open-air mall much like the various outlet malls that now sit beside many of the Interstate highways. It was on Seminary Drive in south Fort Worth, hence the name. The main attraction it held for me at that time was a small bookstore called The Book Oasis. I was able to stop in there for a little while that night, and while I was there I found a book I knew I had to have. It had a bright, pop-art style cover that showed a strong-jawed guy in a fedora socking a thug. The title?

THE HARDBOILED DICKS, of course.

By this time I was fairly familiar with the concept of the pulps from reading Doc Savage novels and the Lancer editions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. I even owned a pulp, a 1931 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY that I had picked up in Thompson’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth a year or so earlier. (In those days you could still buy tons of Gold Medals and Dell mapbacks from Thompson’s for ten cents each – and I did.) THE HARDBOILED DICKS was my introduction to the sort of fiction to be found in BLACK MASK, DIME DETECTIVE, and other hardboiled detective pulps. Originally published in hardcover a couple of years earlier, it was reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books and had a great introduction by Ron Goulart.

But it was the stories themselves that grabbed me immediately and wouldn’t let me go. What a line-up of stories, authors, and characters:

“Don’t Give Your Right Name” by Norbert Davis (Max Latin)
“The Saint in Silver” by John K. Butler (Steve Midnight)
“Winter Kill” by Frederick Nebel (Kennedy and MacBride)
“China Man” by Raoul Whitfield (Jo Gar)
“Death on Eagle’s Crag” by Frank Gruber (Oliver Quade)
“A Nose for News” by Richard Sale (Daffy Dill)
“Angelfish” by Lester Dent (Oscar Sail)
“Bird in the Hand” by Erle Stanley Gardner (Lester Leith)

I knew that Lester Dent was really “Kenneth Robeson”, the author of many of the Doc Savage novels I was reading and loving every month, and of course I’d heard of Erle Stanley Gardner, having read some Perry Mason and Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novels already. Frank Gruber’s name was vaguely familiar to me. But the rest of those guys were brand-new, as far as I was concerned. When I read the stories, I loved them and wanted more. As much as I could get my hands on, in fact. Oddly enough, the stuff wasn’t as easy to come by then as it is now, at least not to a kid in a small town in Texas.

That copy I bought at The Book Oasis in 1967 was lost in the fire a couple of years ago, of course, but I knew that THE HARDBOILED DICKS was one of the books I had to replace. And having a week for Forgotten Short Story Collections was the perfect excuse to sit down and reread it (although, technically, most of the stories in this book are novelettes, not short stories). I was interested to see whether or not they would hold up after all these years.

The answer is simple: Boy, do they.

I recall that on reading them the first time, I didn’t like Gardner’s Lester Leith story or Whitfield’s Jo Gar story as much as the others. They’re good, just not as good as the others, plus the Gardner story isn’t particularly hardboiled. Rereading them confirmed that, but they’re still great fun. The stories by Norbert Davis, John K. Butler, and Richard Sale are all fast-paced and very funny in places. I’m always amazed by how much plot pulp authors could pack into a story. Frederick Nebel’s “Winter Kill” impressed me even more this time around. A lot of people say Nebel was almost as good as Dashiell Hammett, and I agree with that. Frank Gruber’s story about Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, is so good that I’ve already ordered a replacement copy of BRASS KNUCKLES, a collection of Quade stories that came out a year or so after THE HARDBOILED DICKS. It’s another old favorite of mine that contains a long introduction about writing for the pulps that Gruber expanded into his book THE PULP JUNGLE. And then of course there’s Dent’s “Angelfish”, one of two stories he wrote for BLACK MASK about private detective Oscar Sail. These are classics and deservedly so, and in rereading “Angelfish” I was more impressed than ever with Dent’s use of language. It’s just a great yarn. As a matter of fact, that description could be applied to any of the stories in this book.

Seminary South existed much like it was then until sometime in the early Eighties, although The Book Oasis went out of business years earlier. I remember going to Seminary South with Livia several times during the first few years of our marriage. Then somebody got the idea of enclosing it and making a regular mall out of it, and the place lost most of its charm as far as I’m concerned. Now it’s been at least twenty years since I’ve been there, probably longer. I think it still exists in some form, although it’s gone through numerous remodelings and name-changes, but I’m not sure about that.

I know, though, that it still exists vividly in my memory, along with The Book Oasis. I bought other books there over the years, but THE HARDBOILED DICKS was the best. If you like pulp detective yarns, it gets my highest recommendation. You can find copies fairly inexpensively on-line.

Of course, that won’t be like picking it up brand-new and flipping through those red-edged pages and knowing that you’d found something really wonderful. You had to be there for that, and I was. Yesterday, it seems.

Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. This new volume from Black Dog Books, BODYGUARD, is the first major collection of his work.

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easy-going, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. Torrey hasn’t actually been forgotten – reprints of his stories have popped up in anthologies over the years – but he’s certainly been neglected. BODYGUARD is the first step in remedying that situation. I had a great time reading it, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies, Volume One, 1936-37 -- Lee Falk and Ray Moore

The local newspaper when I was growing up didn’t carry the comic strip THE PHANTOM, so I never knew anything about the character when I was a kid. MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, also created and written by Lee Falk, was in the Sunday paper for a while, but I didn’t know anything about the connection between the two strips and was never a Mandrake fan, anyway.

Over the years, as I learned more about comic strips, I was vaguely aware of THE PHANTOM but still hadn’t read any of the old strips. Then when I was in college, one day I went into Reader’s World, the little bookstore across the street from the campus and picked up an Avon paperback called THE STORY OF THE PHANTOM by Lee Falk, which had a nice cover by George Wilson. I knew by then that Falk created and wrote the comic strip, so it seemed like a good bet to learn more about the character.

I read that novel and loved it and wound up buying and reading all 15 books in the Avon series, which were written by Falk, Ron Goulart (as Frank S. Shawn), Basil Copper, Bruce Cassidy (as Carson Bingham), and Warren Shanahan (that may be a pseudonym, too, but if it is, I’m unaware of the actual author). Evidently, Falk actually wrote the novels attributed to him, which is a little unusual in a situation like that. Falk also wasn’t that pleased with the novels by the other authors, but I read ’em all and thoroughly enjoyed the series. I remember reading several of them while sitting on my parents’ front porch, and that was the right place for them.

So by now I knew the character, knew his back-story and some of his publication history, and as time went on I read some of the Phantom comic books (published by Charlton during that era?) and watched the Phantom movie serial with Tom Tyler playing the character.

In recent years, a publisher called Hermes Press has reprinted those novels originally published by Avon, and not only that, they’ve gone back to the character’s origins and reprinted the comic strip. I recently read the first volume, THE PHANTOM: THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES, VOLUME ONE: 1936-37. The first three storylines from the comic strip are included: “The Singh Brotherhood”, “The Sky Band”, and “The Diamond Hunters”.

“The Singh Brotherhood” takes a few days to introduce readers to The Phantom, but Diana Palmer, who eventually becomes the love of his life, appears right away, in the very first strip. She’s an adventuress and explorer on her way back to New York by ship with a load of valuable ambergris she’s discovered. What’s more, she’s located a veritable mother lode of ambergris on the ocean floor, the legendary graveyard of the whales. (Was Falk influenced by Tarzan movies where the bad guys always wanted to find the elephants’ graveyard? Who knows?) Mobsters target the ship, but The Phantom shows up and foils their plans. Turns out the mobsters were actually working for the evil Prince Achmed, who is part of the Singh Brotherhood, a fraternity of pirates that has raided and pillaged for hundreds of years.

This first long storyline finds The Phantom rescuing Diana numerous times, putting the kibosh on various Singh Brotherhood plans, and along the way telling Diana his origin story. The short version (most of you already know this): pirates marooned one of The Phantom’s ancestors on the island nation of Bengalla. (Wait, is it an island or somewhere on the South Asian mainland? I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.) The ancestor put on a mask and a costume and battled pirates as The Phantom and swore an oath that his descendants would do the same. I know there’s a timeline somewhere and The Phantom of the 1930s is the 14^th or 15^th Phantom (or something like that). Because it seems that The Phantom never dies, the natives from the jungles of Bengalla call him The Ghost Who Walks. He has a wolf named Devil as his sidekick.

Anyway, eventually The Phantom invades the secret hideout of the Singh Brotherhood and it winds up blowing up real good. But everything leads neatly into the second storyline, featuring a band of female air pirates called the Sky Band.

This storyline also involves The Phantom locating and infiltrating the hidden headquarters of the enemy. In some ways it’s a redo of the first story as The Phantom is captured and escapes, but it’s complicated by romantic rivalry between the Baroness, the leader of the Sky Band, and the beautiful Sala, her second-in-command, over the affections of The Phantom. Diana winds up playing a part in this, too.

The third storyline, “The Diamond Hunters”, definitely takes place in Africa, adding to the early confusion of where exactly all these fictional kingdoms and tribes are located. Such inconsistencies don’t bother me; I just figure The Phantom fights piracy and crime worldwide (a concept that’s really played up in the Avon novels, as I recall). A couple of prospectors stir up a war between rival tribes so they can grab a valuable diamond field. Eventually, Diana gets involved in this storyline, too, and gets kidnapped again so The Phantom has to rescue her. As the book draws to a close, the on-again, off-again love affair between The Phantom and Diana is off again . . . but we all know it won’t stay that way.

I really had a great time reading these newspaper strips. Lee Falk’s scripts are excellent, terse and well-paced and with moments of both humor and high adventure. The art by Ray Moore is great, with just enough detail and top-notch storytelling. He draws really good-looking women, too. I’ve found that some adventure strips are too repetitive when you read collections of them, but that’s not the case with these early Phantom storylines. They move right along like a well-done movie from that era. This volume is available in an e-book edition that can be read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited; that’s how I read it. Used copies of the hardcover edition are available, but they’re pricey. Later volumes in the series don’t seem to be available as e-books, only as expensive hardbacks. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll pick up any of them, but I sure enjoyed this one and if you don’t mind reading digital comics, I give it a very high recommendation.

Pulp Icons: Erle Stanley Gardner and His Pulp Magazine Characters - Jeffrey Marks

I don't remember the first book I read by Erle Stanley Gardner, which is sort of surprising considering all the other first books by various authors I recall. It may well have been SHILLS CAN'T CASH CHIPS, one of his Donald Lam and Bertha Cool mysteries written under the name A.A. Fair. I know I remember checking that one out from the bookmobile, so that was almost 50 years ago. I checked out other A.A. Fair books, as well as a number of Perry Mason novels, from the bookmobile, and then when my hometown got its own public library I read all the Gardner novels on those shelves, too, many of them early Perry Masons in those cheap Triangle/Blakiston hardcover reprints (more like cardboard cover reprints) with the pages that were already brown and brittle some twenty years after they were published.

All of which is my long-winded way of saying that I've been reading Erle Stanley Gardner novels for a long, long time, but I didn't encounter any of his pulp work until a few years later when Ron Goulart included one of the Lester Leith stories in his iconic anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS.

Even after that it was a while before I read many more of Gardner's pulp stories, but when collections of them began to come out in the Eighties and Nineties, I was right there. I read both volumes of the Whispering Sands stories from ARGOSY. I read both Ed Jenkins collections, and the Ken Corning collection, and the science fiction collection THE HUMAN ZERO. In recent years I've picked up more Gardner pulp collections, and I'll get to them, I swear I will.

That brings us to a recent non-fiction study of Gardner's pulp work, PULP ICONS: ERLE STANLEY GARDNER AND HIS PULP MAGAZINE CHARACTERS by award-winning scholar of mystery fiction Jeffrey Marks. Appropriately enough considering its subject matter, it's a fast, breezy, slightly hardboiled volume that focuses for the most part on the many different series characters Gardner created for the pulps. The longest chapter is the one on Ed Jenkins and Lester Leith, Gardner's best-known characters other than Perry Mason, Donald Lam, and Bertha Cool. However, Marks doesn't neglect the lesser-known characters such as Sidney Zoom, Speed Dash, The Patent Leather Kid, Black Barr, and The Man in the Silver Mask, among many others.

One of the things I really enjoyed in this book is the inclusion of correspondence between Gardner and the pulp editors for whom he was writing as they fine-tuned the stories and the characters. It's an interesting look into Gardner's creative process.

Overall, this is a very entertaining book, packed with information about Gardner and his characters, and whether you're a recent fan of his work or an old-timer like me, you definitely should check it out.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

Forbidden River: Wolves of the Wild - Frederick Nebel

I've read plenty of Frederick Nebel's hardboiled detective yarns in my time, beginning nearly 50 years ago with "Winter Kill", a Kennedy and MacBride story in THE HARDBOILED DICKS, the iconic anthology edited by Ron Goulart. I'd never read much of his pure adventure fiction, though, until recently. Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books is publishing several volumes of Nebel's adventure stories, and the first one I've read is FORBIDDEN RIVER.

The collection begins with an excellent introduction by Roberts that provides more information about Nebel's life and career than I've encountered before and concludes with a biographical sketch of Nebel's life by Evan Lewis and a comprehensive bibliography of his fiction compiled by both men. In between are five top-notch novellas that appeared in ACE-HIGH NOVELS, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, and NORTH-WEST STORIES.

The first is "Wolves of the Wild", from the April 1932 issue of ACE-HIGH NOVELS, an action-packed Northern that finds old sourdough Shorty McWhirtle showing up in the mining town of Mushroom City with some gold dust from a legendary lost lode. An all-or-nothing bet with gambler Jim Cameron forms an unlikely alliance between the two men, but Shorty has an ulterior motive: Jim's father was an old friend of his, and he wants to get the young man away from the decadent life in Mushroom City.

This situation leads to a fast-paced blend of murder, mistaken identities, double-crosses, and shootouts in the snow. Nebel never lets the action slow down for very long, but he also keeps a firm hand on the plot and everything ties up neatly.

Every story in this collection is substantial enough to deserve a post of its own, so I'll stop there and just say that FORBIDDEN RIVER is a fine collection of adventure fiction and well worth reading. You can order it directly from the Black Dog Books website.

Forgotten Books: Tough As Nails: The Complete Cases of Donohue - Frederick Nebel

I first encountered Frederick Nebel’s work in the iconic 1965 anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS, which made me a fan of hardboiled pulp crime fiction ever since. Editor Ron Goulart included one of Nebel’s Kennedy and MacBride stories, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. But then for years after that, I didn’t read much by Nebel since there just wasn’t a lot available. Half a dozen of his stories were collected in the paperback SIX DEADLY DAMES, but I never came across a copy of it.

That’s changed a great deal in recent years as dozens of Nebel’s stories have been reprinted by various presses that specialize in pulp fiction. He was a very prolific writer, turning out Northerns, aviation yarns, and straight adventure stories in addition to his mysteries. His first big success with a series character came with the hardboiled private eye Donohue, who appeared in fifteen stories in BLACK MASK from 1930 to 1935. All of these stories have been reprinted in TOUGH AS NAILS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION OF DONOHUE STORIES. And what a wonderful collection it is. I’ve been reading these stories between other books for a while now and finally finished them.

"Rough Justice" (November 1930) is the first Donahue story, but it finds him in St. Louis on the trail of a fugitive, instead of his usual bailiwick of New York.

The next three stories are linked novellas that form a short novel of sorts: "The Red-Hots" (December 1930), "Gun Thunder" (January 1931), and "Get a Load of This" (February 1931) find Donahue solving several murders and scrapping with a wide variety of characters, including a couple of beautiful women, as everybody tries to get their hands on a diamond worth $90,000 that was stolen in Europe and smuggled into the States.

“Spare the Rod”, from August 1931, finds Donahue back in St. Louis, hired by a crusading lawyer to recover evidence incriminating some local gangsters, but of course, things don’t go exactly like Donohue expects them to.

In “Pearls Are Tears” (September 1931), Donahue is hired to be the go-between in the recovery of a valuable stolen necklace, but as anybody who’s ever read any private eye fiction knows, such exchanges never go off as they’re supposed to. In this one, a cop winds up dead, and Donahue has to track down the killer.

“Death’s Not Enough”, from October 1931, opens with Donahue relaxing at home. You know that’s not going to last. Sure enough, a guy with two slugs in his belly shows up on Donahue’s doorstep and promptly dies. Recognizing the victim as a crusading newspaper columnist, Donahue figures finding his killer will be good publicity, so off he goes on a wild chase that features several blazing gun battles.

The next three stories are connected, and the sequence forms another short novel. Donahue actually has a date in “Shake-Up” (August 1932), but as it turns out, there’s nothing romantic about it, the shady lady in question is actually a witness in a case Donahue’s working on. And when she gets murdered (no surprise there), of course Donahue sets out to find the killer, even if the search makes him some dangerous enemies. “He Could Take It” (September 1932) is a direct sequel, starting just a few hours after the previous story ended. Even though Donohue solved the murder, the case isn’t over, as several new angles crop up. Also in this story, we learn that Donohue’s actual first name is Ben, even though all his friends call him Donny. “The Red Web” (October 1932) is set three weeks later and wraps things up as a danger from the past comes back to threaten a young woman Donohue has met in the previous story.

In “Red Pavement” (December 1932), Donohue feels unusually generous and picks up a drunk out of the gutter to help him get home. Naturally, there’s a lot more to it than Donohue expects, and almost before he knows it, he’s dodging bullets and setting out to do a job given to him by a dying man.

The next three stories, “Save Your Tears” (June 1933), “Song and Dance” (July 1933), and “Champions Also Die” (August 1933) form a short novel in which Donohue gets involved with the boxing racket. He solves the murder of a fight promotor, saves a champion boxer from the wiles of a femme fatale, and tackles the murder of another champion and a boxing manager.

The final Donohue story, “Ghost of a Chance” (March 1935), is also the longest in the series, almost a short novel by itself. Donohue is approached by a potential client about a simple messenger job—somebody is supposed to pick up and deliver some money—but then a hotel house detective gets murdered, the potential client disappears, and things get complicated. The plot in this one is very good, but the story is weakened by the fact that it’s obviously a rewritten story that originally featured Nebel’s other series private eye, Cardigan, whose adventures appeared in DIME DETECTIVE. I’m not sure why the original version was rejected—like I said, it’s a pretty good story—but Nebel didn’t do a great job of rewriting it and it just feels a little off as a Donohue yarn.

That said, the little glitch at the end doesn’t keep TOUGH AS NAILS from being a superb collection. Nebel was just a fantastic writer and everything I’ve read by him has been tough and fast and very involving for the reader. This is the type of hardboiled private eye fiction I grew up reading and loving, and I’m glad I didn’t dig deeply into Nebel’s output until now, because I still have plenty by him to read. TOUGH AS NAILS is easily one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, and I give it my highest recommendation. (Below are the covers of some of the BLACK MASK issues where these stories were published originally.)

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Espionage, February 1985

Like MYSTERY MONTHLY, which I wrote about several weeks ago, when I saw the digest magazine ESPIONAGE on the magazine rack at one of the local grocery stores, my first thought was that here was another market I could send some stories to. The mid-Eighties were a dry time for me as far as writing goes. I ghost-collaborated on a couple of men's adventure novels with a friend of mine. I wrote short stories and letters for the porno digests (and was damned glad to get those 40 or 50 buck sales, too). I wrote novel proposal after novel proposal in a variety of genres, all unsold and lost now, except for one or two. I was still a year or so away from getting the job writing Westerns for Book Creations Inc. that eventually allowed me to become a full-time writer.

So I immediately wrote a slew of spy stories and bombarded the magazine with them. Never even came close to selling any of them, of course. They all came flying back with form rejects. I don't know if any of them were actually any good or not. They're all lost, too.

But I still picked up the magazine when I found it and read the stories, and most of them were pretty good. This issue includes stories by Dan J. Marlowe, Ron Goulart, Edward D. Hoch, Michael Bracken, Bill Knox, and John Lutz. That's a top-notch line-up. The other issues I read were good, too. Several of them feature stories by Joe Lansdale. Despite its quality, the magazine lasted only a year or two, victim of the fact that even in the mid-80s, people just didn't read fiction magazines much anymore.

Dead Man's Chest - Norbert Davis

Norbert Davis is one of the authors I was introduced to in the legendary, Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS in the Sixties. I’ve been reading and enjoying Davis’s work off and on ever since. He’s best remembered for his hardboiled yet humorous mysteries, but he wrote other kinds of stories for the pulps, too, including straight adventure. One such example is the novelette “Dead Man’s Chest”, originally published in the November 1936 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES.

The protagonist of this yarn is drifting adventurer Poco Kelly (a great name if I’ve ever seen one). A character in this story refers to him as a soldier of fortune, but Kelly immediately corrects that to “soldier, but no fortune”. He finds himself in a small town on Mexico, rescuing a beautiful American girl being pursued by sinister stalkers, getting mixed up in a torture killing, clashing with a vicious criminal, and getting captured by a gang of bandits, all while trying to locate a map (drawn on a piece of tanned human skin, no less) that’ll lead him and the beautiful girl to a fortune in gold.

There’s nothing in “Dead Man’s Chest” that we haven’t seen before, but the key to its appeal is in Davis’s handling of the material. And luckily, he does a great job of it. His prose is fast and vivid and action-packed, Poco Kelly is a very likable protagonist, and there are just enough touches of humor to remind you that you’re reading a story by Norbert Davis. And then, at the very end of the story, he throws in a nice twist that I wasn’t expecting. It put a grin on my face, too.

I really enjoyed “Dead Man’s Chest”. It’s a very solid pulp adventure tale that I found well worth reading. It’s available in a stand-alone e-book edition from Wildside Press with an informative and entertaining introduction by publisher John Betancourt. (I had no idea until I read the introduction that Davis was married to mystery author Frances Crane. I have most, if not all, of Crane’s novels about married sleuths Pat and Jean Abbott, but I’ve never read any of them. I can’t help but wonder if Davis had any influence on them. I’ve got to get around to trying those.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, March 1939

Hubert Rogers provides a nice deep sea diving cover for this issue of STREET & SMITH'S DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE. Inside are well-known authors Erle Stanley Gardner (with a Lester Leith novella), Steve Fisher, and William G. Bogart, along with lesser known (at least to me) Edmund M. Littell, Chris Sieyes, and Carl Clausen. Of all the ESG characters I've read, Lester Leith is probably my least-favorite. However, I'm not sure I've ever read any of the stories except the one in Ron Goulart's iconic anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS, so that's hardly a fair trial. I ought to see if I can hunt up a few more Leith yarns and give them a try. I own a few issues of DETECTIVE STORY (not this one) but I don't believe I've ever read any of them. I probably ought to do that, too. 

Now Available: War Games (A Markham PI Novella) - James Reasoner

Here's another of my Markham stories from the early days of writing for MSMM. At more than 15,000 words, "War Games" is the longest of the Markham stories and is now available for the Kindle. The other e-formats will be coming along shortly. I'm glad to get these stories back out there, and readers seem to be responding positively to them. They're historical pieces now, but still pretty entertaining, I think. (It's odd to think that a story like this is just as old now as those pulp stories I read in Goulart's THE HARDBOILED DICKS were in 1967.)

Dead Man's Brand - Norbert Davis

I first encountered the work of Norbert Davis in Ron Goulart's anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS (one of the most important and influential anthologies of the past fifty years, if you ask me), which included a story featuring Davis's private eye character Max Latin, "Don't Give Your Right Name". Great stuff, and since then I've read many other pulp mystery stories by Davis. He's probably best known for his trio of novels featuring a PI named Doan and a Great Dane known as Carstairs. I have these but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

I knew Davis had written other things besides mysteries, but I wasn't really aware he had done Westerns until Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books published DEAD MAN'S BRAND, a collection of eight of Davis's stories from various Western pulps. (And that's Tom's artwork on the cover, by the way.) As you might expect if you're familiar with Davis's work, they're all top-notch yarns.

"A Gunsmoke Case for Major Cain" (DIME WESTERN, October 1940) is a frontier legal thriller with an exciting courtroom scene and a neat twist. It was also Davis's lone film sale, serving as the basis for the Wild Bill Elliott vehicle HANDS ACROSS THE ROCKIES, as detailed by Bill Pronzini in his introduction and Ed Hulse in his afterword. "Their Guardian From Hell" (STAR WESTERN, March 1937) is a hardboiled tale featuring a self-loathing gunman who protects a family of settlers from the villains out to steal their land. In "Leetown's One-Man Army" (STAR WESTERN, October 1941), a drifter named California Tracy with a score of his own to settle finds himself in the middle of a war between a cattle baron and some sodbusters, a traditional plot that Davis enlivens with some fine writing and a nice twist. The title story, "Dead Man's Brand", is from the November 1942 issue of STAR WESTERN. In it, drifting cowboy Dave Tully tries to claim an inheritance and finds himself framed for a murder: his own. "The Gunsmoke Banker Rides In" (STAR WESTERN, July 1942) is another well-plotted Western mystery about a banker who's surprisingly fast with a pair of .41 caliber derringers.

This volume also includes three stories from earlier in Davis's career. "Death Creeps" (ACTION STORIES, December 1935) finds troubleshooter Dave Silver being hired to find the Creeper, a mysterious murderer who kills from the darkness. In "Sign of the Sidewinder" (WESTERN ACES, June 1935), Tom Band, an American cowboy framed for a murder he didn't commit, is broken out of a Mexican prison to carry out a mission of vengeance for his benefactor. This is my favorite story in the collection, a great noir adventure yarn. Tom Band returns in the almost as good "Boot-Hill Bait" (WESTERN ACES, November 1935), which finds him on the trail of a fortune in outlaw loot. If there are any more Tom Band stories, I'd love to read them.

In all of these stories, Davis's smooth prose is a joy to read, and he handles humor, emotional torment, and lightning-paced action all with equal ease and effectiveness. These are simply some of the best-written Western tales you'll ever read, and DEAD MAN'S BRAND is a great collection. It gets my highest recommendation.

Losers Live Longer - Russell Atwood

When this book came out a few months ago, it got quite a bit of attention because of its great horizontal cover by Robert McGinnis. Then people actually read the book and realized that LOSERS LIVE LONGER is one of the best private eye novels of recent years.

This is the second appearance for Russell Atwood’s New York City PI Payton Sherwood, but it’s been ten years since the first one, EAST OF A. Sherwood isn’t very successful as a detective, at least not financially. He’s living in his office, which is almost bare of furniture because he’s sold everything to get by. Then he gets a phone call from a well-known, retired private eye offering him some work, and since Sherwood needs the money and also is eager to work with this guy, he accepts.

Problem is, the old PI is killed on his way to Sherwood’s office. Like all good fictional private detectives, Sherwood sets out to investigate the death, even though he doesn’t have a client. This sets into motion an extremely complicated plot involving beautiful women, missing millions, mobsters, drugs, blackmail, and close to a dozen murders. And it’s all packed into less than twenty-four hours of time!

The writing is fast and funny and contemporary, with the plot turning on things like USB drives and skateboards, but at the same time it’s pure BLACK MASK. Remember the passage from an old pulp story that Ron Goulart quotes in the introduction to THE HARDBOILED DICKS, where the detective goes on for almost a page explaining the incredible twists and turns of the story’s plot, then concludes, “Simple. Got it now?” That’s what LOSERS LIVE LONGER is like. Plus there’s a little Mike Hammer influence thrown in, since Sherwood is motivated by wanting to find out what happened to the older PI even though he doesn’t have a client. (Although Sherwood and Mike Hammer are about as different as they can get in every other respect.)

I had an absolutely wonderful time reading this book and highly recommend it. Like some other bloggers whose reviews I checked out, I immediately went on-line and ordered the first one in the series so I can read it, too. And I sure hope that it’s not ten more years before Russell Atwood writes another Payton Sherwood novel, because LOSERS LIVE LONGER is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Don't Miss This Sale from Black Dog Books!

UNBEATABLE HOLIDAY SAVINGS

On Small Business Saturday save big on the following titles for the holiday season from Black Dog Books!

 WESTERN ACTION—Trail of the Snake by Norvell Page. With an introduction by Bill Crider.
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Unmasked edited by Tom Roberts. With an introduction by Francis M. Nevins.
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Dead Man’s Brand by Norbert Davis. With an introduction by Bill Pronzini.
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Banished by William Murray Graydon
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The Black Death by Marion Polk Angellotti.
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 DETECTIVE/MYSTERYHorse Money by Richard Wormser, with an introduction by Robert J. Randisi
The Cases of Chief Van Eyck, Race Track Detective.
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Bodyguard by Roger Torrey, with an introduction by Ron Goulart
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City of Corpses by Norvell Page, with an introduction by Robert Weinberg
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Twice Murdered by Laurence Donovan, with an introduction by Tom Roberts
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Killer’s Caress by Cary Moran
The moles on a voluptuous siren’s shapely thigh lead Johnny Harding, dapper, wise-cracking columnist of the Daily Telegraph into a web of crime.
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Dead Men Tell Tales by Arthur B. Reeve
Craig Kennedy lives again in these previously uncollected tales of scientific deduction.
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 NON-FICTIONPulp Vault no.14 edited by Doug Ellis.
The grandest of all pulp journals returns with a new issue at over 250 pages.
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Windy City Pulp Stories no.10
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Fundamentals of Fiction Writing by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman
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We appreciate your patronage.
Tom Roberts, Publisher

Visit www.blackdogbooks.net for more information.
Black Dog Books, 1115 Pine Meadows Ct. Normal, IL 61761-5432Reseller discount options available.


(I've read a number of these books, obviously, and you really can't go wrong with anything Tom Roberts publishes. There are some great deals here that you should take advantage of. And watch this space for more Black Dog Books news as it becomes available!)

The Wrap-up

This is my annual end-of-the-year post, where I discuss my writing and the books I’ve read. No movie talk this year. I watched a lot of ’em, some good, some bad, but couldn’t even begin to come up with a list of the best ones. I’ll try to do better about that next year, when I may bring back my end-of-the-month updates, if I can remember to do it. (Remembering anything is more of a challenge than it used to be.) So . . .


Writing


At the beginning of the year, I got this crazy idea: what if I could average 500 pages of fiction per month? That would give me 6000 pages for the year, something I had never achieved before. Was it possible? Was it even wise to attempt it? I’d thought about it in previous years but always given up by sometime in the spring. 500 pages a month, month after month, is just too hard a pace to maintain. Fall behind, and it’s almost impossible to catch up.


But wouldn’t it be cool, I asked myself, to stack up twelve reams of paper and then stand beside them to illustrate how much I’d written? There were a couple of problems with that. One, it’s a stupid, show-offy idea. So you write 6000 pages. If they’re not any good, all you’ve got is a 6000-page-high pile of crap. Two, I don’t have twelve reams of paper, and since everything’s digital now, I probably won’t ever need that much paper again and refuse to waste the money buying it for some dumb picture. So, no photo.


But yes, I wrote my 6000 pages. 6017, to be precise. Looked pretty iffy for a while, but I made it. Being a dinosaur from the typewriter era, I don’t keep a word count. It’s all about the pages with me and always has been. But I know that many pages comes out to be somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 million words, the most I’ve ever written in a year. It breaks down to 16½ books under seven different names, including my own, and about half a dozen short stories. It also includes my first original e-book, RANCHO DIABLO: HANGROPE LAW.


On the publishing front, I had 16 books published in 2010 (books written vs. books published usually comes out pretty close to the same like that), under six different names (all of the above except my own, but REDEMPTION, KANSAS will be out in March with my name on it). Plus a few short stories.


Will I ever write that much again? I don’t know, of course, but I have my doubts. While I’m sure there are some crappy pages among the 6017, I think for the most part they’re pretty good. I think at least a couple of the books I wrote this year rank among my best ever. But the readers are the ultimate judges of that. However, that pace is a little too much, even for me. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll do my million words again in 2011 – I already have about 1.1 million under contract – but unless something else sells or I find myself with more time to work on spec projects than I expect, I don’t think we’re looking at 6000 pages again. Probably more like 5800.


My biggest goal is to get everything back on schedule again. My primary editor has been remarkably patient about me turning in books late. I really appreciate that, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get things squared away so that by the middle of the year, the books will be coming in on time again. There’ll be a few logjams along the way – I have three books due on April 1, for example – but I’ll work through those.


So what it boils down to is that I wrote a lot, I think I did pretty good work, and I intend to keep going as long as the editors have faith in me and the readers enjoy what I’m doing. And none of it would be possible without all the help I get from Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, so a great big thanks goes out to them as well.


Reading


After a few down years, I got back on a more normal pace in my reading. I read 146 books in 2010, which I consider a good year. I read a wide variety of books, in many different genres, as I usually do, some old, some new. I read a number of books in manuscript because the authors wanted blurbs from me, something I’m always glad to do as long as I have the time. Coming up with a list of ten favorites wasn’t easy (it never is), but here are the books I liked the best this year, in the order in which I read them:


THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL, Lou Cameron
ONE FOR HELL, Jada M. Davis
THE HARDBOILED DICKS, Ron Goulart, ed.
THE CROSSROADS BLUES, Troy D. Smith
THE TOYMAN RIDES AGAIN, Robert S. Napier
THE WALK, Lee Goldberg
RAINWATER, Sandra Brown
SIEGE, Brian Michael Bendis
DEATH NOTICE, Todd Ritter
TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, Edgar Rice Burroughs


Troy Smith’s Nashville-set crime novel is one I read in manuscript, and I don’t believe it’s out yet. The others are all either in print or easily available in used copies on-line. A couple of them, THE HARDBOILED DICKS and TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, are rereads of books that I loved when I was a kid, and obviously I still do. And yes, I’m aware it’s an odd list overall. I’m an odd reader. There were dozens of other books that could have made this list, and might have if I’d been coming up with it on a different day. I don’t believe I read a really bad book all year (mostly because if I start one I don’t like, I don’t finish it). But I’m happy with the mix and hope to keep it up.


In conclusion . . .


2010 was a pretty good year, very, very busy but enjoyable for the most part. I was able to stay on a fairly even keel and get a lot done. If 2011 continues that trend, I’ll be pleased.