A Middle of the Night Music Post: Flight of the Silverbird - Two Steps From Hell

I came across this song by Two Steps From Hell and absolutely love it. I've heard it said of their music that it inspires you to create movies in your head, and that's certainly the case here. This is perfect for the opening credits sequence of an epic Western movie. I'm not a big one for playing music while I'm writing, but I have a hunch I may be listening to this one some while pounding the keyboard.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Are You Gonna Be My Girl - Jet

I heard this song on the radio and was reminded of how much I like it, especially the intro. I had to look it up and was a little surprised to see that it came out in 2003. Seems like I've heard it around for longer than that. But I'm always glad to listen to it again.

Review: Rex Brandon #1: Death Warriors - Denis Hughes

Sometimes I’m just in the mood for a jungle adventure. In 1951 and ’52, British author Denis Hughes wrote twelve novels under the pseudonym Marco Garon about Rex Brandon, a two-fisted geologist, explorer, and big game hunter, and his adventures in Africa. These were published by a British paperback publisher, and these days, the first six in the series are available as paperbacks and e-books from Bold Venture Press. They’ve been sitting on my Kindle for quite a while, so I figured it was time I read one of them.

The first book in the series, DEATH WARRIORS, finds Rex acting as an agent for the British and French governments. (I assume Rex is British, but you know, I’m not sure it ever says that in the book.) It seems that several years earlier, a geologist named Georg Traski located a deposit of a rare ore called irikum, which is more valuable for making nuclear weapons than uranium. But Traski disappeared somewhere in the jungle, and an expedition sent to look for him, led by another geologist and his beautiful daughter, never came back, either. Now Rex is going in to this dangerous area to locate the irikum deposit and find out what happened to the previous expeditions.

Well, you know with a set up like that, there are going to be plenty of adventures with wild animals (leopards, lions, and a rogue gorilla with an ear for music, in this case), despicable villains, and a madman or two. And so there is. Does it all play out about the way you’d expect? Sure it does. Is getting to all the expected destinations fun? You bet! DEATH WARRIORS has a lot of action, a stalwart protagonist in Rex Brandon, a couple of colorful sidekicks, and a beautiful, competent young woman. All the ingredients for a very entertaining jungle adventure yarn in the grand tradition. If you’re a fan of such things, like I am, I give it a high recommendation, and I look forward to reading the other Rex Brandon novels that are available.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Easy Virtue (2008)

I’d never heard of this movie, let alone seen it, and I’m not a huge fan of British drawing room comedies, but hey, I liked DOWNTON ABBEY, so why not give it a try?

EASY VIRTUE is based on one of Noel Coward’s lesser-known plays. A young Brit from an aristocratic family is touring Europe when he meets and falls in love with a female race car driver from America. He marries her and takes her home to introduce her to his eccentric and somewhat dysfunctional family. Cultures clash and witty banter ensues, along with a few surprisingly poignant dramatic moments, leading up to a so-so but somewhat satisfying conclusion.

Jessica Biel plays the young race car driver. She’s gorgeous, no doubt about that, and although some of the reviews for this movie fault her acting, I thought she was okay. I’ve always liked Colin Firth, and he’s fine as Biel’s new father-in-law with some dark secrets in his past. The rest of the cast is all right, and the movie looks great. It sort of plods along at times, but overall, I enjoyed it. Except . . .

The filmmakers make the choice to use deliberately anachronistic music in the score, a technique that seldom works for me. In this movie, it’s not too jarring other than the moment we hear the theme from CAR WASH, but I’m still not a fan of it. (I did, however, love CAR WASH when I saw it back in the Seventies, but that’s neither here nor there.) The other problem I have with this movie is that it has a cute little dog in it, and (SPOILER) the dog does indeed die. So if this bothers you, be warned. I might not have even watched it if I had known.

And that wouldn’t have been a great loss. EASY VIRTUE isn’t a terrible movie, and it has some very nice moments scattered through it. But I can only give it a mixed recommendation at best, if you’re a big Noel Coward and/or Colin Firth fan.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Dreamland (2020)

I had never heard of this movie, but the description sounded promising: a Depression-era crime yarn set in the Dust Bowl-blighted Texas Panhandle, with Margot Robbie playing a beautiful bank robber who encounters the teenage stepson of a deputy sheriff.

There are two ways a movie like this can go. Either you get a raucous, AIP/Roger Corman-style, Seventies drive-in epic complete with boobs, chase scenes, Tommy-gun shootouts, and lots of bluegrass music, or you get a leisurely paced, beautifully photographed, moody film reminiscent of Terence Malick’s BADLANDS (a movie I liked a lot, by the way).

Well, DREAMLAND goes the moody, leisurely paced route for the most part, although there are some decent chase scenes and gun battles. The slowly developing relationship between angsty Eugene Baker (Finn Cole, an actor I’m not familiar with) and fugitive Allison Wells (Robbie) after he finds her wounded in his family’s barn takes up the lion’s share of the movie. There are a few flashbacks to fill in the background of both characters. Eugene’s younger half-sister provides voice-over narration from the perspective of twenty years later. Allison wants to escape to Mexico, and of course it’s easy for her to persuade Eugene to help her. Eventually they take off together, banks get robbed, and the law, including Eugene’s deputy sheriff stepfather, pursues them.

The on-line reviews for this one are definitely mixed, with a lot of bad reviews and a few really glowing ones. I can’t give it a full-fledged recommendation, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The cast, which includes Travis Fimmel (Ragnar from VIKINGS) as Eugene’s stepfather, does a good job. The photography is excellent. The movie was filmed in New Mexico, not the Texas Panhandle, and sometimes you can tell that, but it’s not too distracting. I didn’t spot any anachronisms, but I wasn’t watching too closely for them, either. At least there was nothing blatantly wrong. (That sounds like I’m damning with faint praise, and I don’t intend it that way.)

DREAMLAND is no lost classic, but I think it’s worth watching. And I’ve left what I liked best for last: Eugene is a big reader of crime and detective pulps, and issues of BLACK MASK and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY are not only featured prominently on-screen, they even play a part in the plot. What’s the last movie you could say that about?

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, February 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. Although there’s no cover credit on the TOC page and it’s unattributed on the Fictionmags Index, I suspect it’s the work of Arthur Mitchell. It looks like one of his paintings, and he did a lot of covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE during this period.

The lead novella, “Gun Smoke on the Pecos”, is the third and final story in the Roaming Reynolds series by Charles M. Martin. I haven’t read the first one, but I read the second one a while back and liked it fairly well. In this story, Roaming Reynolds and Texas Joe, a pair of drifting cowboys/gunfighters/adventurers, return to their home country in West Texas and immediately find themselves mixed up in a range war. The plot is very much by-the-numbers, right down to the rancher the boys are working for having a beautiful daughter, and Martin’s heavy-handed pulp cowboy lingo and narrative style wear thin pretty quickly. If I’m being honest, and I try to be here, this is a rather mediocre story. And yet . . . the numerous action scenes work really well, the setting rings true, and Martin does a good job of playing up the epic, mythological clashes between Roaming Reynolds and the evil gunfighter on the other side. When they face off at the end, I could hear Ennio Morricone music welling up inside my head. So this novella has that going for it, anyway, and ultimately, that was enough for me, but you might feel differently.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp authors. His story “Headboard Tally” in this issue packs quite a bit of plot in a few thousand words. It’s a revenge yarn, as a cowboy tries to track down the four men responsible for lynching his brother, but as it opens, he’s already killed three of the four and doesn’t know the identity of the final man. He finds out in what turns out to be a pretty far-fetched coincidence, but Olmsted writes well enough I’ll cut him that much slack. For a story that’s mostly bleak and dark, this one turns out to have a heartwarming element to it, as well. It worked for me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

James P. Olsen, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as James A. Lawson, was a consistently good author, with many stories that tend toward over-the-top action. For that reason, “Malachi Murphy—Cowboy” is something of an oddity among Olsen’s work in that it’s a quiet little slice-of-life story about an old cowboy spending the winter at an isolated high country line camp. Not much happens, but it’s well-written and the title character is an interesting one.

I’ve read quite a few stories over the years by Hapsburg Liebe, real name Charles Haven Liebe. While his work is usually enjoyable, I’ve never considered myself a fan of his stories. “Bullet” is about a teenage boy whose father is an outlaw. When Bullet’s pa and another owlhoot rob a bank and are caught, it’s up to Bullet to save them from being lynched. This is a well-written, cleverly plotted story, one of the best from Liebe that I’ve read.

Darrell Jordan is best remembered for almost a hundred stories he wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, but he also turned out a few detective and Western yarns, including the novelette “Range War Nemesis” in this issue. The protagonist, young cowboy Brad Bannon, wants to repay the man who grubstaked his father twenty years earlier, but that effort lands Brad in the middle of a range war, and the fact that he’s a dead ringer for a notorious gunman complicates the issue. This isn’t a bad story and there are some nice action scenes, but the plot is pretty muddled and hard to keep up with. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Jordan before. I ought to try one of his aviation stories.

Sam H. Nickels wrote the long-running Hungry and Rusty series in WILD WEST WEEKLY as well as a lot of stand-alone stories under his own name and various house-names. His stories appeared outside of the pages of WILD WEST WEEKLY from time to time, too, as in this issue with “When the Sheriff Lied”. This is a pretty good action yarn with a protagonist who pretends to be an outlaw and winds up saving a lawman’s life. The reason behind the deception isn’t very surprising, but the story works effectively.

Ralph Condon was a life-long newspaperman who wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps in the Thirties and Forties. “Red Trail” is about a cowboy and his grizzled old sidekick trying to track down a herd of stolen horses. It’s almost all action and fairly well-written, nothing special but entertaining enough.

There’s also a story by S. Omar Barker in his Boosty Peckleberry series, and that’s another one I don’t read. Just not a fan of humorous tall tales, I guess.

Overall, this is probably the weakest issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE I’ve read, with most of the stories falling into the readable but unmemorable range. The ones by Olmsted and Olsen are the best, but I wouldn’t put either in the top rank of those authors’ work. I believe I’ve now read all the issues of ALL WESTERN that I own and I probably won’t seek out any more.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Thanks for the Memory - Bob Hope and Shirley Ross

This clip always gets me right in the feels, as they say, every time I see it. I don't know if any scene in the movies better captures a sense of melancholy nostalgia and bittersweet love. By the way, I've never seen the movie it's from, THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1938. The whole thing is on YouTube, as well. Maybe I ought to watch it.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956)

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I like war movies, and I watched a lot of them on TV when I was a kid. But somehow, I never saw D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE. Now that I’ve watched it, I can kind of understand that. The title should have drawn my attention, but maybe I sensed that this film is only indirectly about D-Day and is barely a war movie at all.

What it is, in fact, is a romance movie told mainly in flashback. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. The story opens on a ship the night of June 5, 1944, as a combined special force of American, British, and Canadian troops are headed for Normandy to carry out a commando raid in the hope of knocking out a big gun overlooking the beaches where the regular troops will land a few hours later. Commanding the force is a British officer played by Richard Todd. One of the American officers is played by Robert Taylor. And there’s a connection between them because, you see, they’re both in love with the same girl they met, at separate times, a couple of years earlier in London. Cue the flashbacks.

The movie spends a lot more time on the relationship between Taylor and Dana Wynter, who plays the young English woman, than it does on Wynter’s romance with Todd. We also get a couple of subplots about Wynter’s father, a brigadier general who was wounded at Dunkirk but wants to get back into action, and Taylor’s commanding officer, who’s also gung-ho to the point of recklessness because he wants a promotion. Wynter’s father is played by the great British character actor John Williams, and Taylor’s commanding officer is played by the always top-notch Edmond O’Brien.

After a lot of well-done romance and British homefront scenes, we finally shift back to Todd, Taylor, and the rest of the commandos landing and going after the German gun emplacement, and for ten or fifteen minutes, D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE actually is a war movie, and decently done, too, although the filming is staged on a very small scale so we can’t see how few people are actually involved. This isn’t a cast of thousands, by any means. But it’s an exciting and satisfying battle.

Followed by a terrible and unsatisfying ending. No spoilers here, but I didn’t like it.

The movie looks good, in a mid-Fifties, major studio way, and the cast is also a good one. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Taylor. He’s one of the most dour-looking leading men I’ve ever seen. That works okay when he’s playing, say, a world-weary gunfighter in a Western, but it’s hard to like him in this move. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a character who’s basically a heel all the way through. I like Richard Todd and he’s plenty stalwart when he has to do something, which isn’t often enough. And Dana Wynter, good grief, she was a beautiful woman! And she turns in a decent performance, too, in a role where it would be easy to be too overwrought. The supporting cast features Jerry Paris in a fairly meaty role, and if you look quick, you can spot Dabbs Greer and Parley Baer, too.

It's probably a good thing I never tried to watch this when I was a kid. All the smooching and violin music would have had me switching the channel or heading outside to play. Watching it now, I thought D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE was a somewhat okay movie for what it is, but for war movie fans, it’s probably best for completists.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

They played some snippets from this song on a recent episode of THE SIMPSONS. Yes, I still watch THE SIMPSONS. I liked it, didn't recognize it at all, and so I had to look it up. I'd heard of The Traveling Wilburys, of course, but I'm not sure I ever heard any of their music. But after listening to this one all the way through, I love it. Some of the lyrics speak to me, as they say. The ones about being old, of course, but how you should keep going to the end of the line. That's my plan.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Uncertain Glory (1944)

I watched this movie a while back but decided I wanted to wait and let my reaction to it percolate in my brain some before I wrote about it, to see if I felt differently after I thought it over. UNCERTAIN GLORY, made in 1944, stars Errol Flynn, and I usually really enjoy Flynn’s movies. The script was co-authored by Max Brand. And it was directed by Raoul Walsh, one of my all-time favorite directors. So it seemed to be a movie I would really enjoy.

I hated it. And I can’t talk about why I hated it without tons of spoilers, especially about the ending. So if you’ve never seen this movie and think you might watch it someday, you might be well-advised just to move on and not read this post.

For those of you still reading, Flynn plays a somewhat different sort of character for him, a French criminal who’s a professional thief and quite possibly a murder. He’s been convicted of murder, anyway, and is about to taken to the guillotine when an Allied bombing raid wrecks the prison and he escapes. World War II is going on, you see, and of course France is currently occupied by the Nazis.

So far, so good. A French police inspector played by Paul Lukas is on Flynn’s trail, and for a while we get an excellent cat-and-mouse movie with Lukas trying to catch Flynn and Flynn trying to stay ahead of the law. Flynn, of course, makes friends with some villagers, because he’s charming and likable despite being a criminal. How could he be anything else? He’s Errol Flynn! He’s not really a bad guy. He’s just a rogue!

Or maybe not. He probably did all the things he’s accused of, the script deliberately leaves that ambiguous. But Lukas finally catches him and is ready to take him back to Paris for another date with Madame Guillotine.

But wait! The Resistance has blown up a bridge in the area, and the Nazis have taken a hundred of the local men prisoner and the local S.S. commander is threatening to execute them unless the saboteur turns himself in. Flynn hatches the idea of pretending to be the saboteur and turning himself in so that he can save the hostages, but only if Lukas will allow him to have a few more days of freedom. Lukas agrees, reluctantly.

This is all very well-done. The acting is great, the script is nice and crisp, and even though there’s not much action, Walsh keeps things moving along at an entertaining pace. I was enjoying this, waiting for what I figured was the inevitable twist: something would happen that results in a big, action-packed climax in which Flynn reveals he really is a good guy as he rescues the hostages, kills a bunch of Nazis, and redeems himself, after which Lukas lets him go to join a Resistance unit. Or else he rescues the hostages and dies in a blaze of glory with a machine gun chattering in his hands.

BIG SPOILER NOW.

What really happens: Flynn turns himself in to the S.S. and they execute him, I guess. We’re never really told one way or the other.

I was left staring at the screen with the proverbial “Wait . . . What?” look on my face. No bullets flying, no grenades going off, no stirring music? Would the ending I expected have been hokey as all get-out? Well, yeah, but it’s still what I wanted, and what I figured I was sure to get from Errol Flynn, Max Brand, and Raoul Walsh. I didn’t want some artsy “statement.”

I almost just let this one go and didn’t write about it. I’m a firm believer in the idea that you should review a book or a movie or a TV show for what it is, not what you want it to be. And to be fair, UNCERTAIN GLORY is a very well-made, well-acted movie. As a piece of cinema, it’s worth watching. But I was enormously disappointed in it.

Those of you who disagree—or agree, for that matter—feel free to let me know. Won’t bother me a bit either way.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Mirage - Steve Cole

I like this song because parts of it sound like it could be the theme song from a 1960s British TV show produced by ITV, full of international intrigue and adventure. When I listen to it, I can see the opening credits quick-cut montage featuring picturesque scenery, beautiful women, and ugly guys with guns.

Review: The Deadly Combo - Jack Webb

When I started reading hardboiled mysteries in junior high, I thought Jack Webb, author of the series featuring priest/detective duo Father Joseph Shanley and Sammy Golden, was the same guy as Jack Webb the star of DRAGNET (and some excellent movies like PETE KELLY’S BLUES and -30-, but I hadn’t seen those yet). It didn’t take long to figure out that Webb the novelist was a totally different person. I read a few of his novels, which were easy to find in those days in their Signet paperback reprint editions, and remember enjoying them. But I hadn’t read anything else by him, as far as I recall, in the 50+ years since then.

Until Stark House recently reprinted two of Webb’s stand-alone novels in a handsome double volume, THE DEADLY COMBO and ONE FOR MY DAME. I started with THE DEADLY COMBO, originally published as half of an Ace Double mystery under Webb’s John Farr pseudonym. The novel opens with the discovery of a corpse in the alley behind a Los Angeles jazz club. The victim is a former jazz musician named Dandy Mullens. The cop who catches the case is Mac Stewart, a big, ugly, former prizefighter who happens to be a jazz aficionado himself and a friend of the murdered man. Mac’s quest to catch Dandy’s killer reminded me a little of how Mike Hammer often set out to avenge the murder of a friend.

Mac’s investigation takes him through a series of jazz clubs, strip joints, and fancy apartments, from the sleazy and sordid to the high class (but perhaps no less sordid). It seems there’s a legend in the jazz world that Dandy owned a solid gold trumpet, given to him as a publicity stunt decades earlier when he was one of the top musicians in the world, rather than the washed-up bum he was when he was killed. Somebody wanted that trumpet bad enough to kill for it, Mac believes, but at the same time, he happens to know that the whole story is a myth. Or is it? Halfway through this novel, the plot takes an abrupt but believable twist, and things that seemed apparent suddenly aren’t. Mac will have a lot to untangle to find the killer, if he lives long enough himself.

THE DEADLY COMBO is both a fast-paced, violent, hardboiled mystery and a love letter to jazz music, all at the same time. Mac Stewart is a great character, a bit of an intellectual as well as a tough, hard-nosed cop. Webb’s style in this novel is the prose equivalent of jazz, swooping and swirling almost into a stream-of-consciousness improvisation at times. It takes a little getting used to, but it works and is very effective. The plot winds up almost as dense and convoluted as a Ross Macdonald novel, but I think it all makes sense in the end.

What I know for certain is that I raced through THE DEADLY COMBO and really enjoyed it. I stayed up later than I normally do to finish it, and that takes a pretty compelling book at my age. The Stark House double volume, complete with a top-notch introduction by Nicholas Litchfield, is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon. I’ll be reading ONE FOR MY DAME soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten but consistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, I don’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all been good so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in a short-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy and troubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in the series. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition to this one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds and his sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into a range war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result in the death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the next twenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of a rustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctive style that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuh mangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing that Western pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins his yarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was a colorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains he killed off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work, but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, like Walt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulps definitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds of stories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about a couple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alone stories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published a story under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” in this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooney because of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoul of the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when it comes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a series character, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’s hired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if not particularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almost completely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out more than 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”, is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for the son of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his father passed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man, who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, before coming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writer not to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, the dialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and the suspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellent story and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but he turned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozen stories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in Ten Sleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place in one night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger called Tennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war between a crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other. Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little of Hammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t become clear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal and graphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interesting characters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one in this issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whose work I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known as Russian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with the Clantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess and told people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after being a Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, but Repp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to use ghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, so another writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read like Repp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote for RANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste. For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a yarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”, Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sort of stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found it funny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins with a violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a local gunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today. His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, although not a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though. While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Western pulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the others are all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and other readers might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues of ALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Golden Dawn - Carlos Dengler

 

Sometimes on a dark night of the soul, you need music that's soothing. Or at least I do.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: The Last Pale Light in the West - Ben Nichols

 

I love raspy-voiced singers and world-weary songs like this. They resonate pretty strongly with me.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Oooh-Ahh (Catalina) - Mindi Abair

 

I really like Mindi Abair's music, and this one is perfect for the middle of the night when a guy's spirits need a little lift.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

That’s right. Somehow, I’ve managed to spend more than 70 years on this planet, and I’ve never seen CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON—until now.

This is another movie where there’s no need at all for me to talk about the plot. You’ve all seen it. So here are some things that struck me about this one.

This is a really well-made movie. The photography, the music, the Gillman suit, even the acting (which is sometimes not stellar in movies like this) are all top-notch. Those underwater scenes with Ricou Browning as the Gillman are just beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, Julie Adams in a seemingly endless assortment of skimpy outfits, including that iconic white one-piece swimsuit, is just breathtaking. What a lovely woman. And she turns in a decent performance, too.

Richard Denning is a good villain, although he’s not terribly villainous, just opposed to the other characters’ ideas. I like Denning. He played Mike Shayne in a one-season TV show based on Davis Dresser’s novels, and from what little I’ve seen of it, he was pretty good in the role.

One of the natives who’s killed early on by the Creature is played by Perry Lopez, who, many years later, was one of the two cops who harassed Jack Nicholson’s character in CHINATOWN. He was the less sympathetic of those two, not the one who says, “Forget it, Jake, it’s . . . Chinatown.”

Is this considered a horror movie? I always thought it was, but to me it seems to have more in common with Fifties science fiction movies like THEM! and TARANTULA.

Those are some of the things that occurred to me while I was watching this one. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the heck out of it and wondered how in the world I managed not to see it all these years. I’m glad I finally did, because CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is just a terrific movie.