More Mounties

Since the book I've been working on has a Mountie in it, I decided to pull down a book from my shelves, an anthology I've had for several years entitled SCARLET RIDERS: PULP FICTION TALES OF THE MOUNTIES. It's edited by Don Hutchison and published by Mosaic Press. It may still be available for all I know. A lot of good pulp authors wrote Mountie stories at one time or another in their careers -- Ryerson Johnson, Lester Dent, Hugh Cave, Murray Leinster, even Frederick Nebel, who is much better known as a mystery author. I've read several of the stories and am enjoying the heck out of them. Currently I'm reading "Spoilers of the Lost Land" by Roger Daniels, from a 1938 issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. I'd never heard of Daniels before and suspected that the name might be a pseudonym, but a check of the FictionMags Index (an invaluable on-line reference) indicates that he was a journalist and that was his real name. This yarn is a pretty over-the-top blending of the Mountie and Lost Race genres and is very entertaining so far.

Monday I frittered away going to libraries and buying groceries, so finishing the current book had to wait until today. I wrapped it up late this afternoon, still have to do a little polishing but the hard part is done. I should get started on the next one by Thursday.

Shadow at Noon

SHADOW AT NOON, Harry White (Harry Whittington)
Pyramid Books, 1955

After he's forced to kill the son of a wealthy rancher in self-defense, drifter Jeff Clane is wrongly convicted of murder because of the rancher's influence. After escaping from jail before he can be hanged, Clane is pursued by a bounty hunter who wounds him with a long-range rifle shot. However, Clane is taken in and nursed back to health by a family of farmers. Clane's saviors and their homesteader neighbors are being crowded out of their valley by a range-hogging cattle baron who wants the valley for himself and will stop at nothing to get it. Once Clane recovers, he is inevitably drawn into this fight, as well as having to deal with the dangers dogging his own trail.

What a joy this book is to read! And I'm not saying that sarcastically. Yes, the plot is pure formula, although Whittington does go to the trouble of blending two standard plots into one. What makes it so entertaining is the rapid-fire, stripped-down prose and the noir-ish tone of the book. Whittington puts his characters through both emotional torment and physical torture. Clane doesn't heal overnight from his wound but is bothered by it throughout the entire book. Nor is he immune from the psychological effects of not only the violence he endures but also that he's forced to dish out. Like an earlier version of Ed Gorman, Whittington's Westerns are often crime stories populated by more realistic, fallible characters than are sometimes found in Westerns. SHADOW AT NOON is probably too formulaic to be considered one of Whittington's best books, but I had a wonderful time reading it anyway.

Other than reading, I spent the weekend plugging away on the current book and had a productive couple of days. I should wrap up this one on Tuesday, unless I get real ambitious tomorrow.

Leftovers

Steve asks below about the recipe for Livia's wild rice and cranberry stuffing. I checked with her, and unfortunately, there is no recipe. She just made it up as she went along. The main ingredients are wild rice, brown rice, cornbread, and dried cranberries. From there she just added spices until, in her words, "It smelled right." This is a perfect example of why cooking is an art. So, Steve, you're just going to have to experiment, I guess.

I had another good day writing and am glad of that. I can sort of see the rest of this book in my head now. It usually goes faster once I get to that point.

Turkey Day

Well, it was a pretty good day. I ate too much (Livia made a wild rice and cranberry stuffing that was really, really good), wrote 22 pages, and watched the Cowboys win a football game for a change. I was disappointed in Drew Henson's outing but still thought Parcells shouldn't have pulled him for the second half. They have to find out sooner or later if he can play. Julius Jones, on the other hand, seems to have answered that question already. He had a great game and looks like the real thing at running back, something the Cowboys haven't had for a long time. (Emmitt Smith, despite his overall great career, wasn't very good his last few years in Dallas.) All in all, a fairly quiet day at home. I like that better than going somewhere there's a mob of people.

Holiday

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it. And to those who don't, I hope you have a good Thursday anyway. I plan to spend most of the day writing, as this has been a pretty unproductive week when I couldn't really afford one. But there'll be a turkey dinner to eat and some football to watch, too.

Fade to Blonde

I've spent the past few days writing, going through a copy-edited manuscript, doing some work around the house, and watching it rain. There was one bright spot among all that semi-gloom, however: I read Max Phillips's novel FADE TO BLONDE, published by Hard Case Crime.

A lot of people I know I have already read and raved about this book, and I asked myself, Can it really be that good? The answer is an emphatic yes. It really is that good.

Writing about a past era isn't all that hard. It takes some research to do it right, but it can be done. Writing in the voice of a past era is a much greater challenge, it seems to me. Simply living in the present puts a filter over our eyes and in our brains that makes it difficult not to relate the past to what's going on now. Something that's off-kilter nearly always creeps in. Sometimes it's just an anachronism, sometimes it's a bit of heavy-handed symbolism that's the author's way of saying, "This book isn't really about the past, it's about what's going on in the world now." Somehow Phillips avoids this trap and writes a book set in the Fifties that could have been written in the Fifties. I didn't see a single missed step in the plot or hear a wrong note in the writing. It's been said that FADE TO BLONDE could have been a Gold Medal novel. It certainly could have. It's easily one of the best books I've read this year.

One More Britton Photo

I can't post this one because it's not the right kind of file, but you can see it at:

http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com/showpic.php?id=34

And I guess with that I should adjourn this meeting of the Barbara Britton Fan Club and get back to work.

Movie poster for another Barbara Britton appearance 

Barbara Britton and Richard Denning from "Mr. and Mrs. North" 

Books and DVDs

I've been writing some every day, and today was no different. But I also found the time to stop by a Half Price Books location that I don't visit very often. I came out with four books:

A trade paperback called ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LITERARY REFERENCE, which seems to be a year-by-year overview of Hemingway's work, including letters between him and Maxwell Perkins, assorted reviews, photocopies of manuscript pages, etc. I'm a big Hemingway fan, so I'll browse through this one happily, I'm sure.

The movie tie-in edition of Daniel Woodrell's Civil War novel WOE TO LIVE ON, under the movie title of RIDE WITH THE DEVIL. I never saw the movie, and I've only read one Woodrell novel, TOMATO RED, which I thought was okay but not something that was going to make me a big fan of his work. I liked it well enough to give this one a try, though.

Ace Double F-285, SHIPS TO THE STARS by Fritz Leiber and THE MILLION YEAR HUNT by Kenneth Bulmer. The Leiber is a short story collection. The only thing I've read by Bulmer was a Viking novel under a pseudonym, but it was pretty good.

NAKED IN A CACTUS GARDEN by Jesse Lasky Jr., a Hollywood novel I'd never heard of, but I generally like trashy Hollywood novels.

Not a great haul, but I'll take it.

I watched one of the Flash Gordon episodes on DVD, and while it was pretty cheap and hokey, I enjoyed it. Steve Hollard sports an odd hair style in this series, but for a non-actor he's pretty good, and so are the action scenes. Bill Crider has been talking about the Mr. and Mrs. North TV series starring Richard Denning and Barbara Britton (check out the photo of Ms. Britton on Bill's blog, if you haven't seen it already). I haven't seen any of the TV episodes, but years ago I read nearly all of the Mr. and Mrs. North novels by Francis and Richard Lockridge and really enjoyed them. I also read their series about a police detective named Heimrich, I think. Richard Lockridge continued writing after his wife's death, but the books weren't nearly as good, leading me to suspect that she plotted most of them.