End-of-the-Month Update

Reading

I read fifteen books in April. They are, in order:

SIN IN THEIR BLOOD, Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)
PEANUTS: A GOLDEN CELEBRATION, Charles M. Schulz
TWISTED, Jeffery Deaver
THE HEIST, Michael A. Black
BATMAN: DETECTIVE, Paul Dini and Royal McGraw
THE LABYRINTH, Francis Stevens (Gertrude Bennett)
JONAH HEX: FACE FULL OF VIOLENCE, Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti
MARKHAM, Lawrence Block
THE DESERT PILOT, Max Brand (Frederick Faust)
THE HIDE HUNTERS, Lewis B. Patten
ASTONISHING X-MEN: DANGEROUS, Joss Whedon
THE BUTCHER #1: KILL QUICK OR DIE, Stuart Jason (James "Doc" Dockery)
THE AVENGER: THREE GOLD CROWNS, Kenneth Robeson (Paul Ernst)
THEY COULDN'T SAY NO, Matt Harding (Lee Floren)
APRIL KANE AND THE DRAGON LADY, Author Unknown (based on comic strip by Milton Caniff -- there'll be a post about this one in a day or two)

Movies

I watched six movies: THE ILLUSIONIST, BORDER FEUD, BORDERLINE, FREEDOM WRITERS, HAPPY FEET, and MAN OF THE YEAR.

Writing

It was another pretty good month, despite the traveling in the middle of it and the slump I've run into -- again -- at the end of the month. I went over my monthly goal by 37 pages, which means that I've erased my deficit for the year and am now 13 pages ahead of schedule. We'll see if that holds up. Setting arbitrary page goals has always bothered me a little. I feel like I'm a bit too obsessed about such things. But I've been doing it for so long that I wouldn't know any other way now.

Mystery Solved, Thanks to Ennis Willie

So I get up this morning and check my email, and there's a message from none other than Ennis Willie, the author of the Sand novels and many other great hardboiled crime novels from the Sixties. Once I calmed down my Inner Fanboy ("I got an email from Ennis Willie? How cool is that?"), I realized that he had given me the answer to a question I asked the other day in my post about the first novel in the Butcher series. Here are Ennis Willie's comments, posted here with his kind permission.

As a faithful follower of your Blog my interest was especially captured by your discussion about who wrote the first Butcher novel "Kill Quick or Die".

The author was an old friend of mine named James "Doc" Dockery, who had been writing novels for Lancer Books under the name Stuart Jason. I don't know how many books he wrote in the Butcher series or how Stuart Jason became a house name, but I can verify the first book. I recall sitting in his apartment here in Atlanta while he discussed his plot for a spy novel. The novel was going to start with his spy landing in Cairo, Egypt and taking a cab to the Shepherd Hotel. I said a name like the Shepherd Hotel didn't sound much like Egypt to me, and he explained that the hotel was real, that he had spent a lot of time in the area and had stayed at the hotel and was familiar with it and other local landmarks. I will add that the character at the time owed more allegiance to James Bond and Matt Helm than to Sand.

I've been out of touch with Doc for a long time, but a more likable guy would be hard to find. He used to spend long stretches of time in Mexico, then rush back to the U.S. to catch up on what was going on. He was always trying to drag me down there with him, and looking back on it now I'm surprised I never found time for at least one trip. With this in mind, I just tackled my filing system (old stuff on bottom / new stuff on top) looking for something on paper from the period. What I found was a letter he wrote me from Mexico about a year before the first Butcher Novel. The first paragraph gives a good picture of him I think.

"Dear Ennis:I just finished another masterpiece for posterity and am spending the day writing letters, and since your name is at the top of the list, you're one of the first to be afflicted by my devastating wit and sagacious pearls of wisdom. Seriously, I just want to talk to a friend who can answer me in English. Here in Tuxpan I am one lone gringo amongst sixty-five thousand Mexicans and it gets real hairy sometimes for lack of a familiar word."

I'm not familiar with James Dockery and haven't been able to find anything about him on the Internet, but the books Ennis mentions that Dockery was writing for Lancer as Stuart Jason must be a series of plantation novels that came out in 1969 and 1970: BLACK LORD, BLACK MASTER, BLACK HERCULES, and BLACK REBEL. They were reprinted by Manor Books about ten years later, still under the Stuart Jason name but with some of the titles changed. I have only one of them, the Manor edition DELTA STUD, which was originally BLACK HERCULES, and I've never read it.

Flipping through the Butcher novels I have, the style in most (but not all) of them seems to match Dockery's style in the first book, KILL QUICK OR DIE. I'm confident that he was the main author on the series until Mike Avallone took it over with #27. But I plan to read some of the others just to make sure.

In the meantime, if any of you know anything else about James Dockery, speak up. And many, many thanks to Ennis Willie for the information he's provided.

Man of the Year

Well, I'm nothing if not consistent in my inconsistency. Last weekend I pan HAPPY FEET because of too much Robin Williams and its schizophrenic nature, and what do I watch this weekend? MAN OF THE YEAR, which not only stars Robin Williams but is even more schizophrenic than HAPPY FEET -- and I sort of liked it.

It's half political comedy (a lot of which seemed to be improvised by Williams, including a few bits reminiscent of his days as Mork from Ork) and half political thriller, with some suspenseful scenes and even a little action. I don't care much for politics, either in real life or as a subject for fiction. But there are some good points made here and there in this movie, and Williams is pretty funny at times. The supporting cast is good, with Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum (who's starring in RAINES, the not-bad TV cop show that just wrapped up its run on NBC), and Christopher Walken in a non-sinister change-of-pace role for him. (I have to admit that I can't even hear Walken's voice anymore without thinking about his guest shot on THE SIMPSONS a couple of years ago where he's reading "Goodnight Moon" to some little kids. "Scooch closer, kiddies. Don't make me tell you again about the scooching.")

Since I keep talking about other things besides this movie, I guess I wasn't that impressed with it. But I laughed a few times and I didn't fall asleep. These days, I'll take that.

They Couldn't Say No -- Matt Harding (Lee Floren)

This is the soft-core porn novel by Lee Floren, writing as Matt Harding, that I mentioned a few days ago. Originally published by Beacon Books in 1961, it was reprinted in ’71 by Macfadden-Bartell (the edition I read). In looking through my shelves, I discovered that I have a couple of Beacon Books by Floren/“Harding”, MOTEL TRAP and THE NEAR-NUDES. I don’t think I’ll be reading them any time soon, though.

Floren wrote several hundred Westerns under his own name and various pseudonyms. I’ve read maybe a dozen and thought they ranged from passable (the early ones) to downright poor (everything after the mid-Fifties). THEY COULDN’T SAY NO, while not a Western, still falls into the downright poor category. It’s the story of Brad Raleigh, an up-and-coming Broadway actor who’s summoned to Hollywood to play the lead in a big Biblical epic. Before leaving New York, he breaks up with his long-time girlfriend, Mavis Montgomery, who had been his college sweetheart. Mavis wants to get married, and Brad doesn’t. What Brad wants to do is have sex with just about every woman he meets, which he proceeds to do for the next 140 or so pages. Mavis heads west, too, has a few flings of her own, and winds up working as a newspaper reporter in California, where – you guessed it – she runs into Brad again.

While the plot is extremely predictable most of the way, I’ll give Floren credit for coming up with a fairly decent twist at the end. It’s not anything to make the reader gasp in surprise, but it’s not the way I expected things to wrap up, either. The prose is so flat and lackluster, though, it would have taken more than that to save this book.

Of course, the reason I read THEY COULDN’T SAY NO in the first place was to see if I could spot any stylistic quirks of Floren’s that would indicate he might be the author of that first Butcher book I read recently. I didn’t. Which doesn’t really mean anything. Determining the true author of unattributed house-name books is usually just an educated guess at best. But that won’t stop me from trying to figure these things out, because I enjoy the hunt.

Death Head Crossing Cover

This one will be out in August, the first Western with my name on it in a long time. Don't worry, I'll remind you again when it's actually available. But I think it's a pretty good cover and wanted to show it off now.

Anonymity

Keith Chapman brings up a good point in his comment on my DUST DEVILS post, so I thought I'd address it in a separate post. He says:

The snazzy cover surely is better viewed at full-screen size. And as you say, it has the Reasoner name on it. Have you ever found house-name anonymity dispiriting? (Don't answer if you consider it wouldn't be politic, or just none of anyone's business!)

I think most writers, if they're being honest, would rather write under their own name (or a pseudonym of their choosing) than under a house-name. At one point in my career, I had written eighty novels, and only one of them had my name on it. People used to ask me if that bothered me, and my standard flippant answer was, "I don't care if my name is on the book, as long as it's on the check!"

And while there was -- and is -- a smidgen of truth in that, of course I'd like for all of my books to have my name on them. I'm proud of what I do. I really enjoyed it a few years ago when I had two historical series going at the same time, in hardback, with my name on the books.

But when I sit down at the computer, I'm not thinking about what name is going on the book. I'm thinking about the characters and the plot and what I can do with them and whether or not I've done enough research and does this scene need to go before that scene and trying to figure out whether this particular line needs some more tweaking . . . in other words, the same exact process that authors who write only under their own names go through. I'm sure there are writers who don't put as much care into house-name books. I'm sure that's been the case as long as there have been house names. But that's not the way I approach it, and it's not the way that my friends who work in this part of the business do, either. They're professionals and they do the best job they can, not only because that's the surest way to get that next contract, but because they care about the readers. And because they love to write.

But yeah, the recognition would be nice. On most of the books I write, I'm contractually bound not to reveal my connection with them, and it's not just a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" contract where people don't really care who knows. I could jeopardize my livelihood by revealing titles and bylines on here. On some of the series I work on, I can tell people privately which books I've written, but I wouldn't post a list. And some, like the Tales From Deadwood series, are pretty much open secrets. I plan to keep writing the house-name books because I enjoy them, because I have a good relationship with the editors I work for, and because they pay enough to keep me in the business and I'm too blasted old to go out and try to do anything else. But I'm very glad that 2007 will see the publication of two new books with my name on them, the aforementioned DUST DEVILS, and a Western/mystery coming this summer from Pinnacle Books, DEATH HEAD CROSSING.

I just got the cover for that one, by the way, and will post it in a few minutes.

Sage Tower -- Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

As I promised Juri a while back, here are my comments on the Dean Owen novel SAGE TOWER. This review was originally published in the Western apa, OWLHOOT.

The title of this short novel isn’t a geographical reference, as I thought it might be when I first picked it up. Instead it’s the name of the hero. Published as half of an Ace Double Western (with Ray Hogan’s KILLER ON THE WARBUCKET on the other side), it has some of the best blurb page copy I’ve read.

There were three things that brought Sage Tower out of Texas:
an eight-sided goldpiece;
a dying Mexican woman;
a message reading: there are no flowers on Emilio’s grave.

If you can read that and not want to read the book, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, compadres. As usual with a Dean Owen novel, the plot is complex, there’s a lot of back-story, and the characters are well-drawn. He packs a lot into a short (in this case, 118 pages) novel. Here we’ve got lust, revenge, buried loot, murder, gun battles, and several brutal, well-written fistfights, all in tough, lean, hardboiled Western style. This is a fine novel and only makes me want to read more of McGaughey’s books.

Dust Devils in the Forecast

No, I'm not talking about the weather. This is the cover for my novel DUST DEVILS, which will be published soon by Point Blank Press. I think it's pretty snazzy. Al Guthrie did a great job editing the book, and JT Lindroos put together a very attractive package. If you click on the picture, you should be able to read the back cover copy. This is the first book with my name on it in quite a while, and my first real crime novel, and I'm pretty proud of it. I hope some of you will read it and enjoy it.

Kill Quick or Die -- Stuart Jason

This is the first book in the Butcher series, one of the many men’s adventure series that sprang into being following the success of the Nick Carter and Executioner novels. The Butcher ran from 1970 to 1982, with a total of 35 books over that dozen years. The only ones from the series I’d ever read were the final nine, which were written by Michael Avallone under the Stuart Jason house-name. Avallone and I were corresponding regularly at the time, and there’s even a mention of me and my first novel TEXAS WIND in one of his later Butcher novels.

The origins of this series seem to owe something to the Daniel Port novels by Peter Rabe and the Sand novels by Ennis Willie. Bucher (I don’t think we ever get a first name for the character) is an orphan who is raised in a foundling home in Knoxville, Tennessee, becomes a member of the Mob as a young man, rises through the ranks to become a Syndicate big shot – then turns his back on his fellow gangsters and walks away, like Port and Sand. Naturally, the Mob vows vengeance on him and puts a bounty on his head, leading to numerous attempts on Bucher’s life and setting him up for a war against the Mafia. (Hmm, where have we heard that phrase before?) Whoever created the Butcher series doesn’t stop there, though. Not content to write a Mack Bolan clone, the author has Bucher recruited by a top-secret government organization known as White Hat. He receives the code name Iceman and is sent out on all sorts of secret agent-type missions. So what we have here is a deliberate cross between the Executioner and Nick Carter, and obviously the blend was a success, at least for a while.

All that back-story takes place before the first novel in the series, KILL QUICK OR DIE. In this one Bucher is sent to bring in a defecting Chinese Communist scientist named Dr. Fong who has invented some new super-duper gizmo. The actual gadget is purely a McGuffin and has nothing else to do with the plot. The Chinese don’t want Fong defecting to the West, though, so instead of sending agents of their own to track him down, they hire the Mafia to kill him. (You can’t worry too much about logic in a book like this.) In the course of trying to find Dr. Fong and save him from being assassinated, Bucher encounters a couple of other evil Syndicate plots and sets out to put the kibosh on them, too. We get some globe-trotting – from Atlanta to Cairo to Tel Aviv and back to Atlanta – and lots of politically incorrect, over-the-top action scenes. It’s all extremely goofy and written in a very distinctive style. I wouldn’t exactly call this book good, but I will say that I had a lot of fun reading it and I might even read some more of the series.

The authorship of the non-Avallone Butcher books is open to debate. The veteran Western author Lee Floren is supposed to have written at least two of them (#10 THE DEADLY DOCTOR and #11 VALLEY OF DEATH, according to the listing of Floren’s novels in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS), and some bibliographers attribute all the non-Avallone titles to him. I suppose it’s possible, but KILL QUICK OR DIE doesn’t read at all like Floren’s work to me. The style in some of the later books is different, leading me to believe that at least two authors besides Avallone worked on this series. I’d like to know who wrote this one, because it’s really like nothing else I’ve ever read before.

Happy Feet

Hey, I like singing, dancing penguins as much as the next guy. But I have to admit that I didn’t care much for this movie. It’s not bad, mind you. The animation is spectacular, and the music is good. The big penguin production numbers are probably the best thing in the movie. But it never quite settles down to a consistent tone, bouncing back and forth awkwardly between goofy animated comedy and screed against the evils of humanity. Also, a little of Robin Williams sometimes goes a long way for me, and at times it seems like he voices every other character in HAPPY FEET. I think I was the only one in our household who didn’t like the movie, though, so maybe I’m out of step . . . or maybe I was just in a curmudgeonly mood when I watched it.

I liked HAPPY FEET better than CARS, though. All of us hated CARS.