Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place

After reading some Sgt. Rock stories in that digest collection earlier this month, I was in the mood for more. SGT. ROCK: BETWEEN HELL AND A HARD PLACE is a real mixture of the old and new. The art in this graphic novel is by the classic Sgt. Rock artist, Joe Kubert. And I mean all the art is by him, right down to the color separations and the lettering. The script is by Brian Azzarello, who I guess is new compared to Kubert, although he’s actually been writing comics for more than ten years now. It’s an odd combination, but it works. Really well, in fact.

The story finds Easy Company in the Hurtgen Forest, advancing from Belgium into Germany. Most of the “combat-happy joes” that long-time readers are familiar with are here: Ice Cream Soldier, Bulldozer, Wild Man, Little Sure Shot, and of course, Sgt. Rock himself. There are also a lot of new replacement troops sent to the front for the big push that’s coming. The first part of the book is a fairly standard war story, with Kubert and Azzarello introducing the reader to the new characters and filling in some back story on the older ones.

But then halfway through, the story takes a sudden twist. Easy has captured four S.S. officers, and during the confusion of a skirmish, three of the prisoners wind up dead, shot at point-blank range. The fourth prisoner is missing. The rest of the book has Rock trying to solve the mystery of who killed the German officers while also trying to keep himself and his men alive and carry out their orders to capture a town being occupied by the enemy. It’s a big job, but who better to handle it than the indomitable Sgt. Rock?

Joe Kubert’s art is a little looser and less detailed here than it is in those classic stories from the Sixties, but it’s still very effective. You expect an old pro like Kubert to be a great pure storyteller in his art, and he certainly is. The violence is a little more graphic than it was in the old OUR ARMY AT WAR days, and so is the language in Brian Azzarello’s script. Azzarello does a fine job, though (except for one bit of dialogue that’s so anachronistic it knocked me right out of the story for a moment). He’s one of the modern-day minimalists when it comes to comic book scripting: no captions, just dialogue. That's all right when you’ve got art like Kubert’s to work with, but I’ll admit, having grown up in the Sixties, when I read modern comics I sometimes miss the more traditional writing styles of Stan Lee, Gardner Fox, John Broome, etc.

Overall, BETWEEN HELL AND A HARD PLACE is a very good World War II graphic novel. Rock is still Rock. If you’re already a fan, that right there is all the reason you need to read this one. And if you’re not, this is a good place to start. Highly recommended.

PW Starred Review

Publishers Weekly likes HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY, giving it a starred review this week. You can read the whole thing here, but the quotes I particularly like are " . . . raises the action bar to nosebleed heights" and "Pulp adventure fans will be thrilled to see the genre so smashingly resurrected." You can't beat that as a nice way to start your week.

Lords of Corruption - Kyle Mills

I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t read a lot of big international thrillers, but I do like a good one every now and then. LORDS OF CORRUPTION is set mostly in Africa, in (to quote Woody Allen), “a fictional but real-sounding country”. It’s a country plagued by tribal violence and ruled by the iron fist of a military dictator. Throw in poverty and disease and you’ve got a place that needs a lot of help.

A young man named Josh Hagarty sets out to provide some of that help, although actually Josh is just interested in a job. He has an engineering degree and an MBA, but he’s also an ex-con because of his inadvertent part in an armed robbery when he was a teenager. He has trouble at home, too, with an alcoholic, dying mother and a younger sister who wants to go to college, so when he’s offered a job with a charity that runs agricultural projects in Africa, he can’t turn down the opportunity.

Unfortunately (and you knew this was going to be the case), things don’t work out like Josh expects them to, and he soon realizes that the so-called charity is really just a front for an international criminal conspiracy. (This isn’t a spoiler. The book’s title sort of gives it away, and the author doesn’t really withhold what’s going on from the reader, anyway.) Josh doesn’t necessarily want to bring down the bad guys. He just wants to survive the various dangerous situations in which he finds himself, but that means that he has to take on some very powerful enemies.

The first half of this novel is a little slow, what with all the set-up going on, but once the real action starts in the second half, it never lets up for very long. Author Kyle Mills’ style is pretty simple and straightforward, and that’s the way he keeps the pace moving, straight forward. Not only that, but he springs a number of surprises along the way, not so much in the plot itself but in how the characters react to it. Things happen that I wasn’t expecting at all, and that’s always welcome. A lot of times, I know how a book is going to play out well before I get to the end, but that’s not the case here. Another thing that LORDS OF CORRUPTION has in its favor is its length. At approximately 90,000 words, it’s long enough to have some real heft to it, but it never feels bloated, the way so many contemporary thrillers do.

I thought I had read other books by Kyle Mills in the past, but looking over the list of his titles, I don’t see any I recognize, so I guess this is the first one I’ve read by him. But it won’t be the last, because I found LORDS OF CORRUPTION to be a very entertaining novel with just enough social and political musings to balance out the part that’s a top-notch adventure yarn.

Forgotten Books: Pushover - Orrie Hitt

With all the Orrie Hitt material I’ve posted on this blog recently (and there’s more in the works, I promise you), it’s about time I got around to reading one of his books. PUSHOVER is the story of Danny Fulton, a small-time con man who, along with a couple of partners, specializes in a scam involving community histories and the Federal Writers Project of the WPA (the first time I’ve encountered that particular angle in a novel about grifters). Most of this yarn centers around Danny, who narrates the novel, putting his usual scheme into action in a small city in upstate New York.

Now, PUSHOVER is not without its flaws. There’s not much action, and in fact, not a lot happens in the entire book. The big twist near the end is pretty obvious early on, and the ending itself seems a little forced and doesn’t ring completely true to me.

So, why am I featuring it as a Forgotten Book and recommending that you read it if you come across a copy? Because Hitt does a remarkable job of capturing the grubby desperation of these people, especially Danny and his two partners, one a young, beautiful blonde who’s separated from her husband, the other an advance man and salesman who misses his wife and family. All of them seem to be teetering on an emotional brink, and so do most of the people they encounter.

But Danny himself is the centerpiece of the book, and he’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve run across in a while. He’s so determined that he’s a heel who cares only about money that even when he does something nice for somebody, which is surprisingly often, he has to rationalize it to himself by coming up with some rotten motive. Then, when he does decide to give up his career as a con man, settle down, and get married, you just know that it’s not going to work out for him. I don’t know if Hitt or his editor at Beacon Books titled this book PUSHOVER, but it’s an ironically apt title. The cover copy makes you think that it’s all the women in Danny’s life who are the pushovers, but the description actually fits him even better.

Of course, as with all the sleaze novels of that era, the cover copy also makes you think this book is a lot spicier than it really is. There’s actually very little sex in it, and most of what there is falls into the “sin, suffer, repent” pattern that’s also common to the genre. There are also quite a few nice lines, some funny, some poignant. Since this is the first novel I’ve read by Orrie Hitt, I can’t speak for the entire body of his work. Sure, he wrote a lot of books for not much money ($250 to $500 was the usual advance . . . which is really not that bad for that time period), but PUSHOVER, at least, is not the work of a hack. Hitt gives his characters enough depth to make them memorable and does so in prose that’s fast-paced and very readable, despite a few unpolished moments. I’ll be reading more of his novels soon.

Now for the other thing that intrigues me about this book: the cover art. It’s nothing special, really, okay but not spectacular, but as soon as I laid eyes on it, I said to myself, “I’ve seen this cover before, but on another book. And the guy had an eyepatch!” That nagged at me ever since the book arrived in the mail. I had a feeling that I had owned a book with the same art, and that it was on one of those early Fifties digest-sized novels published by Star Guidance, Croydon, Original Novels, etc. Long-time paperback collectors know the sort of thing I’m talking about. So a few nights ago, I sat down and started searching for those publishers on ABE and checking out the listings that included cover scans. I never found the one I was looking for, but that jogged my memory enough so that I remembered Uni Books, another digest line that happened to be published by Universal Publishing and Distributing, the same outfit that later published Beacon Books. Then a name popped into my head: Steve Harragan. I seemed to recall that was the name of the author (well, the pseudonym, anyway) as well as the main character. I searched for Harragan’s name, and up popped Uni Books #44, SIN IS A REDHEAD. “That’s it!” I said. I never read it, but I remembered having that book, and I was almost sure it had the same cover art as PUSHOVER, only the guy had an eyepatch.

Well, I mentioned this to my friend Frank Loose, and wouldn’t you know it, he has a copy of SIN IS A REDHEAD and sent me a cover scan. As you can see, it’s the same painting, only the eyepatch is there in the earlier version, just as I thought, and there are a few other modifications in the paperback version, such as the keyhole motif. The artist is George Geygan, a prolific painter of paperback covers. Steve Harragan, by the way, was really a British author named William Macconnachie, or something like that, a little Internet research reveals, and SIN IS A REDHEAD was originally one of those Mushroom Jungle books.

Sounds like another good candidate for a Forgotten Books post, doesn’t it?

(And if you don’t know what I mean when I use the term Mushroom Jungle, you really need to check out this book by Steve Holland and this web page by John Fraser, which is part of a fascinating and much larger site.)

Scribe Award Nominees

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is pleased to announce this year's nominees for the 2009 Scribe Awards, which honor excellence in licensed tie-in writing—novels based on TV shows, movies, and games. The nominees for this year's awards are:

Best General Fiction Original
BURN NOTICE: THE FIX by Tod Goldberg
CRIMINAL MINDS: FINISHING SCHOOL by Max Allan Collins
CSI: HEADHUNTER by Greg Cox

Best General Fiction Adapted
DEATH DEFYING ACTS by Greg Cox
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL by James Rollins
THE TUDORS: KING TAKES QUEEN by Elizabeth Massie
THE WACKNESS by Dale C. Phillips
X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE by Max Allan Collins

Best Speculative Fiction Original
GHOST WHISPERER: REVENGE by Doranna Durgin
RAVENLOFT: THE COVENANT, HEAVEN'S BONES by Samantha Henderson
STARGATE SG-1: HYDRA by Holly Scott & Jamie Duncan
STAR TREK: TEROK NOR, DAY OF THE VIPERS by James Swallow

Best Speculative Fiction Adapted
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY by Bob Greenberger
THE MUTANT CHRONICLES by Matt Forbeck
STAR WARS - THE CLONE WARS: WILD SPACE by Karen Miller
UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS by Greg Cox

Best Young Adult Original
DR. WHO: THE EYELESS by Lance Parkin
PRIMEVAL: SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR by Steven Savile
DISNEY CLUB PENGUIN: STOWAWAY! ADVENTURES AT SEA by Tracey West

Best Young Adult Adapted
IRON MAN: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Stephen D. Sullivan
THE DARK KNIGHT: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohen
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 3D by Tracey West

The highest honor the IAMTW can bestow is the Grandmaster Award, which recognizes a writer for his or her extensive and exceptional work in the tie-in field. This year's honoree is KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO. He has written over thirty novels, most of them original tie-ins or novelizations. His work includes many Star Trek novels, as well as original books in the CSI: NY and Supernatural tie-in series, to name just a few.

The Third Annual Scribes will be awarded at a special ceremony at Comic-Con in San Diego July 23-29. (Specific date and time to be announced)

The IAMTW also awards two Special Gaming Scribes, honoring excellence in game-related tie-ins. Those awards are given at GenCon in Indianapolis August 13-16 2009 (http://www.gencon.com/2009/indy/default.aspx. Specific date and time of the ceremony to be assnounced) The nominees are:

Special Gaming Scribe - Best Original
EBERRON: THE INQUISITIVES, THE DARKWOOD MASK by Jeff LaSala
DRAGONLANCE: DEATH MARCH by Jean Rabe
EBERRON: THE DOOM OF KINGS by Don Bassingthwaite
WARHAMMER: ELFSLAYER by Nathan Long

Special Gaming Scribe - Best Adapted
THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT: BEYOND THE DARK PORTAL by Aaron Rosenberg & Christie Golden
THE MUTANT CHRONICLES by Matt Forbeck
METAL GEAR SOLID by Raymond Benson

For more information about the IAMTW (I AM a Tie-in Writer), please visit our site at http://www.iamtw.org/

The Fugitive Pigeon - Donald E. Westlake

When Donald E. Westlake passed away at the end of last year, I don’t recall seeing any mentions of this book in the numerous tributes to him and his work. I think it’s an important novel, though, because it’s part of the transition in his career, the divergence between Westlake the comic crime novelist and Richard Stark the hardboiled novelist. THE FUGITIVE PIGEON is his sixth book, originally published in 1965. I haven’t read the two Westlake novels immediately preceding it, KILLY and PITY HIM AFTERWARDS, but judging by those titles, they don’t sound like laugh riots. I know the first three novels under the Westlake name (THE MERCENARIES, KILLING TIME, and 361) are hardboiled, because I’ve read them. So I’m guessing that THE FUGITIVE PIGEON is something of a departure, a book that still has some hardboiled elements (gangsters, hit men, crooked cops) but also a considerable amount of screwball comedy. As such, it provides a template for a lot of Westlake’s later work that mixes comedy and crime.

But, now that the pontificating is out of the way, how’s the book itself, you ask? Great fun, I’m happy to report. The narrator is Charlie Poole, an unambitious young man who’s perfectly content to run a neighborhood bar in Canarsie. The bar is owned by Charlie’s Uncle Al, who’s a mid-level gangster. Occasionally, Charlie has to hold a package at the bar for somebody until it’s picked up later, and while he suspects this has something to do with his uncle’s criminal activities, he never asks for details. He doesn’t want to know.

But then late one night as he’s about to close up, two strangers come in, and Charlie quickly realizes that they’re hit men sent there to kill him. He has no idea why anybody would send killers after him, but when he manages to escape with his life, he decides that he’d better figure it out in a hurry, because the two assassins are still on his trail. This is the beginning of a whirlwind three days in which Charlie tries to find out who wants him dead and why, an investigation complicated by the fact that he has to keep dodging the two hit men. Along the way he runs into a murder (for which he’s blamed, naturally) and a beautiful young woman (for whom he falls, naturally). It’s all very fast and entertaining and sharply plotted and written, and while there’s not much of the slapstick humor that shows up in Westlake’s later books, it’s pretty funny in places, too.

I really enjoyed this one a lot. If you haven’t read Westlake before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’re a Westlake fan but have never gotten around to reading it, I highly recommend that you do so. Either way, you’re in for a treat.

Reviews

The first review of HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY has been posted over at the Pulp Fiction Reviews blog. I'm very pleased and honored by the kind words from Ron Fortier. Check it out. And while you're at it, head on over to Mystery Reader Discussion and take a look at this fine review of Livia's THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER.

Forgotten Books: Strictly for Cash - James Hadley Chase

If James Hadley Chase (who was actually an Englishman named Rene Raymond) is remembered for anything these days, it’s probably either his notorious, highly successful first novel, NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, or the charges of plagiarism leveled at one of his early novels, BLONDE’S REQUIEM, which some people thought borrowed a little too generously from Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. One of the people who thought so was Chandler himself, which led to an apology from Chase. Despite that embarrassment, Chase went on to a long, prolific career as an author of mysteries, thrillers, and noir-ish crime yarns.

I read a few books by Chase nearly thirty years ago and don’t remember much about them. A recent conversation with one of the readers of this blog prompted me to try another one, and since I’d recently picked up a copy of STRICTLY FOR CASH at Half Price Books, that’s the one I read. Originally published in England by Robert Hale in 1951, it’s one of numerous Chase titles reprinted in the U.S. by Pocket Books during the Seventies. It’s the story of down-on-his-luck boxer Johnny Farrar (is there any other kind of boxer in books like this?), who’s hitchhiking through Florida when he gets mixed up with a crooked fight promoter (is there any other kind?) and a beautiful but quite possibly dangerous dame (is there any other . . . never mind, you get the idea). So far there’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times before, even though it’s reasonably well-written and enjoyable.

But then Chase pulls a switch and starts playing with time in a way you don’t often see in yarns like this. Ultimately, you may know where he’s going with his story, but you can’t be sure how he’s going to get there, and some of the actual twists are fairly unexpected, too. Like every noir protagonist, Johnny thinks he’s doing the right thing, or at least the only thing he can, but the mess he’s in keeps getting worse and worse until everything comes together in an operatic, almost surreal climax. Along the way, the action scenes are very well-done, and there are some nice lines that made me laugh out loud, like “She had a figure that would make a mountain goat lose its foothold.”

Another charge leveled against Chase is that his books, although set in America, don’t sound American. Well, that’s true in this case, sometimes distractingly so. I’m as much of a supporter of pure texts as the next person, but really, in a book set in America, and published by an American publisher (as these Pocket Books reprints were), a character shouldn’t be pumping petrol and putting something in the boot of the car. It wouldn’t have been too hard for an editor to change those references, and it would have improved the book because sometimes they were so jarring that they knocked me right out of the story.

That said, I enjoyed STRICTLY FOR CASH quite a bit. Chase’s style really keeps the reader turning the pages most of the time. I have several more of his books on hand, and I have no doubt that I’ll read them. And it won’t take me another thirty years, either.

Barnum! in Secret Service to the USA

I’m still reading oddball graphic novels, and this one certainly fits in that category. Here’s the plot: Circus showman P.T. Barnum (who narrates) foils an assassination attempt on President Grover Cleveland, who persuades Barnum to go to work as a secret agent, along with some of the performers from his circus (his “Congress of Anomalies”). Barnum’s job is to stop the evil inventor Nikola Tesla from overthrowing the U.S. government. Helping him is a beautiful, cigar-smoking, female Secret Service agent named Firestone Kelly. Now, I suspect that most people’s reaction to that plot will fall on one of two extremes: either utterly stupid, or a whole lot of fun. I fall on the “whole lot of fun” end of the scale.

There’s a lot of THE WILD, WILD WEST to this one: colorful characters, grandiose plots, far-fetched scientific gimmickry. The story rips right along with cliffhangers and pulp-like escapes, a little romance, a little humor, and a general sense that the creators are having a great time. That usually means the reader will, too.

The script is by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman. I hadn’t heard of Tischman before, and Chaykin’s work has always been pretty hit-and-miss for me. I didn’t like his versions of THE SHADOW and BLACKHAWK, but he did a short-lived, very pulp-influenced comic book series called DOMINIC FORTUNE that was great. There’s an alternate version of Fortune that Chaykin did for another company that I liked, too. I think it was called THE SCORPION. Or maybe it was the other way around. That was nearly forty years ago, though I shudder to think of it. Anyway, I like what Chaykin has done here in collaboration with Tischman, and the art, by Nelo Henrichon (no, I’ve never heard of him, either) is very good, too. Overall, I think BARNUM! IN SECRET SERVICE TO THE USA is a fine graphic novel and recommend it to those of you who like the more offbeat stuff.

Amazing

Yesterday afternoon about three o’clock, one of my editors emailed and said that he needed the outline for an upcoming book in a series I write for him. I told Livia about the email and mentioned that I didn’t have a plot idea worked out for that book yet. Then I went back to work, thinking that I’d figure out something later. Less than an hour and a half after that, she handed me not one but three, count ‘em three, perfectly usable plots, complete with historical references for each. And this isn’t the first time she’s done something like that. I can only shake my head in awe.

I picked one of the plots, fleshed it out this morning, and sent it to the editor. I’m going to use at least one of the other two for another series, as well. No idea goes to waste around here.

On another note, I got author copies of one of my ghost jobs yesterday, too. It should show up in the stores in another week or so. But my name’s not anywhere on it. So just look for a book without my name, and that’ll be mine!