Livia's New Covers

Here are the covers for Livia's two new mystery novels that will be out this fall.  THE PUMPKIN MUFFIN MURDER, the latest book in the Fresh Baked Mystery series, will be released on November 2.  KILLER ON A HOT TIN ROOF, the third book in the Delilah Dickinson series, comes out a few weeks later on November 30.  I've read both these books and think they're great.  Of course, I'm hardly an unbiased judge, but you can trust me on this one.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Mogambo

I’m not sure how I managed to miss seeing MOGAMBO, because it played on TV all the time when I was a kid. However, I hadn’t seen it until now. Actually, now that I think about it, I was never really much of a Clark Gable fan until I saw him in THE MISFITS in the early Seventies. That won me over, and I’ve enjoyed most of his films that I’ve seen since then.


But to get back to MOGAMBO, for the undoubtedly few of you who haven’t seen it, Gable plays a white hunter in Africa who captures animals for zoos and circuses, much like John Wayne’s character in HATARI!, which came out a few years later. His life is disrupted by the arrival of a brassy, wisecracking American showgirl played by Ava Gardner, who was supposed to go along on a safari with a maharajah. The safari was cancelled, but she didn’t know that, and now she’s stuck at Gable’s hunting camp for a while. An English couple show up later. The husband’s an anthropologist who wants to study gorillas; the wife is Grace Kelly. A romantic triangle soon develops between Gable, Gardner, and Kelly.


That’s just about the entire plot, and therein lies the problem with MOGAMBO. Not much happens, and there are some really slow stretches, which surprised me since it was directed by John Ford and his films usually perk along at a pretty good pace. The photography is great, the scenery is beautiful, and the acting is okay for the most part. I was never much of an Ava Gardner fan, either, but she’s really good in this movie.


I wanted to like this one more than I did, but I'm glad I saw it anyway. It’s certainly not a bad film, there’s just not much to it. I guess when it comes to jungle movies, watching all those Tarzan movies as a kid ruined me.

Western Pulp Cover: West, Sept. 20, 1926

I'm trying to be more diligent about updating the cover scans on the WesternPulps website, so I thought I'd go ahead and post here the one I just put up there.  It's from the September 20, 1926 issue of WEST, which features a Bat Jennison story entitled "Odds Are Even".  This was prompted by an exchange of comments between Jerry Page, Walker Martin, and myself about Bat Jennison and the author of the series, George Bruce Marquis.  I've never read any of these stories and probably ought to.  Anyway, I like the cover.  (By the way, this image is from the Fictionmags Index, surely one of the most important and useful sites on the web.)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Recently both of my daughters said to me, “You know what’s a really good movie, even though you wouldn’t think it would be? CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.” And now that I’ve seen it, I have to say that they’re right.


It’s the story of young, would-be inventor Flint Lockwood, who, after coming up with a series of inventions that don’t work out that well (the Monkey Thought Translator, for one), builds a machine that transforms the genetic material of ordinary water, turning it into food. At first this seems to be a great boon to humanity, until the machine (which has been shot accidentally into the stratosphere) spirals out of control and begins producing more and more food, all of it bigger than normal and increasing in size all the time, which leaves the world in danger of being destroyed by giant meatballs and hot dogs.


Yes, of course that’s pretty silly, which is probably what led Hollywood to market this as a kid’s movie, and there’s no doubt most kids would find it funny. But at the same time, it’s full of pop culture references and eventually becomes a fairly sharp-edged satire of scientific disaster movies such as THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and 2012. (I realize that referring to those movies as “scientific” is being generous. In that regard, CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS isn’t much more far-fetched.)


I’m still not all that fond of modern computer animation, but this movie is well-acted and has a funny script with some nice plot twists. I liked it a lot and think it’s well worth watching.

Presence of Mind - Edward Cline

Perfect Crime Books is rapidly becoming a force in the mystery small press field. They’ve published a couple of books by Bob Randisi, and now the second entry in a fine new private eye series by Edward Cline is about to come out. PRESENCE OF MIND is the second novel to feature New York PI Chess Hanrahan, who narrates in classic private eye fashion. This novel finds Hanrahan investigating the murder of a fellow PI, the head of an agency who had taken on a case Hanrahan was too busy to handle. Because of that, Hanrahan feels a certain responsibility to find out what happened.


Like a number of other novels, PRESENCE OF MIND is set in the relatively recent past, in this case the late Eighties, just as the computer industry is about to explode, and the case that got Hanrahan’s friend murdered involves an up-and-coming computer company. The complex plot has a lot more twists than that, however, and ultimately Hanrahan finds himself trying to untangle strands that involve political negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, blackmail, business chicanery, and a deadly secret that goes all the way back to the Korean War. There’s also a considerable amount of discussion about intellectualism and political philosophy, a couple of subjects that normally would have me yawning in a hurry, but Cline does a good job of making it all perk along nicely.


Chess Hanrahan is an appealing protagonist, smart enough to hold his own with those who consider themselves his intellectual and moral superiors, wry enough not to take himself or anybody else too seriously, and tough enough to handle the occasional action scene. Edward Cline writes very well, and if you’re a fan of private eye fiction, you ought to check out his work, including this novel.

Forgotten Books: The Crime Spectacularist - Lester Dent

There are quite a few collections of Lester Dent’s pulp stories available now, and I’ll eventually get to all of them, trust me. Dent is one of my all-time favorite authors and has been ever since that day in 1964 when I plunked down a quarter, two dimes, and two pennies (sales tax, you know) for a brand-spanking new copy of the Doc Savage novel METEOR MENACE off the paperback spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore.


THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST is a collection that originally came out in 2006, but it’s still in print and available from Pulpville Press. It includes two novelettes and a novella starring Foster Fade, a private detective who works exclusively for a New York tabloid called The Planet. His job is to root out spectacular crimes and solve them, well, spectacularly, thereby increasing The Planet’s circulation when the paper runs exclusive stories about these exploits. Fade supposedly writes these stories, but since he’s a detective and adventurer, not a scribbler, the yarns are actually ghosted by his sidekick, a beautiful platinum blonde named Din Stevens who carries an automatic in her purse and is not averse to using it.


If that bit of background doesn’t catch your interest, you might as well stop reading this post. As for me . . . boy, I love this stuff. The three stories in THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST originally appeared in the pulp ALL DETECTIVE in 1934, which was also the second year of Dent’s Doc Savage novels and quite possibly the best year in the whole run of that series. So Dent was pretty much at the top of his game when he wrote these Foster Fade stories, and it shows. The first one, “Hell in Boxes” concerns the deadly and mysterious Aroma Assassin, whose murders are accompanied by a distinctive smell. Dent throws in some killers from South America, as well. The second story, “White-Hot Corpses”, centers around nefarious shenanigans at a creepy, deserted amusement park (a great setting for a story like this) and features one of the grotesque, oddball murder methods that Dent often came up with for his stories. And the third story, “Murder in Circles” is the longest and best of the bunch, with Fade and Din trying to track down some parrots found floating at sea in a canoe. Why those parrots are so important is a mystery, but the quest to recover them involves half a dozen killings, another mysterious murder method, and an isolated Caribbean island. This story could have easily been done as a Doc Savage novel, but at this stage of his career Dent was so imaginative I don’t imagine he had much trouble coming up with plenty of plots.


An added attraction in these stories is the way Dent’s hardboiled prose gallops along at such a breath-taking pace. Most of the time, he was one of the best pure storytellers who worked in the pulps, and once you start any of these stories, you’ll want to keep flipping the pages until you get to the end.


Foster Fade is similar to Doc Savage (and other Dent characters) in that he’s obsessed with gadgets and always has some gizmo handy to help him get out of whatever jam he’s in. He wisecracks a lot more than Doc ever did, though. But as far as I’m concerned, Din Stevens sort of steals the show in these stories. She’s a great character, brave when she has to be, as quick with a wisecrack as her boss, and a real babe, to boot. Dent should have written more stories about her. She could have carried her own series.


It’s also interesting that Fade and Din work for a newspaper called The Planet. It’s been fairly well established that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were heavily influenced by Doc Savage in their creation of Superman, and here’s another instance where they might have been influenced by Dent’s work. Sure, the paper in these stories is a tabloid, and it’s called The Planet, not The Daily Planet, but that strikes me as close enough to be a possibility, anyway. So does the relationship between Fade and Din. A lot of their dialogue could have easily come out of the mouths of Clark Kent and Lois Lane.


All in all, THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST is a fine collection, and if you’re a fan of fast-paced pulp adventure stories, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Bullet for a Ranger - James J. Griffin

BULLET FOR A RANGER is James J. Griffin’s latest novel featuring Texas Ranger Jim Blawcyzk, and as always, it’s an excellent traditional Western novel with plenty of action and a very likable protagonist.


This one opens with Blawcyzk in the same sort of predicament that the protagonists of numerous classic hardboiled crime novels find themselves in: he wakes up naked and hungover in a strange bed, with a beautiful woman beside him who happens to be dead. The similarities to those “man on the run” novels continue as Jim is arrested for murder by the corrupt local authorities and eventually has to escape and try to prove his innocence while eluding capture.


Of course, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll be successful, but Griffin throws in a nice twist or two along the way. You probably won’t be surprised by any of them, but in this case the fact that you know what’s coming while the characters don’t actually added to my enjoyment of the book.


Jim Griffin always brings a lot of passion and enthusiasm to his work, and he’s a gifted yarn-spinner. I had a fine time reading BULLET FOR A RANGER, and if you like traditional action Westerns, I think you will, too.

Legion

LEGION reminds me a lot of some of the horror novels I read in the Seventies and Eighties. A motley group of humans with assorted back-stories (think GRAND HOTEL or STAGECOACH) are trapped in a diner/gas station on the edge of the Mojave Desert and are forced into being humanity’s only defenders against a rapidly approaching apocalypse. Shades of Stephen King and Robert R. McCammon! (And why does the apocalypse always start in the desert southwest?) Oh, and there’s a pregnant woman whose child is the key to saving the world, so our heroes – some of whom will live and some of whom will die – have to protect her until the baby is born and then protect the child.


Yes, you’ve seen and/or read all of this before. One twist is that it’s God who’s going to destroy the world, and the horde of monsters attacking the diner are really humans possessed by angels. And it’s a renegade angel, Michael (played by the always good Paul Bettany) who shows up with a bunch of automatic weapons and a rocket launcher to pitch in on the human side.


Despite the fact that it’s pretty predictable, LEGION is also well-made and entertaining. Sure, you know the formula, but it manages to generate considerable suspense at times. The rest of the cast, which includes Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, and a number of familiar faces from TV, does a good job, and the special effects are creepily effective. If you liked all those horror novels with similar plots, you’ll probably enjoy LEGION. I did.

From Paris With Love

Usually if Luc Besson is involved in a movie, you know there’s going to be a lot of stylish, over-the-top action in it. FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is no exception, although Besson just came up with the story for it. The plot concerns a young man working as the personal aide to the American ambassador to France who is also a low-level operative for the CIA. He gets a chance to move up in the secret agent ranks when he’s assigned to help out a visiting operative who comes to Paris on a mysterious mission that seems to keep changing.


Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays the young man, and John Travolta (with shaved head, beard, and earrings) is the veteran agent whose methods are eccentric, to say the least. After a while, you begin to wonder if Travolta’s character has gone rogue and has an agenda of his own, or if he’s just plain nuts. This is one of those “nothing is what it seems” movies, though, and eventually everything makes sense, but not before there are a lot of those over-the-top action scenes.


Speaking of over the top, Travolta hams it up shamelessly in this one, and few people are better than him at hamming it up and still somehow making his part work. I liked just about everything about FROM PARIS WITH LOVE, even the corny PULP FICTION in-joke. I have a feeling that this is one of those “love ‘em or hate ‘em” movies, too, so bear that in mind if you decide to watch it. I had a fine time with it.

6 Guns

6 GUNS is a new, straight-to-DVD Western from The Asylum, a production company that doesn’t have the best reputation. (I’m just going by what I’ve read; this is the first film from them that I’ve seen.) So my expectations were fairly low, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is a pretty good little film.


It has a simple revenge plot: a gang of outlaws goes after a former lawman who killed the gang leader’s father. They kill the man and his two sons, then rape his wife and leave her for dead. But she survives and enlists the help of a famous bounty hunter to help her get revenge on the outlaws. She doesn’t just want the bounty hunter to go after them, though. She wants him to teach her how to be a gunfighter so she can help kill them. There’s some definite HANNIE CAULDER influence there, I think.


Things play out about like you’d expect, although there are a few twists that sort of stretch credibility almost to the breaking point. The action scenes are well-staged and not too gory, and the production values are pretty good. Barry Van Dyke is not somebody I would have picked to play a rugged, tight-lipped Western hero in the Clint Eastwood mode, but he does a fine job as the bounty hunter.


You’d think that Westerns would be more attractive to movie producers than they are. There aren’t many types of movie that can be made more cheaply these days: few, if any, special effects, typically a small cast, and not many sets (there are only a handful in 6 GUNS). I guess that’s why most Westerns that get made are low-budget efforts like this one. Fortunately, you can make a good Western on a low budget, and 6 GUNS falls into that category. It’s not a great film, but it’s worth worthing.