Stolen - Jordan Gray

I’ve never been much of one for playing computer games, so I’ve never played RAVENHEARST, a mystery game set in the fictional English seaside town of Blackpool. But I’m more than happy to read books based on the game, the first of which, STOLEN, by Jordan Gray, has just been released.


Blackpool was the site of a famous train derailment and robbery in 1940 in which a number of people were killed, including some children of prominent British families who were sending them to the countryside so they would be safe from the German bombing attacks on London. During the confusion of the train wreck, some art treasures and a fortune in gold were stolen, and that loot was never found.


Seventy years later, a documentary film about the Blackpool wreck is about to start production, and American public relations expert Molly Graham is involved in the project. Molly lives in Blackpool with her British husband Michael, a video game designer. At a party announcing the documentary, an elderly woman who is one of the local citizens is murdered. Michael and Molly’s house is broken into that same night. Clearly, somebody doesn’t want the documentary filmmakers poking into the decades-old train wreck and robbery.


That’s just the first of several murders as Michael and Molly investigate in classic amateur sleuth fashion. The plot twists around to involve more than just what’s apparent at first, and Blackpool, like every small town in books like this, proves to have more than its fair share of dark and deadly secrets lurking in its past.


STOLEN certainly has some cozy elements, such as its setting, but it doesn’t read all that much like a cozy. I was reminded more of some of the classic mysteries that feature a husband-and-wife detective team, such as Richard and Frances Lockridge’s Mr. and Mrs. North books. (I really ought to reread some of those.) There’s also a dose of well-handled action now and then, leading up to a very satisfactory climax. Michael and Molly Graham are really appealing characters. They’re both smart and attractive (but not overly cutesy), and they’re realistic in that they don’t really want to run around solving murders and finding themselves in danger – they would just as soon turn everything over to the local cops – but somehow it works out like that anyway.


It’s no secret that veteran author Mel Odom is the one behind the Jordan Gray pseudonym on this book, and it shows in the smooth, well-paced prose and excellent plot. There are at least three more books coming up in the Blackpool series (VANISHED, November 2010; SUBMERGED, February 2011; and UNEARTHED, May 2011), and I plan to read them all.

Forgotten Books: Combat General - William Chamberlain

When I was a kid in school, I loved it when the teacher would pass out the book order forms from Scholastic Book Services. I always found a lot of books I wanted, and I would order as many as my parents were willing to pay for. Even better were the days when the books actually arrived and the teacher gave us the ones we had ordered. I still remember racing home to read THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES in the Scholastic edition.

One book that I remember buying at school like that was COMBAT GENERAL by William Chamberlain. But for some reason I never read it, even though it sat on my shelf for years. I lost track of it and my other Scholastic books over the years. They were already gone before the fire wiped out my library.

However, I recently came across a copy of COMBAT GENERAL in the Nostalgia section at Half Price books, and I didn’t hesitate to pick it up, figuring it was finally time to read it, forty-five years after I bought it the first time.


I’ve always liked war novels. As you might expect from a book published by Scholastic, COMBAT GENERAL doesn’t have any real cussing or sex, but I’m not sure it really qualifies as a young adult novel, either. More than anything else it reminded me of the sort of war movie that was made in the Forties. Those didn’t have any cussing or graphic violence, either, but they still managed to tell some fairly gritty stories. So does COMBAT GENERAL. The protagonist is Brigadier General Miles Boone, who has spent the first few years of World War II stuck at a desk in Washington, so that he has a reputation as a “Pentagon general”. He’s finally transferred to a command position in an armored division and finds himself assuming his new post near the front lines in Belgium in the middle of December 1944.


Mid-December 1944? Uh-oh. You guessed it. Boone, with no combat experience, finds himself smack-dab in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge almost as soon as he arrives at his new command. Throw in a superior officer with whom Boone has been feuding since their days at West Point, a reckless colonel with more ambition than tactical skills, a little romance with the American widow of a French officer, a wise-cracking sergeant to drive Boone around, and you’ve got a Forties movie, all right. Randolph Scott would have made a great Miles Boone. And as a novel, Chamberlain’s yarn, while predictable, is very well-written and highly entertaining. The history seems accurate to me, and so do the characterizations.


Which is not surprising considering that William Chamberlain was a career army officer, retiring as a general himself in 1946. He certainly knew what he was writing about. But in doing a little research about him for this post, I came across something that surprised me. At the same time he was putting together a long and distinguished military career, Chamberlain was also a prolific pulp author, breaking in during the late Twenties with Western, war, and adventure yarns in a variety of pulps. He continued contributing to the pulps into the 1950s, when he made the transition to the slicks and published a steady stream of war and military-oriented stories, primarily in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. I may well have read some of them while visiting one of my aunts in the Sixties, because she always had stacks of old issues of the SEP around. Chamberlain also wrote paperback Westerns and hardcover war novels (COMBAT GENERAL was originally published by the John Day Company, as were several more of Chamberlain’s novels).


Chamberlain’s background as a pulp writer is easy to see in COMBAT GENERAL. It’s especially evident in the masterful pacing. Late in the book, when General Boone and his driver get involved in an adventure when they’re separated from the rest of the command, the story maybe gets a little too pulpish, considering the realism of the rest of the book (an encounter with an SS officer results in the trading of insults like “American swine!” and “Nazi dog!”), but that really doesn’t detract much from the novel’s overall impact.

COMBAT GENERAL is a fine book, one of the best I’ve read this year. Bear in mind, though, that as a middle-aged guy who grew up watching COMBAT! on TV, along with a bunch of war movies, I’m a prime example of the target audience for this sort of yarn. But I really enjoyed it. Some of those SEP stories of Chamberlain’s have been collected in several different volumes. I may have to order them. I also discovered that he was the author of MATT QUARTERHILL, RIFLEMAN, a novel about a young Marine rifleman in the South Pacific campaign. I checked that one out from the bookmobile many, many years ago and read it, and liked it enough that I’ve always remembered the title even though I didn’t recall that Chamberlain wrote it. I may have to get my hands on a copy of that one, too, for a reread. I’m glad I stumbled across COMBAT GENERAL. It proves that my instincts were right when I ordered it all those years ago at Walnut Creek Elementary, even though I didn’t read it until now.

A Deal Too Good to Pass Up

Acclaimed mystery author Marcus Sakey has just published a collection of short stories available on Smashwords, Amazon, B&N, etc. called SCAR TISSUE.  He's offering a great deal:  50% off the price of the book, which is very affordable to start with, or a free short story.  If you're interested, leave your email in the comments section (or send it to me directly and I'll pass it on) and you'll receive a coupon code to take advantage of the offer.  I have the collection and plan to read it soon.

Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-in Writing - Lee Goldberg, editor

I haven’t done all that much in the way of tie-in writing – three Walker, Texas Ranger novels, a Kolchak the Night Stalker story, an upcoming Green Hornet story – but I’ve been a fan of the genre for decades, going back to those Lone Ranger novels I checked out of the Odessa Public Library and the Man From U.N.C.L.E. paperback I bought brand-new in 1964 off the paperback rack in Buddies Grocery Store. (Notice how smoothly I work in those bits of book nostalgia.) I’ve read many, many TV tie-in novels and movie novelizations over the years and still enjoy them.


Despite my somewhat limited professional experience in the genre, I’ve been a member of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers since it was founded several years ago by Lee Goldberg and Max Allan Collins. The IAMTW has just published a new non-fiction book on the subject of tie-ins, and it’s an excellent work that offers something for just about everybody.


If you’re an author interested in writing tie-ins, TIED IN offers advice from the top names in the business, ranging from the general guidelines of a round table discussion of the business and craft of writing tie-ins to specific subjects such as writing tie-in novels for the YA market (from Aaron Rosenberg), novelizing video games (from William C. Dietz), writing soap opera-based tie-ins (from Alina Adams), and writing movie spin-off novels (from Greg Cox). If you’re a fan of certain TV series, such as STAR TREK, PSYCH, MURDER SHE WROTE, and BURN NOTICE, you can get all the behind-the-scenes stories on how the novels based on those series came to be written.


For someone like me, who’s very interested in the history of popular fiction, the highlight of TIED IN is David Spencer’s “American TV Tie-ins from the 50s Through the Early 70s”, which is almost a book in itself. It’s a fascinating historical discussion of how the TV tie-in novel originated and evolved over the years and touches on many of the books I was buying and reading when they were new. This article really brought back a lot of good memories for me. Along similar lines, also of great interest to me were fine articles by Paul Kupperberg about comic book and comic strip tie-in novels (I read a bunch of those, too) and Robert Greenberger about the connection between pulp magazines and tie-ins.


TIED IN is available as an e-book right now, with a print edition coming out soon. Either way, I don’t think you can go wrong. It’s informative, entertaining, and a must-have if you have any interest in tie-in fiction. Highly recommended.

Rabid Child - Pete Risley

Here’s another debut novel, Pete Risley’s RABID CHILD, published by New Pulp Press, one of the excellent small presses that have been founded in recent years. RABID CHILD is about as bizarre as any crime novel you’re likely to read, starting with that creepily effective cover.


The protagonist of this novel is a young homeless man named Desmond Cray. Desmond is not a nice guy. He has a history of being a peeping tom and child molester, and as the novel opens is leading a squalid life, eating out of trash cans and sleeping wherever he can find a place. Then he runs into a former foster parent of his, Mrs. Honnecker, and allows himself to be persuaded to go back to her home with her. As with every noir novel – and RABID CHILD is about as noir as you can get – this seemingly innocent decision turns out to be a bad mistake.


Because Mrs. Honnecker is crazy, the crippled religious fanatic who lives with her as a boarder is even crazier, and her daughter, who has a sordid history with Desmond, may be the craziest and most dangerous of them all. Desmond, who’s really not that bad a fellow if you can get past that whole child molesting bit, finds himself in deeper and deeper trouble. He knows he should get away from them but can’t quite bring himself to do it. Inevitably, things spiral down to a violent, grotesque, unsettling climax.


You’ve got to admire Risley’s sheer guts for taking a character as unsympathetic as Desmond and making him the nominal hero of a novel. I’m not quite sure how he manages to pull that off, but he does. This is a fast-paced, nightmarish yarn with something to offend and/or disturb just about everybody. I’m not sure what to make of Risley. There’s very little information about him in the book, and the quality of the writing is good enough that it makes me suspect the name may be a pseudonym for an experienced, better-known author. At the same time, there’s a raw quality to RABID CHILD that really makes it seem like a first novel. Either way, this is a fine book that really kept me turning the pages, but I’m not going to recommend it for everybody. If you’ve read this far, you already know whether or not the subject matter bothers you so much you ought to avoid it. But if you want to read something that’s probably unlike anything you’ve read before, you ought to check it out.

The Book of Eli

It seems like the older I get, the less I care for post-apocalyptic novels and movies. There are plenty of good ones, of course, including some of the classics of the genre, but my tolerance for worldwide grimness and bleakness seems to be dwindling. Because of this tendency, I was hoping that I’d like THE BOOK OF ELI, but it wouldn’t have surprised me all that much if I didn’t.


As it starts out, the movie certainly has “grim and bleak” down. Denzel Washington is a “walker”, somebody who wanders the mostly deserted highways of an America all but destroyed by a war of some sort. It’s never really explained what happened, but civilization has disappeared for the most part and survival is a matter of kill or be killed. Since Washington’s character Eli has lived for thirty years after the disaster that changed the world, he’s gotten really good at killing.


He wanders into what remains of a town that’s ruled by a local tyrant played by Gary Oldman with his usual lip-smacking evil. His main henchman is Ray Stevenson, who was so good as Titus Pullo in ROME. The always appealing Mila Kunis is on hand, too, as a young woman who wants to get away from the town.


Oldman’s character has been searching for a particular book, and it just so happens that Eli has the only copy still in existence. (No points for guessing what the book is. It’s pretty obvious right from the start.) When Oldman finds out that Eli has the book, he tries to take it, but Eli gets away. Kunis’s character goes on the run with him. From there, the rest of the movie is mostly chases and fight scenes.


It took me a while to warm up to this film with all its bloody nihilism and eye-straining sepia-toned photography. But I wound up getting involved in the story, and Washington, Kunis, and Stevenson are all very good in it. The action scenes are staged so that you can tell what’s going on, at least most of the time, and the ending is pretty satisfying. It’s certainly not a feel-good movie, but I think it’s well worth watching. And it’s kind of gotten me in the mood for something else post-apocalyptic, so we’ll see if anything develops from that.

Killing Trail - Charles Gramlich

We recently bought a Kindle when Amazon dropped the price, and the first book I bought for it and read on it is Charles Gramlich’s Western collection, KILLING TRAIL. It was a great way to inaugurate my Kindle-reading experience.


KILLING TRAIL includes two novellas, “Killing Trail” and “Showdown at Wild Briar”; two short stories, “Powder Burn” and “Once Upon a Time with the Dead”, an excerpt from Gramlich’s unpublished first novel, a Western called THE BEAR PAW VALLEY, and a couple of essays, one about the Old West history to be found in the area where Gramlich grew up in Arkansas and the other about Louis L’Amour. All the fiction is outstanding.  These are well-written yarns with good characters and plenty of action. “Showdown at Wild Briar” is probably my favorite of the bunch, because the hero has to escape from a particularly deadly trap and then finds an even worse plot twist waiting for him. “Once Upon a Time with the Dead” is a flash fiction piece, very poetic and effective. These stories have really whetted my appetite for the first full-length Western novel that Charles is bound to write one of these days, sooner rather than later, I hope. For now, you can start off with this collection, which I give a high recommendation.


As for the Kindle itself, I enjoyed reading KILLING TRAIL on it. When such devices were first introduced, I didn’t think I’d like them, but since then I’ve heard enough people whose opinions I respect say that they liked reading books on the Kindle so I wasn’t really surprised. I don’t know how to do much with it yet, like change the type size or navigate through a book other than one page at a time, but I’m sure I’ll learn all the little tricks. It almost certainly won’t replace reading actual books for me, but for things that are more easily available on the Kindle – or only available on the Kindle – I think it’s great.

National Day of the Cowboy

Don't forget to celebrate the National Day of the Cowboy today.  Here's an excellent place to start: Ron Scheer's Buddies in the Saddle blog, with a special post today about some of the fictional characters who best exemplify the Code of the West.  As for me, I'll be working on a Western today, so maybe that counts as my celebration.

The Hanging Tree - Bryan Gruley

Like STEIN, STONED, which I posted about a few days ago, THE HANGING TREE is set in 1999. It’s the second novel in a series, following STARVATION LAKE, which I haven’t read. I’m obsessive enough that starting with the second book in a series bothers me a little, but author Bryan Gruley does a fine job of writing this one so that a new reader doesn’t feel the least bit lost. I have some experience at that, and it’s harder than it sounds.


THE HANGING TREE is narrated by Gus Carpenter, the editor of the twice-weekly newspaper in the small town of Starvation, Michigan. Gus had gone away to the big city (in this case, Detroit) to make his fortune, but unfortunate circumstances have forced him to return to his hometown. Change is coming to Starvation, though. On the one hand, the economy has taken a downturn and many of the businesses have closed. On the other, the newspaper has been bought out by a bigger company that brings in a new managing editor, the importance of the Internet is growing, and Gus’s career in journalism isn’t turning out the way he expected at all. Added to that, as this book opens, is the apparent suicide of a distant cousin of his, a young woman with a bad reputation who left Starvation but, like Gus, eventually came back. Even though he and his cousin never really got along very well, Gus feels driven to investigate her death and find out what caused her to end her life, and, as you might expect, he uncovers a number of dangerous secrets in the process.


Oddly enough, despite all the sex, violence, and cussin’ in it, THE HANGING TREE reminded me a little of a cozy mystery in the way it goes about gradually uncovering the sinister underbelly of small-town life. It’s a very well-written book, and Gruley’s prose has the same sort of vivid elegance as James Lee Burke’s novels. The pace is a bit leisurely for my taste, but it helps that Gus Carpenter is such a likable, well-developed character. I expect that I’ll go back and read his first appearance in STARVATION LAKE and will return to this series as it continues. If you like dark, small-town mysteries, there’s an excellent chance you’ll enjoy THE HANGING TREE. I did.

Interview on BookLife

Jeremy L.C. Jones has posted an interview with me on the BookLife website.  You can check it out here.  And while you're at it, I recommend that you read the rest of this excellent series of interviews with Western writers Johnny D. Boggs, Cameron Judd, Russell Davis, Max McCoy, Jane Candia Coleman, Lucia St. Clair Robson, Thomas Cobb, and Susan K. Salzer.