Forgotten Books: Hangin' Pards - Gordon D. Shirreffs

Gordon D. Shirreffs was one of the most consistently entertaining hardboiled Western authors for many years. I’ve read quite a few of his books, and they’ve all been good. I’d never heard of this novel (which is half of an Ace Double, with the other side being Shirreffs’ RIDE A LONE TRAIL), but when I ran across a copy, I certainly didn’t hesitate to pick it up. So far, I’ve been well rewarded for doing so.


The protagonist of HANGIN’ PARDS (a great title, by the way) is Holt Deaver, a young man who has drifted onto the wrong side of the law on occasion but isn’t exactly a hardened owlhoot. As the book opens, he’s running from trouble. The men he was riding with robbed and murdered an army paymaster over Holt’s objections, and they’ve decided that they need to kill him in order to keep him from ever turning them in. He had to gun down one of the bandits to get away from them – not the first fatal shooting scrape he’s been mixed up in –and now the rest of the gang is closing in on him. Think things can’t get any worse for our boy Holt? Of course they can.


That’s what happens when he runs into an old outlaw named Cass Riker who has even more trouble on his trail. It seems that Cass has just been released from Yuma Penitentiary, where he served fifteen years for a Wells Fargo robbery that netted him anywhere from eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. (The number keeps changing depending on who’s telling the story.) Cass is the only one who knows where the loot is hidden, so his former partners – who he may or may not have double-crossed – are trying to catch him so they can torture the location of the money out of him. Since both of them are in trouble, Holt and Cass throw in together, of course, with Cass promising Holt a share of the loot if they get away.


There’s nothing particularly original about this plot, but the joy of reading Shirreffs’ work is in his mastery of pacing and his tough, gritty prose. The action scenes in his books are as hardboiled as they come. Plus his descriptions of the rugged settings are vivid without being long-winded and really capture the Arizona landscape. The final showdown takes place at night in an eerie ghost town and is very effective.


HANGIN’ PARDS doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a pleasure to read and packs plenty of excitement into an economical 40,000 words or so. If you’re a fan of tough-minded Westerns, I highly recommend it and just about anything else by Gordon D. Shirreffs. (And every Shirreffs-related post has to include a mention of his CALGAICH THE SWORDSMAN, one of the best historical fantasy novels I’ve ever read.)

My Reading Habits

In a comment on the previous post, Prashant C. Trikannad says, among other things:


Would you consider writing about your reading habits? For instance, the process of selecting and acquiring the books you hope to read, the time you spend reading every day, assimilating what you have read and then putting them up on your blog, perhaps even a regular list of interesting books for the rest of us to read...you get the drift.


A long time ago, a wise man once told me “The problem with writing is that it interferes with your reading time.” That’s all too true. I was a reader long before I was a writer, and if the writing went away I’m sure I’d continue to read. These days, I read a little in the morning, while I’m eating breakfast and while I’m lingering over my coffee, if I think I can spare the time from whatever I’m working on. And I read some at night, usually between ten o’clock and midnight. That’s about it, although every so often I manage grab fifteen or twenty minutes sometime during the day to read. Luckily, I’m a fast reader and always have been, so I can get through quite a few books that way. I’m not a speed reader, and I don’t skim much at all, but when I do read, the pages go by pretty quickly.


In 1980 I started keeping a list of all the books I read. Although the lists are gone, lost in the fire (except for the ones for the past three years), I remember that I never read less than 100 books in a year, and most years I read somewhere between 120 and 150. So that’s ten to twelve books per month.


Choosing what to read used to be done almost entirely by whim, just whatever appealed to me at the moment. For the most part, it’s still that way, although these days more people send me review copies or manuscripts that I’ve agreed to blurb or books for which I’m writing introductions. The thing of it is, nearly all of these are books that I want to read anyway, so I still consider it pleasure reading. There are also occasions when I have to read books in a series where I’m going to be writing some of them. Even though you could call that research, I still enjoy it. And sometimes I read actual research books. Mostly, though, it’s still a matter of “Ooh, that looks good!” or “Ooh, that would make a good Forgotten Books post!”


I buy used books at Half Price Books, on the Internet, and occasionally at other used bookstores. I buy new books on the Internet, either from Amazon or directly from the publisher. I know I should buy more new books from brick-and-mortar stores, but I’m hardly ever anywhere close to one. There was a time when I would say, “This looks interesting, I might read it someday” and buy it. Now, because of the shortage of space, time, and money, I try to be a little more discriminating. I try to hold my purchases down to books that I actually intend to read in the reasonably near future. Of course it doesn’t work out that way. No matter how long I live, I’ll never read all the books I have. I know that. Doesn’t stop me from buying more, because in the words of that same wise man, “You never regret the books you buy, only the books you didn’t buy.”


I blog about most of the books I read, but not all. There are several reasons I won’t blog about a book. The most common is that I didn’t like it. I don’t mind pointing out a few flaws in a book, especially if I can talk about the things I liked in it, too. But I’m not going to really rip a book here, especially not one by a living author. I’m not getting paid to be a critic. I’m just a guy saying, “Hey, I read this book that was really good, you ought to read it.” Anyway, if I start a book and think it’s really terrible, I usually don’t finish it, and I’m not going to blog about a book I didn’t finish. Another reason I might not blog about a book I liked is that it would be difficult to talk about it without getting into divisive issues like politics or religion, topics I tend to steer clear of on this blog. I have definite opinions on such things, but I don’t think you’re here to read ’em. Then there are the oddball books nobody but me would have any interest in. This doesn’t come up very often, but it still does every now and then. But mostly, what I read, I blog about. My reading list so far this year is up to 113 books, and I’ve blogged about 94 of them. Some of the ones I haven’t blogged about were ARCs or review copies, and I’ll have posts about them when the books actually come out. So I think that’s a pretty good percentage.


A few years ago I did an end-of-the-month update post every month, listing all the books I’d read and the movies I’d seen that month, whether I blogged about them or not. I might try that again next year, if I can remember the idea that long.

Caught - Harlan Coben

I still haven’t read any of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books (I’ll get to them sooner or later, I’m sure), but I just read his most recent stand-alone, a “suburban noir”, as someone dubbed them, called CAUGHT.


As usual, one of the appeals of a Coben novel is trying to figure out how he’s going to make all the seemingly unrelated plotlines fit together. In this one you’ve got a seemingly decent guy exposed by a tabloid TV program as a pedophile, a missing teenage girl, embezzlement, drug dealing, angst over the economy and people losing their jobs, an execution-style murder, various cops and lawyers, and secrets going back for decades causing trouble in the present in Ross Macdonald-like fashion. Oh, and blogging. But also as usual, Coben manages to make it all make sense, in a series of twists and revelations that carry through all the way to the end of the book, and does so with likeable characters and prose that races right along. CAUGHT is a solidly entertaining novel, and if you’ve enjoyed Coben’s other novels, or if you haven’t tried one yet, it’s well worth reading.

Reminders

If I've promised you a blurb, guest blog, interview, book intro, short story, or anything like that, and you should have it by now but don't . . . please remind me.  I think I'm caught up on everything, but I'm definitely organizationally challenged these days and I'm worried that I'm forgetting something.

How to Train Your Dragon

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is the story of the war between a village of Vikings and a group of flying, fire-breathing dragons that keep raiding the village. Talk about a movie that could go one of two different ways! Throw out the fact that it’s animated. So were 300 and BEOWULF. This could be either a cute, kid-friendly comedy with humor, anachronistic dialogue, and “awww” moments, or a dark, gritty action movie with lots of intense violence, stirring music, and spectacular images.


Well, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON doesn’t make that choice. It’s actually both of those things, and somehow it works really well.


The appearance of the human characters is exaggerated and cartoony, but the dragons are fairly realistic. (Yes, I know how odd that sounds, but you know what I mean.) The attacks on the village are pretty harrowing. The protagonist is a teenage boy called Hiccup, definitely a comedy name, but at the same time he’s dealing with some angsty issues like being a disappointment to his heroic father, the leader of the village. Death and mutilation figure heavily in the back-story, although there’s not much in the actual film. Eventually the action elements begin to dominate, pushing the cuteness into the background for the most part, and this becomes a good old-fashioned adventure movie, which you probably wouldn’t pick up from the marketing campaign.


A lot of times when I start watching an animated film, I don’t know who does the voices, and part of the fun is trying to figure out who they are. One of the characters here is pretty easy to pin down, but I didn’t have a clue who the other actors were. They all do excellent jobs, though. (And I’m not going to say who they are, in case you watch this movie and want to guess, too.)


I didn’t really know what to expect from HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, but I enjoyed it a lot. I think it’s definitely worth watching.

Captain America: Reborn - Ed Brubaker

When I first heard that Marvel was going to kill off its iconic character Captain America, my immediate thought was “Yeah, right.” I thought the same thing years ago when DC announced that Superman was going to die. Call me a cynic, but after fifty years of reading comic books, I know that death is seldom forever in that world. (Aunt May and Norman Osborn, for example.) But killing off a character, even apparently, can make for a good story in the right hands.


When I decided to start reading Marvel Comics again, I knew I didn’t have the money, the time, or the desire to catch up on everything I missed since I gave them up in disgust more than a decade ago. I figured I’d read just enough older stuff to get up to speed on the current storylines. I wasn’t the least bit interested in any of the big mutant-related mega-crossovers, and from what I’d heard about the Civil War storyline, I didn’t really care about it, either. I knew pretty much what happened and knew that the assassination of Captain America was part of that plot. But since I wanted to start reading Cap’s book again (he’s one of my favorite characters and has been since I bought AVENGERS #4 off the spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore), I backtracked and read the trade paperbacks ROAD TO REBORN and REBORN, figuring that would tell me all I needed to know about Cap’s return from the dead.


I was right, but those reprint collections filled me in everything else that’s been going on since Ed Brubaker started writing the character. Bucky Barnes is really alive? Nah, couldn’t be. But remember what I said earlier about death seldom being forever in comics. Yeah, Bucky’s alive, and the explanation is actually fairly plausible. Bucky even takes up the shield and assumes the role of Captain America after Steve’s death (not the first time by any means that somebody else has been Captain America, and probably not the last). But then Bucky, Steve’s former girlfriend and ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter, the Falcon, the Black Widow, and assorted other characters discover that maybe Steve’s not really dead, and so we get an epic tale of the attempt to find out what really happened and set it right.


Clearly, Brubaker planned all this out years in advance, and I love that sort of long-range plotting. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out due to forces beyond the writer’s control (I still get emails from readers complaining that some of the series I’ve worked on didn’t wrap up well enough), but when it works, it’s great. And it certainly works in this case. Brubaker’s scripts are top-notch, and the art by Bryan Hitch and Butch Guice ranges from very good to spectacular, with only occasional lapses into sequences that are hard to follow. There are some great emotional full-page panels of Cap in action, too. If you’re a backslidden former Marvel follower like me who wants to start reading some of the books again, CAPTAIN AMERICA: REBORN wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Baseball Novels

When I was a kid I loved baseball. Loved playing, loved watching it, and loved reading baseball books, mostly novels. In honor of the Texas Rangers winning the American League pennant last night and going to the World Series for the first time in team history, here are some of my favorite baseball books I read as a kid and a young adult.

The Bronc Burnett series by Wilfred McCormick. High school hero Bronc Burnett (who was a modest, decent guy despite his athletic prowess) played all the major sports, but it’s the books about his baseball exploits that I remember the best. In one of the books, I don’t remember which, Bronc’s high school team plays an exhibition game against the Yankees and beats them.


THE KID WHO BATTED 1.000 by Bob Allison and Frank Ernest Hill. This is one of the books where I bought the Scholastic edition at school.

THE KID COMES BACK by John R. Tunis. I don’t recall much about this one except the climactic scene about a great catch in the first game of the World Series. I need to find a copy of this and read it again.

THE YEAR THE YANKEES LOST THE PENNANT by Douglas Wallop. My junior high library had a copy of this book, which was the source novel for the musical DAMN YANKEES. I thought it was pretty funny and risqué then. Don’t know how it would hold up now.

RHUBARB by H. Allen Smith. The classic about the cat who inherits a baseball team. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and another one I need to reread. Made into a decent movie.

THE SOUTHPAW, BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, and A TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH by Mark Harris. I read BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, the middle book in this trilogy, when the movie based on it came out, then backtracked and read the other two. Great stuff, although A TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH is a fairly minor novel, as I recall. The first two are great, though. There may be a fourth book in the series, I can’t recall, but if there is, I’ve never read it.


I’m sure there were other baseball novels I read, but these are the ones that come to mind first. If you have a favorite baseball novel, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Forgotten Books: The Clue of the Forgotten Murder -- Erle Stanley Gardner

 

In 1933, Erle Stanley Gardner launched the Perry Mason series with the novel THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS, and he was also still a prolific and highly successful pulp author at the time. A year later, under the pseudonym Carleton Kendrake, he published THE CLEW OF THE FORGOTTEN MURDER, which may have been intended as the start of another series featuring freelance criminologist Sidney Griff. Instead, this novel was Griff’s only appearance, probably because Gardner was busy with the Mason novels, his pulp work, and then a few years later the great Donald Lam/Bertha Cool series under the name A.A. Fair. But THE CLUE OF THE FORGOTTEN MURDER, as it was retitled when it was reprinted under Gardner’s name, is a good book on its own.

When this novel starts out, it’s hard to know who the detective is going to be. A young police reporter named Charles Morden uncovers a potential scandal involving a banker and businessman from a neighboring city. Morden sets out to investigate, but murder soon crops up, and it looks like Dan Bleeker, the very Perry Mason-like publisher of the newspaper, is going to take over as the detective. But there are more murders, and about a fourth of the way into the book, criminologist Sidney Griff comes onto the scene and dominates the action from then on. Griff, too, is reminiscent of Mason in that he figures out pretty quickly what’s going on and manipulates people and events to uncover the truth and get the results he wants.

As is common with these early Erle Stanley Gardner novels, the plot is ridiculously complicated, with all sorts of double identities, impersonations, blackmail, past crimes, phony alibis, gangsters, poisonings, and more. I won’t even attempt to get into the details. Eventually Sidney Griff sorts it all out into at least a semblance of coherence, but I’m still not sure how he figured out everything. I will say, however, that I spotted the vital clue as soon as it was introduced.

This book is from the more hardboiled phase of Gardner’s career and has some nice action in it, including a shootout with a guy standing on the running board of a speeding car and blasting away. You gotta love that stuff, or at least I do. There’s also quite a bit of humor and snappy patter, and of course the usual rapid-fire pacing. The early Gardner novels are nice snapshots of their era. Reading them is like watching a good 1930s B-movie. If you’re in that sort of mood, they’re great entertainment, and THE CLUE OF THE FORGOTTEN MURDER definitely falls into that category. Here’s the opening paragraph, which I really like:


Crime sifted into police headquarters and then seeped down into the press room in the basement with the unfailing regularity of dirty water draining through the waste pipe of a bathtub.


I couldn’t find a scan of the original edition, but like most Gardner novels, there were numerous paperback reprints which can still be picked up fairly inexpensively.

Discount Noir Now Available!

And the run of great anthologies continues.  You can buy it here.  This one really is a lot of fun.  Patti Abbott and Steve Weddle did an outstanding job with it.


If you thought standing in line at your local warehouse store was murder, then you haven't been to Megamart. These flash fiction tales of superstore madness and mayhem will make you think twice the next time you hear "clean up on aisle 13."


This anthology contains works by: Patricia Abbott, Sophie Littlefield, Kieran Shea, Chad Eagleton, Ed Gorman, Cormac Brown, Fleur Bradley, Alan Griffiths, Laura Benedict, Garnett Elliot, Eric Beetner, Jack Bates, Bill Crider, Loren Eaton, John DuMond, John McFetridge, Toni McGee Causey, Jeff Vande Zande, James Reasoner, Kyle Minor, Randy Rohn, Todd Mason, Byron Quertermous, Sandra Scoppettone, Stephen D. Rogers, Steve Weddle, Evan Lewis, Daniel B. O'Shea, Sandra Seamans, Albert Tucher, Donna Moore, John Weagly, Keith Rawson, Gerald So, Dave Zeltserman, Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen, Jay Stringer, Anne Frasier, Kathleen A. Ryan, Eric Peterson, Chris Grabenstein and J.T. Ellison.

Great News From Hard Case Crime

Here's an update from Charles Ardai:

We've got some big news to announce today: After a year's hiatus, Hard Case Crime will be returning to bookstores with new titles in 2011, thanks to a deal we just signed with UK-based Titan Publishing.


Titan is a publisher both of fiction and of gorgeous art books focusing on pop culture such as movie poster art, pin-ups, newspaper comic strips, and Golden Age comic books, and has worked with filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, and George Lucas. Titan has been around for 30 years, has more than 200 employees, and in addition to publishing books also has a magazine division, a retail division (Titan owns the famous Forbidden Planet bookstore in London, and until recently co-owned the Murder One mystery bookstore with Maxim Jakubowski), and a merchandise division that produces items such as t-shirts, sculptures, and accessories. We look forward to exploring ways we might develop some cool Hard Case Crime products with them!


But first things first: books.


Hard Case Crime will relaunch in September/October 2011 with four new books, including CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust (sequel to her Edgar Award-nominated MONEY SHOT), QUARRY'S EX by Max Allan Collins (the latest in the popular series of hit man novels by the author of "Road to Perdition"), and two never-before-published novels by MWA Grand Masters (names to be announced shortly).


Additionally, Titan Publishing plans to acquire all existing stock of Hard Case Crime's backlist from Dorchester Publishing and to resume shipping these titles to booksellers immediately.


New books will be published in paperback (possibly some in hardcover as well!); ebook editions will also be released across multiple platforms. Titan is distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Random House.


We're very excited about working with Titan (indeed, we had offers from five publishers and chose Titan over several that were much larger and better-known) -- they love pulp fiction as much as we do and appreciate that in books like ours the visual dimension is just as important as the storytelling. It's hard to imagine a better home for Hard Case Crime.

Charles adds that the Gabriel Hunt series will remain at Dorchester for now, with plans to reissue the series in trade paperback editions.