More Cowboy Romances (A Saturday Morning Western Pulp Sunday Afternoon Update)

Over on the WesternPulps group, Phil Stephensen-Payne (host of the invaluable Fictionmags Index, the source of most of the scans I use on Saturday mornings) provided the information that there were probably five issues of the pulp COWBOY ROMANCES. Since I already posted one of them, I thought I might as well throw the other three cover scans that are available up here, too. Thanks, Phil!


Some pretty good writers contributed to this magazine. I'm not sure why it failed, unless the newsstands were just too crowded then for everything to be successful, no matter how good it was.


By the way, I love that pseudonym from the final issue: Ryder Sage. I'd never encountered it before. It was used at least twice by somebody named Paul Randall Morrison. That's worse than some of the blatantly phony names that got slapped on the multitude of Adult Western series in the Eighties. In fact, that's exactly what it sounds like to me.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Romances, August 1937

How about some competition for RANCH ROMANCES? This attempt must not have been too successful. There are only three issues listed in the Fictionmags Index. But based on the fine cover by Milton Luros and the decent line-up of authors, it looks like a pretty good magazine. William MacLeod Raine, Paul Evan Lehman, and Ed Earl Repp (who's not featured on the cover but is represented inside by an article with the intriguing title "Gun Girls of the West: The Belle of Tombstone") were certainly heavy hitters in the Western pulp field. "Gun Girls of the West" sounds like a good title for a series of Western e-books. Hmm.

Free E-Book from Black Dog Books Tomorrow!

Free eBook Offer, Saturday May 12th
Horse Money—Free eBook offer for May 12!

To promote the BDB line of eBooks, the title Horse Money will be available as a free download for Kindle all day Saturday, May 12.

Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity and get this great collection of  crime stories.

Four hard-boiled novellas of crime and intrigue around the Sport of Kings.

The Cases of Chief Van Eyck, Race Track Detective. With an introduction by Robert J. Randisi.

"These are perfect reading for anyone who enjoys hard-boiled characters and race track settings. Sit back, relax and start reading-and enjoying."—Robert J. Randisi

Known from Saratoga to Belmont and throughout the racing circuit, Chief Van Eyck keeps the bookies and fix games in check—whether using a little strong-arm, or the nickel-platted death securely tucked in his shoulder holster.

And Van Eyck is never above picking up a few greenbacks on the side himself, thanks to an inside tip or two from the jockey club.
Grab a stool, order a strong one and slid to the edge of your seat as the ponies and Van Eyck both give a thrill ride from wire to wire.

(I've read two of the four stories in this book so far and thoroughly enjoyed them. I recommend you grab a copy tomorrow!)

More Good News on the E-Book Front

Longtime Western fans and Amazon Kindle best-selling Western writers Mike Stotter and Ben Bridges have finally realized a long-held dream to bring back into 'e-print' some of the most popular and best-loved Western and action-adventure series fiction of the last forty years.
 
Series fiction, the most popular genre was always the Western, but it also encompassed war stories, tales of pillaging Vikings, life in the Roman arena and action-adventure set in the far-flung future, was at its most popular throughout the 1970s and 80s and is still fondly remembered and avidly collected by die-hard fans. Some books are now so hard to come by that it's not unusual for them to change hands for astronomical amounts.
 
"We got to know a number of the authors when we were teenagers," remembers Mike. "Although they mostly wrote Westerns, they often joked that they had never been further west than Piccadilly, in London's West End."
 
"It seemed such an obvious idea, to bring these books back in a new format for a predominantly new audience," says Ben Bridges, a.k.a. David Whitehead. "For years I had been scouring second-hand bookshops to rebuild my original collection, and everywhere I went I got the same response. 'If I could get my hands on Westerns, I could sell them. But you just can't get them anymore.'"

"It seemed like a ridiculous situation," adds Mike. "I have constantly heard that the Western genre is dead. Yet, through sales, I know we have a large Western readership out there and no-one is catering for them. So I suggested to Dave that maybe he and I ought to do something about it--and now here we are."

 Thus Piccadilly Publishing was born. One of its aims is to bring back titles for new and old readers alike. Great care is taken over the production of each title, and each one has a specially-commissioned cover from Westworld Designs that recreates the feel of the originals, at the same time giving them a fresh and more modern look.

The first Piccadilly Publishing eBook--Trackdown, by Neil Hunter--is now available for download from Amazon's platforms in the UK, US, Spain, France, Germany and Italy, and more titles are set to follow over the next several months. There are plans to expand their availability on other electronic platforms.
 
"We're adding authors and series to our catalogue almost every day," reports Whitehead. "Over the next year or so I think we'll surprise and delight our fellow fans with what we have to offer."

For further enquires email the editors at piccadillyp@yahoo.com

Medical Update

Joanna's had a rough couple of days, as they try to figure out the right meds in the right doses. She's still in the ICU. A little progress each day, but not what we'd hoped. Still, any progress is good, I say. She just has to work her way through this patch.


Our other daughter is staying at the hospital with her today so Livia could come home and get some rest. Five hours' sleep (maybe) in the past three nights isn't much.


I won't dwell on this, everybody has their problems, but it does make me feel a little better knowing there are folks all over the world pulling for her.

Forgotten Books: Stacked Deck - Frank Kane

Frank Kane's private eye character Johnny Liddell began appearing in the detective pulps in the mid-Forties, but he became more well known as the star of a series of novels beginning with ABOUT FACE in 1947. A few of the Liddell novels were published in hardback, but most were paperback originals published by Dell, with fine covers by Robert McGinnis, Ron Lesser, and Victor Kalin. Kane has a reputation for being a generic writer who's a little too fond of punning titles and is also notorious for repeating descriptions, bits of business, and lines of dialogue from book to book. I'm not sure if this rises to the level of self-plagiarism (I'll address that issue later in this post), but I've read quite a few of Kane's books and found them pretty entertaining.

STACKED DECK is a collection of novelettes and short stories starring Johnny Liddell. There's no indication of where they originally appeared, but my guess is that they're from mystery digests such as MANHUNT, MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and THE SAINT MAGAZINE. I know Kane's work appeared in all of those places. Also, some of the stories appear to have been original to this collection.

"Dead Set", the opening story, finds Johnny far away from his usual stomping grounds in New York. He's in Hollywood untangling a case involving a beautiful starlet, a gossip columnist, some transplanted East Coast mobsters, blackmail, and murder. In "Dead Drunk", Johnny is back in New York working on an insurance fraud case in which a rival private eye is mixed up. "Dead Reckoning" is about Johnny protecting a sultry redheaded torch singer with a secret (a perfect part for Christina Hendricks) from a vicious mobster. "Dead Run" opens with Johnny looking down at a murder victim, a washed-up crooner and movie star who's trying to make a comeback, only to run into a bullet. "Dead Wrong", about a hit-and-run accident that may be murder, features Kane's attempt to write "beatnik" dialogue. It's way out, daddio. In "Dead End", motivated by the suicide of a beautiful blonde, Liddell goes after a pornography ring. "The Killing" concerns Liddell's efforts to prevent some gangsters from fixing a horse race. In "A Grave Matter!", a beautiful redheaded cigarette girl has already been murdered when the story opens, and Johnny has to find her killer.

I thought all of these stories were a lot of fun. Not classics of the genre, by any means, but for somebody like me who grew up reading hardboiled private eye stories (and watching private eye shows on TV), they're very enjoyable.

As for the self-plagiarism charges, I think some of it stems from the fact that Kane had certain phrases and bits of business that he liked to use again and again. Most prolific writers do that, I think. I've written so many Westerns I've probably written some paragraphs that are almost identical, purely by accident.

Kane does carry it to extremes now and then, though. In this collection, "Dead Wrong" and "A Grave Matter!" despite having completely different plots, have scenes that are almost word-for-word the same. I never would have noticed that, of course, if they hadn't been in the same collection. Some editor at Dell must have been dozing a little at the switch back in 1961.

That said, I really enjoyed STACKED DECK. An e-book edition is available from Prologue Books, and if you like good old-fashioned, two-fisted private eye yarns, I highly recommend it.

Haywire

After a day of sitting in the hospital and then fighting the traffic in Dallas, a movie about a beautiful woman kickin' butt, shootin' guns, and Blowing Up Stuff Real Good sounded like just what I needed. So I watched HAYWIRE, which is about a freelance spy who has to go rogue to survive after the people she works for turn on her.

It gets sort of a mixed verdict from me. MMA fighter Gina Carano is great as the lead, maybe not classically beautiful but very appealing. She gives a decent performance and of course handles the fights very well. The film has a nice low-key but hardboiled edge to it, although it's almost a little too low-key at times. It could have used a little more craziness. My biggest problem was with the plot, which I found too hard to follow. But maybe I was just too tired.

Anyway, I liked HAYWIRE overall, and really liked Gina Carano. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does next.

Long Day

Some of you know that our daughter Joanna had some pretty major spine surgery today. We got up at three o'clock this morning to take her to Dallas (Addison, actually), where the surgery was done. She came through it very well, and her surgeon was really pleased with the way things went. She'll be wearing a neck brace for several months but won't have to be in a metal halo, like she was when she had spine surgery at 18 months. (Here's something I learned back then: when you have an 18-month-old and the doctors tell you, "We're going to bolt five pounds of metal to her skull . . . but it's not as bad as it sounds", they're lying. It is as bad as it sounds.) Joanna's in the ICU now and will be overnight because her blood pressure was a little low and they wanted to monitor that and her ability to swallow. Should move to a regular room tomorrow. She was in quite a bit of pain, which is to be expected but is still rough on her. On Mom and Dad, too, because no matter how old your kids get, they're still your kids.


I'm back home now, but Livia's spending the night at the hospital with her. I can't say enough about how great both of them have been today, and our other daughter Shayna, too, who has pitched in to take over everything else.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Borderline

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on April 19, 2007. Sorry for the reruns two weeks in a row. Life's a little hectic right now. I hope these posts are new to some of you.)

This movie is from a boxed set of cheap film noirs that I found at Half Price Books not long ago. I wouldn’t actually call all of the movies in the set noir. BORDERLINE certainly isn’t. But it is a pretty good cops vs. drug smugglers film anyway.

By 1950, Claire Trevor was getting a little long in the tooth to be playing a policewoman working undercover as a showgirl in a Mexican cantina as she tries to track down the head of a smuggling ring, but she works hard at the role. She finds herself getting mixed up in a war between rival gangsters Fred MacMurray and Raymond Burr, and after MacMurray mistakes her for Burr’s moll and kidnaps her, she’s forced to pretend to be his wife as he makes a desperate run for the border with a fortune in drugs. Of course, not everything is what it appears to be. Along the way there’s a little comedy, a little romance, and several shootouts, including an action-packed climax.

Having grown up watching Fred MacMurray playing genial patriarch Steve Douglas on MY THREE SONS, I always have a little trouble accepting him in tough-guy roles. There’s also his uncanny and not at all coincidental resemblance to a certain Big Red Cheese to get past. However, he’s plenty hardboiled in this one and does a good job as a ruthless criminal with secrets of his own. And Raymond Burr is perfectly cast as a beefy, white-suited gangster. There’s even a bit part as a U.S. Customs agent for one of my favorite character actors, Charles Lane, who I believe celebrated his 102nd birthday not long ago.

BORDERLINE is nowhere near a classic – for one thing, the filmmakers tip some of the plot twists ’way too early – but it’s good solid entertainment anyway.

UPDATE: And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube if you want to.

New This Week

Honest, I don't just go around buying books hand over fist all the time. The past few weeks have been unusual. I'm sure a lot of weeks this year, I didn't buy anything, not even any e-books. But . . . well . . . that's not the case this week.

This first batch came from the Ridgmar Half Price Books in Fort Worth:

MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES IN POSTWAR AMERICA: THE RICH OBERG COLLECTION – text by Max Allan Collins, George Hagenauer, and Steven Heller. Back in the Seventies I tried to sell stories to the few men's adventure magazines that were left by then, but the genre was really on its last legs. This massive book, consisting mostly of covers and interior illustrations from those magazines but with some informative and entertaining text chapters as well, traces the history of those magazines from their beginnings through their heyday. I came across a copy of the original edition (a later reprint omitted some of the material) and decided I needed to have it. It's an interesting genre, and I wish I could have managed to sell a few stories in it. (Yes, you're correct. I want to write everything. I haven't given up on writing a comic book story and a movie script one of these days.)

DICK TRACY: THE COLLINS CASEFILES, VOLUMES 2 AND 3 – Max Allan Collins. Two more collections of Dick Tracy storylines written by Collins. I got the first one a while back but haven't read it yet.

FIREARMS, TRAPS, AND TOOLS OF THE MOUNTAIN MEN – Carl P. Russell. What looks to be an excellent research book about the fur trapping era. I know some of this stuff already from research for previous books, but you can never know too much.

OVERKILL – Robert Buettner. Science fiction novel by an author compared by some to Heinlein. We'll see.

AREA 7 – Matthew Reilly. Thriller novel by the Australian author. This one features Shane Schofield, the hero of the only other book I've read by Reilly, HELL ISLAND. I sort of liked that one, but I thought it had almost too much over-the-top action in it. (I know, you didn't think that was possible where I was concerned. Neither did I.)

WINTER'S KNIGHT – Richard Argent. I'm not sure whether this is a fantasy novel about the Crusades or a historical novel about the Crusades. Either way it looks decent. I'm not familiar with the author at all.

And finally, LOST RACE OF MARS, an early (1960) juvenile science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg. The one I have is a sixth printing, from 1972. I'm glad to get it, though, because I've never run across a copy of this novel before.

Then I had to be pretty close to Denton on non-book-related business, and since I was already almost there I figured a visit to Recycled Books would be in order. This is what I came away with:

Ace Double Westerns: D-8 GUNSMOKE GOLD, Tom West/TERROR RIDES THE RANGE, Allan K. Echols; D-64 UNDER THE MESA RIM, Chandler Whipple/BULLETS DON'T BLUFF, Paul Evan Lehman; D-72 NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY, Ralph R. Perry/THE DEVIL'S SADDLE, Norman A. Fox; D-192 BEWARE OF THIS TENDERFOOT, Roy Manning/BAD BLOOD AT BLACK RANGE, John Callahan; D-276 THE GUNSMOKE TRAIL, Barry Cord/LEAD IN HIS FISTS, Tom West; D-316 MESQUITE JOHNNY, Barry Cord/A TIME FOR GUNS, Rod Patterson; F-124 SLATTERY/BULLET WELCOME FOR SLATTERY, Steven G. Lawrence. Some of these show some wear and age, but some are in really good condition with maybe the whitest paper I've ever seen in Ace Doubles. Another point in their favor: two bucks each. That's lots of good reading for not much money.

WHISPERING RANGE – Ernest Haycox. Another early novel by Haycox. Evidently this one wasn't originally a pulp story.

MONTANA ROAD – Harry Sinclair Drago. A novel mostly about the aftermath of the battle at the Little Big Horn. Drago, whether writing under his own name or as Bliss Lomax or Will Ermine, is usually worth reading. The cover art on this one was used originally on the December 1948 issue of POPULAR WESTERN.

RIO GRANDE KID – R.M. Hankins. Paperback reprint of a novel originally published as LONESOME RIVER JUSTICE. I guess they put "Grande" in there because there were already too many Rio Kids. I'm not familiar with the author.

RIO RENEGADE/BULLET FOR BANNERMAN – Kirk Hamilton. American reprint of a couple of Australian Westerns originally published by Cleveland, starring a pair of troubleshooters named Yancey Bannerman and Johnny Cato. "Kirk Hamilton" was really Keith Hetherington, one of the most prolific Western authors of all time. He may well be the most prolific and is still adding to his total by writing new novels under several different pseudonyms for the Black Horse Western line.

RICK O'SHAY, HIPSHOT, AND ME – Stan Lynde. A memoir by the cartoonist and Western novelist that also reprints a number of complete storylines from the Rick O'Shay comic strip. This strip was one of my favorites growing up. I remember my dad reading them to me from the newspaper before I could even read.

As if that wasn't enough, I had to go right by the Hulen Half Price Books in Fort Worth, and, well, if that's not fate, I don't know what is. So here's what I bought there:

THE YEAR AFTER TOMORROW – Lester del Rey, Cecile Matschat, and Carl Farmer, editors. Science fiction anthology published by Winston. It doesn't have those great endpapers like you'll find in the Winston SF juveniles. The contents are an odd mix from ASTOUNDING and THE AMERICAN BOY. Authors represented are del Rey, Robert Moore Williams, Carl H. Claudy, and Peter van Dresser. I've vaguely heard of Claudy and never heard of van Dresser. (My copy doesn't have that dust jacket and isn't in great shape, but it cost a dollar.)

HARD CITY – Clark Howard. An autobiographical novel by the well-known crime fiction writer about growing up in Chicago in the 1940s.

A MATTER OF CONVICTION – Evan Hunter. Novel about a district attorney and some juvenile delinquents. This is a movie tie-in edition with Burt Lancaster and Dina Merrill on the cover. I've never seen the movie. Hunter's always worth reading, though.

SAVAGE STREETS – William P. McGivern. Another JD novel, published the same year (1959) as the Evan Hunter novel.

THE MOBSTER – John Roeburt. Pirated edition of a gangster novel set in the Roaring Twenties, originally published by Pyramid Books.

OTHER TIMES, OTHER WORLDS – John D. MacDonald. Collection of science fiction stories written from the late Forties to the late Sixties and originally published in ASTOUNDING, STARTLING STORIES, THRILLING WONDER STORIES, WEIRD TALES, SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, WORLDS BEYOND, GALAXY, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, COSMOPOLITAN, and PLAYBOY. There's also a bibliography of all of JDM's magazine SF. I've read his three science fiction novels and enjoyed them. This should be good stuff.

And finally another Ace Double Western, F-292 THE MAN AT ROPE'S END, Tom West/THE HIDDEN RIDER OF DARK MOUNTAIN, Gordon D. Shirreffs. Hard to beat that combo. I'd never heard of the Shirreffs novel, but I'll bet it's good. With a title like that, I also wouldn't be surprised if it's an expansion of a pulp story.

That's it. And that's more than enough. (More scans below.)