An Obscure Credit of Mine

You never know what you're going to find when you go poking around the Fictionmags Index. In 1979 I sold a story to a men's magazine called DAPPER, never having seen an actual issue and going strictly off their listing in Writer's Market. The acceptance came pretty quickly, as I recall, and was accompanied by a check for a hundred bucks or so, pretty good money for a story I wrote in a day or two. But they didn't send contributor copies and I never knew when or even if the story ever appeared. I checked the newsstands in Fort Worth for a while, hoping to come across it, but no luck and after a while I forgot about it.

But what do you know? The FMI has a listing for the October 1979 issue of DAPPER, and there's my story, "Test Drive", under the pseudonym I used for most of my men's magazine stories, Jay Morris. Not just a listing, either, but a cover scan, too, which you can see here. So after more than 32 years, at least I can see what the issue looks like. How about that? Just don't ask me what the story was about, because I don't remember. It was probably a crime story, but I can't even be sure of that.

Movies: ParaNorman

This one is DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: THE SIXTH SENSE. Just imagine that Greg is obsessed with horror movies and can talk to dead people, and he and Rowley have to battle zombies and break a 300-year-old witch's curse, all rendered in an animation style that seems to be intended to make everything as grotesque and unattractive as possible.

Yeah, I'm feeling a little curmudgeonly today. PARANORMAN is actually a fairly entertaining movie, but I didn't care for the animation and actually thought it might have been better as a live-action movie. The story is pretty interesting, though, and the voice actors (who include Anna Kendrick and John Goodman) do a good job. Despite my quibbles, it's worth watching, I think.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Clubhouse

Like last week's LOVE MONKEY, CLUBHOUSE was barely there, airing eleven episodes in 2004 and 2005. It was about a kid who gets to live out his dream of being a batboy for a major league baseball team. Christopher Lloyd was well-cast as the grumpy old manager, Dean Cain was an aging ballplayer, Mare Winningham was the kid's mother, and young British actor Jeremy Sumpter (who was later on another sports series, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS) played the lead. You know I'm a sucker for baseball yarns, so I enjoyed this series.

Movies: Pitch Perfect

It's GLEE: THE COLLEGE YEARS.

I'm sorry. That's too easy, too snarky, and not entirely fair. But there are some definite similarities between the TV show GLEE and this movie about collegiate competitive a capella singing groups. And PITCH PERFECT never veers from the "group of spunky misfits come together to win it all, find romance, and learn some valuable life lessons" formula.

But it's got the really cute Anna Kendrick in it, and the equally cute Brittany Snow, and Rebel Wilson who's always funny and interesting. The movie is pretty inconsistent, with some good scenes and some that are just awful and unfunny, and the fact that it never quite comes together keeps it from being as good as it should have been. But it's certainly not terrible and I had a pretty good time watching it, overall.

One word of warning, though: if you're one of those people, like me, who wonders when it apparently became perfectly all right to show people barfing all over the screen, you might want to avoid this one, or at least look away during a couple of scenes.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mobsters, December 1952

This is the first and possibly only issue of this pulp from the Thrilling Group, and it wouldn't surprise me if the contents came from stories submitted to some of the other pulps they published. It's an interesting-looking magazine, though, and has a pretty good line-up of authors. Kendall Foster Crossen was a prolific pulpster and paperbacker under various names, probably best known these days, if at all, as the author of the Milo March novels under the name M.E. Chaber, which is a fine hardboiled series about an insurance investigator. Crossen also wrote the Green Llama pulp stories. Bryce Walton, who wrote some well-received science fiction stories, is in this issue, as is Charles Boeckman under his Charles Beckman Jr. pseudonym. I've never seen a copy of this pulp and probably never will, but if I had one in my hands I wouldn't hesitate to read it.

UPDATE: It's been confirmed that there were three issues of this pulp.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Gunsmoke Western, January 1947

This isn't the short-lived but highly-regarded digest magazine GUNSMOKE, published in the Fifties by the same outfit that did MANHUNT, but rather the first issue of a pulp from Trojan Publications, publishers of SPICY WESTERN, SPEED WESTERN, and various other Western pulps. I have no idea how long it lasted, nor do I have any idea who these authors were: John R. Phillips, John Slater, Robert Flemings, Wallace Kayton, Luke Terry, and Joseph McKay. I'd be willing to bet that most, if not all, of them are pseudonyms, so there's no telling who the real authors are. But at least I've heard of the cover artist for this issue: George Rozen. And as always with Rozen, it's a pretty good cover.

Forgotten Books: And the Rain Came Down - S.A. Bailey

If I remember right, back in the dim, prehistoric days of 2008 when the Forgotten Books series started, one of the original reasons for it was to draw attention not only to older books but also to more recent ones that had slipped under the radar somehow and not gotten the attention they deserved.

S.A. Bailey's AND THE RAIN CAME DOWN is certainly such a book. Published by a small press in 2010, it's developed a devoted readership but ought to be more widely known. With luck I can do a little to remedy that situation, since it's a fine debut novel.

AND THE RAIN CAME DOWN is a private eye novel, and it starts with a classic private eye set-up. It was a wandering daughter job. Or rather, in this case, a wandering sister job, although the dynamic is very similar. Jebediah Shaw is an Iraq war veteran who has come back to his East Texas hometown of Athens, where he has a troubled marriage, drinking and drug problems, and a job tracking down bail jumpers for his best friend, who's a private investigator. Jeb doesn't have a license himself, but despite that he's hired by an old acquaintance from high school days who's a member of the richest family in the area. The client's little sister has disappeared, and he wants Jeb to find her and bring her home.

Naturally, nothing about the case turns out to be as straightforward as it appears to be at first. Like I said, this is classic private eye stuff, a structure going all the way back to Hammett and not really changed that much in the eighty or ninety years since. Despite all the twists and turns of the plot – and there are a lot of them – long-time readers of the genre probably won't be all that surprised by the various revelations.

What makes AND THE RAIN CAME DOWN really stand out is the voice through which it's filtered. I'm not a big fan of the angst-ridden, tormented protagonist/narrators that show up in a lot of current hardboiled and noir fiction. Bailey makes that character work in Jeb Shaw, though, and you can't help but root for him despite how messed up he is, probably because he provides a lot of dark but very funny, raw humor as well. And because he paints such a vivid picture of small-town and rural East Texas, which, if you're a fan of the TV series JUSTIFIED, will probably remind you a lot of Harlan County, Kentucky.

Now, when it comes to Texas there are East Texas guys and West Texas guys (as vast a denominational difference as that between Baptists and Methodists), and I'm much more of a West Texas guy. But East Texas writers seem to be great storytellers (Joe R. Lansdale his own self, anyone?), and you can add S.A. Bailey to that mix. I really enjoyed AND THE RAIN CAME DOWN, and if you're a fan of private eye novels or Texas novels or both, I give it a high recommendation.

By the way, the sequel, THE LINES WE CROSS, will be out soon if it's not already, and I'm looking forward to reading it, too.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Love Monkey

This series lasted only eight episodes back in 2006 so it's probably pretty much forgotten. We watched and enjoyed all eight episodes, though. Most shows that can be described as "quirky" don't work for me, but this one did. It was a comedy/drama about a music company executive, played by Tom Cavanagh (who always seemed to be in quirky shows) who was fired from his job and wound up at a small indie label where everybody else was, you guessed it, quirky, too. I thought it was a pretty good show, though, with a good cast that also included Judy Greer, who I really like, and some good music. It's not available on DVD, but the first episode can be found on YouTube.

Movies: Trouble With the Curve

I'm a sucker for baseball movies and I've been a Clint Eastwood fan for going on 50 years now, so it figures I'd like TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, in which Clint plays an aging baseball scout whose eyesight is failing. Amy Adams is his estranged lawyer daughter. Justin Timberlake is a washed-up ballplayer who's trying to become a broadcaster. Clint has to find a good prospect to save his job and defeat the evil sabremetricians. A bunch of fine character actors such as John Goodman, Robert Patrick, Ed Lauter, and Bob Gunton are along for the ride. TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE is predictable and as manipulative as all get-out, but sometimes I just don't care about such things. I had a fine time watching it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Astounding Science Fiction, October 1939

I have a confession to make: I've never read any of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. I've meant to for years now. I read his Skylark series (which this cover refers to, even though the story in this issue isn't a Skylark story) when I was in college and enjoyed the books. They were pretty dated even then, but I didn't care. I know the Lensman series is thought to be the inspiration for the Green Lantern Corps. So I still plan to get around to it. But so far, not yet . . .

Isn't that a great cover painting by Hubert Rogers, though? And in addition to the first part of Smith's serial "Gray Lensman", there are several short stories and a novelette by Malcolm Jameson, a science column by Willy Ley, the usual editorial by John W. Campbell, and assorted features. Looks like a good issue to me, even though I don't read much SF from that era anymore. (I don't read much SF, period, anymore, and I'm not sure why. That bothers me, since I grew up reading a lot of it.)