Writing Update

I was hoping to get my pages back up to 400 this month, but I continued to struggle for much of the month and didn't make it. I finished pretty strong, though (today was my best day in more than six weeks), and wound up with 390 pages for the month. (Missed it by that much! as Maxwell Smart used to say.) That's two months in a row my production has gone up after bottoming out in August. If all goes as planned I'll hit my million words for the year in late November or early December.

Most importantly, though, the past ten days or so I've been pretty pleased with what I'm writing and having a good time with it.

Happy Hallowe'en

Yeah, I've posted this clip before, but I really like it and never get tired of it. I have some good memories of trick-or-treating, but also of watching scary movies and later on IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN, which is still my favorite of all the Peanuts cartoons.

Favorite Western Pulps

A while back someone who commented on one of my favorite Western author posts suggested that I write about some of my favorite Western pulps. Here's a list of ten, in alphabetical order, with the usual caveat that if you asked me tomorrow, I might change my mind about some of them. But I think such a list is always going to include quite a few of these:

DIME WESTERN – One of the longest-running Western pulps in terms of years, although it was never a weekly so some of the other titles far surpass it in number of issues. But DIME WESTERN with its distinctive yellow covers was consistently good and was also the first attempt by editor Rogers Terrill to force the Western pulps to grow up. High quality and historical significance are easily enough to land DIME WESTERN on the list.

EXCITING WESTERN – Some people aren't that fond of the Western pulps published by Standard Publications and Better Publications, really the same outfit that can be lumped together as the Thrilling Group. But I like them. I've really only become a fan of EXCITING WESTERN in recent years, primarily because that was the home of the long-running Tombstone and Speedy series by W.C. Tuttle. This series about a couple of inept but lucky range detectives features Tuttle's trademark blend of humor, action, and complex plots. The Tombstone and Speedy stories are a burlesque version of Tuttle's much better known (and better) Hashknife and Sleepy series, but they're a lot of fun in their own right.

RIO KID WESTERN – I was introduced to the Rio Kid series by the paperback reprints from Curtis Books and Popular Library in the Sixties and Seventies, but I went on to read quite a few of the pulps as well, and it became a favorite series of mine. It follows the adventures of Captain Bob Pryor, a Texan who fought for the Union during the Civil War, and his sidekick Celestino Mireles. The series' gimmick is that all the stories feature historical characters and incidents, and as such they form a sort of alternate history or secret history of the Old West. Tom Curry created the series and wrote many of the novels, but other top pulpsters such as Walker A. Tompkins, C. William Harrison, and Gunnison Steele contributed Rio Kid novels, too.

SPICY/SPEED WESTERN – I have to lump these two together since SPEED WESTERN was a retitled and slightly toned-down version of SPICY WESTERN. The stories in both versions follow the Trojan Publications formula of fast action and female characters losing their clothes, as was often reflected on the covers. Sure, the stories by authors such as E. Hoffmann Price, Laurence Donovan, James P. Olsen, Robert Leslie Bellem, and others writing under a myriad of house-names, were very formulaic and you certainly wouldn't want to read too many of them back to back. But taken in small doses, I find them to be very entertaining.

STAR WESTERN – Along with DIME WESTERN, STAR WESTERN was one of the flagships of the Popular Publications Western line. It always sported a cover with a red background and featured more novellas than DIME WESTERN, something I like because I'm very fond of that length. There was a lot of author crossover among the Popular magazines. Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Tom Roan, Ed Earl Repp, and many others appeared in all the Western pulps from Popular Publications, with stories often garishly retitled by the editors. (Those over-the-top titles are a particular joy of their own, I've found.)

TEXAS RANGERS – The Jim Hatfield novels from TEXAS RANGERS were really the first pulp Westerns I read, if you don't count Max Brand novels (which at the time I didn't know came from the pulps). I've written before about reading paperbacks in study hall when I was in high school, and one of them was GUNSLINGER'S RANGE by Jackson Cole, published by Popular Library. I still remember how much I enjoyed it and how I started picking up more of the Jim Hatfield novels whenever I found them. Now, of course, I know that GUNSLINGER'S RANGE was a retitled reprint of a novel from the TEXAS RANGERS pulp (I don't recall the original title at the moment) and the actual author was Tom Curry. I went on to read all the Hatfield paperbacks and also put together an almost complete collection of the pulp. Those copies went in the fire of '08, but since then I've gotten my hands on almost all of the issues again. And eventually I'm going to read all the ones I haven't already read, if I live long enough.

THRILLING WESTERN – Another pulp from the Thrilling Group, and another that I enjoy primarily for one series that ran in it, the Walt Slade, Texas Ranger stories by Bradford Scott. I first started reading Walt Slade novels in paperback in the Sixties, when I was reading those Jim Hatfield reprints as well, and even then I was struck by some of the similarities. Those similarities were to be expected, although I didn't know that at the time, because "Bradford Scott" was really A. Leslie Scott, who created the Jim Hatfield series and wrote many of the novels under the Jackson Cole house-name. Some of the Walt Slade stories from the pulp were expanded into paperbacks later on, although most of the paperbacks were original. Well, as original as they could be considering that Scott used basically the same plot for almost every one of them, varying only the details. But you know what, in 1967 I didn't care, I just enjoyed all the great action and the colorful prose, and just because I can see some of the flaws now doesn't mean that I don't still enjoy them as good yarns.

WESTERN ACES – As I've mentioned before, WESTERN ACES and it's companion magazine WESTERN TRAILS were considered low-level salvage markets, but despite that I've enjoyed all of the issues that I've read. There were contributions by a bunch of solid Western pulpsters, and for years nearly every issue featured at least two stories by one of my favorites, J. Edward Leithead, one under his name and one under his pseudonym Wilson L. Covert.

WESTERN STORY – The granddaddy of them all, of course, the Western pulp with the most issues, and the home of numerous novels and stories by Frederick Faust, better known as Max Brand and a host of other pseudonyms. But WESTERN STORY also published every other top writer in the Western pulps, including many excellent authors who are now all but forgotten like Frank Richardson Pierce. Yes, WESTERN STORY could be a trifle stodgy at times, but the sheer volume of excellent stories is overwhelming. The only real drawback, to me, is the large number of serials, that bane of the pulp reader and collector.

WILD WEST WEEKLY – WILD WEST WEEKLY, like WESTERN STORY, was published by Street & Smith and could be considered WESTERN STORY'S rambunctious little brother. Deliberately aimed at a slightly more juvenile audience, it featured an abundance of series characters like Sonny Tabor and Kid Wolf (both written by Paul S. Powers under the Ward Stevens name), Tommy Rockford and the Border Eagle from Walker A. Tompkins, the White Wolf from Hal Dunning, and the Oklahoma Kid by Lee Bond (who also wrote a long-running and entertaining series of back-up stories about an outlaw named Long Sam Littlejohn in TEXAS RANGERS). Despite its reputation, there were plenty of serious stand-alone stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY, too, especially in the late Thirties and Forties. I've read a lot of issues, and I've enjoyed every one of them.

There were plenty of good Westerns that appeared in such general fiction pulps as ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, SHORT STORIES, and BLUE BOOK, but I've confined this list to magazines that specialized in the genre. Also, I'm sure there were lots of Western pulps that might have made the list if I'd just read more of them, such as Dell's ALL WESTERN. I've read only two issues of that title, but both were excellent. So consider this list a starting place, I guess, a cross-section of a vast genre that has much to offer. Some people have said that everything from the pulps worth reprinting has already been reprinted. Not as far as I'm concerned. I think we've just started to scratch the surface.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Myth

This post originally appeared on November 30, 2007.

It’s difficult to categorize Jackie Chan’s THE MYTH. It’s part ancient Chinese historical epic, part modern-day archeological thriller, part fantasy, and part knockabout martial arts comedy of the sort that Chan is best known for. He plays duel roles: a Chinese general assigned to protect a princess, and in good old Roy Rogers fashion, a modern archeologist named Jack Chan. It’s obvious from the first that the storylines are going to wind up being connected, but that’s not enough for the filmmakers. They also throw in a bunch of levitating priests, hollowed-out mountains, an anti-gravity machine, and immortality pills, with most of the action taking place in, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, a fictional-but-real-sounding country. Believe it or not, though, by the end of the movie everything gets tied together into a somewhat coherent plot.

Speaking of believing it or not, this movie requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. More than once while watching it I said out loud, “Oh, come on!” But if you can just go with it and not ask for things to make much sense, it winds up being pretty enjoyable. I like most of Jackie Chan’s movies and THE MYTH is no exception. The historical parts of this film are probably the best, featuring some nice battles staged with what appear to be hundreds of actual stuntmen and extras, rather than CGI. Chan plays it straight in these scenes and does a fine job.

Overall this one gets a recommendation from me, with the reservations that you probably ought to be a Jackie Chan fan to start with and that sheer goofiness in a plot doesn’t bother you too much.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, October 1932

It must have been really difficult to come up with covers for the air war pulps. One bunch of planes shooting at each other in mid-air looks pretty much like another bunch of planes shooting at each other in mid-air. At least this one has a pilot blazing away at an enemy crate with a handgun to make it a little different. The quality of the authors inside is good: George Bruce and Robert Sidney Bowen, who were great at these aviation stories, and Arthur J. Burks, who wrote nearly everything and wrote it well.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, August 1946

Here's a THRILLING WESTERN cover by Sam Cherry that's bursting with action. Inside there's a Walt Slade story by Leslie Scott and other yarns by Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Leslie Ernenwein, T.W. Ford, and Samuel Mines, better known as an editor but a pretty good writer, too. I haven't read this issue, but I've read many other issues of THRILLING WESTERN and always enjoyed them.

Forgotten Books: Lady - Thomas Tryon

If you spent much time in used bookstores during the Seventies like I did, you probably saw some books by Thomas Tryon. Lots and lots of books by Thomas Tryon, in fact, usually overstock copies of his horror novels THE OTHER and HARVEST HOME, stacked high on top of the regular shelves along with scores of copies of JAWS and AIRPORT. I remember Tryon as an actor, the big, handsome, square-jawed hero of the TV series TEXAS JOHN SLAUGHTER, as well as movies like Disney's MOON PILOT and the unlikely-titled cavalry Western THE GLORY GUYS. I never read any of his novels, though, until now.

THE OTHER and HARVEST HOME were his first two novels, and they were both set in a small Connecticut town called Pequot's Landing. So is his third novel LADY, but unlike the earlier two books, LADY isn't a horror novel, despite some horrible things that happen in it and a few metaphorical mentions of ghosts.

Instead it's more of a mainstream coming-of-age novel narrated by a boy nicknamed Woody, who's about twelve years old when the story begins in the early Thirties. Woody befriends a rich young widow who lives across the town green from him, Adelaide (Lady) Harleigh. Thankfully, although the novel covers more than twenty years in time and Woody grows into a man, there's never any hint of romance between him and Lady. They're simply good friends, that's all. And that's enough.

Although there are a few sinister hints along the way, the first three-quarters of this novel provide an old-fashioned, leisurely look at growing up in a particular time and place, with lots of period detail (but not too much) that makes it feel like a 1940s black-and-white movie. But then the plot takes an abrupt and much darker twist, and things just continue to get worse as the secrets of Lady Harleigh's past are revealed. Tryon doesn't cheat in this twist, either; looking back at the earlier part of the book, the reader can see where he was setting everything up. But the writing skillfully glides right past what's under the surface, making all the revelations in the later part of the book seem even more shocking.

To be honest, LADY is the sort of slow-paced, long-winded book that I normally find very hard to read. Tryon even indulges in the old "Had I but known" bit. But here's the thing: he makes it work. I got caught up in the story and had to find out what was going to happen. The characters are all vividly drawn, even the unsympathetic ones, and I wanted to know how things were going to turn out for them. For those of you old enough to remember them, LADY is from the same school as PEYTON PLACE and KING'S ROW, long, lush novels with large casts, soapy plots, and at least a skin of realism.

Originally published in 1974, this novel is available again in an e-book edition, which is what I read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, enough so that I might read some of Tryon's other novels. I wouldn't mind paying another visit to Pequot's Landing. There has to be a reason all those copies were stacked up on top of the used bookstore shelves back in the Seventies.

Pulp Icons: Erle Stanley Gardner and His Pulp Magazine Characters - Jeffrey Marks

I don't remember the first book I read by Erle Stanley Gardner, which is sort of surprising considering all the other first books by various authors I recall. It may well have been SHILLS CAN'T CASH CHIPS, one of his Donald Lam and Bertha Cool mysteries written under the name A.A. Fair. I know I remember checking that one out from the bookmobile, so that was almost 50 years ago. I checked out other A.A. Fair books, as well as a number of Perry Mason novels, from the bookmobile, and then when my hometown got its own public library I read all the Gardner novels on those shelves, too, many of them early Perry Masons in those cheap Triangle/Blakiston hardcover reprints (more like cardboard cover reprints) with the pages that were already brown and brittle some twenty years after they were published.

All of which is my long-winded way of saying that I've been reading Erle Stanley Gardner novels for a long, long time, but I didn't encounter any of his pulp work until a few years later when Ron Goulart included one of the Lester Leith stories in his iconic anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS.

Even after that it was a while before I read many more of Gardner's pulp stories, but when collections of them began to come out in the Eighties and Nineties, I was right there. I read both volumes of the Whispering Sands stories from ARGOSY. I read both Ed Jenkins collections, and the Ken Corning collection, and the science fiction collection THE HUMAN ZERO. In recent years I've picked up more Gardner pulp collections, and I'll get to them, I swear I will.

That brings us to a recent non-fiction study of Gardner's pulp work, PULP ICONS: ERLE STANLEY GARDNER AND HIS PULP MAGAZINE CHARACTERS by award-winning scholar of mystery fiction Jeffrey Marks. Appropriately enough considering its subject matter, it's a fast, breezy, slightly hardboiled volume that focuses for the most part on the many different series characters Gardner created for the pulps. The longest chapter is the one on Ed Jenkins and Lester Leith, Gardner's best-known characters other than Perry Mason, Donald Lam, and Bertha Cool. However, Marks doesn't neglect the lesser-known characters such as Sidney Zoom, Speed Dash, The Patent Leather Kid, Black Barr, and The Man in the Silver Mask, among many others.

One of the things I really enjoyed in this book is the inclusion of correspondence between Gardner and the pulp editors for whom he was writing as they fine-tuned the stories and the characters. It's an interesting look into Gardner's creative process.

Overall, this is a very entertaining book, packed with information about Gardner and his characters, and whether you're a recent fan of his work or an old-timer like me, you definitely should check it out.

All Star Western - Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti

I'm a longtime Jonah Hex fan, so naturally I'd have some interest in the current comic book series featuring him, ALL STAR WESTERN. I picked up a trade paperback reprinting the first six issues of that title, even though I'd heard mostly negative things about it, most of them centering around the fact that the stories are set in Gotham City in the 1880s, rather than out west.

Actually, that doesn't bother me too much. There's a long tradition in fiction of sending Western heroes back east. Longarm and The Trailsman have both gone to big eastern cities to have adventures. In one of the books I ghosted I sent the hero to both Chicago and Boston before having him go back out west to wrap up the story. So as far as I'm concerned, sending Jonah Hex to Gotham City on the trail of some fugitive outlaws is fine. So is teaming him up with Dr. Amadeus Arkham, who sometime in the future will build a certain asylum. It's nice to see some of the ancestors of other famous Gotham citizens, as well.

The stories in this collection were written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who chronicled Hex's adventures in his previous title for quite a while. They send Hex and Arkham after a serial killer known as the Gotham Butcher and then get them involved in a case in which hundreds of children from the poor part of town have disappeared. Both are decent yarns. Unfortunately, the art by a single-named artist billed as Moritat doesn't appeal to me at all. Hex looks good here and there and there are some impressive full-page action scenes, but overall it's just not to my taste.

This collection also includes a couple of back-up stories featuring El Diablo (who originally appeared with Hex in the old WEIRD WESTERN TALES comic book many, many years ago) and a new character known as The Barbary Ghost. These stories do take place in the West, and they're pretty good ones, although the Indian curse/zombie plot in the El Diablo yarn strikes me as a little overdone. I like the art in these stories—Jordi Bernet on El Diablo and Phil Winslade on The Barbary Ghost—much better.

Overall, I found enough to like in ALL STAR WESTERN: GUNS AND GOTHAM that I'll probably read the next volume. I still prefer the original Jonah Hex stories by John Albano and Tony deZuniga, but those days aren't ever coming back, are they?

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Frozen Ground

This is another movie I'd never heard of until I came across it on Netflix. It's a grim, fact-based police procedural set in Alaska about a State Trooper's search for a serial killer. Nicolas Cage is pretty restrained as the dogged investigator, John Cusack is appropriately creepy as the supposedly respectable businessman who's really a mass murderer, and Vanessa Hudgens, a long way from HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, seems to be channeling Mila Kunis from eight or ten years ago as a teenage prostitute/stripper who escapes from the killer. An impressively hulking actor named Brad William Henke contributes a nice bit as a hired killer. (He was in the second season of JUSTIFIED as one of the Bennett brothers.) THE FROZEN GROUND is a well-made movie, a little slow but with some nice bursts of tension and action. It's somewhat depressing because of the subject matter but worth watching.