Forgotten Books: Escape to Sindom - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

Like many of the novels in the various imprints published by William Hamling's black box empire, ESCAPE TO SINDOM is essentially a crime story. Val Sparkman is a professional criminal—a con man, a forger, a thief, a killer when he has to be. A bit of bad luck lands him in a small-town jail in Iowa. The local lawmen don't really have a clue who they've locked up, and Sparkman knows he has to escape before they find out. He manages to do so, but now he's on the run with no money and no gun. He hitches a ride and knocks out the traveling salesman who picks him up, stealing the man's car and heading for Mexico, but his odds of getting there are slim.

Meanwhile, a few towns away, beautiful but bored young waitress (and town tramp) Janey Haskell is tired of her life and wants to do something big and exciting. It's pretty much inevitable that when a handsome stranger comes along, Janey will latch on to him and run away with him, even though he may be dangerous...

Anybody who's read very many noir novels, or very many of these soft-core novels, or both (that would be me and no doubt some of you), will know pretty much everything that's going to happen in ESCAPE TO SINDOM. That said, a skillful author can elevate a book above its formula with good writing, and not surprisingly that's what we have in this one since it was written by Robert Silverberg under his Don Elliott pseudonym. Silverberg keeps things racing along at an entertaining pace, throwing in a few flashbacks to earlier sexual adventures of Sparkman and Janey. There's an occasional touch of humor to break up the overall sense of impending doom, and the final twist is a pretty good one.

By the time ESCAPE TO SINDOM was published, the sex scenes in these books were more frequent and more graphic and the rest of the plot isn't quite as important as it was in the books published just a few years earlier. That keeps it from being in the top rank of Silverberg's Don Elliott novels, but it's still pretty darned entertaining. I'll read any of them I come across, and I haven't been disappointed yet.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Far Country

THE FAR COUNTRY is another Western collaboration between star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann, and it's a good one. Stewart, playing the same sort of hardboiled character that he does in his other films for Mann, is a cowboy taking a herd of cattle to Alaska for the Klondike gold rush. He runs into all sorts of trouble along the way, most notably a corrupt lawman played by John McEntire. The character seems to be based on the real-life criminal Soapy Smith, who ruled Skagway, Alaska during the late 1890s.

Stewart's sidekicks are the always watchable Walter Brennan and Jay C. Flippen. McEntire's chief henchman is a young, slender, and very sinister Jack Elam, one of my favorite character actors. (You've all heard the "Who's Jack Elam?" story, I assume?) Henry Morgan is also one of the villains, which is a little hard to accept after watching him play nice guys in dozens of movies and TV shows all the way back to a forgotten series called PETE AND GLADYS. There's a mild romantic triangle involving Stewart with beautiful saloon owner Ruth Roman and tomboyish Corinne Calvet. The location photography is beautiful, and the screenplay by Borden Chase clips right along at a good pace and climaxes with a good shootout between Stewart and McEntire that I actually remembered from the last time I saw this movie more than forty years ago.

Stewart seems to be struggling a little with his own affable nature in this one. He was always capable of reaching into some dark corners, most notably in his films directed by Frank Capra (there's at least one shot in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE that's as noir as anything ever put on screen), but there are a few moments in THE FAR COUNTRY that seem almost like Elwood P. Dowd became a cowboy.

Despite that—or hell, maybe because of it—I like this movie quite a bit. It's nothing special, just a good solid hour and a half of Western entertainment. Just the ticket sometimes.

The Girls of Bunker Pines - Garnett Elliott

THE GIRLS OF BUNKER PINES is the third adventure of Jack Laramie, the Drifter Detective, in what has become one of my favorite current private eye series. Jack, as you may recall, is the grandson of legendary Old West marshal Cash Laramie, but he's a very different sort of character. He wanders around Texas in the mid-1950s, living out of a horse trailer and scrabbling for a precarious living as a private detective. It's a wonderful basis for a series, and author Garnett Elliott delivers another fine yarn in THE GIRLS OF BUNKER PINES.

This time a case involving a traveling preacher and a married woman with a wandering eye involves Jack in something even darker and more dangerous. As a favor to an ex-GI who gives him a hand in that case, he investigates a land development scheme in which veterans are being recruited to invest money in underground houses. Naturally there are some beautiful women involved (the girls of the title), along with plenty of shady characters.

As a bonus this time around, Elliott provides more background on Jack in the form of flashbacks to his service as a waist gunner in a B-17 during World War II. These sections are excellent and give the reader a better sense of who Jack is and what brought him to the life he leads. The scenes set in the Fifties ring true as well. It's hard to write period fiction that comes across as authentic without being overdone, but Elliott always manages to do so quite effectively.

Mostly THE GIRLS OF BUNKER PINES is just plain fun. Fast-paced, with good characters, a twisty plot, some wry humor, and a lot of darkness lurking under the surface (figuratively and literally), this is just about everything you'd want in a good private eye yarn. I had a great time reading it.

E-book on Amazon

Trade Paperback on Amazon

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, May 1947

Earle Bergey's covers were controversial among science fiction fans even when they were first being published, let alone in this more politically correct age. I like 'em, though, but I've never taken science fiction as seriously as some do. With stories by Henry Kuttner, Robert A. Heinlein, Manly Wade Wellman, and John Russell Fearn, this issue looks like a lot of fun.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story, January 1947

Ah, those great Fiction House covers! And with stories by Les Savage Jr., Giff Cheshire, and D.B. Newton, among others, this must have been a fine issue to read, too.

Forgotten Books: The Year When Stardust Fell - Raymond F. Jones

THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL is one of those Winston science fiction novels that were so popular when I was a kid, what we called juveniles back then but are considered YA now. I remember seeing this one numerous times on the bookmobile shelves, but for some reason I never read it until now. That's probably good. For one thing, it's not only a fine novel, but reading it now fifty years later also gives it considerable nostalgia appeal. For another, its grim portrait of society breaking down probably would have scared the crap out of me when I was ten years old.

It's set in Mayfield, a fictional college town in Colorado. Our hero, high school student Ken Maddox, is the son of a professor and a budding scientist in his own right, as well as a whiz on the football team and an all-around great guy. He's not perfect—he does a little hot-rodding—but he's pretty darned close. He even has a female friend who's a beautiful blond Swedish exchange student, and even though the author never gets around to developing a romance between them, you know it's inevitable.

Everything is going along in fine 1950s-sitcom style when a comet shows up and Earth gets stuck in its tail for several months. There don't seem to be any effects from that until machinery suddenly stops working and before you can say "dystopia", civilization collapses. It's as if the cast of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER or FATHER KNOWS BEST were dropped down into a dangerous, post-apocalyptic world. The people in Mayfield struggle to survive and maintain at least a small degree of civilization while Ken, his father, and some other scientists from the college try to find a way to reverse the effects of the dust in the comet's tail, which proves to be the culprit in gumming up all the machines.

When it comes to grim and bleak, THE HUNGER GAMES and all the other current YA stuff has nothing on THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL. Characters die right and left, including some you wouldn't expect. There are no miraculous answers, just a long, deadly struggle that Jones does a fine job of depicting. (As an aside, I haven't read any of the Hunger Games books, but when I watched the first movie, I said, "This is just Fifties science fiction." THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL is pretty good evidence of that point.)

I really enjoyed this book. It's dated, of course, but that never bothers me. I'm pretty much out of date myself most of the time, so THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL was a very nice return visit to Bookmobile Days. An e-book version is available for free numerous places on-line.

(By the way, I don't think the Cleavers would have made it. Although I can sort of see a grim, grizzled, heavily armed Ward Cleaver surviving. Eddie Haskell, of course, would be fine and thrive no matter how much chaos ensued.)

The Bitch - Les Edgerton

You'd think that in a noir novel called THE BITCH, the title character would be a woman, but that's not the case in Les Edgerton's compelling novel from New Pulp Press. As it turns out, "The Bitch" is prison slang for getting a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

That's the threat that two-time ex-con and master burglar Jake Bishop faces as he tries to live a normal life with his pregnant wife. Jake has a decent job and is about to open his own business, when his former cellmate shows up to blackmail him into taking part in a jewel robbery. In a book like this, when one of the characters starts talking about "one last job" and "a sure thing", you know it's going to turn out to be anything but.

Boy, does it.

In fact, just about everything goes wrong for Jake that possibly can, and the choices he makes in response are, you guessed it, also wrong and just drag him deeper into trouble. Any time Jake—and the reader—thinks that things couldn't possibly get any worse, they do.

Edgerton's tough prose and sure hand with the plot twists make this novel race along at a very satisfying pace. He proves to be a master at making the reader care about and almost sympathize with Jake, even when he does terrible things. Ultimately, Edgerton goes places you don't think he'll go, but he drags you along so that you have no choice but to go with him.

THE BITCH is an excellent crime novel. Not what you'd call a fun read, by any means, but to use a cliché, it's a book you can't put down.

THE BITCH e-book at Amazon.

THE BITCH trade paperback at Amazon.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Eisenhower & Lutz

This one's pretty obscure. It's a sitcom from the MTM stable that ran for 13 episodes in the fall of 1988. Scott Bakula played a somewhat sleazy young lawyer in Palm Springs, surrounded by the usual wacky sitcom characters. This is the first thing I remember seeing Bakula in, and he was pretty likable. In fact, I remember the whole show being mildly amusing. I think we watched every episode. It's never been on DVD as far as I know, and there are only a few clips from it on YouTube. The gimmick, by the way, is that there was no Eisenhower in the law firm, only Lutz (Bakula's character). But the staid, conservative citizens of Palm Springs liked the name.

Now Available: Blazing Trails and Western Tales - Charles Boeckman/Who is Elizabeth? - Patti Boeckman

Rough Edges Press is proud to announce the release of two new books from a pair of legendary writers, Charles and Patti Boeckman:

Cover by Laura Givens

BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES

From gunsmoke-laced shootouts in cantinas and saloons to desperate nighttime dashes across the Rio Grande to the quiet, heartfelt courage of men backed into a corner and faced with overwhelming odds, Charles Boeckman's classic stories of the Texas frontier are filled with everything that makes the Old West exciting!

Writing under the name Charles Beckman Jr., Charles Boeckman filled the pages of vintage Western pulp magazines such as STAR WESTERN and DIME WESTERN with colorful tales of action, adventure, and romance. With authentic settings and compelling characters, these stories are some of the best from the pulp era.

Rough Edges Press is proud to present BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES, a new collection of eight novellas and short stories by Charles Boeckman originally published between 1949 and 1957. These tales from one of the master storytellers of the Old West have never been reprinted until now.

Cover by Livia J. Washburn

WHO IS ELIZABETH?

Pit a feisty, she-cat against a reluctant interloper and watch the sparks fly.

When Elizabeth McDaniel's reclusive, sheltered existence on her grandfather's farm is invaded by Derek Huston, she cannot possibly imagine the stunning result of his intrusion into her life. And he has no idea how enchanted he will become with the lovely, spit-fire redhead who demonstrates her dead-eye, rifle aim on their first encounter.

Their first clash of wills precedes a budding romance, the flowering of Elizabeth's musical talents with a guitar provided by Derek, and Derek's acceptance into the family. No one suspects that Derek has a hidden agenda so explosive that, when revealed, it turns Elizabeth's world upside down and her image of herself inside out.

No longer able to trust Derek on any level, she erases him from her life and from her heart.

Is there any hope that Derek can regain her confidence and her love?

Find out in this delightful, warm, touching, compelling account of two people whose lives are dramatically changed by each other and who have to sort through the rubble of their existence before they can know if they have a future together.

I enjoyed editing both of these books. Charles is one of the great Western pulp storytellers and these are fine examples of his work. Patti's novel really kept me turning the pages because of her skill at creating characters the reader cares about.

Below the links are the covers of some of the Western pulps in which Charles's stories in this volume originally appeared.

BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES e-book at Amazon

BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES trade paperback at Amazon

BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES e-book at Barnes & Noble

BLAZING TRAILS AND WESTERN TALES e-book at Smashwords

WHO IS ELIZABETH? e-book at Amazon

WHO IS ELIZABETH? trade paperback at Amazon

WHO IS ELIZABETH? e-book at Barnes & Noble

WHO IS ELIZABETH? e-book at Smashwords

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spy Stories, March 1935

I think I need a monocle and one of those little mustaches that curls up on the ends. Bet I'd look suitably sinister (or just silly). This was an A.A. Wyn pulp, and there's a nice line-up of authors inside, including E. Hoffmann Price, George Fielding Eliot, Norman A. Daniels, and Arch Whitehouse. I don't think I've ever seen an issue of SPY STORIES, but I'm sure I'd enjoy it if I did.