Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Doc Savage, October 1946

We think of DOC SAVAGE as a pulp first, and rightly so since it's one of the most iconic pulps ever. But for a good part of the Forties it was a digest magazine, like Street & Smith's other former pulps THE SHADOW, WESTERN STORY, and ASTOUNDING. I know some people don't care for the series, but I was a huge fan after picking up the Bantam reprint of METEOR MENACE from the spinner rack in Tompkins' Pharmacy after school one afternoon in 1964. (Fifty years ago! Hard to believe.)

Anyway, I bought and read those Bantam paperbacks faithfully all through junior high and high school, and so did my friend Gary Looney. We rehashed the plots endlessly. I knew the novels had appeared originally in pulp magazines, although I had never seen one.

Then one day at school, Gary handed me a copy of the October 1946 issue containing the Doc Savage novel DEATH IN LITTLE HOUSES. He had found it at the First Monday flea market in Weatherford and wanted me to have it, since he knew I was an even bigger Doc fan than he was. Sure, it was a digest, and the cover's nothing to write home about, but it was an actual DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE, not a reprint. In fact, at that time it would still be years before DEATH IN LITTLE HOUSES was reprinted, so I was able to read a story that your average Doc fan in those days couldn't. It was a wonderful thing.

Later I bought some more Doc digests at Collectors Bookstore in Corpus Christi and was glad to have them, too. To this day, I've still never owned a pulp-sized issue of DOC SAVAGE, although I've read most of the novels in reprints, as well as some of Will Murray's new Doc novels.

Is DEATH IN LITTLE HOUSES any good? I haven't read it since high school, but I remember enjoying it. Maybe I'll reread it one of these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, June 1943

I'm not sure exactly what's happening on this cover, but it's a creepy, effective image anyway. Authors in this issue include Norman Daniels, Joe Archibald, and Dale Clark. Walt Bruce, author of the Dr. Zeng series, was really W.T. Ballard and Robert Leslie Bellem. I've never read any of those stories, but I like Ballard and Bellem, so maybe I should.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels, October 1951

Some nice cover art on this issue of a mostly reprint magazine from the Thrilling Group, and a bunch of good writers inside including Ernest Haycox, Allan R. Bosworth, Dwight Bennett (D.B. Newton), Joe Archibald, Larry A. Harris, and Barry Scobee. Wish I had a better scan of this one.

Forgotten Books: Arctic Wings - L. Ron Hubbard

I hadn't read a Northern in a while and was in the mood for one, but this short novel by L. Ron Hubbard (originally published in the June 1938 issue of the pulp FIVE NOVELS MONTHLY) isn't a Gold Rush/fur trapping/frontier story like I expected. Instead it's an adventure yarn contemporary to the time it was published, featuring radium mining, payroll robberies, and Mounties who fly planes and engage in aerial dogfights rather than mushing around with snowshoes and dogsleds.

Bob Dixon is a flying Mountie who's feared by criminals throughout the north country because of his inflexible devotion to the law and his ruthless manner of carrying it out. His nickname is "Lawbook" Dixon. Nobody knows, however, that he's that way because he was psychologically abused as a child by his father, a martinet of a judge who constantly threatened Bob with the idea that he would become a criminal and come to a bad end.

It looks like this is the case when Bob appears to have shot down a payroll plane, murdering the pilot and the manager of the radium mine for which the payroll was intended and stealing the money. It won't come as a surprise, though, that Bob was framed, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to corral the real culprits and clear his name, helped along the way by a beautiful girl who runs a trading post just north of the Arctic Circle.

This may be my favorite of the Hubbard stories I've read so far. The writing is good, the plot is tight, and there's some nice suspense here and there. The action in the dogfights is easier to follow than in some aviation adventure fiction I've read. Overall I enjoyed ARCTIC WINGS quite a bit. It's a good solid pulp action yarn.

Now Available from Rough Edges Press: Fast Track - Ed Gorman and Bill Crider

Dev Mallory has been a Secret Service agent, a detective, and a cowboy...which makes him the perfect man for the job of protecting a British nobleman's Thoroughbred race horse and saving the U.S. government from embarrassment. But there's more going on than sabotage, as Dev's beautiful redheaded partner is kidnapped and Dev finds himself up to his neck in murder, lust, and intrigue.

Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Ed Gorman and Bill Crider team up for this fast-paced Western mystery now available again from Rough Edges Press. Packed with action and colorful characters, FAST TRACK is an adventure novel where the suspense never lets up!

FAST TRACK on Amazon

FAST TRACK on Barnes & Noble

FAST TRACK on Smashwords

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Down Home

This sitcom from the early 90s (nineteen episodes spread out over two seasons) seems to be almost totally forgotten. There are no clips from it on YouTube and only a few pictures of the cast to be found on-line. But I remember enjoying it quite a bit.

The premise of DOWN HOME finds Judith Ivey playing a big city businesswoman who returns to her home, a small fishing town on the Texas gulf coast, to take over her father's diner/bait shop. Naturally the town is full of colorful characters. Aren't all small towns, as I mentioned in my post about HART OF DIXIE last week? But having spent some time on the coast myself, I can say that DOWN HOME was at least somewhat realistic.

This series' biggest asset was its cast, which included some fine character actors such as Dakin Matthews and Eric Allen Kramer. The late, great Tim Scott, probably best known for playing Pea Eye in LONESOME DOVE, was top-notch as a fisherman/homespun philosopher, and Gedde Watanabe as a Vietnamese immigrant shared the series' funniest moment with him, a scene involving a fork for the very few of you who might recall it.

DOWN HOME wasn't a great series, just a pleasant, enjoyable one that never quite caught on. But I enjoyed it for what it was and remember it fondly.

Showdown in Abilene - Alfred Wallon

I've been wanting to read some of Alfred Wallon's Western novels for a while, but nearly all of them were published only in Germany, and despite two years of German in college I'm far from being fluent enough to read in that language at anything more than a very rudimentary level.

However, thanks to the good folks at Piccadilly Publishing, some of Wallon's novels are now appearing in English translations as e-books, so I was able to start at the beginning with his first novel, SHOWDOWN IN ABILENE, which is also the first book in his most successful series, Rio Concho.

These books revolve around the adventures of the cowboys who work on the Rancho Bravo spread in West Texas. Foreman Jay Durango is the protagonist in SHOWDOWN IN ABILENE. I don't know if he plays that role in succeeding books, but I'll find out since I have the next two in the series. This one finds Jay and the rest of the Rancho Bravo crew arriving in Abilene with a trail herd they've brought to the railhead, a classic situation in Western novels. They're not there long before Jay encounters an old enemy and several of the cowboys get mixed up in a brawl that causes Abilene's marshal, Bear River Tom Smith, to throw them in jail. The situation quickly escalates with an attempt on Jay's life, a fire that threatens to destroy the town, and a bank robbery that leads to the title showdown.

This is a relatively short novel, and Wallon never lets the action slow down for long. Jay Durango is a fine hero, tough but honorable and with a touch of mystery about his background. We don't really learn a lot about the supporting cast, but they're likable enough and this is just the first book in a long-running series, after all. I really enjoyed the mixture of fiction and history, such as the appearance of Bear River Tom Smith, who was the marshal in Abilene immediately before Wild Bill Hickok. Wallon provides an entertaining afterword about the historical aspects of the novel, as well as some background on his Rio Concho series.

SHOWDOWN IN ABILENE is a good solid traditional Western, and I'm glad it's now available in English. If you're a Western fan, it's certainly well worth reading. You can pick up a copy on Amazon here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Star Adventure Magazine, December 1936

Decent Foreign Legion cover on this pulp I've never encountered before. "All Star" is maybe a little strong to describe the authors in this issue. I think only Eugene Cunningham and Georges Surdez fall into that category. But I'm sure it's pretty entertaining.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, March 1935

Nice Rafael DeSoto cover on this early issue of WESTERN ACES, and a pretty good line-up of authors inside: T.W. Ford, L.L. Foreman, Joe Archibald, and Phil Richards. Shame about the cowboy's hat, but the girl might be worth it.

Forgotten Books: Herbert West: Reanimator - H.P. Lovecraft

My general dislike of H.P. Lovecraft's work, while still acknowledging its influence and historical significance in the field of Weird Fiction, has gotten me in trouble on more than one occasion in the past. But for some reason, every so often I get the urge to read something by him, maybe in the hope of finding a story that I like. And whaddaya know, I finally did.

I'm fudging a little with this week's entry. "Herbert West: Reanimator" is a novella, not a novel, but it's been published by itself enough times that I think I can count it as a book. Nor is it really forgotten, since it's readily available in any number of print and digital editions. However, if Jeff Shanks hadn't included it in his recent anthology ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, I probably never would have read it, so it was pretty close to being forgotten where I was concerned.

All the things I find annoying about Lovecraft's work are present here: the long-winded prose (although this one does seem to move along at a little faster clip that the other stories I've read by him), the scarcity of dialogue, the overall wussiness of the protagonists. But the genuine creepiness of this tale of a doctor who tries to discover the secret of reanimating dead bodies won me over. It's episodic, reflecting its origins as a serial in a literary magazine in 1922, but that works for me since it serves to pick up the pace. (The novella was reprinted in WEIRD TALES in 1942, after Lovecraft's death.) There are even several instances of violent action that work pretty well.

So, being curious how other people feel about this story since I liked it, I went on-line and discovered that Lovecraft himself reportedly hated it. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi says that it's universally reviled as Lovecraft's worst story. Somehow this does not surprise me. It figures that the one I like, many of his fans hate. But as usual, I don't care. It's the most pulpish Lovecraft story I've read so far, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. And it's got me interested enough to read something else by Lovecraft in the relatively near future. If anybody wants to recommend anything in the comments, based on my comments on this one, have at it. I'd appreciate the input.

I'll have more to say about ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! in due course. It'll probably take me a while to read it, since I tend to work in stories from anthologies between novels, but for me it's off to a good start with "Herbert West: Reanimator". (Side note: I've never seen the movies based on this story, which supposedly don't share much with it other than the title. I'd watch a faithful movie adaptation of it, though.)