Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Marvel Stories, April 1941

This is a pulp I owned and read many years ago. I don't remember anything about it except the cover and the fact that I enjoyed it. Not surprising since the authors included Jack Williamson and Ray Cummings. The Polton Cross story in this one is probably the only thing I've ever read by John Russell Fearn. I have no memory of it. Fearn is one of those authors I've seen mentioned many times, just haven't actually read his stories.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Aces, April 1939

Good cover by Rafael DeSoto on this issue of WESTERN ACES, and some good authors inside including Dean Owen, Wayne D. Overholser, Barry Cord (Peter Germano), and Peter Germane (also Peter Germano).

Forgotten Books: Private Eye Action As You Like It - Joe R. Lansdale and Lewis Shiner

When Joe Lansdale mentioned on Facebook that an e-book edition of this collection was available, I knew I had to get it. My copy of the original edition is gone, and I wanted to read the introductions by Joe and Lew Shiner again. They're the best part of this book for me.

Not that the stories themselves aren't very good. They are. Some of my favorites, in fact. PRIVATE EYE ACTION AS YOU LIKE IT features three Ray Slater stories by Lansdale (including the first story he ever sold), three Dan Sloane stories by Shiner, and three John Talbot stories by both of them in collaboration. All of them except one were published originally in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE—often in the same issues where I had stories appear.

That's what makes this book so great. It's a window back into another time, an era that in most ways is closer to the pulp days than it is to today, and not just time-wise. An era when stories were pecked out on manual typewriters, stuck in manila envelopes, and sent off through the mail to irascible old editors who'd been in the business for forty years, all in hopes of getting an acceptance and a check at the princely, pulp-like rate of a penny a word.

In his introduction, Joe writes about getting a rejection from Sam Merwin, Jr., the editor of MSMM, for a story that Joe had revised and submitted several times. When I read, "I get sicker of this story the more I see it. Try something new", I nodded and thought, yeah, that sounds exactly like Sam. What Joe doesn't mention is that the rejection was probably scrawled on a scrap of paper torn off of something else. I don't think I ever got any correspondence from Sam, rejection or acceptance, on anything resembling a letterhead. That was just the sort of hardscrabble magazine MSMM was.

But those of us who wrote for it formed a sort of fraternity, as Lew talks about in his introduction. We had half a dozen letters to other writers out in the mail all the time, an endless (or so it seemed then) circle of gossip, bitching, and encouragement. The lift in spirits that came whenever I opened the mailbox and found a letter from Nacogdoches or Austin or Brownwood or Durango was a tangible part of what kept me going through those days of pounding out stories and collecting rejection slips or the occasional check for $15 or $25 or even, happy day!, $40 or $50. Groceries this week, baby!

As I've said before about other things, man, I wouldn't go back to those days...but I'm awfully glad I lived through them.

So, I haven't said much about the actual book. It's great. The stories are wonderfully entertaining, classic private eye yarns that were like nothing else being published at that time, and you can see the genesis of both writers in them. I can't read them now without visualizing the covers of those issues of MSMM where they first appeared. I love 'em, simple as that. And PRIVATE EYE ACTION AS YOU LIKE IT is one of the best time machines you'll ever find. If you've never read it, do yourself a favor and grab a copy right away.

Zombies From the Pulps!: While Zombies Walked - Thorp McCluskey

I don't know anything about Thorp McCluskey except that he wrote several stories for WEIRD TALES, some of which have been anthologized over the years. And here's another one, "While Zombies Walked", which was cover-featured on the September 1939 issue of the magazine. This one features a stalwart protagonist who wants to find out why his girlfriend wrote to him breaking up with him soon after she went to take care of her elderly uncle, who had suffered a stroke. When he arrives in the area he finds men working in the cotton fields in a sinister, dazed state. Some of them even appear to have suffered fatal injuries.

No surprise there, but McCluskey provides a nice twist by setting his story in the rural South and making these apparent walking dead poor white trash. In many ways, "While Zombies Walked" is as much a backwoods tale reminiscent of Erskine Caldwell as it is a horror yarn, although make no mistake, it winds up pretty horrific (in a good way). There's even an evil, bombastic preacher who's been tempted by dark forces and given in to them.

Like the Bruno Fischer story that precedes it in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, "While Zombies Walked" is well-written and a little more restrained in tone than some of the other stories in this anthology. But it's very entertaining and makes me think I ought to keep my eyes open for more stories by Thorp McCluskey.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Night Passage

NIGHT PASSAGE is famous as the movie that caused a rift between its star James Stewart and the director who was supposed to helm it, Anthony Mann. Mann quit the picture early on and was replaced by James Neilson. It's not generally regarded as being up to the standard of the earlier Stewart/Mann Western collaborations, but as an hour and a half of entertainment, it's pretty darned good.

Stewart plays Grant McLaine, a former troubleshooter for the railroad who lost his job because he was suspected of letting an outlaw get away. He's been reduced to playing the accordion in end-of-track camps for nickels and dimes. However, when several payrolls in a row are lost to a gang of outlaws headed by the notorious Whitey Harbin, McLaine gets his job back and is tasked with getting a $10,000 payroll through to the railhead.

Naturally enough, the gang goes after the money, including the Utica Kid, the fast-draw outlaw who McLaine supposedly allowed to escape several years earlier. There's a link between the two men that won't come as much of a surprise when it's finally revealed, but it does an effective job of setting most of the plot in motion and eventually leading to a well-done shootout that serves as the movie's climax.

Stewart is fine as always. I can watch him in anything and always enjoy his work. He even sings a couple of songs, something I don't recall him doing in any other film, and does an adequate job of it. As the Utica Kid, Audie Murphy gives one of his better performances. While he was never a great actor, I've liked every movie I've ever seen with him in it. As the villainous Whitey Harbin, Dan Duryea is weaselly as ever. Brandon de Wilde, a few years after his role in SHANE, plays a kid who gets involved with the outlaws.

The rest of the cast is top-notch: Jack Elam and Robert Wilke as two of the outlaws, Jay C. Flippen as a railroad magnate, Paul Fix and Ellen Corby as a married couple in the end-of-track camp, and plenty of other fine supporting players. The Colorado scenery (the movie was filmed along the narrow-gauge railway between Durango and Silverton) is spectacular. The script is by the always dependable Borden Chase, based on a novel by another old pulpster, Norman A. Fox.

I saw NIGHT PASSAGE many years ago but remembered nothing about it. I enjoyed it a great deal this time around. It's a little too formulaic to belong in the top rank of Westerns, but it's good solid entertainment and well worth watching.

The Westward Tide #1: Trail Justice - Jack Tyree (Wayne D. Dundee)

THE WESTWARD TIDE is a new series by Wayne D. Dundee and Mel Odom, writing under the pseudonym Jack Tyree, and as you'd expect from those two authors, it's top-quality entertainment.

TRAIL JUSTICE by Dundee launches the series, which is the story of a wagon train from Missouri bound for Oregon in 1848. Wagon trains have long been fertile ground for authors of Westerns and historical novels. I've written a few myself. They're a natural, with plenty of built-in drama and a wide variety of characters. You can tell almost any sort of story against the backdrop of a wagon train journeying across the plains.

Strong characters are the highlight of TRAIL JUSTICE. Towering mountain man Elwood Blake and young dandy Basil St. Irons serve as scouts for the wagon train and are the protagonists of this first novel, but wagonmaster Eugene Healy and his wife Ingrid, the Reverend Klevold, and villainous Morgan Velmont also make quite an impression. When a trio of plotters carry out murder and robbery a short time after the wagon train departs, Blake and St. Irons set out on their trail to bring them to justice. But while that's going on, Dundee also skillfully sets up some plot threads that are unresolved, so I suspect Odom will take those up in the next installment.

This has the makings of a really fine series, and I'm looking forward to the next book. For now, if you're a fan of strong, fast-moving historical Westerns, TRAIL JUSTICE gets a high recommendation from me.

A Kickstarter of Note: Sword of Wood - Chuck Dixon

Lord William Corrington, the second baron of Corrington and Knight of Christ is a warrior in the Holy Lands at the time of the First Crusade. Tired and disillusioned by years of war, William journeys home to his manor and village along with his squire, Pilsen, only to find the fields and hovels empty and his wife and children gone.

A Dominican friar named Henri DuChamps is the only soul remaining and is forted up in the village church. The friar is glad to see William, but is angered with his absence, stating that while the men of England were out fighting God’s war, Satan has come to take England in the form of an army of vampyres. He tells William of a rampaging horde of monsters that he has been stalking for a year. They sweep down on villages to kill and abduct all they find. They are an army of Satan’s and their ranks swell with each attack. A dark red-haired lord and agent of the Devil called only Kerioth, or ‘The Apostle,’ leads them.

William cannot know if his wife and children have been taken as feedstock or have joined the blood-sucking host.

I'll read just about anything Chuck Dixon wants to write, and this graphic novel looks excellent. You can find out the details about it here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, July 25, 1936

SHORT STORIES was a great adventure pulp, and this issue is especially noteworthy because it featured not just one but two of the authors who were dubbed "King of the Pulps" at one time or another: Erle Stanley Gardner and H. Bedford-Jones. They're also two big favorites of mine. There's also an installment of a Halfaday Creek serial by James B. Hendryx and stories by S. Omar Barker, Hapsburg Liebe, and Stephen Chalmers. Looks like a fine issue all around.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Triple-X Western, November 1931

I love the way the stampeding bull on this cover by Denton Clark seems to be looking right at the reader. That would have caught my eye for sure. So would the presence of a W.C. Tuttle yarn. Other authors in this issue whose names are at least somewhat familiar are Stephen Payne, Jay Lucas, and Carmony Gove. TRIPLE-X WESTERN, published by Fawcett, started out as a general adventure pulp called TRIPLE-X MAGAZINE but changed titles and focus from one month to the next in the spring of 1931, after which it ran for several more years.

The Fyredrake's Prey Now Available in Trade Paperback

The print edition of my heroic fantasy novel THE FYREDRAKE'S PREY is now available from Amazon. I'm trying to figure out a way to write more books like this, but it's probably going to be a while.