The Wrap Up

Not to start this on too much of a downer, but it's no secret that on a personal level, 2014 sucked. I don't want to even think about how many friends and loved ones we lost, and far too many people we know went through the same thing. Add in Livia's broken arm and some lingering health issues affecting several people in the family, and you've got a pretty lousy year.

But we're still here, still working, and why dwell on the negative when some good things happened, too?

Like the fact that I wrote more than a million words for the tenth year in a row. This is something I started thinking about several years ago, and I'm very glad that I made it despite the fact that it looked pretty doubtful for a while. Of course, it really doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but it's a nice accomplishment anyway.

In case you're wondering, that million-plus words took the form of thirteen novels and four novellas. That's a good year's work, I think.

I also launched Rough Edges Press, my publishing imprint, this year, and brought out sixteen books and stories, a mixture of reprints and originals that I'm very proud of, and next year should be even better with the impending launch of the BLAZE! Adult Western series and more work from some of the best writers in the business.

Writing, editing, and publishing cut into my reading time, of course, but I still managed to read 116 books this year, and here are my ten favorites, in the order in which I read them:

JASON EVERS: HIS OWN STORY, Frank Roderus – one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read and a beautiful example of the unreliable narrator.

THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL, Raymond F. Jones – from the classic line of science fiction juvenile novels published by Winston, and even though I didn't read it until this year, it's exactly the sort of book that made me a science fiction fan to start with.

HALF A KING, Joe Abercrombie – a gritty heroic fantasy novel with great narrative pace, from an author I really need to read more of.

LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, Brad R. Torgersen – a collection of, once again, the sort of classic science fiction that made me an SF fan.

CANNIBAL GOLD/BLOOD RED TIDE, Chuck Dixon – I have to put these first two volumes in Dixon's SF/adventure series BAD TIMES together, since it's becoming obvious that what he's doing here is writing one gigantic novel. And it's a superb one, too, full of action and interesting ideas.

THE CHAPLAIN'S WAR, Brad R. Torgersen – greatly expanded from two of the stories in LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, this is the rare "fix-up" novel that works spectacularly well.

DOC SAVAGE: THE ICE GENIUS, Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent) – I've enjoyed all of the new Doc Savage novels I've read so far, but THE ICE GENIUS takes the series to a new level. It satisfies a long-time fan (more than fifty years reading Doc Savage for me!) while at the same time being a classic, sprawling adventure novel of epic scope.

McKENNA'S HOUSE, Robert J. Randisi – a fine private eye yarn and a novel with, as Bob puts it, "a lot of heart". Poignant, well-plotted, with one of the most likable protagonists you'll ever find, this is the best Randisi novel I've ever read.

FORBIDDEN RIVER, Frederick Nebel – a fantastic collection of Northerns from one of the best pulp writers, Frederick Nebel, and one of the best pulp reprint publishers, Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books. This one is pure adventure goodness from start to finish.

I read plenty of other really good books, too, and a lot of comic books and graphic novels I enjoyed. Speaking of comic books, most of the movies I liked wound up on the critics' Worst of the Year lists, but two films I loved that were almost universally well-received are CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. They really got it right. I've gotten away from posting about movies except for the Tuesday's Overlooked series, but I'm going to try to do better about that next year and at least mention most of the stuff we watch.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but another thing I'm going to try to do in 2015 is spend a little less time on-line and more time reading. I have a lot of books and pulps waiting for me to get to them.

This blog is more than ten years old now, and my sincere thanks to those of you who have been reading it from the first and everyone who has discovered it along the way. I'll close by saying that I hope 2014 wasn't too bad for you, and I really, really hope 2015 will be better for all of us. Happy New Year!

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Desert Horseman

It's sort of a given that the movies I write about in this series are ones that I like, but every now and then I'll bend that rule a little to talk about a film I thought was pretty bad but at least had something of interest about it.

In this case, it's the fact that here I am, 61 years old and a fan of Western B-movies for as far back as I can remember (and I mean that literally—some of my earliest memories are of watching Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy movies), and yet I had never seen one of the Durango Kid movies starring Charles Starrett. I'd read about them over the years but somehow never watched one.

Well, I've remedied that now by watching THE DESERT HORSEMAN, a 1946 entry in the series. By the way, that title has absolutely nothing to do with the story. In this one, Starrett plays drifting cowpoke and former army officer Steve Godfrey, who's also the masked hero The Durango Kid. Everybody seems to have heard of The Durango Kid, but I was never sure if he was supposed to be an outlaw, a good guy, or what. He's on the trail of an outlaw who stole an army payroll, a crime for which Steve Godfrey was framed. In the process of that search he stumbles into a save-the-ranch story in which a beautiful girl's father and uncle are murdered so the villainous lawyer who pretends to be her friend can pressure her into saving the ranch. I'm not sure why the lawyer wants the ranch—there's a rumor there's gold on it, but the bad guy actually starts that rumor—and I'm not sure that's ever resolved. This is a pretty muddled script.

Starrett's sidekick, the ranch cook, is played by Smiley Burnette, and to be honest, I have a pretty low Smiley Burnette tolerance. He was okay as Frog Milhouse in the movies he shared with Roy and Gene, but a little of him goes a long way, and there are four or five musical numbers with him in this movie, which is too much for a film with a running time of less than an hour. The featured musical group is Walt Shrum and His Colorado Hillbillies, a far cry from the Sons of the Pioneers or the Riders of the Purple Sage.

Starrett himself is a pretty athletic hero as The Durango Kid, but he's wooden as can be when he's Steve Godfrey. The rest of the cast is adequate at best. The production values are not bad, though. There are some decent stunts by Jock Mahoney, and the photography by William O'Connell is excellent. What it boils down to, though, is that THE DESERT HORSEMAN is a Columbia production, and the Columbia B-Westerns were just never as good as the ones from Republic.

But at least I can say now that I've seen a Durango Kid movie. For all I know this is the worst of the lot and not representative of the rest of the series. Maybe I'll watch another one sometime (they show up occasionally on one of the digital TV channels here). But I don't think I'll be getting in any hurry to do so.

Forbidden River: Gold! - Frederick Nebel

The great Frederick Nebel collection FORBIDDEN RIVER concludes with the simply-titled novella "Gold!", from the May 1931 issue of NORTH-WEST STORIES. This one is something of a departure from the other stories in this volume. It takes place in Alaska during the spring, so there are no shoeshoes or dog teams or frozen rivers. It also has a little more of an epic scope than the others, as mining tycoon Brant Winters takes on a syndicate that wants to move in and take over Brant's mine as well as the town he's founded. The first move made by the villain and his henchmen is to ruin the bank that Brant owns. That launches an explosive series of avalanches, ambushes, and murder that finally leads to a pitched battle for the town.

This would have made a great late Forties bigger budget Republic Pictures movie with John Wayne playing Brant and maybe Forrest Tucker as the villainous Dirk Rood. That's really how it came across to me. Nebel piles the troubles on Brant until you don't see how he's possibly going to come out on top (even though you know he will), and there's action galore, a little humor with a sidekick named Banjo (a good part for Gabby Hayes or Fuzzy St. John), a few poignant moments, and only a touch of that mushy stuff. As good as the other stories are—and they're top-notch, no doubt about that—this is probably my favorite.

And FORBIDDEN RIVER is one of the best books I've read this year. If you like pulp adventure fiction at its peak, this collection from Black Dog Books gets my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, February 22, 1930

Since I seem to have a Leslie Scott theme going this weekend, here's an issue of ARGOSY containing his novelette under the A. Leslie name, "Six-Gun Railroading".  In addition to that we've got an installment of a John Solomon novel by H. Bedford-Jones (haven't read any of those yet, but I need to), part of a Radio Planet serial by Ralph Milne Farley (ditto), more serials by George W. Ogden and Fred MacIsaac, and a short story by Eustace L. Adams. Plus a sword-totin' Viking babe on the cover. Looks like a pretty good issue to me.

Coming Soon: Blaze! (A New Adult Western Series)

J.D. and Kate Blaze are two of the deadliest gunfighters the Old West has ever seen. They also happen to be husband and wife, as passionate in their love for each other as they are in their quest for justice on the violent frontier!

BLAZE! is the first novel in a thrill-packed, all-new Adult Western series created by bestselling action/adventure author Stephen Mertz. J.D. and Kate find themselves facing a deadly ambush by Apaches, then they're hired to track down a gang of ruthless outlaws led by the beautiful, savage bandit queen Rosa Diablo. It's gun-swift excitement all the way in this gritty tale from Stephen Mertz.

Husband and wife gunfighters Kate and J.D. Blaze are hired to track down a gang of rustlers, but what they don't know is that they're going to find themselves in the middle of a three-cornered war, playing each side against the others. If they're lucky they'll collect three payoffs instead of one...but will those payoffs be in gold—or hot lead?! 

Legendary Western author Robert J. Randisi, creator of The Gunsmith, joins the Blaze! team with this fast-action novel of treachery, revenge, passion, and blistering gunplay. From the finest hotels in Denver to a savage showdown in a ghost town, The Deadly Guns is adventure all the way!

J.D. and Kate Blaze, the Old West's only pair of husband-and-wife gunfighters, just want to enjoy their vacation in a beautiful Colorado valley, calling it the honeymoon they never had. But a runaway buggy draws them into a deadly vendetta that threatens the life of one of J.D.'s old friends. Belle Braeden, once a San Francisco soiled dove, is now the wife of one of Colorado's richest ranchers, a fact that the man's spoiled children don't appreciate. When murder strikes, Kate and J.D. have to track down a killer and fight for their own lives against a gang of deadly bushwhackers! 

Wayne D. Dundee, one of today's bestselling and most acclaimed Western authors, spins a lightning-fast, action-packed yarn in BITTER VALLEY, the third book in the all-new BLAZE! series. Trouble always seems to follow J.D. and Kate Blaze, and they answer with hot lead!

(I'm editing and publishing these books, and I can tell you, if you're a fan of The Gunsmith, Longarm, The Trailsman, and Slocum, you're going to want to read these! The first three books will be available as e-books on January 5, but you can pre-order them now. Trade paperback editions should be available about the same time. After that there'll be a new BLAZE! novel every two months, written by some of the top names in the business. If you like plenty of action, be sure to check out BLAZE!)

Writing Anniversary

Regular readers of this blog know that today marks the anniversary of my first sale as a professional writer. For those of you who haven't seen these posts in previous years, on December 27, 1976, I got a check in the mail from Ideal Publishing in New York, in the amount of $167.50, for all rights to a story I'd written for a confession magazine they published called INTIMATE STORY. More details and assorted nostalgic reminiscing about the early days of my career can be found in my December 27^th posts for the past ten years.

So, 38 years in this business and I'm still having fun and learning new things and feeling that old familiar thrill whenever I go into a store and see a book I've written on the shelves, whether my name is on it or not. I'll admit, though, it's starting to catch up to me a little. To paraphrase Chris LeDoux, it ain't the years, son, it's the millions of words. I don't plan to ever retire as long as I'm able to write, but I can see a time when I'll write less, anyway.

Until then, I have pages to do.

For now, a quick thanks to Livia—the one person most responsible for anything good I've ever done—and to all the editors and other authors who have helped make it possible for me to keep spinning yarns all these years.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, January 1942

Yesterday in my Forgotten Books post, I talked a little about Leslie Scott's Walt Slade series that ran in THRILLING WESTERN. Here's another issue that featured a Slade novella. Scott later expanded this one into a full-length novel and sold it to one of the lending library publishers. There's also a novelette by the dependable Chuck Martin in this issue, along with an entry in a series I don't care for, Syl MacDowell's Swap and Whopper, plus short stories by some unfamiliar names. I remember reading this issue years ago, or at least the Walt Slade novella and the Chuck Martin story. I may have skipped the others.

Forgotten Books: Killer Country - Jackson Cole (A. Leslie Scott)

We wrap up the Forgotten Books series for another year with an old favorite of mine, an author I've been reading for close to 50 years. In the early Sixties, when I was volunteering in the local public library, I came across some Western paperbacks that looked interesting in a batch of books somebody had donated. They were about a Texas Ranger named Walt Slade, and they were written by an author I'd never heard of, Bradford Scott.

Well, I read them and thought they were great, so I started buying the new Walt Slade paperbacks that came out every month. Of course, I had no idea at the time who Bradford Scott really was or about the history of the Walt Slade character, but I didn't care. I just read the books and enjoyed them.

But over time I also discovered and became a fan of a paperback series about another Texas Ranger, Jim Hatfield, published under the name Jackson Cole. By then I was aware of pulps and eventually learned that the Jim Hatfield novels being published by Popular Library had appeared originally in the pulp magazine TEXAS RANGERS. It struck me that the style varied considerably from book to book, so I figured out that Jackson Cole must not be a real person, but rather several different authors. And one of them wrote an awful lot like Bradford Scott...

Well, it's too late to make a long story short, but let's move along. Bradford Scott, for those of you who don't already know this, was really Alexander Leslie Scott, a prolific pulp author who also wrote under the names A. Leslie and A. Scott Leslie. He even had some poetry published in WEIRD TALES. In 1936 Scott created the Jim Hatfield character in the first issue of TEXAS RANGERS, in a novel called "The Lone Wolf Rides". Several years later, in the pages of THRILLING WESTERN, a pulp published by the same company, he came up with the Walt Slade character and wrote a long series of novellas about him under the name Bradford Scott, while continuing to write some of the Jim Hatfield novels as Jackson Cole. Scott didn't write all the Hatfields, but he and Tom Curry tied for the largest number of entries in the series at 55 novels.

Then in the early Fifties, Scott stopped writing for TEXAS RANGERS and the other pulps, and I don't believe I've ever heard exactly why. But he moved right over into the new paperback market and took the Jim Hatfield character with him, writing a series of novels for Pyramid Books featuring the Hatfield character. Some of these books were rewrites of Hatfield novels from TEXAS RANGERS, and some were new stories.

Ned Pines, the publisher of TEXAS RANGERS, got wind of this and demanded that Scott stop writing Hatfield novels for Pyramid, since he (Pines) was still publishing the character in the pulp and using the Jackson Cole house-name. Scott resurrected the Walt Slade character from THRILLING WESTERN and starting using him instead in the novels from Pyramid Books. Evidently Pines didn't mind about that. (Slade and Hatfield are almost, but not quite, carbon copies of each other.) Again, some of the early Walt Slade novels were rewrites of pulp stories, but for the most part they were originals. The series was very successful, too, running for more than a hundred books and lasting until 1971.

But to get to the real subject of this post (at last!), the novel KILLER COUNTRY is a Jim Hatfield story from the period when Scott was doing them for Pyramid. I don't know if it's a rewrite or an original. Hatfield is sent to the border country in West Texas to find out who's responsible for terrorizing the Mexican villages on both sides of the Rio Grande. Farmers are being crucified on giant cactus plants, staked out on anthills, thrown into snake pits, and other assorted atrocities. Mysterious night riders are striking terror into the area. Rustling and stagecoach robbery are rampant. In other words, plenty of work for a hard-ridin', hard-shootin' Texas Ranger to take care of.

Hatfield does just that, of course, wading through a flurry of ambushes and a myriad of suspects as he tries to uncover the identity of the hidden mastermind who's really behind all the trouble. Scott's plots nearly always follow this formula, but he throws in a few nice twists in this one and I actually wasn't sure who the villain would turn out to be until the end.

Scott is noted for a couple of things: his flowery, long-winded descriptions of the scenery (he was getting paid by the word for his pulp stories, after all) and his over-the-top action scenes. He's in fine form on both scores in KILLER COUNTRY. Actually, his work has had a considerable influence on my own writing as far as the action scenes go, although I don't write the same sort of long descriptive passages at all. KILLER COUNTRY has some nice lines and a breakneck pace, and I really enjoyed reading it. A lot of modern readers probably wouldn't like it because it's silly and unrealistic, but those things don't bother me when I'm in a nostalgic mood.

Leslie Scott was an interesting writer with a tendency for getting the most financial return out of his work. He rewrote some of his Hatfield novels, changing Hatfield's name to Jim Woodward, and sold them to lending library publishers. The early Ace Double BADLANDS MASQUERADER, published under the Leslie Scott name and featuring Walt Slade, is actually a rewritten Hatfield novel from TEXAS RANGERS. In the early Fifties he wrote soft-core erotica for the hardcover publisher Arco Books and later resold the novels as paperbacks to Beacon Books. He also wrote a number of stand-alone Western novels for Arcadia Books that are a notch above most of his paperback originals. His wife Lily was also a pulp writer, and their son Justin Scott is a writer as well and still in the business, having published a number of well-regarded mysteries and currently writing thrillers with Clive Cussler. I just like Leslie Scott's work, although I don't think it would be to everybody's taste. A couple of his Jim Hatfield novels, including KILLER COUNTRY, are currently available as e-books, and used copies of many of his books are easily found on-line.

A Christmas Memory

When I was a kid, I was, to put it mildly, a handful. As my father, may his truly generous soul rest in peace, once said, "Well, you never let things get too boring when you were a kid." I remember an evening one Christmas season when I was six or seven years old when my sister and her boyfriend were about to go somewhere and I wanted to go along, but I couldn't go with them for some reason. (Those details are fuzzy in my memory.) When they started out the walk in front of our house and my mother told me I wasn't going with them, I reacted in my usual fashion: I burst out the front door and chased after them, yelling and pitching a fit. But then what did I hear?

A booming "Ho, ho, ho!"

I stopped in my tracks, looked over, and saw Santa Claus standing in our front yard, red suit, white beard, and all.

Terrified that my tantrum had put all my presents at risk, I could only stand there as Santa approached me and asked what was wrong. I stumbled over an explanation and then finally just threw myself on the big man's mercy, saying I was sorry and promising that I'd never do it again. He let me off the hook, told me to be a good boy, and said I should go back inside. Which is exactly what I did, as fast as I could. You can bet I behaved better after that...for a little while, anyway.

Of course there's a little more to the story than that. I found out several years later that "Santa" was actually our next-door neighbor Eddie Morrow, who happened to be coming over to show my parents the Santa suit he was going to wear for some sort of festivities. I inadvertently picked that moment to run outside acting like a brat. I'm not sure how everyone managed to get through the confrontation without breaking up at my horror-stricken little face, but they did.

There's no real moral to this story—other than don't act like a jerk because you never know when you'll run into Santa, I guess—but I've never forgotten that evening. So now I'll just wish all of you the very merriest of Christmases, and to all a good night.

Forbidden River: The Roaring Horde - Frederick Nebel

"The Roaring Horde", from the March 1932 issue of FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, finds former lawmen-turned-prospectors Clint Edwards and John Sabbath heading north into the wilds of Alaska when they run across a group of travelers in trouble. These pilgrims are all relatives from California, and they're on their way to the settlement of Hardluck Flat to claim some land they're going to inherit from a dying uncle. But out of the three guides they've hired, two have already been murdered, shot down from ambush, and the third is so spooked that he quits and abandons the immigrants. Edwards and Sabbath have no choice but to take over the chore of getting the group to Hardluck Flat. The fact that one of the travelers is a beautiful young woman plays a part in that decision, since Edwards falls for her the moment he lays eyes on her.

Getting their new-found charges to the settlement is no easy task, but even once that's accomplished, Edwards and Sabbath find themselves neck-deep in murder, lynch mobs, and more trouble. Both of them will have to risk their lives to find out what's behind the affair and set things right.

Frederick Nebel was just about perfect for the sort of short novel collected in FORBIDDEN RIVER. He packs plenty of plot into the stories, and there's room for character development, too. Although Clint Edwards is a stalwart, likable hero in "The Roaring Horde", his sidekick, the dour and deadly John Sabbath, is a fascinating character, too. I don't know if Nebel ever wrote any more about him, but he certainly could have if he wanted to.

All in all, this is another fine story in one of the best books I've read this year. You can head over to the Black Dog Books website to check it out if you haven't already.