Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, December 1933

Ho hum. Stories by Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Eugene Cunningham, and Tom Curry. That's all.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Masked Rider Western, January 1942

I wrote about the Masked Rider novel from this issue yesterday, as part of the Forgotten Books series, since I read the paperback reprint of it. But here's the pulp cover, and it looks like the issue is a good one overall. In addition to Donald Bayne Hobart's entertaining lead novel, there are stories by Johnston McCulley, Allan K. Echols, Sam Brant (a house-name who could have been anybody) and my old friend, editor, and mentor Sam Merwin Jr. his own self. Sam wrote mostly science fiction and detective stories, along with some sports stories and even a few romance yarns. He seems to have been least prolific in Westerns, but I'll bet his story in this issue is a pretty good one.

Forgotten Books: Haunted Mesa - Donald Bayne Hobart

First some background: The Masked Rider was a pretty long-running character in the Western pulps. Novels featuring him, in magazines from two different publishers, appeared for almost twenty years. More than likely, the character was created to cash in on the success of the Lone Ranger on radio. He was also a masked rider of the plains (hence the name) and had a faithful Indian companion, in this case the Yaqui known as Blue Hawk. Because he wore a mask, folks often mistook him for an owlhoot, and he was sometimes known as the Robin Hood Outlaw. But of course the Masked Rider was a good guy, using that unsavory reputation at times to help him foil the schemes of the real villains. In the early issues of the pulp published by Ranger Publications (another nod to the Lone Ranger), he was more of a Shadow-like figure, a mysterious, black-caped personage prone to manipulating events behind the scenes. When the magazine became part of the Thrilling Group, the novels became more action-oriented and less mysterious, but the basic set-up remained the same, with the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk drifting from place to place, righting wrongs.

One thing that made the Masked Rider different from the Lone Ranger was that he had a secret identity of sorts. The Lone Ranger would sometimes masquerade as other characters, but the Masked Rider spent a considerable amount of time in each adventure posing as drifting cowpoke Wayne Morgan. Note that Wayne Morgan wasn't his real name; that's just a fictional identity the Masked Rider made use of. His real name and background is never revealed in the stories.

My introduction to the character came not from the pulps but rather from a series of paperback reprints published by Curtis Books in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Quite a few (but by no means all) of the novels from the Thrilling Group incarnation of the pulp were reprinted. I had a bunch of them and read quite a few of them, but it had been a long time since I'd tried one of the Masked Rider's adventures. I have a few of them on my shelves now, and the other day Donald Bayne Hobart's HAUNTED MESA seemed to need me to read it.

This one originally appeared in the January 1942 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN, and you can see that cover here on the blog tomorrow as part of the Saturday Morning Western Pulp series. I'm writing about the book today because I read the paperback edition. (I don't own a copy of the pulp.) This one has a nicely atmospheric opening as several cattlemen are about to lynch the man they believe to be the leader of the rustlers who have been plaguing the Haunted Mesa country. They're jumped by the rustlers and might be wiped out except for the timely arrival of the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk, who happen to be on top of the mesa itself. The "leader" of the rustlers gets away, but the reader knows all along he's not the actual villain. He's been framed for the crime by the mastermind who's really behind the gang, and the identity of that mastermind couldn't be much more obvious if the guy was wearing a neon sign proclaiming his evilness.

But you know what? I don't care. The real fun of a book like this is reading about how the Masked Rider foils the various schemes of the bad guys, racing around having gunfights and fistfights, getting captured, escaping, and generally being the stalwart pulp hero that he was for many years. This is pure entertainment as far as I'm concerned, comfort reading, if you will, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

A few words about Donald Bayne Hobart: Surely forgotten these days except by a few pulp aficionados, not much is known about Hobart. He was born in 1898 and started writing when he was around 20 years old, but he didn't become a prolific pulp author until the late 1920s, when he began writing for numerous pulps in various genres. By the late 1930s, he had settled into a niche as a productive author of Western and detective stories, nearly all of them appearing in pulps from the Thrilling Group published by Ned Pines and edited by Leo Margulies. Hobart kept turning out stories until the mid-Fifties, usually under his own name and sometimes under the rather transparent pseudonym Hobart Donbayne. He published a few late stories in the mystery digests and died in 1970.

Even though Hobart's name appeared frequently on the covers, I don't think anybody ever considered him to be more than a competent, third-tier pulp writer. I never did, although honestly I'd never read more than a few of his stories. Based on HAUNTED MESA, though, I may have underrated him a little. This is a nicely written yarn with good action scenes and the occasional atmospheric touch, as I mentioned above, including a final battle on top of the mesa during a thunderstorm. Sure, there's a lot of "yuh mangy polecat" dialogue, but you've got to expect that. Good solid work all around, certainly good enough to make me think I need to read more by Hobart. I have another of his Masked Rider paperbacks on hand, as well as stories by him in various Western pulps.

Finally, about Curtis Books: The company lasted only a few years, but during its run it published quite a bit of good fiction, including a lot of reprints from the Rio Kid Western pulp and a number of Mike Avallone's Ed Noon novels, both reprints and originals. (The first Curtis Book I ever bought, off the spinner rack at Trammell's Pak-a-Bag Grocery, was Avallone's SHOOT IT AGAIN, SAM.) They've come to be notorious for producing some of the cheapest, most shoddily made paperbacks of all time, however. The pages in my copy of HAUNTED MESA are as brown as if they had come from the original pulp itself. Luckily, they're not very brittle. And in even more of a surprise, the glue has actually held up in this copy, so the pages didn't separate from the spine. I've seen that happen time and time again with Curtis Books.

Copies of the Masked Rider paperback reprints can be found on-line, but they're fairly pricey, maybe because not all that many of them survived. If you can put yourself in that pulp mindset (I live in that pulp mindset, most of the time), they're a lot of fun. If you run across any of them that aren't too expensive, I think they're worth picking up and worth reading.

Tuesday's Overlooked Commercials: No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach's In)

I remember this one well, mainly because of the great music by The T-Bones. It became a radio hit after the commercial started airing on TV. I think The T-Bones had one other song on the charts, but that was it for them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, July 25, 1931

A striking cover on an issue featuring W.C. Tuttle, F.V.W. Mason, George F. Worts, Fred MacIsaac, and Richard Howells Watkins. Further evidence of why ARGOSY was one of the top pulps in the business for many years.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, December 1934

This cover was painted by R. Farrington Elwell, but it seems to me to be influenced by the great Charles M. Russell. ALL WESTERN was one of the top Western pulps and had good covers and authors. In this issue, there are stories by Eugene Cunningham, George Cory Franklin, S. Omar Barker, and J.E. Grinstead. Nearly all forgotten today, but top writers in their time.

Forgotten Books: Pirates' Gold - H. Bedford-Jones

This novel by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones, appeared complete in the December 20, 1922 issue of the iconic pulp magazine ADVENTURE, and it certainly is an adventure tale in the classic sense. Ever since TREASURE ISLAND, writers have been spinning yarns about desperate people going after buried gold, and that's what Bedford-Jones does here. The story opens in London in the early 1700s, where narrator George Roberts, a sailor from the colony of Virginia, is looking for a ship to sign on with. He winds up taking a position as first mate on the King Sagamore, under the command of an old friend, Captain Ned Low. There are some pretty shady rumors about Low's past, but Roberts doesn't put much stock in them. Turns out he probably should have.

Because the ship has barely left port before there's a murder, and a beautiful young woman shows up on board, and everybody in the crew seems to have some secret or another, usually sinister, and there's more going on than a simple search for buried treasure, including a years-long quest for bloody vengeance.

Everything clips along at a fast pace, in Bedford-Jones' terse prose (terse compared to a lot of pulp writers who got paid by the word, anyway), and there are several nifty twists along the way. PIRATES' GOLD is definitely a little old-fashioned in some respects, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it a great deal. It was reprinted a number of years ago by Wildside Press in a trade paperback edition that's still available, and there's an e-book edition as well. If you like traditional historical adventure tales, it's a mighty good one.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Club Havana

(This post originally appeared on December 16, 2009, in slightly different form.)

I heard about the movie DETOUR and its director, Edgar G. Ulmer, for years, and when I finally got around to watching it, I liked it a lot. Now I’ve watched another Ulmer film, the much more obscure CLUB HAVANA, and it’s . . . interesting.

CLUB HAVANA is basically a Grand Hotel sort of movie, introducing the viewer to a number of different characters who show up at the opulent Miami nightclub of the title. There’s the idealistic young doctor, the married couple on the verge of breaking up, the middle-aged society woman with three very creepy grown children, the gangster who’s suspected of murder, the piano player, assorted other musicians, the somewhat shady switchboard operator . . . You get the idea. Ulmer gives each of these characters a little time in the spotlight, so to speak, and then lets them interact and their storylines intertwine.

The biggest problem with this movie is that at 62 minutes, it’s just too short to do justice to all the plot that Ulmer tries to cram into it. Watching it you get the sense that if it had been thirty or forty minutes longer, it would have been a much better movie. As it is, it’s really rushed, and the fact that at least ten minutes get taken up by a couple of musical numbers doesn’t help matters. Still, there are some striking scenes and genuinely suspenseful moments. The big ending, which takes place in the club’s parking lot, is marred by photography that’s too dark and murky to tell what’s going on most of the time.

Tom Neal, one of the stars of DETOUR, plays the young doctor, and while Neal’s tragic personal life later on inevitably resonates for the modern viewer in these early roles, he’s not given much to do here. Marc Lawrence as the gangster turns in the best performance and the movie would have benefited if his role had been bigger.

Overall, CLUB HAVANA would have been better if it had been longer and had better production values . . . but if it had had those things, then it wouldn’t really be an Ulmer film, now would it? This one’s hard to find, but if you come across a copy it’s worth watching, as a curiosity if nothing else.

Now Available: Cross Examinations - John Hegenberger

A series of serious crimes: Kidnapping. Murder. Art Thief. Blackmail. Comic Books.

Private Investigator Eliot Cross faces heartache, headache, backache, and a royal pain in the neck in these rollicking noir stories from the heart of the Heartland.

Cross Examinations, Inc. established in 1988 
Crime in Columbus

Never before published, CROSS EXAMINATIONS sets the stage for an exciting new novel that will join pop-culture author John Hegenberger’s soon-to-be-published Tripleye trilogy and his upcoming Stan Wade, L.A.P.I. series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, August 1935

Good old SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES and Robert Leslie Bellem. He has three stories in this issue, one under his own name and one each by Jerome Severs Perry and Ellery Watson Calder. There's also a story by the great E. Hoffmann Price and stories by assorted little known authors, some of whom may be house names. And of course, that, ah, cover...