Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, November 1946

An old codger with a bullet hole in his hat and his hands full of dynamite . . . he told those darn kids to stay off his lawn and away from his gold mine! I like this cover, probably because a lot of the time I feel about like this guy looks. But inside this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES are yarns by Ed Earl Repp, Barry Cord, Ray Gaulden, and some lesser-known names and house-names, so I'm sure if I sat down and read it, my mood would improve.

Now Available for Pre-Order: The Last Martian Chronicles - John Hegenberger

From the cold, rocky surface of Mars to the vast reaches of deep space, from the dusty pages of the pulps to the cutting edge medical technology of the future, the stories in John Hegenberger’s THE LAST MARTIAN CHRONICLES span the frontiers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Unlikely friends try to survive the dangers of future war in “Keys to the Kingdom”. A bizarre fate befalls a famous author in the alternate history story “Howard’s Toe”. Sinister forces are on the prowl in “Dead Dames in Dayton”. Alien visitors come to Earth with surprising results in “Last Contact”. And two races face a poignant destiny in “The Last Martian”. These stories and others from popular author John Hegenberger are filled with imagination, ingenuity, and heart.

Forgotten Books: The Pusher - Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) (A Winter Holiday FFB)

I almost reread this one for Ed McBain Week a while back but finally decided to go with a book I'd never read instead. Still, I had very good memories of THE PUSHER from the last time I read it, more than 40 years ago when I was in high school, and I recalled that it takes place around Christmas, so when it came time to do a Forgotten Books post featuring a winter holiday, it jumped to the top of my list.

This was not the first 87^th Precinct novel I read, but it was among the first half-dozen or so. It's also the third novel in the series, so while some of the characters are very familiar—Steve Carella, Bert Kling, Meyer Meyer, Lt. Byrnes, Hal Willis—many of the characters who would become prominent in later entries haven't come along yet. That's all right. I have a real fondness for the early books where the 87^th Precinct "mythology" wasn't quite so sprawling.

This one opens with the discovery of a young man's body in what appears to be a suicide by hanging. The cops discover pretty quickly that he was already dead when the rope was put around his neck. But there's an empty syringe beside him, and when it's confirmed that he died from an overdose of heroin, the focus shifts to either suicide by overdose or an accidental death. Nope. It's murder, and there'll be several more before the detectives from the 87^th figure out what's going on and close in on the killer.

As usual with this series, THE PUSHER is a very readable blend of terse, no-nonsense police procedure reminiscent of DRAGNET with more introspective, even literary passages of characterization and setting. I'm not sure anybody's ever done this better than Evan Hunter. Not many have come close. He does a fine job of capturing the feeling of Christmas time in a big city. The actual plot, the revelation of the killer and the motive, is functional but nothing more, but what sets this novel apart is the way that plot involves two of the main characters on a very personal level. There are probably a few of you who haven't read the book (the ones who have likely know what I'm talking about), so I won't go any deeper into that for fear of spoilers. But there's some gut-wrenching stuff here, and I remember sitting in study hall barely able to breathe as I read the last five or six pages, they were so suspenseful. And that was having already read later books in the series, so I already knew how this one was going to end! Hunter/McBain was just that good.

However, for the record, his agent and editor were right when they talked him into changing the original ending of the manuscript, at least as far as I'm concerned.

I've long said that THE PUSHER is my favorite of the 87^th Precinct series, and after rereading it I think it still is, although all of the first eight or ten books are at a very high level. If you haven't read it, it gets a big recommendation from me. If you have, it's worth rereading, like visiting an old friend. (That's the original Pocket Books edition above, the later Dell edition--the one I read in high school--below.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Bold Caballero

I've been a Zorro fan almost as far back as I can remember, starting with the Guy Williams TV version, but I'd never seen this 1936 feature film until now. It stars Robert Livingston, probably best known for playing Stony Brooke in a bunch of Three Mesquiteer movies, as Don Diego Vega, who in this version is a poor but charming adventurer rather than a Spanish aristocrat. And of course he's also the masked rogue/hero Zorro.

The film opens with Zorro about to be hanged by the brutal Spanish commandant, played by Sig Ruman in an odd performance in which the character comes across as part bumbling comedy relief, part ruthless psychopath. Strange it may be, but it's effective. Anyway, Zorro escapes the gallows, of course, and then a new Spanish governor shows up in California, accompanied by his daughter (Heather Angel, British accent and all, even though she's supposed to be a Spanish noblewoman). The governor is murdered in short order, Zorro is framed for the killing, and the beautiful orphaned daughter takes over as the new governor and vows to hunt him down.

The script by Wells Root (who also directed) is fairly complex and has some nice lines. The photography is pretty good, although I watched the black-and-white version, rather than the "thrilling natural color' version mentioned on the poster above. The acting is adequate at best. I've never been much of a Robert Livingston fan. The movie also gets a little bogged down in the middle with too much silliness. But overall things move along nicely and there's some excellent stunt work here and there, leading up to a big battle at the end that finds Zorro fighting off a bunch of Spanish soldiers by using a couple of flaming arrows as if they were swords. That's a really nice scene.

So in the end I found THE BOLD CABALLERO to be worth watching, especially if you're a Zorro fan. And it put me in the mood to read some more of Johnston McCulley's Zorro stories, as well. Will I find the time? We'll see.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mammoth Detective, September 1942

I'm sure there are people who collect mummy covers. This is a pretty good one. And with stories by William P. McGivern, Howard Browne, Dwight V. Swain, Robert Leslie Bellem, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, George Armin Shaftel, the ubiquitous Alexander Blade, and more, this issue of MAMMOTH DETECTIVE is probably pretty good reading, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, October 1941

WESTERN ADVENTURES may have been Street & Smith's third-string Western pulp (behind WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY), but it had some excellent authors in its pages. This issue featured stories by Walker A. Tompkins, Norman A. Fox, Jim Kjelgaard, Eli Colter, Ney N. Geer, and M. Howard Lane.

Forgotten Books: Night Calls the Green Falcon - Robert McCammon

I'm fudging a little this week since "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is a novella, not a novel, but it's been my favorite of Robert McCammon's work since I first read it 25 years ago, it's available by itself as an e-book, and when I reread it recently, it held up very well. So I thought I might as well say a few words about it and maybe inspire some of you to read it.

"Night Calls the Green Falcon" was first published in 1988 in the anthology SILVER SCREAM, edited by David J. Schow. I had a copy of that book but never got around to reading it. I did, however, read this story when it came out a couple of years later in McCammon's collection BLUE WORLD. That's a great collection, but "Night Calls the Green Falcon" is the real stand-out as far as I'm concerned.

Creighton Flint (real name Creighton Boomershine) is a washed-up actor, a former champion athlete from the Midwest who went to Hollywood in the early Fifties and starred in four movie serials during the fading days of that film genre, until a tragedy cut short his career. He played the masked crimefighter known as the Green Falcon and still has the costume from those serials, even though it's not in very good shape. Neither is Flint, who now lives in a rundown apartment house in a bad neighborhood in Hollywood.

A serial murderer known in the papers as the Flip-Top Killer has been preying on street people in the neighborhood, and when a friend of Flint becomes one of the victims, he sets out to track down the murderer. But he puts on the uniform of the Green Falcon to do so, which attracts unwanted attention and complicates Flint's quest for justice—which is also a quest to reclaim his lost celluloid heroism.

Things play out about like you'd expect in this novella, and McCammon opens it with a dream scene, a technique I don't like, but other than that it's very well written and the pace is absolutely relentless. More than that, and most of all, it's an unabashed love letter to serials, comic books, pulps, and all the other things that helped make so many of us what we are today, and I don't mind admitting I was a little misty-eyed when I got to the end. To quote a wise man from Alvin, Texas, I miss the old days, and I sort of miss 'em even more after reading "Night Calls the Green Falcon". McCammon's a fine writer and I still have several of his books that I haven't read yet, but I doubt if any of them will top this one for me.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Tarantula

Here's another one from Svengoolie that I missed somehow growing up. TARANTULA is a pretty good entry from the giant creature genre. Nuclear biologist Leo G. Carroll (best known as either Cosmo Topper or Alexander Waverly, depending on your age, I guess; I remember him as both of them) is working on a formula that will solve the world's hunger problem. Unfortunately it has a couple of side effects: it makes animals grow incredibly big, and it turns human subjects into acromegalic freaks. Naturally, one of the test subjects is a tarantula that gets loose, grows to 100 times its normal size, and terrorizes the nearby desert community. John Agar is the local doctor (when I was a kid I had a good friend who was a huge John Agar fan), Mara Corday is a gorgeous graduate student, Raymond Bailey (Milburn Drysdale from THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES) is another scientist, and a very young Clint Eastwood is a fighter pilot who has three or four lines and is on-screen maybe 30 seconds. Despite the occasional lapse of logic in the screenplay, TARANTULA is a well-made film directed by Jack Arnold and watching it was a considerable amount of fun.

One thing struck me, though, during the opening scene where one of the human victims of the formula dies in the desert (a pretty effective opening, by the way): a lot of these movies were shot in the same locations where many Western movies were made. Then later, during the town scenes where there are lots of guys in cowboy hats walking around, the thought crystalized. They should have made one of these giant creature movies with Roy Rogers. Just imagine Roy, backed up by Andy Devine, Foy Willing, and the Riders of the Purple Sage (since it's the Fifties and Gabby Hayes and the Sons of the Pioneers have moved on by then) fighting some giant grasshopper or such, in a movie directed by William Witney and written by Sloan Nibley. I'd watch that!

Lie Catchers - Paul Bishop

Paul Bishop has been one of my favorite writers for a long time, but he may have set a new standard for himself with his latest novel, LIE CATCHERS. This is the first book in a new series featuring LAPD detectives Ray Pagan and "Calamity" Jane Randall, who is also the narrator. Both of them have special abilities that make them better at what they do—interrogating prisoners—than anybody else.

As LIE CATCHERS opens, Randall is recuperating from a gunshot wound suffered in the line of duty, during an incident that's one of several which have given her the nickname "Calamity". She wants to get back to work but is uncertain about being teamed with the eccentric Pagan, who doesn't really dress, talk, or act like any of the other cops she has known or worked with. It doesn't take her long to figure that he's a genius at interrogation, though, and he thinks she can be, too.

After working together on a gang shooting case, the new team launches into the investigation that will keep them busy for the rest of the book: the kidnapping of the six-year-old daughter of a rap music mogul. Before long there's the seemingly unrelated kidnapping of another child and a couple of murders to complicate things, but Pagan and Randall sort through everything with a mixture of dogged police work and brilliant questioning of suspects.

The police procedural element is fascinating, as is the developing relationship between the two protagonists. Bishop's prose races right along, never losing control of the complex plot. LIE CATCHERS is easily one of the best novels I've read this year. Also included in this book are two autobiographical essays by Bishop about his first interrogation and his last arrest before retiring from the LAPD, and they're worth the price of the book by themselves. You won't go wrong with this one. It gets my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, August 1940

I think this may be the first trapeze shootout I've ever seen on a pulp cover. Seems pretty dramatic. Inside this issue of DETECTIVE TALES you've got a Satan Hall story by Carroll John Daly, plus yarns by Arthur Leo Zagat, Philip Ketchum, Dale Clark, and more.