Overlooked TV: John Adams (2008)

The DVDs of this 2008 mini-series made for HBO sat unwatched on our shelves for years, but recently we were in the mood for a historical drama and finally watched it. Often when we watch a historical movie or TV show, I have a feeling of “Been there, wrote that”, because I’ve written about so many different time periods. That’s definitely the case in the few two episodes of JOHN ADAMS, which cover the build-up to the Revolutionary War between 1770 and 1776. I dealt with a lot of the same material in my series PATRIOTS (six novels published by Bantam Books under the pseudonym Adam Rutledge), which ended on July 4, 1776.

Of course, there are some differences, too. In my books, most of the action—the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the capture of the British cannon at Fort Ticonderoga—took place on-screen, but since John Adams himself didn’t take part in any of that, in the mini-series we hear about those historic events but don’t witness them.

What we get instead is people talking about stuff. Lots and lots of people talking about stuff. The saving grace of JOHN ADAMS, along with its good acting and very high production values, is that the things being discussed are mostly interesting, and the dialogue is well-written. There’s no getting around the fact, though, that this mini-series is pretty slow and dry. Thankfully, it goes on to cover the war itself and everything else that happens afterward: George Washington’s presidency, Adams’ own term as president, the various power struggles between him, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and others. I don’t know as much about that era, so most of it kept me intrigued.

There’s also a fair amount of soap opera—alcoholism, sibling rivalry, vaulting ambition, disease, and tragedy—all of it historically accurate for the most part, because real life often is a soap opera. But the script never lets things get too lurid and shies away from any really over-the-top moments.

Paul Giamatti plays John Adams and Laura Linney plays his wife Abigail, and their lifelong love story is really at the heart of this series. They each do a good job, as does the rest of the cast. Slow though it may be, JOHN ADAMS is a decent slice of history and I’m glad we finally watched it.

If you want plenty of powder-burning action and some real soap opera, though, I recommend that you read my PATRIOTS novels. (Sorry for the commercial.)

Monday Memories: My Home Town

I’m never going to write an autobiography. For one thing, I don’t have the time and energy, and for another, it seems a little pretentious for a hack writer to be doing such a thing. Also, let’s be honest here. I’ve read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and spent a lot of time in a room by myself typing. There you go. JAMES REASONER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES. The End.

However, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I wax nostalgic from time to time, and in doing so quite a bit lately it occurred to me that I ought to start a series of such posts that are sort of autobiographical in nature. If nothing else, it gets some of my memories down in a bit less transitory form, and they might provide a little entertainment for some of you or make you think back to your own younger years. And of course, one of the great advantages of doing these as blog posts is that you can roll your eyes and skip them and I’ll never know the difference.

I’m going to begin with the picture above. That’s an aerial photo of Azle, Texas, taken in 1938. Now, before you think, “Just how old are you, anyway?”, let me say that my parents didn’t move to Azle until the early Fifties, right after I was born. So that photo predates me by more than a decade. However, some of those buildings were still there when I was growing up in Azle in the Fifties and Sixties, and some of them are still there.

The two-story white building in the lower right portion of the picture? That’s one of the oldest buildings still standing in Azle. I believe it was originally MacDonald’s Grocery Store, and after that it was Stribling’s Drug Store. By the early Sixties, it was Tompkins’ Drug Store. There was a spinner rack of comic books, and I bought a bunch of DENNIS THE MENACE comic books there, along with issues of the DC war comics OUR ARMY AT WAR and OUR FIGHTING FORCES. The Odd Fellows lodge met on the second floor, and around on the side, for a while, there was a small lending library where you could check out books for, I think, ten cents a week.

After the drug store moved to a new strip shopping center at the other end of town (where I bought even more comic books and paperbacks), the building became the home of C&W Electronics, a TV repair shop. Azle had three such shops for a long time: C&W on Main Street downtown, Jimmy Chandler’s out on the Boyd Highway, and my dad’s shop, where he worked out of our house on Hankins Drive. C&W was there for a long time, and after it went out of business the building sat vacant for ages. A few years ago, a For Sale sign went up on it, and I thought, “Crap. Somebody’s going to buy it and tear it down.” They’d already torn down the Red Top Café, just up the street, which dated back to the 1870s and started its existence as a saloon. But no, the building is still there, and these days it’s Red’s Burger House. I go in there to pick up burgers sometimes, and I still know approximately where the comic book spinner rack stood. It’s a good feeling.

Now, diagonally across the street on the corner is a two-story stone building. It was fairly new when that photo was taken in ’38, I believe. A local couple named Jim and Eula Nation built it. I don’t know the original purpose, but in the early Sixties there was a barber shop on the first floor and a snow cone stand on the corner of the parking lot during the summer. I never went to the barber shop (my dad and I got our hair cut at Hukill’s, across the street, in a building that wasn’t there yet in ’38), but I did eat a lot of snow cones from that stand. Then the building was vacant for a while, and in the mid-Sixties, the Azle Public Library, which had gotten started a few years earlier in a small space also across the street, moved in. Mrs. Nation, who still owned the building, was the librarian. I was already working at the library by that time, first as a volunteer and then as a modestly salaried employee (I made enough to buy more comic books and paperbacks!), so I worked there until, I think, 1969. In the mid-Seventies, the library moved into a new building out on the highway, not far from the hospital. The stone building on Main Street is now the Azle Historical Museum, where the original of this aerial photo now hangs, or at least it did the last time I was in there.

See the road that turns off of Main Street next to the museum building and curves up and to the left out of the picture? The second building on the right, the little white house, was still there as recently as a year or two ago, but I believe it was jacked up and moved out. I don’t know where it is now.

Across from that house, on the left side of the road (Church Street), you can see the steeple and part of Azle Christian Church. The building still sits on that property, although in a slightly different place now, and is the church’s Fellowship Hall. Follow Church Street on around, and that clump of trees and cluster of buildings on the left is what was then Azle’s only school. It’s a sprawling stone building famous in these parts as the Rock School. When I went there in the Sixties for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, it was Azle Junior High. When my daughters attended fifth and sixth grade there, it was Azle Elementary. But whatever its official name, it was and always will be the Rock School.

There are a few other buildings in Azle old enough to have been in this picture that are further out. About half a mile to the south is Ash Creek Baptist Church, where a building that dates from 1898 is now Fellowship Hall. When I was a kid it was still the church’s main building, and that was where I attended the first church services I remember. Livia and I also had our wedding shower in that building. Farther out the same road the church is on is an old house that was built in the 1850s, within a decade after the first settlers moved into the area. When I was a kid, an old log cabin built in the 1840s was still standing on property belonging to the family of a friend of mine. I remember seeing it. I don’t know if it was torn down or fell down, but it’s long gone, like the Red Top up on Main Street. I’m sure there are other private homes in the area that date back that far, but I don’t know the details on all of them.

Since the Sixties, a four-lane highway runs right through the middle of the area in the picture. Most of that farm land you see stretching into the distance? Covered with houses, of course. Things changed a lot during that era, but in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, Azle was still a darned good place to live and grow up. One thing about living in one place all your life, every time you go anywhere, you drive right past all those old memories and they come alive again in your mind.

At least they do in mine.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, December 1940

The usual eye-catching cover by Herbert Morton Stoops leads off this issue of BLUE BOOK, and inside are some familiar names, too. As often happened, H. Bedford-Jones has three stories in this issue, one under his own name and one each as by Michael Gallister and Gordon Keyne. Fulton Grant and Nelson Bond, two more BLUE BOOK regulars, are on hand, too, and there are also stories by Howard Rigsby, William Bryon Mowery, Charles L. Clifford, and Tracy Richardson. BLUE BOOK was one of the classiest of the pulps, with consistently excellent stories.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, April 3, 1943

A lot of WESTERN STORY covers seem to capture the moment just before gunplay erupts. That's the case with this one. I think it's a nice dramatic scene and I like it quite a bit. There's a lot to like inside the issue, too, with stories by Norman A. Fox, Harry F. Olmsted, William Heuman, Bennett Foster, and David Lavender, one of the few Western pulp writers I actually met before he passed away. Elmer Kelton, Bill Gulick, Thomas Thompson, Wayne C. Lee, and Fred Grove are others who come to mind. There may have been more.

Forgotten Books: Midshipman Bolitho and the Avenger - Alexander Kent (Douglas Reeman)

MIDSHIPMAN BOLITHO AND THE AVENGER is the second novel, chronologically, in the 18^th Century naval adventure series written by Douglas Reeman under the pseudonym Alexander Kent. I really enjoyed the first one, RICHARD BOLITHO, MIDSHIPMAN, so I was looking forward to the sequel and it didn’t let me down.

As this book opens, 17-year-old Richard Bolitho has returned to England from his pirate-chasing adventure in the previous novel and has leave to travel to his family home in Cornwall to celebrate Christmas with his family. His friend and fellow midshipman Martyn Dancer goes with him. But no sooner do they arrive than a dead man is found on the beach of a nearby cove, then the King’s ship Avenger, under the command of none other than Bolitho’s older brother Hugh, shows up. Hugh has been sent to crack down on smugglers and wreckers working along the coastline, and since he’s short on officers, he presses his younger brother and Dancer into service on the Avenger.

There’s some action at sea, including a really excellent climactic chase and battle, but most of this adventure takes place on land as the Bolitho brothers try to break up the smuggling ring. The twist ending isn’t entirely a surprise, but it still works pretty well. Reeman writes great action scenes, and I continue to be impressed by how tight his writing is and how he spins his yarns at such a fast pace. No bloated historical novel here. This is good, old-fashioned swords and pistols high adventure, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have the next novel in the series on hand, and I suspect I’ll be getting to it soon.

Overlooked Movies: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

As often happens on this blog, you’re going to have to put up with some nostalgia before I get to the actual subject of this post. Or you can just scroll on down, I won’t mind, honest.

I’ve mentioned the Eagle Drive-In Theater before. When I was growing up, it was only about a quarter of a mile from my parents’ house if you cut through back yards, a field, and the parking lot of the Western Lodge Motel. I saw a lot of movies there. Somebody always took me until I was about ten years old, but after that point I usually walked, sometimes with other kids from the neighborhood, sometimes by myself. (Times were different then. Those of you who are old enough know that, and those who aren’t, just take my word for it.)

The Eagle had a promotion during the summer called Merchant’s Night, which was, I believe, on Tuesday each week. Businesses around town would buy bunches of really cheap tickets and give them away to their customers with purchases made in their stores. With those tickets, you could get in free on Merchant’s Night. The double feature was always older movies (cheaper for the theater to rent, I’m sure), so you got a lot of Elvis and Audie Murphy movies from four or five years earlier.

You also got THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN.

I loved this Don Knotts movie (the first one he made after leaving THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW) when I saw it as a kid. Svengoolie ran it on his show a few weeks ago, so I had to record it and watch it for the first time in almost 50 years. Knotts plays Luther Heggs, a typesetter on the local paper in the small Kansas town of Rachel. He has an ambition to be an actual reporter, though. One of the local legends involves a creepy old house in town where a notorious murder/suicide occurred 20 years earlier. The old man who owned the house murdered his beautiful young wife in a fit of insane jealousy, then climbed into a tall tower attached to the house, played crazy tunes on the organ there, and finally leaped to his death.

So who do you think gets the job of spending the night in the murder house on the twentieth anniversary of the crime? Actually, how do you think the rest of this movie is going to go? Because you’ll probably be able to predict everything that happens in it, right down to the identity of the bad guy.

But here’s the important thing: It doesn’t matter. This is a wonderful film, and I had a big smile on my face the whole way through it. It’s just a beautiful snapshot of small town Americana, from the diner where the citizens of Rachel eat to the bandstand in the town park. I’ve been known to say that a little of Don Knotts goes a long way, but he’s great in this one, doing all of his usual nervous routines but pulling back from them when he needs to. Dick Sargent is the owner and editor of the newspaper, Skip Homeier is the arrogant reporter who makes life miserable for Knotts’ character, and Joan Staley is the beautiful girl-next-door Knotts has a crush on. The supporting cast is full of familiar faces: Hal Smith (Otis from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, playing the town drunk here, too), Burt Mustin (from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER), the great Charles Lane, and many more.

My friends and I loved this movie when we were kids. We spent weeks hollering “Attaboy, Luther!” (the movie’s most famous running joke) at each other and thinking it was hilarious. It’s still pretty funny. Watching it now, I still love it. I know intellectually that those days really weren’t simpler, better times for everybody, but they were for me and THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN did a great job of transporting me back there for a while. Attaboy, indeed.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: War Birds, January 1932

You just don't run across stories with titles like "Fokker Dust" anymore. Thomson Burtis was a well-known writer of aviation and air-war stories, but I don't believe I've ever read anything by him. Also in this issue of WAR BIRDS are stories by O.B. Myers, another prolific and well-regarded aviation pulpster, Allan R. Bosworth, an excellent Western author who wrote a little bit of everything for the pulps, William E. Barrett, best remembered for the novel THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, and several authors whose names are unfamiliar to me. I've never really read much from the aviation pulps compared to some of the other genres, but I've generally enjoyed what I've read.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, September 1945

As I've said before, no poker games ever ended peacefully in the Old West, at least according to the Western pulps. This issue of NEW WESTERN is another example. Although violence hasn't broken out yet, you just know it's about to. So while the brawl's going on, you can read stories by Wayne D. Overholser ("Gun-Cure for Lava City" is a great title), D.B. Newton, C. William Harrison, Thomas Thompson, M. Howard Lane, Ralph Yergen, Theodore J. Roemer, and Charles Hammill, an author I've never heard of. Any Western pulp with Overholser, Newton, Harrison, and Thompson is going to be worth reading. 

Forgotten Books: When Dames Get Tough - Hank Janson (Stephen D. Frances)

I’ve been aware of the Hank Janson series for many years (and the gorgeous covers by Reginald Heade), but never got around to reading one until now. Although it might not have been the wisest course of action, for reasons I’ll get into below, I started with the very first Hank Janson novella, WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH, published in 1946.

Some quick background: Stephen D. Frances was a young, struggling writer/publisher in England who had been writing what were known as gangster stories, lurid, hardboiled tales set in America, mostly written by authors who had never been in America and had only a loose grasp of American slang and geography. As a publisher, Frances found himself in need of urgent need of a 15,000 word novella over a weekend, and not having anyone else to do it, he wrote it himself, dictating it to a secretary. Not only is the protagonist named Hank Janson, that was the by-line on it, as well.

This was WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH, a fast-paced, first-person yarn narrated by a traveling salesman (of ladies’ cosmetics) named Hank Janson. Hank happens upon a beautiful young blonde being interrogated and tortured by thugs, so naturally he wades in and rescues her, which lands him up to his neck in a criminal scheme involving black market goods (still a hot topic in those days just following World War II), mistaken identity, yet another beautiful blonde, and more than one attempt on his life.

This novella is certainly not without its flaws. Frances’s American tough-guy patter is less convincing at this point than that of James Hadley Chase (Rene Raymond) or Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates), the other two English authors I’ve read who produced mainly American-set mystery novels. The plot is driven by several pretty hard to swallow coincidences. And making your wise-cracking, two-fisted hero a salesman of ladies’ cosmetics is, well, an unusual choice, to say the least.

However . . . WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH is pretty darned entertaining. Frances’s style may be a little crude at times, and his Americanisms may not ring true, but dang, this yarn rockets along and is told in a distinctive voice, which I always like. There’s plenty of action, the girls are sexy, and Hank is a likable galoot. The Heade cover depicts an actual scene from the story with a fair degree of accuracy (the girls are both blondes in the story). I wound up liking this one quite a bit.

There are a couple more early novellas before Frances retooled the character as a crime-busting reporter from Chicago, and those tales are included in an ebook currently available, along with two short stories featuring the later incarnation of the Janson character. I plan to read those as well and then move on to the ebooks of the full-length novels. I’m glad these reprints are available since the original editions are sort of hard to come by, and I want to read more about Hank Janson.  

Coming From Stark House: The Red Scarf/A Killer is Loose - Gil Brewer

THE RED SCARF
Roy Nichols needs to find some quick cash to keep from losing his motel. The new highway was supposed to go through, providing plenty of business, but now it's been delayed. The bank refuses to help, and his brother turns him down. Desperate and on the way back home, he catches a ride with a bickering couple named Vivian and Teece. They start drinking, then Teece gets spooked, and crashes the car. That's when Nichols discovers that his travelling companions have been carrying a briefcase full of cash. Teece appears to be dead, and Vivian confesses that they have robbed the mob, and begs him to help her escape. But to do that, Nichols will have to lie to his wife Bess...to the cops...and ultimately, to a very dangerous man named Radan.

A KILLER IS LOOSE
Ex-cop Steve Logan is down on his luck. With a baby on the way, Logan decides to pawn his last pistol to a bartender friend. On his way, he rescues a stranger, Ralph Angers, from being hit by an oncoming bus. Angers is an eye surgeon and a Korean War vet, and he has plans to build a hospital in town. Unfortunately, he is also prepared to kill anyone and everyone who gets in the way of his plans. So when Angers manages to get a hold of Logan's Luger, he also drags his rescuer into a nightmare of murder and insanity. Logan becomes a hostage to Angers' plans, and there will be no mercy to anyone who gets in his way.

This Gil Brewer double volume will be available from Stark House in a few months. That's a quote from one of my reviews on that gorgeous cover, and I'm very happy for my words to be sharing space with some beautiful artwork by Robert McGinnis. Man, when I was buying all those Carter Browns and Mike Shaynes with McGinnis covers off the spinner rack at Lester's Pharmacy when I was a kid, I never dreamed that I'd be part of a cover like that someday. This is very cool for me.

Not to mention, THE RED SCARF is a great noir novel. I read and reviewed it back in 2011. But I haven't read A KILLER IS LOOSE, and I remember Bill Crider telling me about it. I thought there was a review of it on Bill's blog, but I can't find it now. Maybe we just talked about the book. But I'm sure looking forward to reading it in the near future, and when I have, I'll be writing about it here. In the meantime, this Stark House edition is available for pre-order, and like everything from Stark House, if you're a fan of great hardboiled and noir fiction, it's going to be well worth your time and money.