Death Squad - Alan Hebden

Having grown up reading OUR ARMY AT WAR (with Sgt. Rock), OUR FIGHTING FORCES (with Gunner and Sarge—and Pooch!), and all the other DC war comics, plus SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS over at Marvel, plus being a huge fan of the TV series COMBAT!, I had a hard time warming up to the sub-genre of war fiction that features German protagonists. Oh, I read ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT by Erich Maria Remarque and was impressed by it, but it took the ENEMY ACE series by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert to convince me that good, compelling war stories could be told from the enemy point of view. Still, I haven’t read much in that field. I have novels by Sven Hassel, Charles Whiting (writing as Leo Kessler) and Kenneth Bulmer (writing as Bruno Krauss) that feature German protagonists, but I haven’t gotten around to them yet.

But then along comes DEATH SQUAD, a magnificent collection of a serial written by Alan Hebden, with art by Eric Bradbury, that originally appeared in the British comic book BATTLE ACTION in 1980 and ’81, and just like that, I’m a big fan. This is one of the best war comics I’ve ever read.

The Death Squad is part of a punishment battalion in the German Wehrmacht and consists of five men: Granddad, the crusty old non-com who’s also a veteran of the first World War; con man Gus; knife expert Frankie; Swede, a Scandinavian lumberjack who’s deadly with a throwing axe; and Licker, the only real Nazi in the bunch, stiff-necked and pompous, as you’d expect. They’re grunts, with the exception of Licker, and as such they’re fighting more for each other and to stay alive, rather than for the Fuhrer or the Fatherland. This seems to be a common concept in the sub-genre. The protagonists are either enlisted men or occasionally an aristocratic officer, but none of them are actually Nazis, and none of them get along with the Gestapo or the S.S. This allows the reader to sympathize with them, at least to a certain extent.

It’s impossible not to sympathize with the Death Squad, as they get thrown into mission after mission where the odds of their survival are almost nil. They’re fighting on the Eastern Front against Russia (which admittedly helps in making the reader root for them) and have to deal with the terrible extremes of a Russian winter, to boot. They infiltrate Moscow to destroy a tank factory, get stranded on a snowed-in troop train under attack by Russian partisans, are tortured by sadistic prison commandants, encounter a beautiful female Russian freedom fighter, and engage in a deadly game of masquerade and deception. Even when they’re transferred back to France, to what seems like an easy job guarding a U-Boat post, they immediately run into trouble from British commandos raiding the place.

Hebden’s script is great, especially in the extended Russian front sequence where he throws in plot twist after plot twist and makes them all work. Characterization is, of necessity, rather limited except for the Death Squad, but each of them comes alive vividly. The tough but likable old-timer Granddad is my favorite, but they’re all portrayed very well. The art by Eric Bradbury is also top-notch, filled with action and details, capturing both the carnage and the poignant moments of war. If you’re a fan of war comics, or war fiction in general, I give DEATH SQUAD a very high recommendation. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, April 1942

By the spring of 1942, most of Herbert Morton Stoops' covers on BLUE BOOK were war-themed, not surprisingly, and so was a lot of the content. This issue has a great line-up of authors including H. Bedford-Jones, Richard Sale, Georges Surdez, Frederick Painton, Richard Howells Watkins, Jacland Marmur, a Tiny David story by Robert R. Mill, and a Free Lances of Diplomacy story by Clarence Herbert New. BLUE BOOK really packed in the great reading.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western, December 1954

I've always sort of felt that a magazine called REAL WESTERN should have been non-fiction, like TRUE WEST or FRONTIER TIMES. But no, although it published a few articles and features like most Western pulps, REAL WESTERN was almost entirely fictional. And despite coming from bottom-rung publisher Columbia, it had some good covers, like this one, and plenty of good authors in its pages. For example, in this issue, Gordon D. Shirreffs, Lauren Paine, Lon Williams (with one of his supernatural-themed Deputy Lee Winters yarns), Zachary Strong (probably E.B. Mann), and house-name Mat Rand. 

Forgotten Books: The Eagles #5: Sea of Swords - Andrew Quiller (Kenneth Bulmer)

 

The series that was published as THE GLADIATOR in the United States (by Pinnacle) and as THE EAGLES in the United Kingdom (by Mayflower Granada) comes to end with this fifth volume, SEA OF SWORDS, which was never reprinted in the U.S. As a result, copies can be a little scarce and pricey, but I came across an affordable copy on-line and had it on hand before I started reading the series. Three authors alternated on these historical adventure novels: Laurence James, Kenneth Bulmer, and Angus Wells. When the fifth one rolled around, it was Bulmer’s turn in the rotation, after he previously wrote #2.

The protagonist of this series is Marcus Britannicus, a half-Roman, half-British nobleman and soldier who also fights in the arena as a gladiator, and when he’s not doing that, carries out secret missions for the emperor. Each book opens with Marcus battling in the arena and then flashes back to the main story, which is some exploit he had in the past. In the case of SEA OF SWORDS, the mission on which he’s sent takes him to the Carpathian Mountains (yes, those Carpathian Mountains . . . the ones in, you know, Transylvania) to rescue a beautiful princess from a crazed warlord who likes to . . . wait for it . . . impale his enemies. I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but honestly, after a long set-up that has very little to do with the rest of the book, it’s blatantly obvious what Bulmer is going for here. The question is, how well does he carry it out?

I’d say the results are mixed. In most of his work, Bulmer does a couple of things that bother me. He overloads his plots with so many characters that it’s difficult to keep track of who’s who. He also throws in so much technical jargon and minutiae about whatever he’s writing about, whether it’s the Roman military, sailing, or what have you, that the reader constantly has to stop and try to figure out things from context. I don’t like info-dumps any more than the average reader, but at times Bulmer’s prose is so obscure it’s almost like a foreign language.

However, at the same time, he’s very good at depicting his protagonists, his action scenes are great most of the time, and he comes up with some interesting plots. His books generally move along pretty well, and that’s the case with SEA OF SWORDS. Despite being a pretty brutal guy sometimes (he lives in a brutal world, after all), Marcus is a likable protagonist with his own code of honor. It’s always a pleasure watching him triumph over the bad guys.

On the other hand, the main story in this book is a little jumpy at times, skipping stuff that probably could have done to greater effect if so many pages hadn’t been spent on the framing sequence. But the biggest problem in SEA OF SWORDS is that Marcus’s vengeance quest, which formed the spine of the series in the previous four books, was wrapped up satisfactorily in #4, Laurence James’s BLOOD ON THE SAND. As a result, SEA OF SWORDS comes across as sort of an afterthought, as if somebody said, “Hey, we’ve got one more book in the contract. What do we do now?” Occasionally, it reads like Bulmer is trying to set up some other storyline that could continue, but nothing comes of it. Indeed, the whole thing comes to a rather bittersweet conclusion with this paragraph:

“Names rang in his head, names from the past, names for the future. Yes, there remained much to be done, many battles to be fought by the Fox in this grandiose world-shaking Empire of Rome.”

Nope, no more battles for Marcus Brittanicus, also known by his gladiator name Vulpus the Fox. Which is really kind of sad, because despite my reservations about this fifth book, I enjoyed the series overall and consider it well worth reading. It’s bloody and crude and lurid but also fast-paced and exciting. Completists will want to read this fifth volume, too, but just the four volumes reprinted by Pinnacle will suffice for most readers, I think. I have all the entries in another British historical adventure series called WOLFSHEAD that was also written by Laurence James and Kenneth Bulmer, and I hope to start reading those soon.

Happy Thanksgiving

 

A Hack's Notebook - Ben Haas

 

I don’t recall the first book by Ben Haas that I read. I remember seeing Fargo and Sundance paperbacks, which he wrote under the pseudonym John Benteen, when I was in college, and I’m pretty sure I owned a copy of the movie novelization ROUGH NIGHT IN JERICHO, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Meade, even earlier than that, but I don’t think I ever read it. So it was probably sometime in the Eighties before I read anything by him. I know I started reading the Fargo novels then. The first one I picked up may have been VALLEY OF SKULLS, which is widely acclaimed as one of the best in the series. I know I loved it. I’ve read a bunch of novels by Ben Haas since then and enjoyed every one of them. I haven’t read them all yet, but that’s okay. That gives me something to shoot for.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that when I became aware Haas’s unfinished autobiography A HACK’S NOTEBOOK was published earlier this year, I had to grab a copy and read it right away.

I’ve been acquainted with Haas’s oldest son, the acclaimed sculptor Joel Haas, through the Internet for a number of years now. He’s provided me with some material regarding his dad’s work that I’ve published here on the blog. Joel edited A HACK’S NOTEBOOK, and the fine people at Piccadilly Publishing (who publish excellent e-book versions of many Ben Haas novels) brought it out in a very nice trade paperback edition. Ben Haas’s autobiographical manuscript comprises a little more than half the book and covers his childhood and adult life, providing a lot of details about his writing and his struggle to break in as a professional author, up to the point in the early 1960s when he’s finally starting to see some real success as a writer. It’s an intriguing, very readable mix of the personal and the professional. That’s a balance that a lot of author biographies and autobiographies fail to pull off, but not surprisingly, Haas—who could always juggle plot, character, and action beautifully in his novels—does a great job of it here, too.

Unfortunately, the manuscript ends at that point, so we don’t get to read what Haas has to say about his years of greatest success. But we do get fine reminiscinces by Joel Haas and by Ben Haas’s lifelong friend and occasional collaborator Jim Henderson, plus a selection of family photos and a complete bibliography of Ben Haas’s books. This is a really excellent volume and certainly one of the best books I’ve read this year. If you’re a fan of Ben Haas’s work or great action novels or 20^th Century genre fiction, or would just like a compelling look into the mind of a top-notch professional writer, A HACK’S NOTEBOOK gets a very high recommendation from me.

Overlooked Movies: Them! (1954)

 

After watching BIG ASS SPIDER! a while back, I was in the mood for another giant bug movie, so when Svengoolie showed one of the granddaddies of the genre, THEM!, I recorded it and we got around to watching it this week. I’d seen this before, but the last time was more than 50 years ago, so I think it counts as overlooked.

All the staples of Fifties sci-fi horror are there: the guy who first encounters the menace and gets drawn into the effort to defeat it (a New Mexico highway patrolman played by James Whitmore); the stalwart forces of the government (FBI agent James Arness) and military (officers Onslow Stevens and Sean McClory); a brilliant but eccentric scientist (Edmund Gwenn) and his beautiful daughter (Joan Weldon), who is also a brilliant scientist. After a truly creepy opening featuring Whitmore and his partner finding a little girl wandering through the desert in a catatonic state, more grim discoveries are made as it becomes apparent that something is killing the inhabitants of this sparsely populated area. The giant ants (mutated by nuclear tests at White Sands, natch) soon show up and go on a rampage, and our heroes gather to do battle against them, a war that ultimately winds up in the sewers underneath Los Angeles.

But all of you know that because you’ve seen this movie, too. But maybe a few of you haven’t. When we watched it, Livia commented that she didn’t remember ever seeing it before. I remembered the basics of the plot, but that’s all.

What I didn’t recall is what a really well-made movie THEM! is. Director Gordon Douglas, who made some pretty good Westerns, too, keeps things moving along very nicely, the photography is excellent, and the special effects are pretty good for the era. But the cast really carries this movie. James Whitmore isn’t who you think of when you talk about action heroes, but he does a fine job as an average joe caught up in something big and terrible. Edmund Gwenn is good in anything (although, yes, it is hard not to think about MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET when he’s talking). James Arness wasn’t a great actor at this point of his career, but he already has a really commanding screen presence. And there are a few moments, when his character loses his temper, that pure Matt Dillon comes through. Fess Parker, Davy and Dan’l his own self, is great in a short scene as a Texas rancher who encounters the giant ants and is locked away in the loony bin when he tells his story. (Yes, I know “loony bin” is politically incorrect, but it wasn’t in 1954.) Elsewhere in the cast are Leonard Nimoy (don’t blink, or you will miss him), Western stalwart Dub “Cannonball” Taylor, and former major league infielder John Beradino, a fine character actor who appeared in countless Western and detective TV series in the Fifties before settling down to a long run as Dr. Steve Hardy on the soap opera GENERAL HOSPITAL. He was actually the leading man/protagonist of GH in its early years.

We also get the usual Fifties sci-fi lectures and veiled warnings about the unknown dangers of nuclear weapons, all of them delivered by Gwenn in distinguished but ominous tones. So THEM! checks the right boxes and pushes the right buttons for its genre, but it does that so well that I found it a pure pleasure to watch. I really enjoyed it, and if you haven’t seen it lately, or at all, I think it’s well worth the time.

Besides, in what other movie will you ever see Matt Dillon shake hands with Santa Claus?

The Summer House - James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

I haven’t read a James Patterson book in a while, but I picked up THE SUMMER HOUSE because the co-author (who probably did most of the actual writing) is Brendan DuBois, who I know to be a good writer. And not surprisingly, THE SUMMER HOUSE turns out to be a pretty darned good thriller.

It opens with the brutal mass murder of seven people in an old vacation house in Georgia (the summer house of the title), and soon after, four Army Rangers from the nearby military base are arrested for the crimes. Army CID sends in a team of investigators to look into the case, even though it seems pretty open-and-shut. Guess what? It’s not. All sorts of sinister things are going on, and pretty soon our Army detectives are up to their necks in mysteries and danger.

Three of the investigators consider themselves cops more than soldiers: the leader, a former NYPD detective who was seriously wounded while serving in Afghanistan; an ambitious former detective from Los Angeles; and a female former highway patrol officer from Maryland. The other two members of the team are a lawyer and a psychologist, who aren’t really cut out for action but find themselves forced into such situations anyway. For most of the book, they all seem pretty overmatched against the vast, shadowy, sinister forces arrayed against them.

Patterson and DuBois do a couple of things I really don’t like. The book is written in present tense, and it switches back and forth between first and third person. There’s only one first person POV, though, which at least helps a little. Those things can be overcome, though, if the story and characters are good enough, and they are in THE SUMMER HOUSE. The authors keep things moving along at such a nice pace that I had no trouble sticking with the book, even though it’s a little longer than the novels I usually read. (It’s not a real behemoth. Maybe 100K words.) By the last fourth of the book, I was really flipping the digital pages to find out what was going to happen, and that’s one of the best things I can say about any novel.

Patterson and DuBois have done a couple of other books together, and I enjoyed this one enough that I think there’s a good chance I’ll go back and read them, too. I’m not a big fan of contemporary thrillers, but I liked THE SUMMER HOUSE and think it’s well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, June 1944

You know me. Any cover with a sexy redhead on it is going to catch my interest. But in addition, this issue of DETECTIVE TALES features stories by Ray Bradbury, Frederick C. Davis, and Fredric Brown. That's a pretty potent trio of authors! Also on hand are Donald G. Carmack, Francis K. Allan, and a few lesser-known authors. The cover would have made me pick this one up. Bradbury, Davis, and Brown would have made me plunk down my dime.

UPDATE: The cover art is by Gloria Stoll.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story Magazine, May 6, 1933

A nice cover by H.L. Parkhurst on this issue of the venerable WESTERN STORY. Inside are stories by Robert J. Horton (Walt Coburn's mentor and an author I have to get around to reading one of these days), Austin Hall, and Hugh Grinstead, plus a serial installment by Frederick Faust writing as John Frederick. Looks to be a pretty typical issue of WESTERN STORY from this era, which means it's probably pretty good.