Coming Soon: West Texas Blood Feud - James Reasoner

The Nashes and the Lockharts have been feuding so long that nobody in Pecos even remembers what fueled the bloody hatred. The patriarchs of the two families, Axel Nash and Jubal Lockhart, would like nothing better than to wipe out their enemies. But Edward Nash, Axel’s nephew, wants no part of the feud and would rather concentrate on his law practice in partnership with the veteran attorney Billy Cambridge.

But then Edward’s younger brother Johnny winds up dead, apparently at the hands of Jubal Lockhart’s son Matt, and all of Reeves County is set to rip wide open in a hot lead war between the two clans. Add in an ambitious politician, his beautiful daughter, and a twist of fate that finds Edward defending his own brother’s accused killer in court, and you have another powerful, exciting tale from bestselling Western author James Reasoner. Fists and bullets will fly before peace returns to Pecos!

This will be out September 5 and is available for pre-order now.

Red Sonja: The Ballad of the Red Goddess - Roy Thomas, Esteban Maroto, and Santi Casas

Back in my comic book reading days, I was never a big fan of the character Red Sonja. Not really a Robert E. Howard character but more Howard-adjacent, let's say, she was very loosely based on the character Red Sonya in Howard's historical adventure yarn "The Shadow of the Vulture". So in reality she was actually created by scripter Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith, with her visual appearance being revamped early on by artist Esteban Maroto. Mind you, these are not bad things. Roy Thomas is one of my all-time favorite comics writers, and Maroto and Windsor-Smith are top-notch artists. But when Red Sonja got her own book, I read it only sporadically, and although I had copies of all six novels by David C. Smith and Richard Tierney that featured the character, I never got around to reading them before they were lost in the Fire of '08. These days copies of the novels tend to be pretty expensive, so I've never replaced them.

All that said, when I came across a digital version of the graphic novel RED SONJA: THE BALLAD OF THE RED GODDESS available on Kindle Unlimited, I didn't hesitate to download and read it. Maybe it was time to reevaluate the character, I told myself. And with a script by Roy Thomas and art by Esteban Maroto, the two guys who basically came up with the character, it seemed like a good bet whether it turned me into a Red Sonja fan or not.

The jury is still out on that, but I really enjoyed this graphic novel done originally for a Spanish publisher several years ago. Thomas's script is an origin story with a framing sequence. It covers ground that has been covered to a certain extent in previous stories but fleshes it out in an enjoyable fashion. The tale even provides a reasonable explanation for the infamous chain-mail bikini the character wears, over and above the idea of appealing to horny male comic book readers in the Seventies. (Hey! I resemble that remark!) The action is good, Sonja is a likable character, and while this doesn't break any new ground, it's a perfectly acceptable sword-and-sorcery yarn that entertained me quite a bit. Maroto's art is very good (I've always liked his work) and the art in the framing sequence by Santi Casas is good as well.

There are e-book editions of other Red Sonja collections that reprint the original comics run from the Seventies. Might be time to check them out, too.

The Digest Enthusiast, Book Sixteen - Richard Krauss, ed.

For those of us who are long-time fans of genre fiction, this is kind of a Golden Age. Not only are there more readily available reprints of vintage material than even the most devoted fan could ever get around to reading, there are also a number of magazines and journals devoted to the fiction we love. For example, MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, THE BRONZE GAZETTE, and the subject of today’s post, THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST. Book Sixteen in that series is now available, and it’s one of my favorite issues so far.

It starts off with a very nice keyhole cover featuring pinup model Jeanne Carmen, who’s featured in a long article about her career, lavishly illustrated (as they say) with many photographs and magazine cover reproductions.

Inside, regular contributor Steve Carper starts things off with an in-depth article about Handi-Books and their publisher James Quinn. Handi-Books published one of my favorite Harry Whittington novels, SLAY RIDE FOR A LADY, as well as good books by Robert Leslie Bellem, Cleve F. Adams, Paul Evan Lehman, Leslie Ernenwein, and others.

TDE editor Richard Krauss examines the first year of Howard Browne’s tenure as editor of FANTASTIC and returns later in the issue with a look at Robert A.W. Lowndes’ editorship of various magazines published by Health Knowledge. I’ve long been interested in Lowndes, who was known for editing some entertaining pulp magazines on next-to-nonexistent budgets. Krauss’s article about the Health Knowledge magazines is fascinating. Those magazines were never distributed to any of the stores and newsstands I frequented as a kid, or I would have picked them up for sure. I have a few in my collection now and always find them interesting.

Peter Enfantino continues his survey of MANHUNT, the best crime fiction digest of the Fifties, and Anthony Perconti takes a look at some of the digest-sized comic book reprint collections published by DC in the Eighties. I enjoyed both of these articles as well. Perconti’s stirred up some nice nostalgic memories because I bought and read quite a few of those digest comics collections when they were new. I actually remember seeing some of the very late issues of MANHUNT on the stands when they were new, but I never bought any of them. I’m not sure why, unless my allowance and the money I earned just wouldn’t stretch quite that far. EQMM was my mystery digest of choice in those days.

So there’s something for just about everybody in Book Sixteen of THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST, and it’s all well-written, informative, and entertaining. This is a great series, and the latest volume is available on Amazon in both a full color and a black-and-white edition. Highly recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, October 1941

The unmistakable artwork of J. Allen St. John graces the cover of this issue of AMAZING STORIES, and with a St. John cover, it's no surprise that there's an Edgar Rice Burroughs story inside. In this case, it's "Invisible Men of Mars", the fourth and final novella that was fixed up into the John Carter novel LLANA OF GATHOL. I read that book many, many years ago in the Ballantine edition with an explosive Robert Abbett cover that you can see at the bottom of this post, but I don't remember a thing about it except that I liked it, because I liked all the John Carter books. I ought to read it again one of these days. Unlikely, but you never know. Anyway, before I wander too far off into the weeds . . . this issue of AMAZING STORIES also features stories by William P. McGivern (under the house-name P.F. Costello), David Wright O'Brien (under his pseudonym John York Cabot), editor Raymond A. Palmer (under the house-name A.R. Steber and in collaboration with Thornton Ayre, who was really John Russell Fearn), and Festus Pragnell (as himself). I sure loved those Mars books when I was a kid. I'll bet many of you reading this did, as well.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Super Western, August 1937

This is the first issue of a short-lived Western pulp from Ace. Four issues were published under this title, plus a dozen more as VARIETY WESTERN and ALL-NOVEL WESTERN. Calling this one SUPER WESTERN might have been pulp hyperbole, but it actually had pretty good credentials, starting with a cover by Norman Saunders. Inside are stories by Tom Roan, Norrell Gregory, Joe Archibald, W.H.B. Kent, forgotten pulpster Glenn A. Conner, and house-name Cliff Howe. Not quite super, maybe, but no publisher was going to put out a pulp called PROBABLY PRETTY GOOD WESTERN . . . even though that's what it was.

The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson)

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE (1971) is one of the many high adventure novels Jack Higgins wrote before becoming an international bestseller with THE EAGLE HAS LANDED in 1975. Many Higgins fans regard these earlier novels as his best work, and I can’t say as I disagree with them.

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE is set in Brazil in 1938 and is narrated by Neil Mallory, a down-on-his-luck British pilot who, through a series of misadventures, winds up working for an American flier named Sam Hannah, who was a flying ace in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. Hannah was even known as the Black Baron, the Allies’ answer to the Red Baron. But now he’s come down in the world considerably and has a contract to fly mail and supplies to various isolated settlements in the Amazon jungle.

Things take a turn for the worse when a mission hospital is attacked by natives and the priest and nuns who work there are slaughtered, except for two nuns who are missing when the atrocity is discovered. The sister of one of those nuns, who is a beautiful nightclub singer and aspiring movie star, shows up along with another nun, and Mallory and Hannah are drawn into their efforts to locate the missing women or at least find out what happened to them. Not surprisingly, this does not go well.

As usual, Higgins (whose real name was Harry Patterson) does a great job with the setting, vividly portraying the beauties and the dangers—mostly the dangers—of the Amazon rainforest. His characters are well-developed, none of them completely sympathetic or truly evil. The romantic triangle that develops between Mallory, Hannah, and the young American woman is believable and handled in a realistic fashion. And of course, there’s plenty of action, both in the jungle and in the skies above it. The problem in this book, if there is one, is that the plot is fairly thin and sort of meanders along without any real twists. The one late development that takes Mallory by surprise has been pretty obvious to the reader all along.

But that wasn’t enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. The last section is very suspenseful and then it all comes to a fitting conclusion. I had a good time reading THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE, but I’ve read enough by Jack Higgins in the past that I wasn't surprised by that. I’m sure I’ll be reading more by him in the future, especially more of those early novels before he was a household name. This one is still in print from Amazon in both e-book and paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Novels Magazine, October 1940

I don't know who did this cover, but the guy in the eyepatch is certainly sinister-looking. It's safe to say that Norman A. Daniels wrote more than half of this issue since both of the lead "novels" are by him: a Crimson Mask story under the pseudonym Frank Johnson and a Candid Camera Kid story under the pseudonym John L. Benton. I really like the Candid Camera Kid series. The Crimson Mask stories are about two-fisted pharmacist and part-time crimefighter Robert "Doc" Clarke. I've read one or two of them and they're okay, slickly written as always with Daniels' work. Other stories in this issue are by the prodigiously prolific Arthur J. Burks, a forgotten pulpster named Robert Gordon, and Rod Brink, whose story here is his only credit in the Fictionmags Index. He may well have been Norman Daniels, too. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, April 1935

This issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE sports a nice dramatic cover by Emery Clarke (who also did a bunch of Doc Savage covers in the late Thirties and early Forties) and a really strong group of authors inside. There are stories by Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, James P. Olsen, Bennett Foster, Richard Wormser, Ralph Condon, house-name John Starr, and Fred J. Jackson, unknown to me but who wrote hundreds of stories in a career that lasted from 1906 to 1937. That's a good long run! Coburn, Cunningham, and Olsen are favorites of mine and Foster and Wormser were dependable pulpsters, as well. Plenty of good reading in this issue, I'll bet.

Malibu Burning - Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg is one of the best thriller authors in the business and proves it again with MALIBU BURNING, the first book in a new series featuring a team of arson investigators for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Walter Sharpe is a veteran when it comes to figuring out the source of fires, a Sherlock Holmes of arson. Andrew Walker is Sharpe’s new partner, a former U.S. Marshal who has switched jobs because he’s promised his pregnant wife that he’ll do something safer than chasing down fugitives.

I think we can all guess how that’s going to work out.

On the opposite side of this equation from Sharpe and Walker is Danny Cole, a brilliant con man and master thief who was arrested by Walker at one time in the past and became a convict firefighter. This background gives Danny the idea for a spectacular heist when he gets out, and also provides him with a motive for revenge on a wealthy businessman who has a huge mansion in the Malibu hills. All Danny has to do is reunite his old team and set a few huge wildfires . . .

With some flashbacks to Danny working out his plan and setting things up, in classic heist novel fashion, Goldberg keeps things racing along at such a pace, and in such smooth prose, that it’s almost impossible to stop reading in this novel. I stayed up late to finish it, which is almost unheard of for me these days. Us old guys need our sleep! But giving up a little of it was well worthwhile because MALIBU BURNING barrels along to a great climax and a very satisfying ending. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a very high recommendation. It’ll be available from Amazon in e-book and paperback editions on September 1, but you can pre-order it now.

Slaves of the Blood Wolves - Robert Weinberg, ed.

This is a modern-day reprint published by Wildside Press of a collection originally edited and published by Robert Weinberg in 1979 that reprinted four Weird Menace pulp stories from the Thirties. The Weinberg edition has a very nice cover by Stephen Fabian that the Wildside Press reprint also uses. This collection features four authors who were million-words-a-year guys, or close to it, anyway.

The author who leads off this collection, Arthur J. Burks, definitely produced more than a million words a year for a number of years during the pulp era. He wrote all types of stories, as well: detective, aviation, adventure, science fiction, even a few Westerns and sports yarns. He was a prolific contributor to the Weird Menace pulps. His story “Slaves of the Blood Wolves” appeared in the December 1935 issue of TERROR TALES. It’s about a doctor and nurse flying into a blizzard to reach a remote Canadian settlement where the doctor’s father once lived. The people there are beset by two calamities: a mysterious wasting disease and the threat from a horde of starving, blood-hungry wolves. Things turn nasty quickly, as you might expect. Unlike most Weird Menace stories, there’s no real mystery or Scooby Doo ending in this one, just pure action and horror. It’s well-written but maybe a little too over the top for my tastes. (Yes, such a thing is possible, believe it or not.)

Wyatt Blassingame had a great career in the pulps, writing hundreds of detective, Western, and sports stories in addition to being one of the leading authors of Weird Menace yarns. His novelette “Satan Sends a Woman” appeared in the January 1936 issue of TERROR TALES. In it, two-fisted adventurer Ed Roland explores a sinister Alabama swamp where several men have disappeared. The swamp is also the only way to reach an area of the coast where a ship carrying a fortune in pearls is supposed to have run aground some years earlier. Not only does Roland have to deal with the regular dangers that a swamp poses (snakes, alligators, quicksand, etc.), but he also encounters a strangely beautiful young woman who may not be what she seems. Like the Burks yarn that precedes it in this collection, “Satan Sends a Woman” doesn’t really follow the Weird Menace formula, but it’s well-written and gallops along in an entertaining fashion. I’ve read quite a few stories by Blassingame in the past few years and always enjoy his work.

Norvell Page is best known for writing most of the Spider novels, of course, but he wrote a bunch of other stuff for the pulps, including stories for some of the Weird Menace magazines. His novella “The Red Eye of Rin-Po-Che” appeared in the November 1939 issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Its protagonist is globe-trotting Irish adventurer Moriarity O’Moore, who is in a New York City nightclub one evening when a beautiful young woman jumps up from a table as he’s passing by, throws her arms around him, and kisses him like he’s her long-lost lover. Only thing is, O’Moore has never laid eyes on her before. But the man she’s with is a sinister-looking bozo, and when she begs O’Moore for help, you know he’s going to play along with the gag, whatever it is. And so off we gallop into a yarn that’s almost non-stop action as O’Moore battles to save a beautiful girl and a fabulously valuable ruby from the evil clutches of some cultists and their high priest. As with the first two stories in this collection, “The Red Eye of Rin-Po-Che” isn’t a standard Weird Menace yarn, either, and it probably would have been more at home in a detective pulp or some magazine like ARGOSY. But I’m not complaining, because this is a great tale that reminds us Norvell Page was one of the top action writers in the pulps, right up there with Robert E. Howard and Lester Dent. There’s a second Moriarty O’Moore story, “The Red Eye of Kali”, which also appeared in DIME MYSTERY a year later, in the November 1940 issue, but it appears never to have been reprinted.

This collection wraps up with “Girl of the Goat-God” by Arthur Leo Zagat, one of the top names in Weird Menace pulps and also the author of numerous detective, science fiction, and adventure yarns. Originally published in the November 1935 issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE, this story actually does fall firmly within the usual Weird Menace boundaries: there’s a sinister old house with some sinister gardens, a statue of Pan that may be coming to life and killing people, a swamp, a beautiful young woman with a menacing aunt, a stalwart hero who loves the girl, and a herd of goats that stampedes at the worst possible time. All of it told in Zagat’s slick, breathless prose that makes the pages just race by. Anybody who has read many Weird Menace stories will figure out the ending pretty quickly, but that doesn’t matter. The fun lies in how Zagat gets there, and it’s a lot of fun indeed.

As we’ve seen, SLAVES OF THE BLOOD WOLVES isn’t really that representative of the Weird Menace genre, but every story in it is very well-written and highly entertaining. My favorite is the Norvell Page yarn with its fantastic action and pace, but the other stories are all well worth reading as well. For pulp fans, I give this collection a high recommendation.