Review: The Case of the Lame Canary - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY is the 11^th novel in the Perry Mason series, published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1937 and reprinted many times in paperback since then. It starts off, as so many of the novels do, with something odd catching Perry Mason’s interest. A beautiful young woman carrying a canary in a cage visits Mason’s office and tries to hire him to represent her sister in a divorce action. The sister’s husband, you see, is kind of a shady character and has embezzled quite a bit of money from his wife. He’s also threatened to kill her, and that’s why the wife’s sister has the canary. She’s afraid her jerk of a brother-in-law might hurt it. Mason first refuses to take the case. He doesn’t do divorce work, he states flatly. But then he notices that the canary has a sore foot, or claw or talon or whatever you call it, and that intrigues him enough to make him agree to look into the matter.

By now you’re thinking the same thing I was: there’s a lot more to this story than what Mason’s potential client is telling him. Somebody’s going to wind up being murdered, and that canary will turn out to be important. That’s exactly what happens, of course, and we’d all be disappointed if it didn’t. Things get very complicated before the end, as they always do in a novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, but the whole thing revolves around a car wreck, multiple impersonations, a flying trip to Reno, and two, count ‘em, two inquests instead of an actual trial scene.

Since this is one of the novels from the Thirties, Mason is still more hardboiled than he would be in later decades and actually punches a guy and knocks him down. Paul Drake has some pretty funny banter in places, and the whole Perry/Della/Paul dynamic is in good form. Della gets a little tiresome with her constantly badgering Mason to leave the murders behind and take an around-the-world cruise with her, but she also comes through when Mason needs her to pull a stunt that could land her in trouble with the law.

I actually spotted the vital clue and figured out who the killer was pretty early on, which is rare for me when it comes to reading this series. I never figured out the motivation behind everything, though, and I have to admit, the clues were right there in plain sight. Still, I was proud of myself for knowing who the killer was. After that revelation, in an annoying final chapter that could have been left off the book, Gardner makes a rare misstep. This is the book where Mason proposes to Della Street, and it’s no gimmick to trap a killer, it’s the real thing. Thankfully, she turns him down. But even so, none of that rang true to me where these characters are concerned. It’s not enough of a problem to ruin the book or anything like that, but I wish he hadn’t done it.

All that said, I enjoyed THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY. I’ve been reading this series for 60 years now, and I’ve never read one I didn’t enjoy. I expect to continue reading one now and then for as long as I’m around.

Review: Apache Crossing - Will Ermine (Harry Sinclair Drago)

I admit, one reason I bought this book is because of the great Sam Cherry cover, which first appeared on the August 1949 issue of the pulp GIANT WESTERN. But also, I knew that Will Ermine, the author of APACHE CROSSING, was really Harry Sinclair Drago, a prolific and popular author of Western stories and novels under his own name as well as his best-known pseudonym Bliss Lomax, in addition to the novels he wrote as Will Ermine. I’ve read Drago’s work numerous times in the past and always enjoyed it, so I expected to like APACHE CROSSING.

The protagonist is a young cowboy named Pat Ritchie who breaks his leg while on a cattle drive through Indian Territory. His outfit has to leave him behind, and he winds up recuperating while staying with a gang of mostly sympathetic outlaws led by a frontier philosopher known as Little Bill Guthrie. Little Bill knows that Pat is tempted to remain with the gang once his leg is healed, but the boss outlaw doesn’t want the young cowboy to start riding the owlhoot trail. He tries to send Pat away, but a chance for a lucrative bank robbery comes up and the rest of the gang wants to use Pat to hold some horses in reserve for the getaway. He wouldn’t participate in the actual holdup, but in the eyes of the law he would still be an outlaw.

Of course, things don’t go as planned. There’s a big shootout in town and the gang has to scatter. Pat makes his way to Arizona, goes to work on a ranch there, falls in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, and hopes that his shady past will never catch up to him. I think we all know how that’s going to turn out. Throw in some rustlers plaguing the ranch, too, and you’ve got the makings of a riproaring traditional Western novel.

By the time this novel was published originally by Doubleday in 1950, Harry Sinclair Drago was already an old-timer, having started writing Westerns for the pulps in the early Twenties. Not surprisingly, that causes it to have a bit of an old-fashioned feel to it, rather than the hardboiled grittiness you find in a lot of post-war Westerns. Pat Ritchie is about as clean-cut and stalwart a hero as you’ll ever see, always trying to do the decent and honorable thing even when he’s hanging around with a bunch of owlhoots. Those outlaws, especially their leader Little Bill Guthrie, are the only characters in this book with any moral complexity. Drago’s portrayal of Little Bill is excellent. He was also a historian and produced several well-regarded volumes of Western non-fiction, and that gives his fiction a feeling of authenticity and realism.

APACHE CROSSING ambles along at a very pleasant pace with a fine mix of sympathetic characters, dastardly villains, vivid settings, and enough action to keep things interesting. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad the cover prompted me to buy a copy. Recommended if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Battle Birds, February 1940

I don’t own this pulp, but I do own an e-book reprint of it which I read recently because it contains one of David Goodis’s early aviation yarns, and after reading Cullen Gallagher’s excellent books about Goodis’s pulp fiction, I wanted to sample one of them. I figured I might as well go ahead and read the other stories while I was at it.

This is actually the first issue of BATTLE BIRDS’ third incarnation as a pulp. It started out as a regular aviation/air war pulp under the name BATTLE BIRDS in December 1932 and continued for 19 issues through the June 1934 issue. Then with the July 1934 issue, it became a character pulp with science fiction elements as DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, with the title character leading an air war against a future invader of the United States. I read one of those many, many years ago and probably ought to check out that series again. That lasted for 12 issues until July/August 1935. The title was dormant for a few years until BATTLE BIRDS made a comeback with this issue from February 1940.

Robert Sidney Bowen, who wrote all those earlier Dusty Ayres novels as well as scores of other aviation and air war yarns, leads off this issue with the novella “The Last Flight of the Damned”. Bowen was a solid pro who knew how to keep a story perking along with action and drama, but the plot of this one, involving a German mad scientist who comes up with a super-scientific weapon (powered by handwavium, no doubt) with which to destroy Allied planes during World War I, had been done an awful lot, even by 1940. Despite it being well-written, I had a little trouble working up much excitement about this one—which is absolutely unfair of me because I’ll read Western pulp stories with plots that had been used even more and still love them. I know that the stalwart cowboy falling in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter and saving the ranch is even more of a stereotype than the German mad scientist and his super weapon. But I guess as readers we like what we like, and “The Last Flight of the Damned”, while mildly entertaining, is nothing special.

David Goodis is up next with “Bullets For the Brave”, published under his own name instead of one of the numerous house-names under which he also worked, and it’s about as different as you can get from Bowen’s tale and have both of them still be World War I aviation yarns. There are no super-weapons in this one, just raw human emotion and suffering as an American pilot loses his nerve after surviving being shot down and gets a reputation among his squadron for being yellow. His efforts to live with that and finally redeem himself are pretty powerful stuff, and Goodis’s prose is unrelentingly bleak. This is a really good story and just makes me want to read more of Goodis’s pulp fiction.

I don’t know anything about Moran Tudury except that he wrote hundreds of stories for various aviation, sports, Western, and romance pulps beginning in the mid-Twenties and then finally cracked the slicks in the mid-Forties. His short story in this issue, “The Ghost Rides West”, is about a German ace who is shot down again and again, only to rise from the grave and continue fighting. An American pilot who flies for the Lafayette Escadrille eventually figures out the secret behind this seemingly unkillable ace. It’s a decent story. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Tudury, but based on this yarn, I would again.

Despite his name, Orlando Rigoni was a Westerner born and raised, born in Utah and spending most of his life in northern California. He was a railroader, a miner, and worked for the Forest Service in addition to being a very prolific pulpster who wrote hundreds of stories, mostly for the Western pulps, but he started out in the aviation pulps and contributed quite a few stories to them. He also wrote dozens of Western novels and is best remembered for those today. I knew his name as a Western writer long before I found out he wrote aviation stories, too. His story in this issue, “Eagles Fly Alone”, is an excellent yarn about the Horde of Hellions, a group of pilots who are mavericks and have trouble adjusting to a more disciplined style of flying and fighting when a new commander comes in. This is the first thing by Rigoni that I recall reading, although I have several of his Western novels on my shelves. I really ought to get around to reading them one of these days.

Harold F. Cruickshank is another author I knew as a Western writer long before I realized he got his start in the war and aviation pulps in the late Twenties. I haven’t really liked the Western stories I’ve read by him. I don’t know what it is, but something about them just rubs me the wrong way. He did a long series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN about a group of settlers in Sun Bear Valley, a series that’s sometimes referred to as the Pioneer Folk series. I got to the point that I just skipped those because I knew I wouldn’t enjoy them. “The Valley of the Green Death” in this issue is the first air war yarn I’ve read by him, and I wanted to give it a fair chance. One problem that crops up right away and isn’t Cruickshank's fault is that the group of pilots in this story is also called the Hellions. This is something the editor should have addressed by asking either Cruickshank or Rigoni to change the name of their group or at least not running the stories back-to-back in the same issue. But again, this isn’t Cruickshank's fault, so I pressed on. Sure enough, the villain of this story is a mad German scientist who’s invented a superscientific weapon to kill American pilots. But wait! This time the mad German scientist isn’t a wizened little gnome or a disfigured giant. No, he’s actually a pilot himself and an ace, to boot. This is a very nice twist, and I’ll give Cruickshank credit for it. The story itself isn’t bad. I thought the writing was a little clunky in places, but it moves right along and wound up being enjoyable. I’d read more of Cruickshank's aviation stories, which is good because I have some of them.

“Passport to the Grave” is the only story by Rupert B. Chandler listed in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me suspicious that the name is a pseudonym. This story has an interesting idea—a group of fliers known as Squadron Ex that’s made up of pilots from different countries—but the writing is clumsy enough that I had to reread several passages just to figure out what was going on. One of the squadron’s members is shot down and believed to be dead, and another pilot goes on a one-man mission to avenge him and uncover a traitor in the group. There are definitely things to like in this one if the writing was better. Maybe Rupert B. Chandler was a real guy and that’s the best he could do. Kind of a shame if he didn’t get a chance to develop, for whatever reason.

The final story in the issue is “The All-American Ace” by Metteau Miles, evidently the author’s real name, who published a dozen and a half stories in a brief career between 1937 and 1941. It’s a pretty good yarn about a former All-American college football player who’s now a pilot flying alongside a former teammate. When the teammate gets shot down, the protagonist sets out to avenge him (a lot of that going around). This is a pretty well-written tale with good characters. I enjoyed it.

Overall, I enjoyed the whole issue, but the more aviation stories I read, the more I realize I need to space them out. As I said above, I’m really being unfair to the genre since I’m a lot more tolerant of stereotypical plots in Westerns—and in detective and science fiction pulps, too, to be honest—than I am of these. Still, I’ve become more of an aviation pulp fan than I’ve been in the past and look forward to reading more of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, October 1944

That is one rough-looking hombre on this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE. I'm not sure if that cover is by Sam Cherry or Robert Stanley, but it's a mighty good one no matter who painted it. I don't own this issue, but if you do, it looks like a good one to read since it includes stories by L.P. Holmes, Norman A. Fox, Tom W. Blackburn, Philip Ketchum, William Heuman, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), William R. Cox, and lesser-known authors Morgan Lewis and Joe Payne. It would be hard to find a better lineup of authors in a Western pulp from the mid-Forties.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Trail of the Hunter - Dudley Dean (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

This book opens right in the middle of the action, a technique I always like, with brothers Justin and Ford Emery clashing over Justin’s wife Samantha, whom he suspects of having an affair with Ford. This rift, following a really brutal fistfight between the brothers, causes them to split up, Ford remaining on the ranch they own in Texas while Justin takes part of the herd and starts north for Dakota Territory.

As it turns out, that’s not a very smart move, because first the trail drive runs into a killer blizzard, and then a deadly menace from Samantha’s past unexpectedly shows up to threaten not only Justin and Samantha’s marriage but also their lives. And from there, things get even worse as the author, Dudley Dean McGaughey (who also wrote under the name Dean Owen and several other pseudonyms), really heaps on the trials and tribulations for the troubled couple.

This is a fine hardboiled Western novel with plenty of gritty action scenes and nice lines like describing a man as being “mean enough to braid his own hangrope”. For a Western published in 1963, there’s a lot of talk about sex, although all the actual bedding down happens off-screen, so to speak. Justin Emery is a really tough hero, absorbing an unusual amount of punishment but still coming back to take on his enemies. McGaughey was a consistently fine Western author, and I thoroughly enjoyed this particular example of his work.

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on October 2, 2009.)

Looking For Lost Streets/High Fliers, Middleweights, and Lowlifes - Cullen Gallagher

I haven’t read a great deal by David Goodis, but everything I’ve read has been very good. He’s one of those authors I need to read more. I’ve never read any of the scores of stories Goodis wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, mostly under his own name but a good number of them under house-names, as well. However, Cullen Gallagher has read those aviation yarns, as well as the sports, mystery, and Western stories Goodis sold to the pulps. In fact, there’s a good chance Gallagher has read more of Goodis’s short fiction than anyone else, since there are less than a handful of stories he hasn’t read.

Gallagher puts the knowledge gained from all this reading to superb use in two recent non-fiction books about Goodis’s pulp fiction. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF DAVID GOODIS’S PULP FICTION lays the groundwork, and then HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS delivers in spectacular fashion as Gallagher provides summaries and critical commentary on nearly 200 stories, as well as developing a well-researched case that the themes and characterizations that made Goodis’s later hardboiled crime and noir novels modern-day classics actually grew out of his work for the aviation pulps, not his early efforts in the detective pulps.

Along the way, Gallagher adds considerable insight to the use of house-names in the pulps, and LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS contains an invaluable section that identifies not just the stories Goodis wrote for Popular Publications that were published under house-names but also identifies the actual authors of dozens of other house-name stories. I’ve never seen this information before, and it’s great to know which well-known Western pulpsters actually wrote stories under the names Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and others. Gallagher dug most of this out of Popular Publications pay records that are part of a collection at the New York Public Library. This is research and scholarship well beyond the call of duty and is a real boon to fans of pulps and popular fiction.

If you’re a David Goodis fan, you really need to read these books. If you’re interested in pulp fiction in general, I give them my highest recommendation. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS is available in e-book and paperback editions. HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. They’re two of the best books I’ve read this year.

Now, we need to get more of Goodis’s aviation yarns back in print . . .

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Shaker Song - Manhattan Transfer

I love this performance beyond all reason. A while back I posted the original instrumental version of "Shaker Song" by Spyro Gyra and said that I'd post the vocal version by Manhattan Transfer, but I never got around to it. Let's remedy that.

Movie Review: The Spoilers (1955)

I can’t call this a Movie I’ve Missed because I’ve seen it before, but the last time was more than fifty years ago when I was in high school. But I recalled liking it, so when it showed up on Grit TV, I decided to give it a try.

This is actually the first version of THE SPOILERS I ever saw. Rex Beach’s bestselling 1906 adventure novel about the Yukon Gold Rush (something he experienced first-hand) has been filmed five times, twice during the Silent Era and three sound films: a 1930 version starring Gary Cooper that isn’t available and may be lost; a 1942 version starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich, the best-known and almost certainly best version if only for the cast; and this one from 1955 with Jeff Chandler, Rory Calhoun, and Anne Baxter.

It’s a familiar story: Chandler is the stalwart gold mine owner, Baxter is the flamboyant and beautiful saloon owner, and Calhoun, cast against type, is the charming but crooked gold commissioner who’s trying to swindle Chandler out of his mine and steal his girl, to boot. Elsewhere in the cast, Ray Danton is a gambler whose motivations are murky but who definitely can’t be trusted, John McEntire is Chandler’s crusty partner in the gold mine, Carl Benton Reid is a judge, Barbara Britton is the judge’s niece and some competition for Baxter, Wallace Ford is an old codger, and perennial villain Roy Barcroft is a good guy for a change, playing the local marshal. The characters jockey back and forth for position, romantic entanglements ensue, schemes are exposed, and it all culminates in a big battle between the miners and the bad guys in which a train crashes and stuff blows up real good, following by a brutal, saloon-destroying fistfight between Chandler and Calhoun.

As the only color version of THE SPOILERS, this one looks great. The location photography is good and there are plenty of bright colors. I’m not a fan of some of the Westerns made since the Seventies that are obsessed with muddy streets, filthy clothes, and scenes so dimly lit it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I don’t care if it’s realistic. The streets are muddy in this one, but other than that it’s definitely a Technicolor production. There’s some decent miniature work in the train crash, and the two leads (and their stunt doubles) throw a lot of enthusiasm into their big fight at the end. I’m not a huge fan of either Jeff Chandler or Rory Calhoun, but they’re fine here. It seemed to me that the fight is over quicker than I remember it, but it’s still pretty good.

If you’re going to watch only one version of THE SPOILERS, go with the Wayne/Scott/Dietrich effort from 1942. I’ve seen it several times, and it’s a better film. However, I think this 1955 version is worth watching, too. As I said above, I remember enjoying it the last time I saw it. I liked it this time, too, and I’m glad I saw it again.

Although I’ve been familiar with his name for years, I’ve never read anything by Rex Beach. Maybe I should. Most of his novels are in public domain, and free e-book editions are available on Amazon. If I ever get around to it, you can count on reading about it here.

Now Available: Lair of the Serpent Queen (Snakehaven #3) - James Reasoner

Jorras Trevayle is back, exploring the sprawling city of Nucarrah, a cesspit of sin and corruption, the hub of a world of danger and sinister sorcery where the giant serpents known as Nloka Maccumba roam. Rescued by the beautiful Llorna Valyasha from an attempt on his life, Trevayle pledges his allegiance to this queen of Nucarrah’s underworld, unaware that he’s sinking deeper and deeper into a war between criminals from which he may not escape! 

LAIR OF THE SERPENT QUEEN is the third exciting entry in the critically acclaimed Snakehaven saga, following the adventures of soldier and swordsman Jorras Trevayle in a world where death may strike from any direction without warning. New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner spins another breathtaking tale of sword and sorcery action in a brilliantly inventive and compelling setting. If you haven’t begun exploring Snakehaven yet, now is the time to start!

(I'm really enjoying writing these stories. This is the longest one yet, not quite long enough to call it a novel, but close. A print edition that will combine the first three stories is in the works and will be available later this fall for those of you who prefer print. I plan to do several more Snakehaven novellas next year, so as I always say at the end of these--Jorras Trevayle will return!)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Detective, September 1938

TOP-NOTCH DETECTIVE lasted for only three issues, of which this is the first one. That cover has enough going on that I thought at first it might be by Norman Saunders, but it's actually by J.W. Scott. The fact that this pulp didn't last long couldn't be due to the quality of the authors in its pages. This issue features stories by Cleve F. Adams, Arthur J. Burks, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons), Norman A. Daniels, Henry Treat Sperry, and Orlando Rigoni, as well as a number of other, lesser-known authors. That's a pretty strong lineup and an indication of a pulp worth reading.