Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Review: Horror Movies, The First 75 Years, Volume 1: The Mummy - David Whitehead

I always think of David Whitehead as a Western author, either under his real name or his pseudonym Ben Bridges, and he’s a top-notch Western writer, too. But he’s also written horror novels and he’s a long-time fan of the genre. How long-time I wasn’t really aware of until I read his recent non-fiction book, HORROR MOVIES: THE FIRST 75 YEARS, VOLUME 1: THE MUMMY.

I’m a horror fan, too, although on a somewhat limited basis. I tend to like the older stuff (no surprise there), including the classic Universal monster movies from the Thirties and Forties. As I’ve mentioned before, I saw a bunch of them on NIGHTMARE, the Saturday night monster movie showcase on one of the local TV stations, hosted in suitably creepy fashion by Bill Camfield as Gorgon. During the week, Camfield was also kid’s show host Icky Twerp, playing cartoons and Three Stooges shorts on SLAM-BANG THEATER. I loved both shows but had no idea Gorgon and Icky were actually the same guy.

I’ve wandered ’way off into the weeds of nostalgia. To get back to David Whitehead’s book, he’s a fan of the same era of horror movies as me, although his expertise extends up to the Hammer Films horror boom in the Fifties and Sixties. I like those movies, too, just not as much as the ones from Universal. Whitehead starts what promises to be a very entertaining series by focusing on movies featuring sinister mummies. I had no idea there was a mummy movie made in 1899, in the dawn of filmmaking. The subgenre really gets underway, though, with 1932’s THE MUMMY, starring Boris Karloff, and its assorted sequels. THE MUMMY is an excellent film, and Whitehead covers its story, cast, production details, and reception in fascinating detail. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this movie, its sequels, and other movies featuring mummies, most of which I’ve never seen. I’ve already made a list of several I intend to try to hunt up.

If you’re a fan of classic horror movies, I can’t recommend this volume highly enough. It’s written in a fast-moving, entertaining style and presents a lot of interesting information but never in a ponderous way. Honestly, it’s easy for a book like this to bog down in minutiae. Whitehead avoids that trap and delivers a fine book of movie history. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the books in this series, which will cover Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and other classic horror movie characters.

Review: Convict Commandos: Frenzy of Fear (Commando #4571) - Alan Hebden

With the exception of Private "Jelly" Jakes -- the unit's resident coward -- the Convict Commandos were among the most fearless fighters in the British Forces. So why were they running in terror from a unit of Germans leaving their quaking comrade behind in their haste? Something was badly awry, something had happened to throw the Convict Commandos into a Frenzy Of Fear.

A few years ago I read a bunch of digital issues of COMMANDO, the long-running British war comic, and some of my favorites were in a series called Convict Commandos, created and written by legendary comics author Alan Hebden with art by Manuel Benet. As you might guess from the series title, these stories chronicle the exploits of three criminals recruited to be commandos -- strongman Titch Mooney, knife expert Smiler Dawson, and burglar and explosives expert Jelly Jakes -- and the officer who leads them on their mission, Lt. Guy Tenby. I've decided to pick up where I left off and read the rest of the series, starting with this one from 2013, which is still available on Amazon. It's a fine yarn with a particularly good plot, as the Convict Commandos set out to destroy a Nazi radar jamming operation in occupied Greece, only to encounter a menace that forces them to act nothing like their usual selves. It's a clever, very entertaining tale, and if you're a fan of war comics, I give it a strong recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, April 1939

That's a pretty daring cover on this issue of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, especially for a pulp published by Street & Smith, an outfit that could be a little stodgy from time to time. The art is by Modest Stein, not a favorite artist of mine, but I have to admit, I like this one quite a bit. Inside are stories by Donald Wandrei, Otis Adelbert Kline, J. Allan Dunn, J.J. des Ormeaux, Robert C. Blackmon, and Harry Lee Fellinge, all of them prolific and dependable pulpsters. I don't own this issue or any issues of CLUES, as far as I recall, but it seems like a pulp that would have been worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story, August 30, 1941

This issue of the iconic WESTERN STORY sports a fine, very dramatic cover by A. Leslie Ross, one of my favorite pulp and paperback cover artists. The authors inside are no less notable: Harry Sinclair Drago, L.L. Foreman (with a Preacher Devlin novella), Tom W. Blackburn, S. Omar Barker, Frank Richardson Pierce (as Seth Ranger), George Michener, and Eric Howard. Definitely looks like an issue worth reading. I don't own a copy, or I just might. I do have Harry Sinclair Drago's novel BUCKSKIN EMPIRE, one installment of which is serialized in this issue. May have to see if I can find the book.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Wild Lovers - Orrie Hitt

This novel, a 1961 release from Kozy Books, is a typical Orrie Hitt yarn in some respects, but not in others. It’s a backwoods book, as you can probably tell from the cover, and sort of reminds me of some of Harry Whittington’s novels. It’s about the lives and loves of several people who come from a poor area in upstate New York known as Shanty Road. (There is, in fact, a sleaze novel by Whittington called SHANTY ROAD, published by Original Novels in 1954 under the Whit Harrison name. It would have made a good title for this book, too.)

Unlike the usual male protagonist you find in Hitt’s novels, the main character in WILD LOVERS is a young woman, Joy Gordon, who was orphaned at sixteen when a fire burned down the farm house where she lived with her parents, killing her mother and father. Left on her own, Joy moves into a shed that remains standing on the property and supports herself by selling eggs from the flock of chickens that’s almost her only possession of any value.

Almost, but not quite, because the property she inherited from her parents includes the only easy access to a lake which some developers want to turn into a hunting and fishing resort (another interest of Hitt’s). As the novel opens, though, the real estate agent in charge of the negotiations won’t meet Joy’s price. Actually, the agent is just trying to get her to go to bed with him, because in the five years since she was orphaned, she has grown up into a virginal, twenty-one-year-old beauty.

Helping out Joy is her neighbor, mechanic Pug Stark, who does meet the usual description of a big, burly Hitt hero. Pug comes from a real white trash family: his father refuses to work, and his sister is pregnant and has no idea who the father is. (Ah, the unwanted, unwed pregnancy, another favorite theme of Hitt’s.)

Then a stranger shows up, an artist from New York City whose family owns one of the properties along Shanty Road. He’s come up there to work and brought his beautiful mistress with him, and he’s a big, brawny guy, too. When he sees Joy, he immediately wants to paint a portrait of her – nude, of course – and his arrival changes everything, as Joy winds up juggling the three men who are interested in her, a neat reversal of the standard Hitt plot where the hero has to decide between three women.

That’s not the only twist that Hitt throws into the plot, as characters do things that take the reader by surprise and turn out not to be exactly what they appear to be at first. The ending won’t be any huge shock for Hitt fans, but it is pretty satisfying. The writing is good in this one, too, not quite as terse and hardboiled as in some of Hitt’s other books but with quite a few good lines.

WILD LOVERS is a good solid Orrie Hitt novel and very entertaining. If you haven’t read his work before, it would be a decent place to start, and if you have, you’ll want to read this one, too.

(How is it possible that I've been reading Orrie Hitt novels for more than 15 years? It certainly doesn't seem like it. But this post originally appeared on November 28, 2009, and WILD LOVERS wasn't the first novel by Hitt that I read, by any means. If you're interested in checking it out, there's a reprint edition available as an e-book.) 

Review: Chartered Love - Conrad Dawn

I love it when I find a little gem of a book in an unexpected place. At first glance, CHARTERED LOVE looks like it might fall into that category. Originally published in 1960 by Novel Books, one of the bottom-of-the-barrel paperback publlshers that specialized in what was then considered fiction for adults only, it’s the debut novel of Conrad Dawn, an author I’d never heard of, let alone read. Dawn published only six books, all of them from Novel Books in 1960-62. The cover promises some adventure to go along with the risque elements, and the book was reprinted recently by Black Gat Books, a consistently top-notch imprint, with an introduction by Gary Lovisi, an author whose opinions I respect, so yeah, this book might actually be pretty good.

CHARTERED LOVE starts out in very promising fashion. It’s a South Seas adventure yarn with a two-fisted boat skipper being hired by a beautiful young woman to help her recover a fortune in gold bars that went down with a refugee ship sunk by the Japanese during the early days of World War II. This is a very standard adventure plot going back to the pulp days. H. Bedford-Jones wrote probably dozens of stories that used some variation of this concept. So did plenty of other pulpsters, and the sunken treasure plot was used again and again by paperbackers and also hardcover authors such as Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, and Alistair Maclean. It’s a plot that I happen to like a lot, and I’ve even used it myself. Whether it succeeds or not is all a matter of execution. In a familiar tale such as this, a writer has to create strong characters, keep up a fast pace, provide vivid settings, and maybe, in the best of them, come up with a few twists in the standard plot.

A good protagonist is a must for this kind of novel. John Darrow, the skipper of the Malacca Maid, is a very good one. Reasonably smart, plenty tough, with morals just questionable enough to be interesting but still with a code of honor that he follows. The beautiful girl, Elizabeth McClain, is also smart and tough, not the least bit whiny, and a fine match for Darrow. The ship’s crusty old first mate is a great sidekick, the villains who are also after the gold bars are properly oily and evil, and all of them do good work as the story races along. There are some excellent action scenes during a typhoon, and the underwater diving scenes are suitably creepy. You’d barely know this book was from a so-called sleaze publisher. Except for a few mild, not-at-all graphic sex scenes, this reads very much like a Higgins or Maclean novel from the same era.

So, having read it, I’m happy to report that CHARTERED LOVE is indeed one of those lost gems. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation for fans of sea-going adventure yarns. It's available in paperback and e-book editions. I don’t know if Conrad Dawn’s other books are as good, but I’d love to find out. 

Miniseries I Missed Until Now: Buffalo Girls (1995)

There was a time when I was a big fan of Larry McMurtry’s work. This was back when I was in high school and college and he had published only a handful of novels. But those novels, especially THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, were the first ones I’d ever read that took place even partially in places where I’d been. When Sonny and Duane go to Fort Worth in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, they take the Jacksboro Highway, which meant they went within a couple of hundred yards of my house. I could stand in the street in front of the house and look down the hill to the highway and think, “Sonny and Duane drove right along there.” This immediacy and connection to my own life had a big impact on me, and I read everything by him I could get my hands on.

Then McMurtry went from being a Minor Regional Novelist (he claimed to have a T-shirt with that printed on it) to being a Big Bestseller and a Hollywood Guy, and while I still read one of his books occasionally, it was never the same after that. The kinship I’d felt with him (because I was an aspiring Minor Regional Novelist, too) was gone. Many years later, I sat at a Spur Awards banquet at the Western Writers of America convention in Fort Worth and listened to McMurtry give a long-winded acceptance speech because he won a Best Western Novel Spur for LONESOME DOVE. I maybe could have introduced myself to him later and told him I was once a big fan of his work, but nah, I was hanging around with Joe Lansdale and Scott Cupp and Bob Randisi, and that was a lot more fun.

So, speaking of long-winded, that’s why I never got around to reading McMurtry’s Calamity Jane novel BUFFALO GIRLS. They made a TV miniseries out of it in 1995, and I never watched it, either. But we came across a DVD of it at the library and thought, hey, why not? Anyway, it has Sam Elliott in it playing Wild Bill Hickok, and Sam Elliott is nearly always worth watching.

The story follows Calamity Jane from the time she’s working as a bullwhacker for the army through her time in Deadwood and finally her participation in her old friend Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show that traveled to England. As is common with McMurtry’s work, the plot strays within shouting distance of historical accuracy every now and then but doesn’t come any closer. McMurtry never worried about staying true to the facts, but I’m convinced he tried to capture the feeling of the times about which he was writing, and I’ll give him credit for that. This adaptation of BUFFALO GIRLS does capture the epic scope of the Old West and gets better as it goes along. The first half, which has all the Deadwood stuff in it, is actually a little weak, but the second half, about the Wild West Show going to England, is top-notch and very moving in places.

Anjelica Huston plays Calamity Jane. I thought at first that sounded like miscasting, but she does a fine job in the role. Sam Elliott is okay as Wild Bill but really has very litle to do. Peter Coyote plays Buffalo Bill Cody and is pretty good, although maybe not as flamboyant as he should have been. Melanie Griffith, an actress I’m not fond of, is the frontier madame Dora DuFran and came across to me as more annoying than anything else. Reba McEntire, a long-time favorite of mine, does a good job as Annie Oakley. Among fictional characters McMurtry added, the great Jack Palance and the very good character actor Tracey Walter are a couple of old mountain men and have some superb scenes, as does Floyd Red Crow Westerman as a sympathetic old Indian.

I really enjoyed watching BUFFALO GIRLS. It’s not going to make me rush out and read more of McMurtry’s books, but there are a few of them I’d still like to try. I have a copy of his Western TELEGRAPH DAYS, and I’m curious about his take on a gangster yarn, PRETTY BOY FLOYD. One of these days, maybe, if I get around to them. You know how that goes. Seldom. But now and then, it goes.

Review: Queen of the Gangsters, Volume 1: Boardwalk Empire - Margie Harris

A while back I mentioned Margie Harris, the prolific, well-regarded pulpster who contributed many stories to the gang pulps during the Thirties and whose true identity remains a mystery to this day. I wondered if any of her stories had been reprinted. Turns out that not only have several stories been reprinted in various places, there’s even a collection of her work entitled QUEEN OF THE GANGSTERS: BOARDWALK EMPIRE, published by Off Trail Publications in 2011. I’ve been meaning to read more from the gang pulps, so I got my hands on a copy.

The book leads off with a pair of introductions by editors David Bischoff and John Locke. Bischoff, a well-known science fiction writer, seems an odd choice to be editing a pulp collection like this, but his introduction reveals a genuine fondness for the author and her work. Locke, the man behind Off Trail Publications, provides as much biographical information as we have on Harris. As far as I can tell, nothing else about her has turned up in the 13 years since this book was published.

The first story, “Cougar Kitty”, from the June/July 1930 issue of MOBS, was Harris’s second published story, but it reads like the work of a seasoned veteran. It’s a revenge yarn, as the beautiful, redheaded Kate Dever heads for Seattle and gets a job as a hostess in the speakeasy run by brutal gang boss Scar Argylle. Kate has a hidden agenda (not a spoiler, since Harris doesn’t keep this a secret from the reader) and things race along as she puts her plan into action. This is a very entertaining tale, fast-paced and full of colorful characters.

“The Night Before Hell” (GANGLAND STORIES, August/September 1930) is Harris’s fourth story. This one finds a gangster convicted of murder and facing a death sentence breaking out of jail to seek revenge on the rival gang leader who framed him. It’s almost all action as the protagonist battles his way into the heart of his enemy’s stronghold, although there are a few heartstring-tugging moments. Not quite as strong a yarn as “Cougar Kitty” but still well-written and enjoyable.

In addition to having a great title, “Hellcat Buys a Stack” (GANGSTER STORIES, November 1930) is a good yarn with a fine protagonist. Hellcat is a gangster who earns that nickname for being such a fierce fighter despite his mild appearance. Surprisingly, his best friend is a crusading newspaper reporter whose life he saved during a battle in the Great War. It probably helps their friendship that the reporter lives in New York City while Hellcat is based in Chicago. But when Hellcat visits the Big Apple and tries to get together with his buddy, the reporter is murdered right in front of him. This proves to be a mistake since Hellcat sets out to avenge his pal and will stop at nothing to do it. Lots of fast-paced action and intrigue in this one.

“The Raspberry” is a novelette that appeared in GANGLAND STORIES that same month, November 1930. In it, mob boss Shane Stevens decides to get out of the rackets (for the love of a good woman, of course) and take the fortune in loot he’s amassed to Europe. When his lieutenants get wind of this, they don’t like the idea and double-cross him, resulting in Shane having to hole up in his heavily fortified penthouse while his former minions lay siege to it. This battle goes on high above the streets of Manhattan with the teeming populace below having no idea what’s happening. Shane finally conceives a daring escape plan that has almost no chance of succeeding, but he has to try it anyway if he wants to get away with the girl and the loot. This yarn is almost non-stop action, and Harris does a great job of making the reader sympathize with Shane and forget the fact that he’s a criminal and probably got that loot in all sorts of sordid ways. We don’t care, we just want him to defy all the odds and make his getaway. This is a fine story and a beautiful example of breakneck pulp pacing.

“While Choppers Roared” (RACKETEER STORIES, February 1931) is an action-packed tale that finds two daring undercover cops infiltrating a vicious gang and setting them up for a raid, while at the same time, a tough Irish cop on the verge of retirement tries to save the son of an old flame from a life of crime. This one has a few more touches of sentimentality and melodrama than the previous stories, but it certainly doesn’t skimp on the shootouts, either. I lost track of how many guys on both sides got gunned down in this blood-soaked yarn.

Just when you think Harris’s work can’t get any darker, here comes “The Angel From Hell”, which appeared in the April 1931 issue of GANGSTER STORIES. A mob killer whose face is paralyzed from a war injury discovers that his boss is setting him up to take the fall for a murder he didn’t commit. He goes on a vengeance spree in advance that includes torture, shootouts, and grisly deaths carried out with an acid gun. This is the most violent yarn of Harris’s so far, and the reader doesn’t have a shred of sympathy for any of the characters except for maybe one, and that’s not revealed until the last-second twist ending. This is potent stuff.

In “Understudy From Hell”, a novella from the July 1931 issue of GANGSTER STORIES, a mob boss is rubbed out by a rival gang, leading his beautiful blond moll to swear vengeance. She gets it, too, in another yarn in which Harris spills seas of blood. The big twist in this one is obvious very early on, but it probably came as a real shock to readers in 1931. Knowing what’s coming doesn’t keep this from being a suspenseful, action-packed yarn that has some truly poignant moments as well. Is it a little melodramatic? Sure, but it’s still a superb story that had me engrossed from start to finish.

The final story in this volume is “Twisted Vengeance” from the January 1934 issue of GREATER GANGSTER STORIES. It’s the shortest story in the book, but that doesn’t mean it packs any less punch than the longer yarns. The protagonist is a crippled former gangster known as Gimpy the Bum, who has a bad leg from bullet wounds suffered when he was just starting out in the mobs. When a female settlement worker who helped him recover from his injuries is murdered, Gimpy sets out to avenge her death, and of course that involves plenty of brutal violence. Gimpy’s bad leg doesn’t slow him down much as he tackles the underworld. This is another fine story that really had me flipping the pages.

Overall, QUEEN OF THE GANGSTERS is one of the best pulp collections I’ve read in a while. These stories are really powerful, and while Harris may not have been the most polished writer you’ll ever read, she could sure tell a riveting tale, and without shying away from any of the ugliness of the subject matter, either. I’ve read a few gang pulp stories here and there over the years, but this is my real introduction to the genre and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m sorry it appears to be the first and only collection of Margie Harris’s stories. It’s still available on Amazon and I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, May 1934

This issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE sports a creepy, eye-catching cover by Rafael DeSoto. The lineup of authors inside is a strong one: George Harmon Coxe, Johnston McCulley, Norman A. Daniels, George Fielding Eliot, Wayne Rogers, Joe Archibald, and George Allan Moffatt, who was really Edwin V. Burkholder. I don't own this issue, but I think it would be well worth reading if I did.