Page Proofs and Horror

I spent most of the day reading page proofs, and as I've mentioned on here before, that's one of my least favorite jobs. I've found only one typo so far, and I have a feeling it may be the only one in the book.

In between stints of reading my own words, I read part of a book called WRITING HORROR, edited by Mort Castle, written by members of the Horror Writers Association, and published by Writers Digest Books. I saw this at the library last week and couldn't resist it, even though I attempt to write horror fiction only occasionally and have been spectacularly unsuccessful at it. (I have managed to sneak horror elements into some of my Westerns, but again, only occasionally.) WRITING HORROR was published in 1997, so all the market information is very dated, but that's okay. I just like reading what various writers have to say about a particular genre. And some of the articles in the book are pretty well universal, such as David Morrell's piece on how to write good dialogue. This is a pretty interesting book. It makes me want to read some horror fiction more than it makes me want to write it, but that's okay, too.

Back at It

First of all, many, many thanks to everyone who wrote to express their sympathy at the passing of my dad. Your words of support meant a great deal to me. I think I have a scan of the photo that Bill mentions in his comment below, and if I can find it, I'll post it and the story behind it.

Though I didn't write any today, I was able to get some pages yesterday, and the current book is about one-third done. I need to pick up the pace on it a little.

I finished Connelly's THE LAST COYOTE and enjoyed it very much, as expected. I also read THE FRANKIE AND JOHNNY MURDER, a chapbook collection of two novelettes by Roger Torrey from the pulp PRIVATE DETECTIVE. I've read and liked Torrey's work before, and these are fun stories. I was especially fond of the set-up in the title story, which involved a roadhouse owned by a couple of beautiful women named Frankie and Johnny. This seemed to me like the first story in a series, but I don't think Torrey ever used the characters and background again, which is a shame. I'm not sure what I'm going to read next.

Marion Reasoner, 1916 - 2004

My dad passed away early this morning. We knew this was coming, so it wasn’t a shock, but yet it always is, of course, when someone who has always been there no longer is.

Marion Reasoner (no middle name) was born in the community of Indian Creek, Texas, on February 5, 1916. Indian Creek no longer exists; when the Army built its huge training base, Camp Bowie, in Brownwood in the early Forties, it completely took in Indian Creek, and the town, never big to start with, disappeared. My dad was raised on a farm and cowboyed a little as a young man on the old Binion spread, owned by the father of famous gambler Benny Binion. He managed a bowling alley in Brownwood, worked as a civilian aircraft mechanic during World War II, and then as a member of the Signal Corps strung telephone wire across most of Austria in ’45 and ’46. He came back to aircraft work after his time in the Army and worked in that industry until he retired in the mid-Seventies. At the same time he worked as a TV repairman and continued with that long after his official “retirement”. He started a TV and appliance sales and service shop and I worked for him for several years, running the office and doing a little repair work. (I was never good at it, though.) Most of my early writing, including my first novel, was done a paragraph at a time in between loading and unloading TVs, washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc.

Although he liked to read as a young man, he stopped for a long time, devoting most of his time to work, as many Depression-era kids did when they grew up. He thought the idea of somebody wanting to write books for a living was utterly nuts. Writers were people who lived somewhere else, not in little towns in Texas. But whether he understood it or not, he made sure I had a chance to give it a try. I’m also convinced I inherited whatever storytelling talent I have from him, because anybody who knew him knows how much he liked to talk and spin yarns. And when I began to have some success, he became the world’s biggest booster of my work. He told everybody he ran into about me and the books I had written, and he carried copies around in his truck while he was doing TV work and sold them to his customers. Earlier this summer, while he was in the hospital in bad shape, he was still plugging my books to the nurses.

He read just about everything that I wrote and became a big reader again, not just of my work but of any books he could get his hands on, especially Westerns. During the Nineties, he went with me to a couple of Western Writers of America conventions and had a great time hanging around with writers and editors. He learned a lot about the business and always wanted to know what I was working on and what deals I had coming up. A writer couldn’t ask for a better dad, or a better friend.

He was married for over 63 years to my mom and raised me and my brother and sister and did a fine job, if I do say so myself.

Connelly Again

I'm reading THE LAST COYOTE, the fourth Harry Bosch book by Michael Connelly, and enjoying it as usual. Connelly writes non-fancy, meat-and-potatoes prose and still makes it lyrical at times. That's a neat trick. I started reading another book this morning but it might as well remain unidentified since I'm not going to finish it. It was by a fairly well-known, highly-praised author, but the prologue was about a brilliant and eccentric serial killer, and by the time I finished it I realized I just didn't care, so the book went back on the shelf. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

This was a library and errand-running day, but when we got home I managed to get some pages done anyway.

Three Star Books

Steve Mertz comments below about that Jerry Cotton book I read, and that prompted me to do a little digging into the publisher, Three Star Books of Chicago. A search on ABE turns up two more books they published: an anthology called GREAT SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Tony Licata and including stories by Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Avram Davidson, L. Sprague de Camp, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Porges, Lester del Rey, and Brad Steiger; and IAN FLEMING'S INCREDIBLE CREATION, consisting of "Part I: My Friend Ian Fleming, by Paul Anthony (Fleming's drinking partner), and Part II: The World of James Bond, by Jacquelyn Friedman, an analysis of Fleming's work and of his character James Bond". Throw in the Jerry Cotton book, and that's a really odd trio. Three Star Books was a division of Camerarts Publishing Company, which also produced Merit Books, the publisher of most of Ennis Willie's novels. (For more on Ennis Willie, see recent installments of Ed's Place, as Steve also mentions.)

I'm reading a 1936 ARGOSY serial by H. Bedford-Jones called "River Devil", in which Mike Fink plays a prominent role. I've been a fan of Mike Fink fiction since watching "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates" as a kid. For a more recent Mike Fink novel, look for a copy of Kerry Newcomb's excellent CALL DOWN THUNDER, published several years ago by Harper Paperbacks.

Jerry Cotton

A conversation on the WesternPulps list with Juri Nummelin strayed onto the topic of the Jerry Cotton books, a long-running series of mystery novels published in Germany. Written by a stable of anonymous authors, the books were published under the house-name Jerry Cotton, and that's the name of the lead character as well. Cotton is a U.S. federal agent, a fairly standard wise-cracking tough guy. In 1965 one of the novels was published in an English translation by Three Star Books, a small Chicago paperback house, under the title IN THE LION'S DEN. I've had a copy of this book on my shelves for years, so today I read it. The cover refers to Jerry Cotton as the German James Bond, but there's no James Bond feel to this book at all. Instead, it reads more like a very minor Gold Medal novel, with Cotton working undercover to clean up the corruption in a small Southern city. He gets shot at, beaten up, nearly run over by a gravel truck, almost blown up with dynamite, etc., and has one romantic interlude with a beautiful blonde who may or may not be working for the bad guys. It's all told in the usual breezy, hardboiled style, and while the writing is pretty mediocre most of the time, there are some nice scenes here and there. All in all, a slightly better book than I expected.

I looked through the serials I own and settled on THE MYSTERY SQUADRON to watch next. This is a 1933 Mascot serial starring Bob Steele. "12 Mystifying Chapters of Zooming Adventure!" according to the box. We'll see how it goes.

Zorro's Black Whip

I finished watching this serial tonight. I didn't quite make my goal of watching a chapter each night, had to skip a night or two, but I've been watching it pretty regularly. I wouldn't put it in the top rank of Republic serials, but it's very enjoyable. The plot is thin even by serial standards, and the villain is a scrawny little guy who doesn't live up to the great villainous standard of Roy Barcroft. But there's plenty of action, with numerous gunfights and a set-destroying brawl in nearly every episode. Stuff blows up real good a couple of times. The stunt work is excellent, with Babe DeFreest doubling Linda Stirling and Dale Van Sickel doubling George J. Lewis. Linda Stirling is considerably shapelier in the Black Whip costume than Babe is, so it's fairly easy to tell when they switch, but that's all right. Hal Taliaferro, also known as the early Western star Wally Wales, does good work as the villain's chief henchman. One of the opening credits says, "Zorro character created by Johnston McCulley". Well, yes, that's true, but it's got nothing to do with this serial, which never even mentions Zorro. I guess Republic figured they had paid for the right to use the name, so they might as well use it to try to boost revenues. All in all I had a very good time watching this and plan to start another serial soon.

Spur Awards

I'm serving as a judge in the Spur Awards this year, in the category of Best Novel of the West. This is the same category I helped judge seven or eight years ago. The rule that determines which novels go in which category is purely arbitrary: if it's under 90,000 words, a book is eligible for Best Western; if it's over 90,000 words, it goes in the Best Novel of the West category. I'll be getting a lot of books to read over the next three months or so, and it strikes me as unethical somehow to discuss them while the competition is still going on. So if I'm rather vague about what I'm reading for a while, that's the reason. Of course I'll continue to read and comment on other books, too, and after the Spur competition is over and my nominations have been turned in, I'm sure I'll have some things to say about some of the books I've read in the course of the contest.

By the way, the Spur Awards are given out each year by the Western Writers of America, which I failed to mention above.

Western Story, October 28, 1939 

Yard Work

I managed to fritter away the day working on our lawn mower and doing some other chores, so no writing got done. I did manage to read some more of that Western pulp, though. I'm going to see if I can post the cover of it here, since I think it's a pretty good one, but don't hold your breath waiting.