Barbara Britton and Richard Denning from "Mr. and Mrs. North" 

Books and DVDs

I've been writing some every day, and today was no different. But I also found the time to stop by a Half Price Books location that I don't visit very often. I came out with four books:

A trade paperback called ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LITERARY REFERENCE, which seems to be a year-by-year overview of Hemingway's work, including letters between him and Maxwell Perkins, assorted reviews, photocopies of manuscript pages, etc. I'm a big Hemingway fan, so I'll browse through this one happily, I'm sure.

The movie tie-in edition of Daniel Woodrell's Civil War novel WOE TO LIVE ON, under the movie title of RIDE WITH THE DEVIL. I never saw the movie, and I've only read one Woodrell novel, TOMATO RED, which I thought was okay but not something that was going to make me a big fan of his work. I liked it well enough to give this one a try, though.

Ace Double F-285, SHIPS TO THE STARS by Fritz Leiber and THE MILLION YEAR HUNT by Kenneth Bulmer. The Leiber is a short story collection. The only thing I've read by Bulmer was a Viking novel under a pseudonym, but it was pretty good.

NAKED IN A CACTUS GARDEN by Jesse Lasky Jr., a Hollywood novel I'd never heard of, but I generally like trashy Hollywood novels.

Not a great haul, but I'll take it.

I watched one of the Flash Gordon episodes on DVD, and while it was pretty cheap and hokey, I enjoyed it. Steve Hollard sports an odd hair style in this series, but for a non-actor he's pretty good, and so are the action scenes. Bill Crider has been talking about the Mr. and Mrs. North TV series starring Richard Denning and Barbara Britton (check out the photo of Ms. Britton on Bill's blog, if you haven't seen it already). I haven't seen any of the TV episodes, but years ago I read nearly all of the Mr. and Mrs. North novels by Francis and Richard Lockridge and really enjoyed them. I also read their series about a police detective named Heimrich, I think. Richard Lockridge continued writing after his wife's death, but the books weren't nearly as good, leading me to suspect that she plotted most of them.

Dollar Tree DVDs

Since I had to be out in the blasted rain today anyway, I stopped by Dollar Tree and pawed through their DVDs. The last time I was there they were about to restock but hadn't done it yet, so I thought there was a good chance I'd find some new stuff. Sure enough I came home with six more DVDs: two discs of Flash Gordon episodes and discs of The Lone Ranger, Jim Bowie, and the Cisco Kid, plus a Western compilation disc with one episode each of Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, and the Cisco Kid. Cisco occupies a special place in my heart, because when we got our first color TV in 1966 (as I've mentioned before), the very first thing I watched on it was an old rerun of The Cisco Kid. I've never forgotten the excitement of seeing color TV in my own living room. (And if you think that as a kid I was probably a little too wrapped up in TV, you're right. But hey, I read comic books, too . . . !)

Anyway, I think that tonight I'll watch one of the Flash Gordon episodes. Flash was played on TV by Steve Holland, who is perhaps best known as the model for the Doc Savage covers that James Bama painted for the Bantam reprints. However, he was a cover model for lots of paperbacks, including some of the Louis L'Amour novels and the Nevada Jim series. I associate Holland almost as much with Western paperbacks as I do with Doc Savage.

On, You Huskies!

Like Bill Crider, I'm addicted to the cheap DVDs at Dollar Tree and Wal-Mart. One that I picked up a while back at Dollar Tree has three episodes of the old TV series SERGEANT PRESTON OF THE YUKON on it. Since the book I'm writing has a Mountie in it, I thought it would be appropriate to watch an episode of SERGEANT PRESTON. Call it research. Yeah, that's it, research. Hard to believe that in 170 books this is the first one to feature a Mountie, but as far as I can remember that's the case.

Anyway, I was surprised to find that the show was in color. Not very good color, mind you, but still . . . The story was set in a ghost town, and as anyone who has ever watched a B-movie or read a pulp story knows, the buildings in ghost towns are always full of hidden passages and secret hideouts. This episode was no disappointment. Sergeant Preston got to the bottom of the mystery and caught the villains, with the help of his wonder dog, Yukon King. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Less enjoyable has been the weather around here. We haven't seen the sun for about a week now, and I'm tired of the constant gloom and drizzle. I honestly think it's slowed down my production. With the rain not supposed to break until the weekend, I think I'm going to take an extra lamp out to my studio in an attempt to brighten it up some. I hope that helps.

Couple of Books

It occurred to me that I ought to post some covers every now and then. Here are two, one that's out now (Longarm) and one that will be out in January (Trailsman). I don't know what Buck Jones is doing on the cover of that Longarm, but hey, it's always good to see ol' Buck.

Longarm and the Devil's Bride (#311) 

The Trailsman #279: Death Valley Vengeance 

Errands

Made stops at two libraries today, as well as Half Price Books and Wal-Mart. I picked up a few research books for that new idea I'm working on, but at this point it's just background. I have no idea when I'd have time to write even chapters-and-outline for the book. But maybe I can get a basic plot written down so I won't forget it later. I didn't buy much at Half Price: a couple of Leslie Ford mysteries (I haven't read the Fords I bought a while back, so I still don't know if I'll like them or not, but what the hey, they were only a buck apiece), and also for a dollar, a copy of ROGUE ROMAN by Lance Horner (a plantation novel transplanted to ancient Rome) to replace a copy I had that seems to have gone missing.

Once we got back I was able to work for a while, got the revisions done I wanted to do on the current book and also wrote a few more pages. There were page proofs of a Trailsman novel waiting on the doorstep when we got home, so I'll be taking the time to read them in the next few days, too.

Backtracking

This was just another chilly, rainy work day, semi-productive, not great. But I did come to a fairly important decision, I think. When I started this book I thought I would change my style a little on it, just to keep things interesting. That's one of the advantages of writing house-name books: as long as you stay reasonably close to the established formula, you can do all sorts of playing around with style and characters. Anyway, fifty pages into this one in my "new" style, I hate it, and it's taking me longer than usual, and I'm smart enough to call a halt to this failed experiment. I'm going to go back and revise that first fifty pages into my regular style and write the rest of it the way I normally would have. It's always good to try new things, but you've got to be able to recognize when they're not working.

Also, I'm distracted anyway because a few days ago Livia gave me a great idea for a book and I'm spending too much time thinking about it rather than the one I'm working on. What I need is more hours in the day. (Yeah, me and the rest of the world, I know.)

Brownwood

I spent yesterday going to Brownwood, Texas, about 120 miles southwest of where I live, for the funeral of one of my aunts, who passed away on Wednesday. My mother went with me, and we visited a little with other relatives while we were down there. (Both my mother and my father were born and raised down in that area, and I still have lots of relatives around there.) The driving pretty much wore me out. Time was I could drive all day and not feel it much, but that's no longer the case.

When I was a kid I always liked going to the house of the aunt who passed away this week, Iva Mae Heath. She had a nice back yard where her husband Bear liked to grill hamburgers (every kid should have an uncle named Bear). My cousins knew somebody who worked for the local magazine distributor, so they had stacks and stacks of stripped comic books. (In those days, unlike paperback books, only the top third of a comic book cover was torn off to return for credit.) And they had a color TV, too, which was magical to me. We didn't get a color TV until 1966. My aunt was a big fan of Western TV shows, especially BONANZA. I've never forgotten one time when she said that she watched an entire episode of BONANZA wondering where Adam was, before she finally realized that she was actually watching THE VIRGINIAN.

Today I got back to work on the current book and had a pretty productive day. I only have about half an outline on this one, so I hope I don't run into a brick wall part of the way through. That hardly ever happens, but I always worry about it. Winter-type weather has arrived at last in this part of Texas, cold and dreary. I turned on the heater in my studio today for the first time since last winter.