Two More Announcements from Western Fictioneers

Next year, the Western Fictioneers will present the first annual Peacemaker Awards for the best works of Western fiction published in 2010, and submissions are now open.  You can find out all the details, including how to enter, on the WF website.

Also, if you'd like to show your support for WF and for Western fiction in general, an assortment of merchandise with the WF logo is now available here.  All profits will go to the organization.

Forgotten Books: Tongking! - Dan Cushman

Dan Cushman is a problematic author for me. I’ve always felt that I should like his work, since he wrote extensively for the Western pulps and in fact was responsible for creating the last Western hero pulp, THE PECOS KID. (Cushman write five Pecos Kid novellas for the magazine, all of which have been reprinted in Leisure paperbacks during the past decade.) He also wrote original paperbacks for Gold Medal and was still turning out hardback Western novels for Walker during the Eighties. And yet, when I’ve tried to read Cushman’s work, most of the time I haven’t cared for it. I’ve started some of his novels and haven’t even finished them.


Ah, but I’d never read one of his Far East adventure yarns until now.


TONGKING! was published in 1954 as half of an Ace Double and is very much of its time. The protagonist is down-on-his-luck American soldier of fortune Rocky Forbes, who finds himself broke in Bangkok, not a good situation. He falls in with an old ally/enemy, the smuggler Fatto Kolski (who seems to be modeled pretty blatantly on Sydney Greenstreet). Kolski has a plan to smuggle some guns to anti-communist guerrillas in China, but in order to pull off the scheme, he needs Forbes to pretend to be a dead man.


This is just the beginning of a very twisty plot that involves American spies, British spies, Chinese spies, a beautiful Spanish torch singer, a beautiful American missionary, double crosses, triple crosses, murder, tramp steamers, and shootouts with Thompson submachine guns. If all those plot elements don’t perk your interest, I don’t know what would. The pace never lets up for very long, the local color is very well-done, and Rocky Forbes manages to be a likable hero while at the same time remaining an unrepentant heel. TONGKING! is an updated version of the sort of pulpish international intrigue and adventure stories that were published in BLUE BOOK during the Thirties.


In an interview with George Tuttle that was first published in PAPERBACK PARADE and recently reprinted in SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, the first collection of Cushman’s Armless O’Neil stories that originally appeared in the pulps JUNGLE STORIES and ACTION STORIES, Cushman himself offers a fairly low opinion of TONGKING! I hate to disagree with the author, but I found this novel very entertaining, definitely enough so to make me want to read more of Cushman’s adventure novels. If you have it on your shelves but have never read it, you should take it down and give it a try. If you run across a copy of the Ace Double for a reasonable price, as I did, grab it. That great cover alone is worth something.


(Speaking of SEEKERS OF THE GLITTERING FETISH, that was a Father’s Day present from my daughters this year, along with several other pulp reprint collections. This really is a Golden Age for pulp fans, the best since the Sixties. I just need more time to read!)

National Day of the Cowboy Coming Up

The National Day of the Cowboy is coming up later this month on July 24, and my friend Ron Scheer has come up with an excellent way to celebrate it.  Check out all the details on his blog.

Beat to a Pulp Anthology

David Cranmer has posted a short excerpt from my story "Heliotrope" on his blog today.  This story will appear in the anthology BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND ONE, which looks like it's going to be a fantastic collection of stories.  "Heliotrope" is a little different from the sort of yarn I usually write, and I'm grateful to David and Elaine Ash for wanting to publish it.

Western Fictioneers Website

The official website of the Western Fictioneers has gone live this morning, including information on how to join the organization.  You can check it out here.

Happy Fourth of July

I hope all of you who celebrate the Fourth of July have a great day (and those of you who don't celebrate it as well).  I plan to spend it in the great American tradition:  working.  But we live up high enough we usually have a good view of all the fireworks shows in the area, so I might watch some of that tonight.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Sometimes I watch a movie for which I'm really not the target audience and like it just fine.  Other times . . . well, not so much.

Now, I like a good time travel yarn as much as the next guy, but for me a good time travel yarn usually includes, oh, say, the Borg, or Nazis, or Terminators.  You know, the "travel through time, kick some butt, save the universe" type of stuff.  You don't get any of that in THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE.  Instead you get a semi-weepy romantic drama.  Which is not to say that it's a terrible movie.  It looks good, there are a few funny lines amidst the angst, and I stayed awake all the way through it.  Take that for what it's worth.

I will say this.  We watched all of it, which is more than I can say for some movies we've attempted to sit through lately.

Announcing Western Fictioneers

I'm very happy to announce the formation of a new writers organization for professional Western authors, the Western Fictioneers.  The group's blog is up and running here, with an official website to follow soon.  In the meantime, if you're an author who has been paid to write Western fiction (of any length), you're eligible to join Western Fictioneers, as many of today's leading Western writers already have.  Award-winning author Frank Roderus is the first president of the organization, and I've agreed to serve as vice-president.  If you're interested in joining, email me (the link is in my profile), and I'd be happy to give you all the details.  WF has a lot of exciting plans in the works, and if you're a Western author, we'd love to have you be part of them.

Loser Friendly - Jake Cassidy

I didn’t have a Forgotten Book yesterday, but I’ll be back with one next Friday. In the meantime, here’s something not forgotten, but rather, brand-new. And mighty entertaining, too.


New Pulp Publishing is a new small press producing primarily e-books (although printed copies are available, too), in a variety of genres. As their website puts it: “New Pulp Publishing is dedicated to delivering blistering novella length fiction in the crime, suspense, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and western venues.” Their first book, LOSER FRIENDLY, has just been released and features Miami recovery agent Jake Cassidy (a name the author of the series is also using as a pseudonym). Jake seems to be a bit of a cross between Travis McGee and Mack Bolan. He lives on a boat (a yacht, not a houseboat) and for a fee, recovers things that people have lost, usually to some bad guys. But he also has a lot of heavy weapons and is very proficient in their use. Despite those influences, Jake takes on his own character and is a very likable hero and narrator, tough but not flawless, just enough of a smart-ass to be funny, and a good guy to have on your side when you’re in trouble.


In LOSER FRIENDLY, he starts out doing a favor for an old girlfriend and finds himself trying to rescue a would-be Hollywood screenwriter who has run afoul of some mobsters. They want a script the writer has written even more than they want the guy himself, and Jake winds up having to recover it, too. Occasionally the story pauses to take a breath, but for the most part it’s very fast-paced action and very effectively written, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it.


The author behind the Jake Cassidy name is a prolific writer who has been published in a wide variety of genres (it’s not, repeat not, me; I don’t have anything to do with New Pulp Publishing except as a satisfied reader). I had a great time reading LOSER FRIENDLY and look forward to the next book in the series. You can order the e-book here for a very reasonable price.

The Shamus Winners, Volumes 1 and 2 - Robert J. Randisi, ed.

I don’t normally recommend books before I’ve read them, but in the case of these two volumes I’ll make an exception because I have read many of the stories included in them. THE SHAMUS WINNERS, VOLUMES 1 AND 2 reprint all the winners of the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for Best Short Story from 1982 through 2009, plus a couple of bonus stories from the other nominees in each volume. Among them are two stories that became the basis for full-length novels, Lawrence Block’s “By the Dawn’s Early Light”, which was expanded into WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES, and Mickey Spillane’s “The Killing Man”, which became the novel of the same name. There are also great stories from Sue Grafton, Bill Pronzini, Ed Gorman, Loren Estleman, John Lutz, Max Allan Collins, Jeremiah Healy, and a host of other fine authors. As I mentioned, I’ve read many of these stories, and I look forward to rereading them and reading the others for the first time.

In addition to the stories themselves, you get a couple of introductions by Robert J. Randisi, the founder of PWA, and an appendix in each volume listing not only all the Shamus winners in all the categories, but also the other nominees in each category. This is an excellent reference source, and it’s great to have all that information in one place. (Two places, actually, since it’s split up between the volumes, but you know what I mean.)


If you’re a fan of private eye short fiction at all, these books are must-have items and another example of why Perfect Crime Books has become an important publisher in the field of crime fiction in a short period of time. Honest, I don’t work for Perfect Crime and I don’t have anything coming out from them. They’re just putting out a lot of really good books these days, and THE SHAMUS WINNERS, VOLUMES 1 AND 2 are among the best. Highly recommended.