More Free Books

Livia's giving away books again on her blog. This time it's one copy each of the brand-new Delilah Dickinson hardcover, KILLER ON A HOT TIN ROOF (with a great cover) and the mass-market paperback edition of the second Delilah novel, HUCKLEBERRY FINISHED.  All the details are here.

Forgotten Books: Lawnmower Blues - Rex Anderson

My friend Clifford Fausset recommended this book to me, otherwise I might not have ever heard of it. The author, Rex Anderson, isn’t what you’d call prolific. LAWNMOWER BLUES, which was published in 2005, appears to be only the fourth novel in his career, which began with COVER HER WITH ROSES in 1969. But based on reading this one, I really need to go back and find those other three books.


LAWNMOWER BLUES is a medium-boiled private eye novel. Tony Aapt is a young Houstonian who inherited the agency from his grandfather. Tony’s trying to make a go of it in the security business but also handles more traditional PI work, mostly divorce cases. Then a barmaid at the watering hole Tony frequents wins the lottery and decides to hire him to investigate the murder of her husband. The problem is, the woman’s husband evidently committed suicide, and it happened more than thirty years earlier.


Tony takes the job and begins to investigate anyway, and sure enough, he starts to believe that maybe the guy really was murdered. Turns out there’s a motive worth millions of dollars, and some other things happen that make Tony think somebody – the real killer, maybe? – doesn’t want him to find out the truth.


This is a pretty standard private eye novel plot, and to be honest, it probably could have used another twist or two. However, what really makes LAWNMOWER BLUES worth reading is some wonderful writing. The first-person narration is fast and breezy and pretty funny in places, and Anderson does a great job with the setting (although I’m no expert on Houston, having been there exactly twice in the past fifty years). He also populates this novel with a multitude of eccentric, vividly drawn characters, none of them better than Tony himself. Smart, funny, flawed, and persistent, driven by a moral code that he struggles with, the reader can’t help but like him and root for him.


All that combines to make LAWNMOWER BLUES a top-notch novel that I really enjoyed. Highly recommended. (And if Anderson wants to bring Tony back in another novel, that would be just fine with me.)

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it, and to the rest of you, I hope you have a great day, too!  I plan to work today, but not as much as usual, so there'll be time for family and plenty of good food.  I probably have more to be thankful for than anybody I know, and it's good to stop and remember that from time to time.

Do the Math

No, wait, Kevin J. Anderson already has.  If you're a writer, you should read this blog post.

How I Came to Write This Book

You can find out all about it over on Patti Abbott's blog today.

The Karate Kid

I remember watching and enjoying the original version of THE KARATE KID, but not being a kid myself in the Eighties, I never had the emotional connection to the film that some of you might have. However, I thought it was good enough that there was really no need to do a remake of it, especially when it smacked of a vanity project for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and their son.


However, now that I’ve seen the new version, I have to say that it’s fairly watchable. The screenplay is considerably different from the original, which helps, and the Chinese scenery is spectacular at times. Also, it has Jackie Chan in it, and he’s always worth watching as far as I’m concerned. And the fight scenes are surprisingly tough. At two hours and twenty minutes, the movie is probably half an hour too long and would be more effective if the pace was faster. But the payoff is okay. Overall I enjoyed it, and unless you’re heavily invested in the original version, it’s a pleasant enough way to pass some time.

Bad Girls Need Love, Too - Gary Lovisi

From Gary Lovisi:

Thrill to the pleasures of sexy pulp paperback cover art gorgeously displayed along with those wild, campy, and sleazy blurbs and teaser text that are such a part of these amazing books. This attractive 6 x 8" hardcover contains almost 200 pages full of outstanding sexy pin-up covers, bad girls, steaming situations, wild text and blurbs, all in breath-taking FULL COLOR. It's a frolicking celebration of pulp fiction floozies doomed to keep looking for love in all the wrong places -- it's outrageous glorious pulp excess fun. This book is a feast for the eyes and would make a great gift for the holidays! It is out now. Cover price is just $12.99 + postage.

Also if you're looking for something extra, go to the Bad Girls Need Love Too website and get the lowdown on bad girl images, a free newsletter, free BGNLT wallpaper, and blog about the book at:
www.badgirlsneedlove2.com

You can order the book here.

Book Sale at the Library

Livia, Joanna, and I went to a big book sale at the local public library this morning.  You never know what you're going to find at sales like that.  The prices were good:  $1 for hardbacks and 50 cents for paperbacks (including trade paperbacks).  I picked up eight or ten novels, most of them fairly contemporary thrillers by authors I haven't read before.  I don't mind betting a buck a book in a case like that, especially when the proceeds benefit the library.  I don't check out all that much these days, but I like knowing it's there.

Those of you who remember my post about baseball novels a month or so ago will understand why I was excited when I found a couple of Chip Hilton novels by Clair Bee.  Unfortunately, when I looked closer I realized they were "new, updated" versions of the original novels.  Maybe I'm being unfair, but right back they went onto the shelf.  Nearly all the "updated" novels I've read in my life have been nowhere near as good as the originals.  (Yes, I'm talking to you, Frank and Joe Hardy and your chums.) Anyway, I did find a 1945 baseball novel by Jackson Scholz.  It's a later reprint but appears to have the original text.  That one I grabbed.

We also got a bunch of non-fiction books on various subjects to go in our research library (a high-falutin' name for dozens of books stacked here, there, and yonder), and Joanna picked up quite a few books for her third-grade class.  Right now the bags, nearly a dozen of them, are still stacked on the sofa, waiting to be gone through, so I don't really know what we have in there.  I do know, though, that it was a very pleasant way to spend part of a Saturday morning when I really should have been working.

Forgotten Books: The Iron Trail - Jackson Cole (Peter Germano)

Warning: Nostalgia ahead.

When I was in high school, my favorite class was . . . study hall. We weren’t required to take study hall, you understand, but I always did, and for one simple reason. Most of my teachers would give us time in class to work on our homework, and I’d finish it there, leaving me with nothing to do in study hall but sit and read some library book or paperback. Yep, 55 minutes in the middle of an otherwise boring school day when I could spend some time with John Carter or Simon Templar or Shell Scott or Donald Lam and Bertha Cool.

The teacher in charge of study hall (which was located in an old converted World War II army barracks) was Coach Gilmore, one of the assistant football coaches. The coach, as you might expect, was a large, rather intimidating man who didn’t seem to care for the fact that I always sat there reading. One day he got up from his desk, walked over to where I was sitting, and loomed over me with a frown on his face.

“Reasoner, don’t you have any homework to do?”

“Already did it, Coach.”

“What kind of grades do you make, Reasoner?”

“All A’s, Coach.”

He looked at me for a second longer, then sighed, shook his head, and walked away.

(That was a slight exaggeration on my part. I usually made all A’s, but occasionally I made a B in P.E.)

All of which is my long-winded lead-in to the fact that I remember very well the first Jim Hatfield novel I read. It was a Popular Library paperback called GUNSLINGER’S RANGE, and I read it during study hall in that old barracks building (which is long gone, by the way, and the high school I attended then is now a junior high). I wasn’t a big fan of Westerns at the time – most of my reading consisted of mysteries and science fiction – but I read quite a few of them here and there. GUNSLINGER’S RANGE was great fun. I recall racing right through it, flipping the pages as fast as I could to get to the big showdown at the end between Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield and the three outlaws who had escaped from prison to hunt him down. That made me a Hatfield fan, and so I immediately started looking for more Jackson Cole paperbacks and discovered that there were a lot of them. Even then I checked copyright pages and such and noticed that GUNSLINGER’S RANGE was copyright in the Forties by Standard Magazines, or possibly by Better Publications (it doesn’t matter, it was the same outfit). I was already familiar with pulps, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that the Hatfield novels were reprints from some Western pulp.

Well, that pulp was TEXAS RANGERS, of course, which ran from 1936 to 1958, making it one of the last true pulps. Over the years I read all the Hatfield paperbacks I could find, learned more about the actual authors behind the Jackson Cole house-name, and even amassed a sizable collection of the original pulps (although it didn’t rival the collection of my friend Jim Griffin, who had the entire run before he donated it to the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco). Through the generosity of several people after the fire destroyed my original collection, I once again have quite a few issues of TEXAS RANGERS.

But what about “The Iron Trail”, you ask? It’s the lead novel in the January 1953 issue, which I read recently. In this case, the actual author is Peter Germano, who wrote quite a few of the Hatfield novels during the Fifties but is better known as the Western novelist Barry Cord. Germano was one of the best of the Hatfield authors, and “The Iron Trail” is a fine yarn that opens with a great scene in which outlaws attack a medicine show wagon that’s pulling a cage with a huge tiger in it. The medicine show is called Doc Pinkle’s Jungle Caravan, and Doc Pinkle sells a potent potion known as Tigereye Tonic, the Wonder Remedy. Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, also known as the Lone Wolf, who is riding into the area because a railroad baron building a spur line has been plagued by payroll holdups, interrupts the attack and from there is drawn into a fast-paced adventure featuring gunfights, double-crosses, and a hidden mastermind (and if you don’t spot said mastermind right away, you’ve never read a pulp Western or watched a B-Western movie, but that’s okay).

While the plot of “The Iron Trail” is pretty predictable, it has several things going for it that make it well worth reading. First is Germano’s usual lean, hardboiled prose, which makes for some fine action scenes. Then you’ve got off-beat elements like the presence of that tiger, and a great fight that takes place on top of a moving train. If you’ve read many of my Westerns, you know I like that sort of stuff, and the fact that this battle takes place while the train is racing over a high trestle makes it even better.

“The Iron Trail” probably isn’t in the top rank of Jim Hatfield novels, but it’s a solidly entertaining yarn. It hasn’t been reprinted since its original appearance, so it’s not like you can run out and grab a copy. But the paperback reprints of many other Hatfield novels are still fairly easy to find in used bookstores and on the Internet and usually aren’t very expensive. The quality of the stories varies, of course, as with any house-name series, but I’ve enjoyed nearly all the ones I’ve read, both in the pulps and in paperback. If you’re a Western fan and you run across one, I recommend that you give it a try.

By the way, as I said last week in my comment about reading Shadow novels while I was in college, Coach Gilmore didn’t know it, and I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but I really was studying when I was reading all those paperbacks in study hall, especially the Jim Hatfield novels, which years later had a definite impact on my career . . .

But that’s another story.

Book Giveaway

Livia's giving away one copy each (autographed, of course) of her most recent Fresh Baked Mysteries, KILLER CRAB CAKES and THE PUMPKIN MUFFIN MURDER.  You can find out all the details on her blog here.