More Books for the Nook

Several more of our books are now available on Barnes & Noble for the Nook, including all three of Livia's Lucas Hallam novels, WILD NIGHT, DEAD STICK, and DOG HEAVIES, my Western/World War I novel UNDER OUTLAW FLAGS, and DUST DEVILS.  If you have a Nook, check 'em out.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Gun the Man Down

Last week when James Arness passed away, I decided to watch something of his I’d never seen before. I wound up watching GUN THE MAN DOWN, from 1956, which must have been made about the same time Arness was starting work on GUNSMOKE. It’s a pretty good hardboiled Western.


The script by Burt Kennedy starts off with a fairly standard premise. Arness plays Rem Anderson, a young man who falls in with bad company, in this case a couple of bank robbers played by veteran movie heavies Robert J. Wilke and Don Megowan. When the job they pull goes wrong and Rem is wounded, his so-called partners abandon him to the law, taking with them not only the loot from the bank but also Rem’s girl, a soiled dove named Jan who is trying to leave that life behind (played by a very young Angie Dickinson).


Well, Rem gets sent to prison for a year, and when he gets out, you guessed it, he tracks down the men who double-crossed him so that he can get his revenge on them. This leads to a war of nerves in the town where the two bank robbers have settled and used the loot to become the owners of a successful saloon.


Actually, GUN THE MAN DOWN is maybe a little too leisurely as it tries to build suspense by having the characters sitting around and waiting for all hell to break loose . . . which it inevitably does, of course. But if the script is a tad weak, the movie has plenty of other virtues to make up for it, first and foremost among them a very solid cast. Arness, as always, is a powerful physical presence. During one brawl, he picks up a buggy (!) and hits a guy with it. Granted, there wasn’t a horse hitched to the buggy at the time, but still, that’s pretty impressive. Wilke does a great job portraying sleazy, sweaty desperation, and the town’s two lawmen are Emile Meyer, who was so good as the old cattle baron Riker in SHANE, and Harry Carey, Jr., a welcome presence in any Western movie.


The black-and-white photography is very good, too, and the movie’s low budget gives it a stark, stripped-down look that adds to the noirish atmosphere.


GUN THE MAN DOWN is also interesting because it was the first film directed by Andrew W. McLaglen, the son of legendary character actor Victor McLaglen, who went on to direct several of John Wayne’s later films. The Wayne connection is no accident. Wayne and Arness were good friends (we’ve all heard the story about how Wayne recommended Arness to the producers of GUNSMOKE after turning down the role of Matt Dillon himself, and you’ve probably seen the intro Wayne filmed for the first episode of that series), and GUN THE MAN DOWN was produced by Wayne’s company, Batjac Productions. The presence of Angie Dickinson playing a somewhat shady lady and Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez as a hotelkeeper, along with the general air of tension in the movie, makes GUN THE MAN DOWN seem a little like a dry run for RIO BRAVO, which came along several years later. Other than that the two movies aren’t alike, but I can’t help but think those roles might have helped Dickinson and Gonzalez get similar parts in the later film.


I don’t think GUN THE MAN DOWN ever quite lives up to its early promise, but it’s still a brisk (76 minutes), well-made, and very entertaining Western. James Arness gives a fine performance and is great fun to watch in it, as always. If you’re a Western fan and haven’t seen this one, you really should.

Booksigning Post on the Western Fictioneers Blog

If you're an author, L.J. Martin's post today on the Western Fictioneers blog about booksignings ought to be required reading. Larry is one of the absolute best at this part of the business. And if you're not an author, you ought to read it anyway, because it's not only informative, it's very entertaining as well. Check it out.

A Couple of Gunsmoke Items

This is actually my favorite GUNSMOKE opening, rather than the more famous showdown(s).  By this time in the series, the characters are not only old friends with each other, they're old friends of ours as well.  This opening just seems very heartwarming to me.


Also, Jim Meals has contributed an excellent piece about the GUNSMOKE radio series over on the Western Fictioneers blog.  I highly recommend that you check it out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, May 5, 1926

Here's a rather simple cover from the simply titled WEST, which had a long run from 1926 to 1953. For most of its existence, it was part of the Thrilling Group, published by Better Publications, but it started out as a Doubleday pulp, and during that part of its run the setting sun along the upper edge of the cover (or is it a rising sun?) was a standard feature, like the more famous "red sun" on the covers of SHORT STORIES, another Doubleday pulp. This issue had a good line-up of authors and stories, including a "Complete Novel of Banditry by Murray Leinster", who was much better known as a science-fiction author despite having written a little bit of everything in the pulps. Other authors in this issue are one of my favorites, W.C. Tuttle, the always dependable Frank Richardson Pierce, and prolific Western pulp author Stephen Payne. Plus a feature on the inside front cover called "Worked Over Brands" by none other than Charles M. Russell. Definitely a dime and a nickel well spent for readers in 1926.

James Arness, R.I.P.

One of my all-time favorites is gone.  When I wrote about his series THE MACAHANS and HOW THE WEST WAS WON a few weeks ago, it didn't even occur to me that he might not be around much longer. James Arness just always seemed indestructible to me.  Rest in peace.

Lust of the Lawless Review

Steve M. over at the indispensible Western Fiction Review has some nice words to say today about LUST OF THE LAWLESS, the Robert Leslie Bellem collection for which I provided the introduction.  This is a very entertaining book which brings together all of Bellem's Western fiction, so if you haven't read it yet, check out the review and then give some thought to picking up a copy from Black Dog Books.

Forgotten Books: Naked Lust - Shep Shepard

NAKED LUST was originally published by Bedside Books in 1959 and reprinted ten years later by Macfadden Books, which is the edition I read. It’s the story of Jane Smith, who is, for want of a better term, a middle-class prostitute. She’s not an expensive, high-class call girl, or a lowly, drug-addicted streetwalker, either. She travels from town to town with another prostitute and their pimp, a guy who has Syndicate connections. Not a great life, but Jane copes with it pretty well.


Then she’s arrested, for the first time since she became a hooker, and as part of her sentence, she’s sent to work in a mental hospital (which seems like sort of a stretch to me, but hey, we’ll let it go). While there, she’s befriended by one of the doctors and a couple of the nurses, and she decides she’s going to change her life and start over somewhere new. That turns out to be a small town in California, where she gets a job as a waitress and even meets a decent guy who falls in love with her, not knowing her sordid past, of course. This book practically screams “noir”, though, so you know things can’t stay that good for long, and sure enough, they don’t . . .

For years there’s been some debate over whether Harry Whittington actually wrote this book, because the copyright notice in the original edition is in his name. The notice in the Macfadden reprint, though, says “Copyright 1959 by Bedside Books Inc.” Having read a lot of Whittington books over the years, I decided to give this one a try and see if I could make an educated guess.


Having read it, I can say I’m 99.9% sure that NAKED LUST is NOT Harry Whittington’s work. The plot is certainly noirish enough, but nothing in the style reminds me of Whittington’s writing at all. If someone were to come up with something in Whittington’s records saying he wrote this novel, I’d accept it, but I’d sure be surprised, too. I think the copyright notice in the original edition was just a mistake on the part of the publisher.


That said, is NAKED LUST worth reading? Well, yeah. It’s not all that well-written for the most part, although there are some really nice lines here and there, but the author does a good job of creating an atmosphere of bleak inevitability that hangs over the novel. And the ending, in which everything doesn’t work out exactly like I expected it to (always a plus) is very powerful. I have no idea who Shep Shepard really was, but a year or two later this could have easily been a Nightstand Book and held its own with the entries by Block, Silverberg, Ramirez, etc. I imagine the original edition is pretty scarce, but if you ever come across a copy of it or the Macfadden reprint for a decent price, my advice is to grab it. This one’s well worth reading.

2010 Peacemaker Awards Announcement from the Western Fictioneers

The Western Fictioneers are proud to announce the winners and finalists in the first annual Peacemaker Awards.  You can read all about it here or here.  Big congrats to the winners and finalists, and if you're an author with a Western novel or short story published this year, submissions for the 2011 Peacemaker Awards will be open soon.  Details will be announced as soon as they're available. 

The Dead Man #4: The Dead Woman - David McAfee

The fourth book in the DEAD MAN series, THE DEAD WOMAN by David McAfee, officially goes on sale today.  Like all of Matt Cahill's other adventures so far, this entry in the series is fast-moving, funny in places, creepy in others, and full of action and intrigue.  Highly recommended.

THE DEAD WOMAN is BOOK #4 in THE DEAD MAN saga, the action/horror series that readers and book critics alike are hailing as "an epic tale" that compares to the best of Stephen King and Dean Koontz...

Matt Cahill thought he was alone with his torment, that he was the only one who could see the evil in people’s souls as rotting flesh. But in a small town in Tennessee, terrorized by a vicious serial killer, Matt meets a woman who may see what he does…and together they must confront a horrific and immortal terror that thrives on death.

BONUS FEATURES

* An excerpt from 33 AD, David McAfee's stunning horror novel.
* An excerpt from DEAD MAN #5: THE BLOOD MESA by James Reasoner


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David McAfee was born in Lakenheath USAFB, England, and spent his youth traipsing about the globe with his military family, soaking up the cultures of faraway places like the Philippines, Turkey, Spain, and even California. When David was in his tweens, his father retired to Texas, which he still considers home. His work has been featured in horror magazines like Necrotic Tissue. His debut horror novel, 33 A.D., spent several weeks as the #1 bestselling horror title in Kindle UK. David currently lives in Tennessee with his wife, daughter, son, and a small army of loyal but dysfunctional pets.

Lee Goldberg is the bestselling author of the thriller THE WALK and the MONK series of novels. William Rabkin writes the wildly successful PSYCH books and is the author of "Writing the Pilot." And together, they are the authors of DEAD MAN #1: FACE OF EVIL and have written and/or produced such hit TV series as "Diagnosis Murder," "SeaQuest," "Nero Wolfe," "Martial Law,' "Monk" and "The Glades."