Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles, Vol. II - Edward A. Grainger (David Cranmer)

The first volume of the ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES was a fine collection of Western short stories, but Volume II is even better.  Cash Laramie, known as the Outlaw Marshal because of his willingness to bend the rules in order to achieve justice, dominates this collection, which leads off with "Origin of White Deer", the story of Cash's boyhood and how it shaped his later life.  There are six more stories in Volume II, some new and some previously published, and all of them good.  My favorites are the bizarre mystery "Cash Laramie and the Masked Devil" and the particularly bleak but very well-written "Reflections in a Glass of Maryland Rye".

Edward A. Grainger is, of course, David Cranmer, the mastermind of the BEAT TO A PULP website and anthologies, and he's making a well-deserved name for himself as one of the top new writers of Westerns.  If you enjoyed the first Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles collection, you'll definitely want this one, and if you haven't yet made the acquaintance of these two fine characters, Volume II is a great place to start.  Highly recommended.

O'Doul - Wayne D. Dundee

Wayne Dundee is quickly making a name for himself as a top-notch Western writer. His short story "This Old Star" won the Peacemaker Award for Best Short Story from the Western Fictioneers. His novel DISMAL RIVER has been acclaimed as one of the best Westerns of recent years. And his e-book novella THE GRAVE OF MARCUS PAULY has been very well-received as well.

His new e-book novella O'DOUL was published recently, and it's another winner. O'Doul is an old cowhand with a grim secret. He works on a ranch where the owner and his much-younger wife are haunted by a tragedy of their own. There's also a young puncher involved, but he's an honorable man and the complicated relationship between him and his boss's wife doesn't work out exactly like you might think. All of it leads inevitably to violence.

There's not a lot of action in this story. It's more of a low-key, intense, character-driven yarn, but Dundee's fine writing keeps things moving along just as briskly as if there were a gunfight every few minutes. I have a lot of admiration for a writer who's skillful enough to make human emotions as exciting and compelling as action scenes, and Wayne Dundee definitely fits that description. O'DOUL is an excellent novella, and I highly recommend it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fighting Western, October 1945

As you can tell from the "Speed" logo on the cover, this pulp was published by Trojan, the same company that published SPICY WESTERN and its later incarnation SPEED WESTERN. As such, it's not surprising to find Laurence Donovan as one of the contributing authors. He wrote a lot for the Spicy/Speed imprints. Other authors in this issue include William Heuman, whose work is always good, and a couple I'm not familiar with, Charles Handley and Max Neilson. I like the cover fairly well, although I'm not sure how politically correct it is. (Political correctness isn't something you'd expect from the pulps, especially those published by Trojan!)

New Glen Orbik Cover for Hard Case Crime

This book won't be out for a while, but Hard Case Crime has released the cover by the great Glen Orbik, and it's up to his usual fantastic standards. This would have been right at home on a Gold Medal novel and really makes me want to read the book . . . which, of course, was the goal. There's more info here. Check it out.

Forgotten Books: Sword of Tomorrow - Henry Kuttner

I enjoyed THE CREATURE FROM BEYOND INFINITY, that Henry Kuttner novel I read a few weeks ago, enough that I decided to read another one. "Sword of Tomorrow" originally appeared as a complete novel in the Fall 1945 issue of the pulp THRILLING WONDER STORIES. It never had a paperback reprint, but it's available as a free download in a number of places on the Internet.

Like a lot of pulp novels, "Sword of Tomorrow" is fairly short, more of a novella than a full-length novel, but that doesn't stop Kuttner from packing a lot into it. Not as much as in THE CREATURE FROM BEYOND INFINITY, mind you, but that one was really stuffed to the gills with plot. "Sword of Tomorrow" begins during World War II, with its protagonist, American fighter pilot Ethan Court, being held prisoner by the Japanese in a POW camp in China. Could Ethan Court be related to Stephen Court, the hero of the previous Kuttner novel I read?  Well, sure, why not, although there's nothing in "Sword of Tomorrow" to indicate that. I like to think it's true, anyway.

But I digress. Ethan's captors torture him, trying to get him to reveal vital military information, so to thwart their goals, he puts himself into suspended animation using a technique that a fellow prisoner learned in a Tibetan lamasery. (Obviously, they know how to do all kinds of stuff in those Tibetan lamaseries.)  Court is being held in an underground dungeon, so when an Allied bombing raid late in the war destroys the prison camp, he survives, although he's still in his trance, with all his bodily functions slowed down enough that he sleeps on and on and on, for a thousand years or more before he finally wakes up.

Shades of Buck Rogers!  Kuttner has worked a clever variation of Philip Francis Nowlan's ARMAGEDDON 2419 A.D., although Ethan Court wakes up to find himself in a world on the verge of war, rather than already in the middle of one like Anthony Rogers. With his 20^th Century knowledge of weapons, something that's lacking in this future world, Court is a valuable commodity and is soon caught up in a lot of dangerous political intrigue, as well as a romance with a beautiful redheaded queen.

As usual, Kuttner keeps things speeding along with numerous action scenes and an abundance of double- and triple-crosses. I'm usually pretty good at spotting twists, but there's one late in this yarn that took me by surprise, and it leads to a surprising and powerful ending. Kuttner does an especially good job of putting the reader inside Court's head and dealing with the shock and disorientation he feels when he wakes up to find himself a thousand years or more in the future.

"Sword of Tomorrow" offers another interesting aspect about midway through when Court finds himself trapped and has a series of hallucinations brought on by a machine that belongs to one of the plotters. This is a long scene, and the writing is much more vivid and colorful than that in the rest of the novel, which leads me to suspect it may have been written by Kuttner's wife C.L. Moore. I don't know that, of course, but it just reads like Moore's work to me, and they were famous for working on each other's stories.

No matter who wrote what, "Sword of Tomorrow" is a very entertaining yarn. If you enjoy pulp adventure SF like I do, you should check it out.

The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block

I remember very well the supermarket where Livia and I bought most of our groceries when we were first married. It was still called Buddies then, although it changed later to Winn-Dixie. And as grocery stores did back then, it had a good-sized paperback rack. That was where I bought a paperback original private eye novel called THE SINS OF THE FATHER. The author was Lawrence Block.

Now, I knew that name, of course, because I'd been seeing it on Gold Medal paperbacks for a number of years, mostly notably the Evan Tanner novels. Since I loved private eye novels and knew the author could be depended upon to produce good books, I didn't hesitate in picking up THE SINS OF THE FATHER. That was my introduction to unlicensed, alcoholic PI Matt Scudder.

Since then I've gone on to read quite a few (but not all) of the Scudder novels, most recently A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF, and a few of the short stories featuring the character. Now Block has collected all the Scudder novelettes and short stories into a new volume called THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, which he's published himself as an e-book and a trade paperback. They seem to be in the order in which he wrote them, which makes for a very interesting look at the evolution of the character. Some of the short stories are flashbacks to the time in Matt's life before his debut in THE SINS OF THE FATHER. And all of them, as you'd expect, are very well-written. My favorite, I think, is the title story, "The Night and the Music", which has no crime element at all, but instead finds Matt and his wife Elaine talking and listening to music in various places around their part of New York. That may not sound like much, but this story is so elegant and evocative that it reminds me very much of some of Irwin Shaw's stories. (Shaw being one of my favorite non-genre writers.)

Also in that vein is the final story in the book, the recently written and fittingly titled "One Last Night at Grogan's", again not a mystery or a crime story. I don't know if Block plans to write any more about Matt Scudder, and he may not know, either, but "One Last Night at Grogan's" has a beautifully elegiac feel to it, and if it does turn out to be the series' farewell, it's a good one.

If it seems like I've read quite a bit by Block this year, that's because I have. And I'm sure my Block Binge will continue, since I already have several of his early novels on my Kindle, ready to read, plus I want to catch up on those Scudders I've missed. (I've also read a lot by Robert Silverberg this year, but I can't think of a catchy phrase to describe that.) THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC holds a lot of nostalgic appeal for me, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, but there's a lot more to it than that. These are fine stories, written by one of the best in the business, and this volume gets a high recommendation from me.

The Paths of Righteousness Now Available in Trade Paperback

My science fiction collection THE PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS is now available as a trade paperback, and you can order it here, if you're so inclined. Also, I should have signed copies available soon. You can email me for details. (The address is in my profile, if you don't have it already.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Hooded Angels

Here's one that I'll bet most of you have never even heard of, let alone seen.  HOODED ANGELS is a low-budget, independent Western filmed about ten years ago in South Africa with an international cast, most of whom I'd never heard of.  It's about a group of women who are brutalized in an attack on their town by Union soldiers during the Civil War and how after the war they become outlaws and drift across the West robbing banks.  The son of one of the men they kill during a robbery goes after them, along with some of his friends.

This isn't the easiest movie to follow, and we never really find out as much about the characters as I would have liked.  But at least the filmmakers tried to make a decent Western, and I'll give them credit for that.  HOODED ANGELS has some problems, including sloppy editing (a revolver is cocked, then uncocked, then cocked again, things like that) and that murky script I alluded to when I said the story is hard to follow.  And some of the costumes are just, well, weird.

But there are plenty of action scenes that are fairly well-staged, and there's a long scene with plenty of gratuitous nudity.  Paul Johannson, who I really like, makes a fine hero and I wish he would have made more Westerns.  Amanda Donohoe is good as one of the outlaws, and Gary Busey shows up in a small part as a sheriff, although he doesn't have a lot to do.  I don't know that I'd say HOODED ANGELS is a good movie, but it's certainly not terrible and if you're a Western fan you might well enjoy it.  I did.

Comfort to the Enemy - Elmore Leonard

I really have mixed emotions about Elmore Leonard's work.  I like his Westerns a lot, and I enjoy his crime novels, too, but they frustrate me because the plots meander around so much.  I guess I'm just too much of a plot guy.  But several years ago I read and liked his novel THE HOT KID, about U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, which was set during the Thirties in Oklahoma.  So when I came across Leonard's collection COMFORT TO THE ENEMY, which also features Webster, I thought I'd give it a try, and I'm glad I did.

There are two short stories, "Showdown at Checotah" and "Louly and Pretty Boy", which fill in more of the background concerning Carl Webster, and then the title novella, "Comfort to the Enemy", which is more of a novel as far as I'm concerned.  (I don't agree with people who claim that anything less than 70,000 words is a novella, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the subject at hand.)  Whatever you call it, "Comfort to the Enemy" is a really fine story, one of my favorites by Leonard.  Set during World War II, it finds Carl Webster investigating the murder of a prisoner in a POW camp full of Germans.  The plot is actually pretty straightforward, although Leonard does manage to work in some gangsters and Nazi saboteurs.  The whole thing generates a considerable amount of suspense by the end.

There's another Carl Webster novel, UP IN HONEY'S ROOM, that I haven't read yet.  I have a hunch that I'll be reading it soon, as much as I enjoyed COMFORT TO THE ENEMY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, 2nd April Number, 1957

RANCH ROMANCES is the only pulp I remember seeing new on the stands, although by the mid-Sixties when I began to notice them, they had shrunk slightly from the standard pulp size and the page edges were trimmed. It didn't cease publication until the early Seventies, but by then it was all-reprint. I never bought an issue new. It had "romance" in the title, after all, and I wasn't interested in romance fiction.

It was only years later that I realized RANCH ROMANCES wasn't that different from all the other Western pulps. Most of the authors who wrote for it wrote for other Western pulps as well, although a typical issue of RANCH ROMANCES would include at least one female author who didn't show up in DIME WESTERN or WESTERN STORY (at least not under her own name). And all the stories had to have some sort of romantic interest in them, but that's nothing unusual. So did most of the stories in the traditional Western pulps. The biggest difference in RANCH ROMANCES was in the features that it ran, which leaned toward pen-pal requests, movie news (allegedly written by actor Bob Cummings, although I doubt if he penned a word of it), astrology columns, and relationship advice. The stories, though, were usually good, hardboiled action Westerns.

The lead story in this particular issue, which I own and read recently, is "Holdup at Stony Flats" by Clair Huffaker, and as I started reading it, it didn't take me long to realize that there was something very familiar about it. The protagonist is Jack Tawlin, a gunfighter recently released from prison, who gets involved with his brother and some other crooks in a scheme to hold up a heavily armored stagecoach carrying a fortune in gold. That's right, this novella is the story that Huffaker expanded into his novel THE WAR WAGON, which was subsequently turned into a pretty good movie starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas. ("Mine hit the ground first," Douglas boasts to Wayne after a gunfight. "Mine was taller," Wayne drawls.)

I've read THE WAR WAGON, but it was many years ago. My impression is that other than the lead character's name and the basic set-up, "Holdup at Stony Flats" is considerably different. It's very entertaining, though. There's a good reason so many of Huffaker's novels were made into movies, often with screenplays that he wrote himself. He knew how to tell a fast-moving story with interesting characters and plenty of action. That's certainly true in this one. (And if you haven't read Huffaker's best novel, THE COWBOY AND THE COSSACK, you really should.)

Backing up Huffaker's story is a novelette by Robert J. Hogan, author of the bizarre World War I aviation series G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, as well as a number of other aviation and Western yarns. "Track the Man Down" finds gunfighter Vermilion Smith (great name!) helping a young woman escape from a Paiute war party. Oh, and the woman happens to be the sister of a man Smith is sworn to kill. Although this story lacks the goofiness of the G-8 novels, it's told in the same clipped, fast-paced style and is very entertaining. They should have made this into an Audie Murphy movie. As I read it I kept thinking it would be a perfect vehicle for Audie, with its flawed, hardboiled hero and its effective and somewhat unexpected ending.

The short stories start off with one of those female authors I mentioned above, Dorothy Roseborough, who seems to have contributed stories only to RANCH ROMANCES during a career that lasted from 1947 to 1957. Her story "The Short Trail" is about a young woman and her alcoholic father who join a wagon train bound for California and the trouble they encounter along the way. There's nothing at all ground-breaking about it, but it's a well-written and enjoyable yarn. Next up is "The Legacy of Happy Valley" by Teddy Keller, an author I hadn't encountered until now. It's a rancher vs. farmers story, but with the nice twist that the rancher is the only cattleman in a valley full of sodbusters determined to run him out. I liked this one quite a bit. I don't know if the author, Teddy Keller, was male or female, but while most of his/her stories appeared in RANCH ROMANCES, Keller also published some mystery stories, had a few appearances in men's magazines, and even published a science-fiction story in ANALOG, leading me to wonder if Teddy Keller is the only author whose work appeared in both RANCH ROMANCES and ANALOG. That seems possible to me. The final short story in this issue is "To the Last Man", a feud story by Ben Frank, an author whose work I'm on record as disliking. This forgettable story didn't change my opinion.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of one of the longest-running Western pulps. I may not have been a fan of RANCH ROMANCES when I was a kid, but I am now.