A Million Words and Counting

I've been so busy lately that a little milestone slipped past me last week without me noticing.  On Thursday I passed a million words of fiction written this year, hitting that level for the seventh year in a row.  I have no idea how long this streak will continue, but I intend to keep it up as long as I can.  Thanks as always to Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, whose help is immeasurable, to the editors who have faith and give me the opportunity, and mostly to the readers who keep buying the books.  Without all of you, I'm just a guy sitting in a room typing.

Priest - Min-Woo Hyung

I haven't seen the movie PRIEST yet, but it's on our Netflix queue. I came across a three-volume collection of the graphic novels on which the movie is based, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I hadn't read the back cover copy:

An evil, ancient and hungry, is roaming the badlands of the Old West. It spares not man, woman, or child, devouring all that stand before it. Only one man can stop it . . . a mysterious Priest with a cross carved into his head. His name is Ivan Isaacs, and he will smite all evil in a hail of hot lead. Hallelujah.

Oh, it's a Western. Why didn't you say so?  Of course I'll read that!

Well, the verdict is mixed. There's a lot to like:  A train full of monsters (and yes, there are action scenes set on top of a moving train, one of my favorite bits, as anyone who's read very many of my books already knows). A settlement full of zombies. An outlaw gang led by a beautiful young woman with a tragic back-story. An enigmatic, gunslinging hero. Those are the ingredients for something really good, as far as I'm concerned.

However, the execution doesn't really match the ideas. The artwork by creator Min-Woo Hyung isn't to my taste, and the storytelling leaves a lot to be desired, causing me to have to study some of the pages just to figure out what's going on. And on some of them, I never did figure it out. There are also too many anachronistic weapons (I know, that's a quibble, but some of the guns look more like they belong in a World War II story, at the very least). There's a reference to the setting as being Tennessee (!) when it's a flat, dusty desert that's obviously meant to be in the American Southwest.

Despite all that, the story did hold my interest overall, and some of the art is quite striking. The biggest influence as far as the Western elements are concerned seems to be Sergio Leone, which is always a good thing. I can't give PRIEST an unqualified recommendation, but if you're a fan of horror Westerns, you might want to give it a look and see if it appeals to you.

As for the movie, I'll probably still watch it eventually, but from what I've read about it on-line, the filmmakers jettisoned the Old West stuff and made it a post-apocalyptic story instead, so there's not much resemblance to the graphic novels. I would have liked to see them stick to the original storyline, but hey, they didn't ask me, did they?

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Adventures, November 1930

In the Forties, Street & Smith also published a pulp called WESTERN ADVENTURES that was a companion magazine to WESTERN STORY and WILD WEST WEEKLY. This issue is from an earlier incarnation published by Clayton, and look at the line-up of authors:  H. Bedford-Jones and Erle Stanley Gardner (two of the writers known at one time or another as the King of the Pulps; if they'd just had Frederick Faust in there, too, it would have been a hat trick), plus Johnston McCulley, Stephen Payne, and James W. Routh. That's a high-powered bunch of pulpsters. The cover's not great, but it's colorful, and with those authors I would have picked up this one without hesitation if I had the two dimes to spare.

Forgotten Books: Trailin'! - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

TRAILIN'! is one of those odd hybrids, a Western contemporary with the times in which it was written.  In fact, it opens in New York City, at a Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden, and has the hero, young Anthony Woodbury, leaping into his car after the show for a fast drive out to his father's estate on Long Island.

But from there, things change in a hurry.  While at the Wild West Show, Anthony has accepted the challenge offered up by a Westerner and ridden a wild bucking bronco.  You see, despite his Eastern upbringing, Anthony has always been interested in riding and shooting and such Western pursuits.  When he gets home, it's not long until his father is accosted by a mysterious stranger and killed in a Western-style gunfight.  Anthony sets off after the stranger, which is where the title of the novel comes in, and of course the trail leads west to the "mountain-desert" in which nearly all of Max Brand's Westerns are set.

TRAILIN'! uses the old "tough tenderfoot" plot to great effect, as Anthony uncovers secrets about his father, the mysterious killer, and his own heritage.  Any modern reader is going to see the book's big revelation coming very early on, but at this late date you shouldn't expect to read Max Brand and be surprised.

No, you should read the work of Frederick Faust, the real name of Max Brand, for the distinctive prose that makes him almost a genre unto himself, for the breakneck action scenes, and for the sheer emotional torment he puts his characters through.  Faust can really pile on the angst, but he breaks it up well with gunfights, fistfights, and desperate chases, usually on horseback.

TRAILIN'! is a little long for its plot, but to Faust's credit, he kept me reading anyway.  His best work was in the novella length, I think, but I've enjoyed all of his full-length novels that I've read.  Originally published in the pulp ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1919, this is only Faust's second novel, following his debut THE UNTAMED.  If you're a Max Brand fan, it's well worth reading, and if you've never sampled Faust's work, it wouldn't be a bad place to start.  It's as old-fashioned as it can be, but sometimes that's exactly what I want, so I enjoyed it a great deal.

Favorite Bookstores #3: Readers World

When I was attending what was then North Texas State University in Denton, near the end of my stay there, a little hole-in-the-wall new bookstore called Readers World appeared in the row of businesses directly across the street from the Auditorium Building, just a few doors down from Voertman's, the big college/textbook store.  (I know some of you are familiar with the area, that's why I include those details.)  Given its proximity to Voertman's, it probably wasn't the best location for a small bookstore, but I liked it because it carried quite a few genre paperbacks that Voertman's didn't.  I remember buying the Zebra editions of some Robert E. Howard books there, along with some of the novels based on Lee Falk's comic strip The Phantom.  But my time in Denton didn't overlap that much with the time Reader's World was there, so I didn't visit it that often.

Fast-forward a year or so, and I'm driving through River Oaks, Texas (a suburb on the northwest side of Fort Worth) one day when I spot a sign that says Readers World.  It was another hole-in-the-wall store in a small strip shopping center, and when I went in (what, did you think I wasn't going to stop and go in?), the same lady was running it who used to have the Readers World store in Denton.  This new location of Readers World was much the same, heavy on genre paperbacks with a magazine section as well that carried all the fiction digests of the time.  That was the first place I ever bought a new copy of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE.  I also bought quite a bit of science fiction (I recall picking up Joe Haldeman's THE FOREVER WAR and the first printing of the novelization of some movie I hadn't heard of called STAR WARS), some Starsky and Hutch tie-in novels by Max Franklin (who I found out later was Richard Deming), a bunch of comic books off the spinner rack, and the first volume of the Byron Preiss-packaged WEIRD HEROES, the subtitle of which – A NEW AMERICAN PULP! – sent thrills through me.  (Thrills which, I'm sorry to say, the Weird Heroes series never quite lived up to, although there was much to like in it.)

The store was successful enough that it moved around the corner in the same shopping center to a space that was three or four times larger.  The newsstand area was expanded, and so were the number of paperbacks they carried.  I bought the trade paperback edition of Glenn Lord's THE LAST CELT there and read it over and over again, and one day I picked up a mystery paperback called THE VAMPIRE CHASE, by an author I'd never heard of, Stephen Brett, published by an outfit equally unknown to me, Manor Books.  Well, Stephen Brett was really my buddy Steve Mertz, of course, although I didn't know him then, and Manor wound up publishing my first novel TEXAS WIND (and stiffing me on the advance for it).  But all of that was in the future, along with my friendship with Glenn Lord.

I became friends with the couple who owned the store, Gene and Linda Sanders (and I really hope I'm remembering their names correctly – this was a long time ago).  When I started selling to MSMM, they would order extra copies of the magazine for me, since Renown Publications never sent comp copies to the authors, of course.  I shopped there regularly for several years, making at least one trip a week into town to pick up new comics and paperbacks.

Eventually that location closed down.  Probably the lease was up, and it didn't generate enough sales to make it worthwhile to continue (but I'm just guessing about that).  The owners opened an even larger store in Hurst, around on the other side of Fort Worth from us, called G. Sanders Books.  It was there for several years and Livia and I went there a few times, but it was too far, through too much bad traffic, for us to make it a regular stop.  The shopping center in River Oaks that housed the two locations of Readers World is still there.  I drive past it occasionally, and whenever I do, I can't help but think about all the pleasant time I spent there and all the good books I bought.  I wouldn't want to live in those days again, but it's nice visiting them in my mind.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Madron

This is one of those films I saw once on late night TV nearly forty years ago, so I have no idea how it holds up. But I remember that I liked it quite a bit at the time. Of course, I like nearly everything with Richard Boone in it, and it's an offbeat Western, something else that appeals to me. Leslie Caron is the nun who survives an Indian attack on a wagon train, and Boone is the grizzled old gunfighter who rescues her and tries to get her safely back to civilization. It's kind of a romance and kind of a Spaghetti Western (although it was filmed in Israel, if I recall correctly). The photography is nice, the ending is poignant, and the decidedly non-Western-sounding theme song (which was nominated for an Academy Award) was a staple on easy listening radio stations for a number of years. If any of you have seen this in recent years, I'd love to know what you think of it.

Kirby: King of Comics - Mark Evanier

Chances are I first saw Jack Kirby's artwork in some of the monster/science fiction comic books Marvel published in the late Fifties and early Sixties, but back then I wouldn't have been aware of who the artists were, even one whose style was so distinctive.  I really became aware of his work when I started reading FANTASTIC FOUR and the other Marvel superhero books in December of 1963 and January of 1964.  He quickly became my favorite artist, although I was awfully fond of Steve Ditko's Spider-Man work, of course.  And I was really bummed out when Kirby left Marvel six or seven years later.  It just didn't seem like the same company without him, although the Seventies saw some excellent work come out from Marvel.

Then there were the Fourth World books Kirby produced at DC, which I've written about before on this blog, most notably JIMMY OLSEN, surely one of the oddest but most entertaining runs in comics history.

KIRBY: KING OF COMICS is a big biography/retrospective/coffee table book about Kirby and his work by longtime associate Mark Evanier.  As you might expect, part of this book's appeal is the large amount of vintage Kirby art reproduced in its pages, but Evanier's well-written prose conveys a lot of information in an informal, very readable style.  It's clear that Evanier is a guy who really loves comics, especially comics produced by Jack Kirby.  He doesn't shy away from talking about Kirby's flaws, though, and he takes a very even-handed approach to the long-standing controversy involving Kirby and Stan Lee and how much each contributed to the creation of their iconic characters.

(For what it's worth, my feeling on that controversy is that Stan got too much credit at first, then when the pendulum swung the other way, for a long time he didn't get enough credit.  Rereading those classic stories now, I'd divide it pretty much right down the middle.  Yes, Kirby's art and the concepts he came up with are great, but I don't think the books would have been nearly as successful without Lee's dialogue that brought the characters to life and his work in the captions that tried to compensate for and explain away the plot holes and logical inconsistencies that Kirby built into the stories.)

To get back to the issue at hand, Evanier has produced a book with a lot of nostalgic value for readers like me and a great introduction for people who might not be as familiar with Kirby's work.  Kirby probably is my all-time favorite comic book artist, and if you're a fan as well, you really need to read KIRBY: KING OF COMICS.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: North-West Romances, Summer 1942

I've always considered Northerns to be a sub-genre of Westerns, and hey, this pulp even has "West" in the title, so I think it counts. While I don't read nearly as many Northerns as I do traditional Westerns, sometimes I'm really in the mood for some yarns about Mounties and cheechakos and mushing over the pass. This particular issue has a Norman Saunders cover, too, so you can't go wrong there. Unfortunately, I don't own a copy, so I can't read it, but I can enjoy the cover and you can, too. Jack Byrne, who wrote the lead novel, was best known as an editor (he bought a lot of Robert E. Howard's boxing stories while he was at Fiction House, and he was the editor of ARGOSY during one of its best runs during the mid-to-late Thirties), but he also wrote quite a bit of pulp fiction in a variety of genres. I haven't read much by him, but I've enjoyed what I've sampled so far. Fred Nebel, also mentioned on the cover, was Frederick Nebel the hardboiled detective writer, author of the Cardigan stories and the Donahue stories, all of which are great stuff. I've read a couple of Nebel's Northerns, and they're very good, too. The other authors in this particular issue -- James Kirkland, Evan Slyter, Dan O'Rourke, A. deHerries Smith, Derek West, and Owen Finbar -- are all unknown to me. Some of them may be house-names for all I know. Still, with stories by Nebel and Byrne, I expect this issue was worth reading.

Forgotten Books: The Further Adventures of Zorro - Johnston McCulley

I remember being a big fan of the Walt Disney TV version of ZORRO when I was a kid, and I love the Republic serials ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION (with its insanely addictive theme song) and ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP (with the breathtakingly beautiful Linda Stirling). But oddly enough I've never read many of Johnston McCulley's original stories featuring the character. A few short stories here and there, but none of the novels . . . until now.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ZORRO was serialized in the pulp ARGOSY – ALL STORY WEEKLY in May and June of 1922 (with the title character's name misspelled on the cover of the issue containing the first installment). It's the second book in the series, a direct sequel to THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO, which introduced Zorro to the world. There's no secret identity in this one. Zorro has already been revealed to the citizens of the Spanish settlement of Reina de Los Angeles as the young nobleman Don Diego Vega. In fact, as the novel begins, Zorro is retired, and Don Diego is about to marry the lovely young Señorita Lolita Pulido, much to the chagrin of his best friend Don Audre Ruiz and the other young firebrands who fought at his side in the first novel. They crave more excitement, but as Don Diego says at a dinner with his friends, "I am done with roistering and adventure."

Uh-huh. Sure you are, Diego.

It will come as no surprise to any of you that a couple of Zorro's old enemies from the first book are plotting with some pirates to raid Los Angeles and kidnap Lolita. They succeed in this but fail to kill Zorro, which of course is a big mistake. He sets out to rescue Lolita and bring the pirates to justice, with Audre and the rest of his cabellero friends following closely behind him.

That's it for the plot. What follows is a lengthy series of battles, death traps, near miraculous escapes, sea chases, a lot of galloping around on horseback, and swordfight after swordfight. It's all very reminiscent of one of those Republic movie serials.

In other words, I loved it.

It's a testament to McCulley's skill as an adventure writer that he could take a thin plot like this, spin it out to novel length, and still make it compelling and entertaining. The characters are pretty good, including the pirate captain Barbados who is plenty evil but still retains a certain code of honor, the gallant priest Fray Felipe, and the Falstaffian Sergeant Gonzales, who manages to be a good guy even though he's under the command of the villainous Captain Ramon. Lolita is an appealing heroine, too, who contributes quite a bit to the action despite her primary role as kidnap victim. Zorro himself is an iconic hero, of course, always laughing in the face of danger and swashbuckling for all he's worth. There's some genuine humor in the way he continually taunts and frustrates his enemies.

McCulley evidently intended for THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO to be a stand-alone novel, but the success of the Douglas Fairbanks silent movie based on it, THE MARK OF ZORRO, prompted him to bring back the character. A lot of the action in this second novel seems to be written with Fairbanks in mind. I can just about see the scenes playing out in my head in glorious black-and-white.

I don't know if THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ZORRO was ever reprinted as a book (surely it was), but a new, inexpensive reprint taken directly from the pulp installments will soon be available from Beb Books. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It might come across as hokey and old-fashioned to modern readers, but my inner twelve-year-old highly recommends it to those of you who have an inner twelve-year-old of your own. (You know who you are.)

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: The Edge of Night

I make no secret of the fact that I like soap operas. When Livia and I were dating and then newly married, she got me started watching one called RYAN'S HOPE. Several of the actors who appeared on it went on to bigger (but not necessarily better) things. I also watched GENERAL HOSPITAL for a good while, during its action/adventure phase which saw plotlines like a weather-controlling machine that would allow the resident bad guys to take over the world and a villain who was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great (or at least thought he was). This was also the period that spawned the whole Luke and Laura frenzy that culminated in their wedding. Along the way, although I never watched it on a regular basis, I saw enough bits and pieces of the recently departed ALL MY CHILDREN to know who most of the characters were.

My all-time favorite daytime soap opera, though, is one that might have held some appeal for some of you reading this: THE EDGE OF NIGHT. Other soaps were primarily doctor shows or lawyer shows. THE EDGE OF NIGHT, from beginning to end, was the mystery soap opera, the show where cops and district attorneys and crooks and murderers were the main characters, not supporting roles. That emphasis goes all the way back to its origins, when Proctor & Gamble tried to create a soap opera based on Erle Stanley Gardner's iconic Perry Mason, only to be unable to reach a deal. So they just created their own version, centered around attorney Mike Karr instead of Mason.

I don't know all the history of the series, but by the time I was watching it, mystery novelist and Edgar winner Henry Slesar had been hired at the head writer, and he continued in that job for many, many years, often writing almost every episode with assistance from only one or two staff writers. The plots tended to move a little faster than on most soaps, and there was nearly always an unsolved murder or two driving the action. And action there was, with a minimum of sitting around talking. The characters were almost always in motion. The cast expanded to bring in more doctor characters, but hospital scenes were more than balanced out by smoky, jazzy moments in the local watering hole, the Blue Moon Café, run by the somewhat shady Johnny Dallas. And if you were lucky, at the end of an episode you got the full-length version of the show's theme song, which had a definite noirish, wet-streets feel to it.

I watched THE EDGE OF NIGHT for about ten years and never failed to enjoy it. I didn't figure out many of Slesar's well-plotted mysteries, either. Then, fairly abruptly, the show reinvented itself. Slesar either quit or was let go, and was replaced as head writer by Lee Sheldon, who kept some of the cops vs. mobsters plots but opened up the scope and turned it into a globe-trotting series of international intrigue. The plots got more over-the-top, including an epic swordfight between the private eye who had become the hero of the series, Sky Whitney, and the bad guy who was going to, yes, take over the world with the help of some Rube Goldberg machine. It was all pretty silly, even by soap opera standards, but somehow it worked and I really enjoyed it.

Then, even though ABC was still broadcasting the show (it had started out on CBS), the local ABC affiliate stopped carrying it in order to schedule something else, I don't remember what it was. That bothered me, but the proverbial writing was already on the wall and ABC cancelled THE EDGE OF NIGHT entirely a few months later. It ended, appropriately enough, with the mysterious disappearance of several of the characters.

This was all a long time ago. You can still find a few clips from THE EDGE OF NIGHT on YouTube, but soaps don't translate well to DVDs so I doubt if we'll ever see more than that. You can tell from my comments and how much I recall about it that I was very fond of the series, and I hope a few of you remember it as well. I've been known to say somewhat facetiously that everything I know about plotting, I learned from soap operas and comic books. For good or bad, there's probably some truth to that.