Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Band of Brothers

Years ago before I started writing my World War II series, The Last Good War, for Forge, I read quite a few research books about that war, mostly non-fiction but a few novels, too, just to get me in the right frame of mind. One of the non-fiction books I read was BAND OF BROTHERS by Stephen E. Ambrose, about Easy Company of the famous 101^st Airborne. I was aware that HBO had made a mini-series of this book and wanted to watch it.  I almost bought the DVD set a few times but didn't for one reason or another. And then time, as it has a habit of doing, passed. Other things cropped up in my life. And watching BAND OF BROTHERS was sort of forgotten. Overlooked, if you will.

Then I came across the DVDs at Half Price Books on a day when I had a coupon for 40% off one item . . . Since I'd been meaning to watch this series for so long, I figured it was time.

Now I have, and as most of you probably already know, man, it's good. I remembered the book fairly well and also have a pretty good general knowledge of the war, so I sort of knew what was going to happen, but I certainly didn't recall all the details. The casting is great, and although Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston sort of dominate as Dick Winters and Lew Nixon, it really is an ensemble piece most of the time. The photography and special effects are top-notch, although some episodes had a little too much of that shaky, hand-held camera for my taste.

My other quibbles are that with dirt on their faces and wearing helmets, too many of the characters look too much alike much of the time, and it took me almost to the end of the series to figure out who was who in some cases. I guess there's not much that could have been done about that, though. Also, since the characters were real and the storyline follows the actual events pretty closely, there's a curious lack of drama in some of the episodes. Along toward the middle, especially, they all run together in one long battle scene.

However, the later episodes, beginning with the Battle of the Bulge and the 101^st being trapped at Bastogne, are very powerful, with the Bastogne episode being especially harrowing. And by the end, I did know the characters well enough to really care about them and was glad that we got to find out what happened to them after the war as well.

Another thing I really liked was the way most episodes were introduced by short interviews with actual vets from Easy Company, and seeing them again at the end of the series is very effective.

Some fans say that if you regard this 10-hour mini-series as a movie, it's the best war movie ever made. I don't know if I'd go that far – there have been some really, really good war movies over the decades – but it is excellent and one of the best things I've seen recently, no doubt about that. It's definitely good enough to make me want to see THE PACIFIC, the follow-up series. I'll probably wait a while, though. Just not ten years.

New This Week

All e-books this week.



The Gramlich story is the only one I've read so far. My review of it is posted a few days back. I hope to get to the others soon.

The Thing: Idol of Millions - Dan Slott

The Thing has always been my favorite comic book character. I don't know why, but from the moment I first encountered the big rocky galoot in FANTASTIC FOUR #16 on Christmas Day 1963, I liked him. THE THING: IDOL OF MILLIONS is a trade paperback collection of a mini-series that was published several years ago, while I wasn't reading comics. Since I started reading them again I haven't tried to go back and fill in all the gaps from that time, preferring just to move forward, but hey, for Ben Grimm, sure.

Because of that, I don't know exactly what's going on here – Ben's a billionaire, for one thing, and lives in a penthouse, and he's dating some sultry actress, not Alicia Masters, who's evidently with some architect guy – but I didn't let that bother me. The collection opens with a multi-issue storyline where Ben and some of his rich friends, including Tony Stark, are marooned on an island full of death traps set up by the murderous super-villain Arcade (from the late, much-lamented MASTER OF KUNG FU, one of the best comics of the Seventies). After that there are several stand-alone stories concentrating on Ben's past when he was growing up on Yancy Street in a bad part of New York City, culminating in a story centered around a particular rite of passage in Ben's life and a superhero poker tournament that features nearly everybody who was active in the Marvel Universe at that time.

The scripts are by Dan Slott, who's currently doing a good job writing THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. They're pretty lightweight for the most part but a lot of fun. I grew up reading comics at a time when they weren't all bleak, earth-shattering epics, and it's nice to read some throwback stories like this. The art is by Andrea Divito and Kieron Dwyer, and for once I don't have any complaints about it. If you're a Fantastic Four fan, this collection is well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, December 1933

Pulp art dealer and STAR WESTERN collector Steve Kennedy sent me some fine cover scans from issues he owns, so I'll be featuring them in this series from time to time. This one is from the third issue of the magazine, December 1933. T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite Western authors, had a story featured on the cover of the very first issue of STAR WESTERN, and he's back this issue with the fine novella "Satan's Deputy", which was reprinted in one of the Leisure Books paperback collections of his work (sorry I don't recall which one -- but they're all good). I'm not familiar with Wallace K. Norman, who also made this cover, but Ray Nafziger, Art Lawson, and George C. Henderson were all solidly entertaining pulp authors. The guy on the cover reminds me of William S. Hart. It strikes me as unusual to see a wounded, possibly even dead horse on a Western pulp cover. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that didn't show up very often.

Forgotten Books: Bowman's Kid - Gordon D. Shirreffs

Manhunter-for-hire Lee Kershaw takes on the job of finding cattle baron Duke Bowman's long-lost son in this novel first published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1973. Bowman is dying and wants Kershaw to find his son so that the boy can inherit the ranch, rather than letting his enemies take it over after he's dead. Those enemies, of course, want to stop Kershaw and kill the boy, if possible.

A fairly simple set-up, but in his quest to find the boy (young man, actually), Kershaw uncovers a lot of dark secrets from the past. A friend of mine who read this novel compared it to the work of Ross Macdonald, and it's an apt comparison. I've said before that I consider Walt Coburn the closest Western equivalent to Macdonald, what with Coburn's obsession with the way sins and secrets of the past inevitably surface to wreak havoc with the present. But Shirreffs also does an excellent job of exploring that theme in this novel, and he's a better stylist than Coburn, to boot. Shirreffs' action scenes are some of the best in the Western field. Also, much of this book takes place at night, something that's a little unusual in a Western. All in all, a very solid job by Shirreffs and a book well worth reading.


UPDATE: There's an interview with Shirreffs from a 1986 issue of LIBRARY JOURNAL here. I don't have access to the full article, but some of you might through your local library or academic institution. Thanks to Charles T. Whipple for the link.

Free Rancho Diablo!

Today only, you can get Bill Crider's Rancho Diablo novel DEAD MAN'S REVENGE absolutely free on Amazon. Grab this one while you can!

Harvest of War -- Charles Allen Gramlich

HARVEST OF WAR is a new e-book novelette by Charles Allen Gramlich, a tale of heroic fantasy with an unusual protagonist, an orc who is captured by humans after a bloody battle. But there are worse things in this world than orcs, as the humans learn to their regret.

This is a well-written, very fast-moving tale, and Gramlich does a great job not only with the action (and there's plenty of it), but also in making the reader care about Khales, the orc who winds up going against all his instincts. The prose manages to be both brutal and poetic, often at the same time, and there's even some unexpected humor.

I read this in one sitting, something that's very rare for me, even with shorter pieces. And right now you can download it for free on Amazon. Highly recommended.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: One Tree Hill

I've made a few passing references on the blog to my fondness for the TV series ONE TREE HILL, but since it's ending its nine-season run tomorrow night, this seemed like an appropriate time to write a full post about it. And I think it qualifies as overlooked, too, since it's been on the verge of cancellation probably more times than any other series that's managed to hang around for nine years. It's a prime example of a series that prompts people to say, "Is that show still on?"

Mock me if you will, but I love this show.

It started out as a fairly standard, angst-heavy, teen-centric nighttime soap opera about a small town in either South or North Carolina, I never can remember which. The main characters were Lucas and Nathan Scott, half-brothers who hated each other even though they played on the same high school basketball team. Their father, car dealership owner Dan Scott, married Nathan's mother and raised the boy in wealth and comfort, although Dan made Nathan's life a living hell by pressuring him to be a great basketball player. Meanwhile, Lucas was raised by his struggling single mother Karen and ignored by his father. Throw in a bunch of classmates, high school romances and rivalries, and some soap opera among the adult characters, too, and that's the basic set-up.

But then . . . but then things start to get weird. Not in a paranormal sense, but in the plotting. Yeah, 95% of the time it's still a soap opera, but that other 5% includes some jaw-dropping plot twists that I never expected, even though they were set up fairly. It's really pretty difficult for Livia and I to be surprised by anything on TV, but probably a dozen times each season while watching ONE TREE HILL, we'd look at each other and one of us would say, "Huh. Didn't see that coming." I'm talking about some truly bizarre stuff, too, but somehow it worked in the context of the show. There's also a lot of unexpected humor, with a number of throwaway running jokes that lasted a season or more.

The whole thing was helped by a great performance from Paul Johansson as Dan Scott, who was one of the most evil, hated villains I've ever come across in a TV show. At one point he even murders a close relative in cold blood. The rest of the cast was good, too, but Johansson was a dominant force.

Then after four seasons it looked like the series would be cancelled, so creator Mark Schwan wrote a very effective series finale which took the teenage characters to the end of high school. If it had ended there, ONE TREE HILL would have been a fine series.

But it got a reprieve and came back the next year, and Schwan took the gamble of jumping the storyline ahead four years, to the point where the central characters were out of college and starting their lives as young adults. (To be fair, all but one of them were playing quite a bit younger than their real age, anyway, which is pretty common on TV shows featuring teens.) The plots featured even weirder twists (one classic involving a dog and a heart transplant) and started down the intriguing path of trying to achieve a measure of redemption for convicted murder and uber-villain Dan Scott. It was an interesting two seasons . . . and then it looked again like the series would be cancelled, so Schwan wrote an excellent series finale with a number of the characters getting some closure on their storylines and others leaving.

Then wouldn't you know it, the show came back again. The characters who had left were still gone, but new characters came in to replace them. It was still an entertaining series, but less weird, and as the characters became more successful, the blue-collar appeal of the early years (when car salesman Dan Scott was the richest, most powerful character) became diluted. It didn't help that Johansson as Dan was written out of the show for long stretches. At the end of the eighth season, renewal looked highly unlikely, so Schwan wrote yet another effective series finale.

And then the network asked everybody to come back for one more, shortened final season that really and truly would bring ONE TREE HILL to an end.

For the most part, it's been a great comeback, too, very dark, twisty, and filled with action. Paul Johansson as Dan Scott was back full-time and thoroughly dominated the plot as he continued his journey to redemption from his evil past. As one fan put it, he went from the most hated character on the series to the most loved, and speaking as a writer, orchestrating something like that has got to be really hard to do. So now there's one episode left, and I fully expect Mark Schwan to come up with a great finale, just as he's already done three times during the life of this series.

Okay, by now I expect you all think I'm crazy. I never would have figured that I'd love this series as much as I do. But sometimes things come at you out of nowhere and resonate more than they seem to have any right to. DVD sets of the first eight seasons are cheap and easy to come by. I see them at Half Price Books for five bucks, sometimes less. If you're ever in the mood for something different, give the first season a try. Stick with it a while to let the plot twists start cropping up. Maybe you'll hate it. Probably you'll hate it.

But just maybe you'll be like me and find yourself really enjoying a series you never thought you would.

Peacemaker Award Nominations Announced

Western Fictioneers (WF) is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Peacemaker Award. Winners will be announced on the Western Fictioneers (WF) web site (http://www.westernfictioneers.com/) on June 1, 2012. Entries were accepted in both print and electronic forms with a 2011 copyright date.  The Peacemaker Awards are given out annually.  Submissions for the 2012 awards will be open in July, 2012. Submission guidelines will be posted on the WF web site. The following list of nominees is in no particular order. Best Western Short Story: ***There were  two ties in this category, which is why there are seven nominees instead of the required five. “Planting Season” by Johnny D Boggs (Cactus Country Anthology, Volume I – High Hill Press) “The Way of the West” by Larry J. Martin (The Traditional West anthology, WF) “Blackwell’s Run” (Western Trail Blazer) by Troy D. Smith “The Sin of Eli” by Troy D. Smith (The Traditional West anthology, WF) “Panhandle Freight” by LJ Washburn (The Traditional West anthology, WF)     “The Death of Delgado” by Rod Miller (The Traditional West anthology, WF) “Stay of Execution” by Lucia St. Clair Robson (Cactus Country Anthology, Volume I – High Hill Press) Best Western Novel: The Sonora Noose by Jackson Lowry (Berkley) Redemption, Kansas by James Reasoner (Berkley) Blood Trails by Lyle Brandt (Berkley) The Assassination of Governor Boggs by Rod Miller (Bonneville Books) Between Hell and Texas by Dusty Richards (Kensington Pinnacle imprint) Best Western First Novel: Unbridled by Tammy Hinton (Roots and Branches Publishing) The Black Hills by Rod Thompson (Berkley) Dismal River by Wayne Dundee (Oak Tree Press) Bullets And Bad Bad Men by B.A. Kelly (Oak Tree Press) The Guerrilla Man by Steven Clark (Solstice Publishing) Western Fictioneers (WF) was formed in 2010 by Western writers Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional Western writers with the mission of preserving, honoring, and promoting the Traditional Western in the 21st Century. Western Fictioneers (WF) is the only professional writers organization composed entirely of authors who have written Western fiction, the classic American genre. A writer or publisher does not have to be a member to be nominated, or win, the Peacemaker Award. Contact: Larry D. Sweazy, WF Awards Chair, larrysweazy@prodigy.net

New This Week

Another pretty active week here. I seem to be buying more books since I started taking part in this series. Not a good development.

Erle Stanley Gardner – nine double volumes of Perry Mason novels published in a uniform series by Walter J. Black, the Detective Book Club publisher. The novels range from 1948 to 1971, and one volume, THE CASE OF THE CRIMSON KISS, includes a Perry Mason novella and four of Gardner's non-series pulp novelettes from the Twenties and Thirties. The titles of the novels, in case you're wondering are (insert THE CASE OF THE in front of all of these, of course): DUPLICATE DAUGHTER, SUN BATHER'S DIARY, SHAPELY SHADOW, FIERY FINGERS, LONG-LEGGED MODELS, FOOT-LOOSE DOLL, MISCHIEVOUS DOLL, NERVOUS ACCOMPLICE, FABULOUS FAKE, DROWNING DUCK, PHANTOM FORTUNE, BEAUTIFUL BEGGAR, CALENDAR GIRL, FENCED-IN WOMAN, RELUCTANT MODEL, BIGAMOUS SPOUSE, and FUGITIVE NURSE. I've read a few of these before, but it was years ago and I don't remember anything about them. I probably didn't really need them, but they look great, they were cheap, and I've been in the mood to read some Perry Mason novels ever since I downloaded the theme from the TV show and put it on my cell phone as my ringtone. I get some interesting looks whenever it starts to play while I'm out in public.

Stephen Coonts, editor – VICTORY, a massive anthology of novellas set during World War II that came out about ten years ago. Authors included are Coonts, Ralph Peters, Harold Coyle, Harold Robbins (although this one may well have been ghosted), R.J. Pineiro, David Hagberg, Jim DeFelice, James Cobb, Barrett Tillman, and Dean Ing. I'm a sucker for WWII fiction.

Clair Huffaker – ONE TIME, I SAW MORNING COME HOME.  A memoir by the novelist and screenwriter about his life growing up in a small town in Utah during the 1930s. It may be a memoir, but it looks to be written like a novel. Huffaker wrote some fine traditional Westerns, many of them made into movies for which he wrote the screenplays, as well as adapting novels by many other authors for film. And of course he's the author of THE COWBOY AND THE COSSACK, one of my all-time favorite novels.

Wayne D. Dundee – RECKONING AT RAINROCK.  An ARC of a Western novel coming out later this year featuring Lone McGantry, the protagonist of Dundee's earlier novel DISMAL RIVER. I thought DISMAL RIVER was a great Western, and I'm looking forward to reading this one.

Larry Alexander – BIGGEST BROTHER: THE LIFE OF MAJOR DICK WINTERS, some World War II non-fiction, a biography focusing on one of one of the major figures in Stephen Ambrose's book BAND OF BROTHERS and the resulting HBO mini-series. We've been watching the mini-series on DVD – somehow I missed it until now – and I'll have an Overlooked TV post about it in a week or two.

Matt Hilton – DEAD MAN'S DUST, the first in his Joe Hunter series. I haven't read any of them yet.

Also, some comic book trade paperbacks:

Brian Wood – Volumes 3 through 6 of the NORTHLANDERS Viking series.

Ed Brubaker – POINT BLANK and SLEEPER, SEASONS ONE AND TWO, an espionage series, and THE SINNERS, Volume 5 of the CRIMINAL series.

Brandon Choi and Jim Lee – DEATHBLOW: SINNERS AND SAINTS, collection of a mini-series from almost twenty years ago, from the early days of the Wildstorm Universe, and man, it's hard for me to believe that was almost twenty years ago! I read this back then and remembered liking it, but that's almost all I remember about it.

Steve Gerber, et al. – THE ESSENTIAL MAN-THING, VOLUME 1, a big, black-and-white collection of the first 32 stories featuring the "muck-encrusted man-monster". I was a big fan of this series as well as DC's very similar SWAMP THING, both of which first came out at almost exactly the same time and both of which owe an obvious debt to Theodore Sturgeon's classic story "It!", as well as The Heap, from AIRBOY COMICS. Pure Seventies comic book goodness . . . I hope. We'll see. I haven't read them since then.

Dave Wood, et al. – SHOWCASE PRESENTS: BLACKHAWK, VOLUME 1, another big black-and-white collection, this one from DC, reprinting twenty issues of BLACKHAWK from 1957 and 1958. This is the version of the Blackhawks I first encountered, and I'm looking forward to seeing how well the stories hold up.

Clearly, I need to figure out some way to do without sleep so I'll have time to read all this stuff. There'll be blog reviews of most of it . . . eventually.