Task Force Desperate - Peter Nealen

Alone, Outnumbered, Outgunned.

Jeff Stone and his team of Praetorian Security contractors are marking time on counter-piracy duty aboard a freighter in the Gulf of Aden when the boredom ends abruptly. A major US base on the Horn of Africa is overrun in a well-coordinated terrorist attack, and those base personnel who survive are taken hostage. With the world economy tanked, and most of the Western militaries dangerously thinned, the Praetorian operators find themselves to be the hostages’ only hope of rescue.

The mission wasn’t going to be simple, or easy. But as events in East Africa accelerate, and outside players start to show their hand, the Praetorian shooters start to realize just what a desperate gamble they are embarked upon, and what this particular job is going to cost…

This near-future thriller is a prime example of the new wave of excellent military adventure novels coming out these days, most of them independently published. It's also a debut novel from a very promising writer. I'm especially impressed by the way Nealen set himself the difficult job of writing TASK FORCE DESPERATE in first person, from the point of view of Jeff Stone. It's really not easy to write a large cast book with a lot going on in the plot and make it work when you have to stick with one narrator. Nealen succeeds admirably in that. This is a well-written, literate thriller, and I really enjoyed it. Recommended for any and all action fans, and available in both print and e-book editions.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Safety Not Guaranteed

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is just the sort of movie this series of blog posts was made for. I'd never heard of it until the science fiction and fantasy website io9 included it on the list of the best SF and fantasy movies of 2012. So I checked it out and think it's an excellent film.

The story concerns a magazine journalist and a couple of interns investigating an oddball guy who claims to have invented a time machine and advertises for a companion to go back in time with him. "Provide your own weapons", the ad says. "Safety not guaranteed." So in order to get the story, the female intern answers the ad.

Well, you can probably guess most of what happens from there, up to and including the ending. But the journey to get there is very entertaining. This is one of those rare comedy/dramas that actually works for me, with some very funny moments and some very touching ones. It's well written and well acted. Most of the cast I'd never heard of, with the exceptions of Jake Johnson, who's great on the TV series NEW GIRL and very good here as the journalist, and Kristen Bell in a very small but pivotal part late in the movie.

I enjoyed SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, so it gets a strong recommendation from me.

Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man

This is a well-made, perfectly fine film, but what's the damn point in remaking a movie that's only ten years old? Does Hollywood think the public's attention span is that short? Well, actually, they may have a point about that . . .

So, taken for what it is, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN has its good points and its not-so-good. As usual with comic book movies, it takes characters and plot points from years of continuity and crams them together in an arbitrary fashion to come up with a story. Movies like this always turn me into Comic Book Guy from THE SIMPSONS, as I sit there mentally grousing about this change and that change and that other thing they got totally wrong.

However, this new version gets some things right that the 2002 movie got wrong, primarily giving Spidey web-shooters instead of making his web-spinning a natural ability. A lot of the shots are very Ditko-esque, enough so that I think it had to be deliberate. They get the feeling of the early issues right part of the time, anyway.

Why, though, do you take somebody like Emma Stone, who would have made an excellent Mary Jane Watson, and cast her as Gwen Stacy instead? And I would have liked to see a nod to the other Marvel movies, as well. I mean, Spidey met the Fantastic Four in the very first issue of his own title, after making his debut in AMAZING FANTASY #15. He's always been part of the Marvel Universe. Why not acknowledge that?

Sequels are clearly intended. If they get made, I'm sure I'll watch them, since I found enough to like in this one to keep me interested. What I'd really like to see, though, is a comic book movie that stays faithful to its source material.

Edge of Black - J.T. Ellison

I don't read a lot of current thrillers, but one author who has become a favorite is J.T. Ellison. EDGE OF BLACK is her second novel to feature forensic pathologist Dr. Samantha Owens, who also appeared in Ellison's Nashville-set police procedural series starring Detective Taylor Jackson.

In this one Sam has relocated to Washington D.C. and become a professor instead of a medical examiner, but that doesn't stop her from getting involved in the investigation of an apparent act of biological terrorism that leaves three random victims dead. Ah, but are they really random? It comes as no great surprise that they're not.

Ellison does a fine job of gradually uncovering the different layers of the plot. I really enjoy books structured like that. She's also very good at creating likable protagonists, and Sam Owens certainly falls into that category. Her romantic interest, former Army Ranger Xander Whitfield, is a good character, too. Yeah, he's a little idealized, but not annoyingly so, probably because the romance angle is played down enough to make this novel, for the most part, a combination of police procedural and anti-terrorism thriller.

Mostly, though, it's well written, smartly paced, and highly entertaining. If you're a fan of contemporary thrillers, you should check out J.T. Ellison's work, and EDGE OF BLACK would be a good place to start since it's out now. Even though it's part of a series, it works just fine as a stand-alone.

Movies: Premium Rush

This is a pretty good little action thriller about a bike messenger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in New York City who winds up trying to deliver an envelope that somebody is willing to kill to recover. The plot is pretty predictable, even with a number of flashbacks, but the execution is top-notch. Lots of well-staged action scenes, a little humor, and an entertaining, fast-paced hour and a half. I liked it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 1947

The glory days of the pulp magazine ADVENTURE are considered to be the Teens and the Twenties, and it was still a force to be reckoned with during the Thirties. But it was bought by Popular Publications and by the late Forties was thought to be just a shadow of what it once was. And that may well be true. But here's the thing: it was still a pretty darned entertaining pulp. Case in point, the September 1947 issue, which I read recently.

First of all, that's a fine cover by Rafael DeSoto. Jungle? Check. Stalwart, hairy-chested hero? Check. Sinister native fetish? Check. Blazing gun? Check. Big-ass snake? You betcha! Even if it doesn't go with any of the stories in the issue, it's a heck of a cover.

The issue's contents start off with the novella "According to His Lights" by William Chamberlain. I had read several of Chamberlain's YA war novels, but this was the first pulp yarn of his that I'd read, at least as far as I remember. This one opens with a couple of officers visiting Corregidor after the war, then flashes back to the days in the Thirties when they were young lieutenants stationed there and their clashes with a harsh and uncompromising commanding officer. I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen in this one, but I like Chamberlain's no-frills style and the story has an undeniable air of authenticity about it, probably because in addition to being a pulpster he was also a career soldier and retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force in 1946 to concentrate on his writing career. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more of Chamberlain's work.

John Scott Douglas was a prolific pulp author from the Twenties to the Fifties. His short story "Deep-Water Decision" is about a couple of highly competitive deep sea divers, each of whom is willing to endanger his own life to show up the other one. It's an okay story, if not particularly memorable.

Fred Gipson is best known as the author of the novels OLD YELLER and SAVAGE SAM, but before that he wrote quite a few Western stories for the pulps. "Hell and Holy Water" is a humorous story about a couple of mischievous boys, a big sister's romance with a bronc rider, blackmail, and a runaway team of horses. Pretty good stuff that does a fine job of capturing rural Texas.

"Eskimo No Cry" by Howard Stephenson is set in post-war Alaska, but that's all I got out of it because it's written in the form of a report from some bureaucrat and it's so dry I gave up after a few pages.

C.P. Donnel, Jr.'s "Ashes to Ashes" is a short-short about an incredibly lucky bartender and the unlikely source of that luck. It's amusing, but I'm not sure what it's doing in ADVENTURE. It strikes me more as something that should have appeared in one of the slicks.

"Escape to El Dorado" by Allison W. Bunkley is billed as a "Fact Story", and it reminds me of the sort of yarn that would show up more often a few years later when ADVENTURE became more of a general interest men's magazine with a lot of non-fiction in it. Ostensibly it's about a new search by helicopter for Colonel H.P. Fawcett, the British explorer who disappeared in the Mato Grosso in 1925. That's really just an excuse for a recap of Fawcett's expedition and disappearance and the subsequent sightings and theories about what happened to him. It's pretty interesting stuff. I believe there was a new book about Fawcett and his disappearance written just a few years ago, so some people are still trying to figure out what happened to him.

Next up is a serial installment from a novel by James Norman, HE WHO RIDES THE TIGER. Didn't read this one, either, since it's part four of five.

"The Man Who Didn't Like Texas" by Clifton Adams is an oilfield story about an epic fistfight and feud between a massive roughneck and an icy-nerved nitroglycerin expert who "shoots" the wells with nitro to bring them in. Adams is a fine Western writer who knew his way around the oil patch, and this is an excellent story with plenty of action and humor, told in first-person narrative resembling that of Robert E. Howard's Breckinridge Elkins without being quite as slapstick.

"A Pig for Muana Loa" by Carl J. Kunz (a writer unknown to me – and to the Fictionmags Index) is a pretty good story about the clash of cultures and a volcanic eruption in Hawaii.

Earl Sutterfield is another mystery. I can't find anything about him. But his story "When Your Number's Up", about a crew working on a railroad tunnel through a mountain, is okay. Lots of detail about tunnel work mixed in with a decent story that's marred by an ending I didn't care for.

Eustace Cockrell had a fairly long career as a pulp writer, but based on "1:54 and a Fraction", I'm not sure I see how. It's a trifle about harness racing that never caught my interest.

Plus assorted columns and departments.

So overall, this is a good but certainly not great issue of ADVENTURE. It has that fine cover going for it, plus three pretty good stories (by Chamberlain, Gipson, and Adams). The rest of the contents are pretty much forgettable. The biggest drawback is that several of the stories seem more like they were intended for the slick magazine market, rather than being pulp yarns, and they just weren't, well, adventurous enough. Still, it's an issue worth reading, even if you just pick and choose the good stuff.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, March 1952

This is another issue I own and read recently, and the cover scan is from my copy. I don't know who the artist is, but the scene is a little too dimly lit for my taste. It has a nice sense of menace and impending violence to it, though, so it's not really a bad cover. I don't know what caused that streak of light across the center of the scan; it's not on the actual pulp. But I noticed that the scan of this issue on the Fictionmags Index has the same streak. Odd.

Anyway, on to the contents. The March 1952 issue of EXCITING WESTERN starts off with the novella "Brand for a Maverick" by one of my favorite Western pulp authors, Walker A. Tompkins. It's the story of a range feud as well as something of a Romeo and Juliet yarn, since the only surviving members of the feuding clans are Speck Seevy of the CV spread and Beth Adams of the Circle A, and Beth happens to be in love with Speck even though he doesn't return the feeling. There's also the local range hog, Jake Grote (with a name like that he might as well be sporting a neon sign that says VILLAIN), assorted colorful supporting characters, and a little orphan girl who's the catalyst for the action. This story is a bit more humorous and lightweight than most of Tompkins' work (hence the use of the word "rollicking" to describe it on the cover), and with the romance angle it probably would have been more at home in RANCH ROMANCES rather than EXCITING WESTERN, but that really doesn't matter. I found it very fast-moving and entertaining. Tompkins comes in for some criticism from some quarters, mostly because of his early serials that ran in WILD WEST WEEKLY which were, admittedly, pretty over the top. But by the Forties I think he had matured into a fine Western writer and I've always enjoyed his novels and stories.

Tom Roan's "Fight for Your Mate" is a wildlife short story, told entirely, and with no dialogue, naturally, from the point of view of a bull moose. I read quite a few novels and stories like this when I was a kid, but I really don't like them now and I didn't finish this one, despite the fact that I usually enjoy Tom Roan's work.

Next up is the novelette "Riders of the Haunted Hills" by A. Leslie, really Alexander Leslie Scott, who also wrote as Bradford Scott and under the house-name Jackson Cole created the Jim Hatfield series in TEXAS RANGERS and wrote more than 50 of the Hatfield novels in that pulp. His yarn in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN is about a new sheriff trying to find out who bushwhacked and killed the previous sheriff, and anybody who has read much of Scott's work will know immediately where this one is going. Scott had a tendency to use the same half-dozen or so plots over and over. That said, his sometimes flowery prose is under fairly good control in "Riders of the Haunted Hills" and he keeps the plot perking along nicely. I've read a lot of Scott's stories and have gotten a great deal of enjoyment from his work, but I'll admit he's probably best read in small doses.

"Gambler on the Range" is a noirish short-short from a writer whose work is new to me, Nick Selsky. In fact, this is the only story of his listed in the Fictionmags Index. It's fairly well-written but suffers from being extremely predictable.

T.C. McClary's "Shorthorn Outlaw" is a mild little tale about an aging badman and the widow who wants him to reform, settle down, and get married. Not much action, but it's well-written and had a nice elegiac feel to it. This is another one that would have been right at home in RANCH ROMANCES.

And finally we come to a story that actually did appear first in RANCH ROMANCES, a reprint of a long novella by L.P. Holmes called "Skyline Trail" that was originally published in the Second May 1944 number of that venerable pulp. It's a range war story, with cattleman Jim Coryell trying to save his Castle spread from the sinister plotting of a rival rancher. There's a beautiful girl with a crippled brother, a lynch mob, several shootouts, treachery, and romance (of course). There's not a thing in this one I didn't see coming, but that didn't keep me from getting caught up in it and really flipping the pages. I haven't read much if anything by L.P. Holmes, but based on this story I need to remedy that. He wrote really well, in a style that reminds me of Ernest Haycox and Luke Short. Predictable or not, this is the best story in the issue.

So EXCITING WESTERN for May 1952 turns out to be a mixed bag, with one excellent story, a couple of good ones, and the other yarns minor and forgettable. Still well worth reading as far as I'm concerned, and I'm glad I did.

Forgotten Books: The Prisoners - Matthew S. Hart (James Reasoner and Bill Crider)

I'm probably fudging a little by writing about a book I had a hand in, but the Cody's Law series is long out of print and probably won't ever be reprinted, so it's pretty much forgotten. Besides, Bill mentioned this book recently on an email group we both belong to, and I thought some of you might be interested in it. Warning: this post is as much memoir as it is about the book and has some behind-the-scenes stuff in it, so if that doesn't appeal to you, feel free to move on. My feelings won't be hurt, I promise.

The Cody's Law series came about because the Western editor at Bantam at the time had worked at Leisure earlier in his career and edited a series of Westerns by Roe Richmond about a Texas Ranger named Lashtrow. Some of you have probably read some of those books. Richmond must have been a believer in the freelancer's adage, "Never throw anything away." Because those Lashtrow novels were actually rewrites and expansions of novels that Richmond wrote for the pulp magazine TEXAS RANGERS during the Fifties, featuring Ranger Jim Hatfield. For the paperback version, Hatfield became "Lash" Lashtrow, but the supporting characters all remained the same.

The Bantam editor approached an editor at Book Creations Inc., the book packaging company I was doing a lot of work for at the time, and asked BCI to come up with a Texas Ranger series similar to the Lashtrow books. The editor at BCI was also an author and planned to write the first book in the series, and he asked me if I would continue it from there. I agreed, of course, since back then I never turned down work (I still don't turn it down very often, and only when I just don't have time to do anything else). As it turned out, the editor at BCI was too busy to write the book, so after doing an outline and a couple of chapters he gave it to me and told me to use whatever I wanted out of it. By this time he had mentioned the Roe Richmond/Lashtrow connection to me and asked me if I was familiar with those books. I just said that I was and didn't mention that I was very familiar with the original versions, having read dozens of issues of TEXAS RANGERS including some of Richmond's Jim Hatfield novels. I think I was the only one in this particular loop aware of the true origin of the Lashtrow books.

So I kept the outline, rewrote the first couple of chapters the editor had done, renamed the hero Sam Cody (I don't recall what his name was in the first draft), and finished the book, going one step further back than the Lashtrow books and basing my version very much on the Jim Hatfield character from TEXAS RANGERS, while still trying to make him a distinctive character in his own right, of course. Sam Cody was never a Jim Hatfield clone . . . but I tried to get that same sort of Western pulp hero spirit into the books.

So time went by and I wrote the first six books in the series, all published under the pseudonym Matthew S. Hart. I was doing a lot of other work for BCI, and the editor got worried that the workload might be too much for me. He wanted to bring in another author to write a couple of the books. I wasn't real crazy about this idea. I felt like I could do it all (a feeling that still gets me in trouble from time to time). But since BCI owned the series I couldn't really object.

The editor also wanted me to team up with yet another author on the other books, with me providing outlines and the other author doing first drafts, which I would then edit and polish. The person he had in mind was Bill Crider, who had written a couple of books for BCI.

Now, as it happens, Bill is my oldest friend in the writing business and a fine author, so I was pretty pleased with this arrangement. The first book we did together was #8 in the series, EAGLE PASS.

Which brings us to THE PRISONERS.

I've mentioned many times how Livia helps me with the plots on some of my books. She wrote a half-page outline for the book that became THE PRISONERS, which I developed into a much more detailed outline (the editors at BCI loved detailed outlines). The plot involves Sam Cody having to fetch in a prisoner from an isolated mansion on the West Texas plains during a freak blizzard and ice storm. The family that lives in the mansion is . . . unusual, to say the least, and gives Cody a lot of trouble as he tries to complete his assignment, which is also complicated by the captured outlaw. So after a while I started telling people that THE PRISONERS was the world's only vampire/lesbian/cannibal/incest Western. Which as far as I know it is. I believe that description is a little exaggerated, though, since I don't remember them being vampires. But I suppose they could have been.

What's odd is that despite all those bizarre elements, I think THE PRISONERS turned out to be a decent traditional Western with a stalwart hero, a villainous outlaw, and plenty of ridin' and shootin'. I'm not sure how we pulled all that together, but I believe we did.

On a related note, some years ago I was at a convention where Elmer Kelton was the Guest of Honor, and I wound up with the job of doing the GOH interview with him. During the interview I pointed out the rather strange juxtaposition of having the man widely regarded as the world's greatest living Western writer (and maybe the greatest Western writer of all time) sharing the podium with the co-author of the world's only vampire/lesbian/cannibal/incest Western. But hey, that's the writing business for you, isn't it? You never know who you're going to wind up sitting next to.

Copies of THE PRISONERS, and all the other Cody's Law books, can be found pretty cheaply on the Internet. I wrote #1 – 6, and Bill and I collaborated on #8, 9, 11, and 12. I think they're all solid, entertaining Westerns.

One more side note: the contract was supposed to run through #14, but after #12 had been turned in, Bantam told BCI they were cancelling the series. In fact, they not only cancelled Cody's Law in mid-contract, they cancelled the other three series I was working on for BCI at the same time, effectively putting me out of work, a condition that didn't last long, thank goodness. But for years after that whenever Livia and I got bad news, we would groan and say, "Oh, no! We've been Bantamed!"

Movies: Lawless

I'm going to try again to start blogging more about the movies we watch, even if the posts are pretty quick and informal. We watched this on New Year's Eve and I really enjoyed it. It's based on a true story about a family of bootleggers in Virginia during the Depression and hits all the usual action movie beats just fine. The acting is good all around, with Tom Hardy excellent as the leader of the family who believes himself to be invincible. Likable heroes (even though, technically, they're criminals), a despicable villain, a little humor, a lot of action, great music . . . what's not to like?

Also, watching this gave me the same feeling that JUSTIFIED does, an undeniable sense of "These could be some of my relatives." I come from a long line of hillbilly stock, although it's Ozark-based, rather than Appalachian.

Killing Melvin Badthunder - Peter Brandvold

LOU PROPHET RIDES AGAIN IN A NEW E-BOOK EXCLUSIVE SHORT-STORY FROM MEAN PETE PRESS...

The bounty hunter Lou Prophet wakes up in bed with a soiled dove to find a penciled note deposited in the dove’s cleavage.

“We have the girl. If you want her back in one piece, ride to Santo Domingo Station.”

Prophet rides out to the abandoned stage station to learn that his beautiful partner, Louisa Bonaventure--“The Vengeance Queen” herself--has been kidnapped and locked away in a snake-infested mine shaft. To get her out alive, Prophet must do a job for the kidnappers:

Bring them the head of Melvin Badthunder!

Can Prophet hunt down the savage border bandit in time to save his comely partner’s life?

On the trail of Melvin Badthunder, Prophet rides to the little desert town of Muleville to find not only Badthunder but that, as always in a Mean Pete yarn, nothing is quite as it’s supposed to be...

Boy, that's the truth. Mean Pete packs several very nice twists into this story to go along with the great action scenes. This is the last thing I read in 2012 and the first thing I'm reviewing in 2013, and it's a fine way to both end and begin a year. I've read all of Brandvold's short stories and they're always well-written and very entertaining.

And speaking of those other short stories, they're all available in one volume now, and that one gets a high recommendation from me as well.