Forgotten Books: Operation: Outer Space - Murray Leinster

I have to admire Murray Leinster. He was writing science fiction before the term existed. But he also wrote mystery, adventure, and Western yarns for the pulps. He wrote movie novelizations. Late in his career he wrote TV tie-in paperback novels. He wrote a little bit of everything for more than fifty years and did it well.

He's remembered mostly for his science fiction, though, and OPERATION: OUTER SPACE is a good example of his work. Originally published in 1954, this novel manages to be very much of its time while also being sort of a throwback to the "scientific romances" published in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, when Leinster started writing.

The protagonist of OPERATION: OUTER SPACE is Jed Cochrane, who works for an advertising agency producing TV shows that the agency's clients sponsor. He's very Madison Avenue, a slick guy with a smart, beautiful secretary he can't see is in love with him. As a favor to one of his bosses, he's sent to Lunar City to promote a scientific discovery by the executive's son-in-law. Cochrane's secretary Babs goes with him, of course. The first part of the novel plays a lot like MAD MEN, only set on the Moon. In its satire of the advertising business, it reminded me as well of Pohl and Kornbluth's THE SPACE MERCHANTS, although it's considerably more gentle in its humor than that novel.

But then it turns out that the invention Cochrane is there to promote, a new method of radio transmission, can be adapted into a faster-than-light drive for spaceships. (Trust me, it makes sense in the book. Sort of. Enough to buy the premise, anyway.) So what does an ad man do when he finds himself with an FTL drive? He gets a cameraman and a writer and takes off for the stars, of course, taking along his faithful secretary. Then he sells advertising time and beams their adventures back to Earth for a TV show.

There are some other characters going along for the trip, including a psychologist and a sociopathic wealthy playboy and his beautiful wife. The rest of the book consists of a travelogue of distant worlds, one of the staples of early-day SF, along with the adventures our intrepid travelers have there. To be honest, those adventures are pretty mild, but they're still interesting and Leinster is one of the best at describing alien worlds.

We get a little more satire to close out the book when the group returns home, and Leinster wraps things up nicely. There's nothing groundbreaking about OPERATION: OUTER SPACE, but it's well-written, has a likable hero, provides a number of funny lines, and is generally just a pleasant, enjoyable book. A comfort read, if you will, for those of us who grew up in an era when rocket ships had fins and still miss those days.

Hitler's Time Machine - Robert F. Dorr

Robert F. Dorr is one of the leading military historians in the business and the author of numerous volumes of non-fiction. I'm particularly fond of HELL HAWKS, an excellent account of the air war in Europe during World War II. Before that he wrote scores of stories for the men's adventure magazines, often but not always with military themes.

So it's not surprising that Dorr's first full-length novel also has the Second World War as its backdrop, but I might not have predicted that it would also be science fiction. HITLER'S TIME MACHINE is part of the sub-genre known as Alternate History. Actually, it fits even better into what I think of as Secret History. Dorr doesn't actually alter historical events so much as tell us the truth about what was really going on.

What you didn't know is that during the war, American and German scientists were in a deadly race to see which side could develop a working time machine and turn it into a weapon first. Along the way there are journeys into the past, assassination attempts on famous historical figures, miscalculations that result in unintended consequences (the so-called Philadelphia Experiment), and commando raids that change the course of the war.

As always, Dorr's research is impeccable. Many of the events in this novel actually happened; Dorr just gives them a different spin than what we're used to. His characters are a mix of fictional and historical, and he does a fine job making us care about them, especially Barbara Stafford, the young scientist who heads up the American time travel project. The action scenes are excellent, and so is the speculation about the nature of time travel and its effect on history. Like Chuck Dixon in the Bad Times series, Dorr comes up with some angles that haven't been done to death.

HITLER'S TIME MACHINE manages to be both a fine war novel and a top-notch science fiction yarn. If you're a fan of either, I highly recommend that you check it out.

Print Editions of the Blaze! Novels

The trade paperback editions of the first three BLAZE! novels from Stephen Mertz, Robert J. Randisi, and Wayne D. Dundee are now available from Amazon.

 

The Marvels Project: Birth of the Super Heroes - Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting

This hardback collection reprints a mini-series published in 2009 and 2010, a short time before I started reading comics again, but somehow I'd never heard of it until I came across a copy at the Half Price Books in Corpus Christi last summer. It's written by one of my favorite modern comics authors, Ed Brubaker, and drawn by one of the best artists, Steve Epting. Since those two were responsible for what's probably the best run on CAPTAIN AMERICA since the days of Lee and Kirby, I expected to enjoy THE MARVELS PROJECT, and I certainly did.

Like Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's iconic MARVELS, this story takes a look at some familiar events from a different perspective. The primary point of view character in THE MARVELS PROJECT is Dr. Thomas Halloway, who was also the masked crimefighter known as The Angel in Golden Age comics stories published by Timely, the company that would one day become Marvel Comics. Through Halloway's eyes we get a fresh look at some pivotal events in comics history: the creation of the original Human Torch; the attack on New York by Prince Namor, the Submariner, and the epic battles between him and the Torch; the transformation of Steve Rogers into Captain America; the introductions of the sidekicks, Bucky and Toro; and finally, after foiling a diabolical plot by the Red Skull, the formation of The Invaders, the first superhero team. Along the way, a number of other familiar characters show up, such as Nick Fury, The Destroyer, and even The Two-Gun Kid.

That last line is enough to tell comics fans that THE MARVELS PROJECT is a mixture of comics history from the actual Golden Age and some modern-day retconning that includes elements like The Invaders and John Steele. I'm generally a purist when it comes to such things, but Brubaker, after all, is the guy who not only did the unthinkable—bringing Bucky Barnes back to life after fifty years—but made even comics curmudgeons such as myself not only accept it but like it. He does a great job here, telling a fast-paced story steeped in history and nostalgia. Epting's art is excellent as well. His Captain America is the best since Jack Kirby's, and his period details are top-notch.

I'm glad I came across this one. It's thoroughly enjoyable and brought back a lot of good memories of Golden Age stories I've read, mostly in reprint volumes but a few in the original comics that I bought many years after they were first published. It was a different era in comics but a good one, and if you'd like to revisit it, THE MARVELS PROJECT is well worth your time.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Texican

I've been an Audie Murphy fan ever since I watched a bunch of his Westerns on TV with my dad when I was a kid. I suspect my dad felt a certain kinship with Audie, since they were both from small towns in Texas and the sons of farmers. They were close to the same age, too, although my dad was a little older. Of course, my dad didn't have the same sort of combat exploits—he arrived in Europe right after V-E Day and spent his time stringing telephone wire—but I suspect a lot of servicemen from that era identified with Audie to a certain extent.

At any rate, I've enjoyed Audie Murphy's movies for a long time, but somehow I'd never seen THE TEXICAN until now. It's from 1966, late in his career, and a Spaghetti Western shot in Spain rather than a Hollywood studio film, although the two leads, the writer, and the director were all American.

Murphy plays a former lawman from Texas named Jess Carlin. He's framed for a crime by the local owlhoot mastermind (an old and tired-looking Broderick Crawford) and forced to flee into Mexico. But when Corbin hears that his brother, a crusading newspaperman, has been murdered, he has to return to find the killer.

Oddly enough, after Murphy's character returns to Texas, the script by John C. Champion never again mentions the fact that he's wanted by the law. He walks around seemingly without any worries about being arrested, all the while trying to dig up evidence that will prove who killed his brother. We know all along, of course, that Crawford's character was responsible for the killing. Murphy's character seems to know that, too, but his low-key investigation into the affair makes the movie drag considerably at times before it moseys its way to a pretty good final showdown.

Murphy turns in a decent performance, as he usually did. Technically, maybe, he wasn't a very good actor, but I always found him believable and likable in his roles. Crawford seems bored by the whole thing, but his commanding voice and physical presence mostly make up for that. The rest of the cast is all European and adequate at best.

But the photography is excellent, the music's not bad (not Ennio Morricone level, but not bad), and old pro director Lesley Selander, who got his start directing B-Westerns in the mid-Thirties, including some of the Hopalong Cassidy pictures, does a top-notch job of staging the few action scenes the script gives him. All that adds up to a movie that's maybe slightly below average, but it still held my interest and I'm glad I watched it.

40 Years

40 years ago tonight, Livia and I went out on our first date. We saw the movie FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, which I've already written about here. Despite some circumstances that were less than perfect, she must have seen something worthwhile in me. Or maybe she's still hoping to find it if she's stubborn enough. The photo above is her senior class picture which was taken a few months earlier.

Needless to say, the decision to ask her out was the smartest move I ever made.

Now Available: The First Three Blaze! Novels

E-book editions of the first three books in the new Adult Western series BLAZE! are now available. Print editions should be live soon. If you're a fan of Longarm, The Gunsmith, Slocum, and the Trailsman, you need to check out these books. They're excellent novels by some of the best writers in the business, and I look forward to the series having a long, successful run.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: South Sea Stories, October 1940

Looks almost like a romance pulp, doesn't it . . . until you notice the dead body floating face-down beside them. Ah, there's always trouble in paradise, I suppose. And yes, that's none other than the famous science fiction writer Alfred Bester whose story "Treachery on Camoia" appears in this issue, along with yarns by E. Hoffmann Price, George Armin Shaftel, William O'Sullivan, and Alexander Blade his own self. (There's a part of me that wishes I had written something as "Alexander Blade".) SOUTH SEA STORIES lasted only a handful of issues, but it appears to have been pretty good reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Western Book Magazine, May 1935

Umm, I don't know about you, but that cover strikes me as a little . . . creepy. I'm not sure if it's the crazy eyes or the giant nostrils or the fact that those horses look rather carnivorous, but my first impulse would have been to run the other way. Inside, though, you've got stories by the well-regarded Dane Coolidge, the dependable Harry Sinclair Drago, and somebody named Anson Hard, whose real name was W.C. Harding. COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE was usually a pretty good pulp, but I think I might have left this one at the newsstand.

Forgotten Books: A Short Bier - Frank Kane

For my first Forgotten Book of the new year, we've got another old favorite author of mine whose work I've been reading since high school. Frank Kane has come in for a good deal of criticism over the years because of the formulaic nature of his books and his tendency to cannibalize his earlier work, but for some reason his private eye yarns nearly always resonate well with me. They're definitely literary comfort food.

A SHORT BIER is from 1960, a Dell paperback original with a cover by Harry Bennett, who did the covers for several of Kane's novels. Bennett is no Robert McGinnis, but I like his covers all right. They always seem to fit the subject matter well.

This case opens with the murder of a crusading newspaper reporter. In a nice twist, there's no real mystery about this killing. We know the murder is a mob hit, and we have a pretty good idea why the contract was carried out. A SHORT BIER becomes, instead, sort of a private eye procedural, as we watch Johnny Liddell unravel the plot behind the murder and discover who ordered the reporter killed. Later on there's another murder where the reader doesn't know who the killer is, and Kane handles that part of the plot expertly as well.

In between we get some nice scenes involving Liddell and his friend Jim Kiely, the editor of the newspaper the murdered man worked for, and Jim's beautiful, redheaded reporter daughter Muggsy, who happens to be Liddell's girlfriend. I've always liked Muggsy Kiely. She's almost as good a girlfriend/sidekick for Liddell as Lucy Hamilton is for Michael Shayne. Liddell also tangles with Las Vegas showgirls, Syndicate triggermen, Puerto Rican juvenile delinquents, prizefighters, stoolies, bartenders, and corrupt politicians. He smokes constantly and guzzles down bourbon while not walking along rainy streets in New York. This is a 1960 private eye novel, and don't you forget it.

I'm sure you can tell from that description whether this is the sort of book that would appeal to you. As for me, I raced through it and enjoyed every page. Johnny Liddell is my kind of private eye: smart, tough, a bit of a wise-ass, a little world-weary at times, and hell on killers. Good stuff, I say.