Now Available: The Savage Pack - Fred Blosser

The North Carolina wilderness is a dangerous place in 1714. Trappers and traders Axtel Fannin and Jesse Driggs rescue a beautiful young woman and her brother from kidnappers, only to find themselves entangled in a scheme that may cost them their lives. They and their friends will need every bit of their skill as woodsmen and fighters to survive a savage pack of killers driven by vengeance and greed.

In the tradition of such classic authors of historical adventure as James Fenimore Cooper, Robert E. Howard, and Hugh Pendexter, Fred Blosser spins a colorful, action-packed tale of passion and danger on the early American frontier. THE SAVAGE PACK is excitement from beginning to end!

(I published it so I'm hardly unbiased, but I think this is a great adventure novel, one of the best books I've read this year.)

Snakehand - Chuck Dixon and John Neal

Town-taming lawman Joe Wiley was once a Comanchero, an outlaw and a killer so fast on the draw he's come to be known as Snakehand. However, an unexpected tragedy leads him to change his ways. Now with his blind mentor and sidekick, the former leader of the Comanchero band, Joe travels from town to town in the West, taking on the job of bringing law and order to the worst hellholes between the Mississippi and the Pacific. It's that job that brings him to the settlement known as Mercury Wells, but what he finds waiting for him there is worse than he ever expected and will change his life again.

This is the first Western novel by comics scripting legend Chuck Dixon, along with his co-author John Neal, and it's a rip-snorting tale that barrels along at full speed, an action-packed blend of the pulp, the traditional, and the Spaghetti Westerns. The violence is reminiscent of the Edge books by George G. Gilman and other series produced by the Piccadilly Cowboys during the Seventies, the settings are well rendered, and while Joe Wiley may not always be the most likable guy, he's a fine protagonist. I'm looking forward to the next book in this series. Recommended.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Shadow of a Doubt

(This post originally appeared in different form on July 11, 2010. Haven't had time to watch much, and everything I've watched has been new and/or too popular for this series.)

This is the one that somehow I had never seen until now. It was reportedly Hitchcock’s favorite of his films, and I liked it quite a bit, too. It’s a somewhat uneasy but highly entertaining mix of small-town Americana and serial killer thriller, as a young woman (the lovely Theresa Wright) tries to figure out whether her charming uncle (Joseph Cotton, who will always be Jed Leland from CITIZEN KANE to me) is really a murderer. There’s a great supporting cast in this one and a lot of humor despite the grisly subject matter. Macdonald Carey strikes me as an odd casting choice for the FBI agent who’s the hero. Wallace Ford, who played the taxi driver in HARVEY, is much better as Carey’s partner. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen where I was really uncertain how it would end, so I think Hitchcock deserves that Master of Suspense label on this film. If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check it out.

Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg - Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

I don’t recall when I read my first science fiction story by Robert Silverberg, but it was more than forty years ago, that’s for sure. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of them since then. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed this book-length series of interviews with Silverberg conducted by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, focusing as much on Silverberg’s views about art, music, travel, and philosophy as it does about his writing career and science fiction in general. Now, me personally, I would have been fine with a little more “And then I wrote” material, but that’s just me. All in all, this is a thoroughly entertaining volume, and if you’re a science fiction fan at all, I give it a high recommendation. I seem to recall a few years ago that some young SF writer asked dismissively why anybody should read Robert Silverberg. Well, here’s the answer, right here in this book.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Complete Stories, First May Number, 1931

This scan comes to us courtesy of David Lee Smith, and I really like this cover. I don't know who painted it. The contents are not as impressive--the only authors whose names I recognize are C.S. Montanye, Hal Dunning, and Forbes Parkhill--but for all I know the stories by them and the other authors are excellent.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: The Rio Kid Western, October 1940

Yesterday I wrote about the lead novel in this issue of one of my favorite Western pulps. The paperback edition of THE COMSTOCK LODE doesn't include one of the features that made the original pulp interesting: with its historical settings and characters, each issue included several half-page vignettes scattered throughout the lead novel, each with a drawing of one of the historical characters and background on that person. In this issue, these mini-articles feature Brigham Young, Adolph Sutro, Mark Twain, and Al Sieber. Elsewhere in the issue are short stories by prolific Western pulpster Hapsburg Liebe and house-name John M. Easterly. THE RIO KID WESTERN is one of my favorite pulps. I've read probably three-fourths of the Rio Kid novels and enjoyed most of them.

Forgotten Books: The Comstock Lode - Tom Curry

THE RIO KID WESTERN has long been one of my favorite Western pulps. I discovered the Rio Kid character through paperback reprints published by Curtis Books during the Seventies, read many of those, and went on to collect and read quite a few of the original pulps. The Rio Kid is Captain Bob Pryor, former Union cavalry officer, who wanders through the West with his sidekick Celestino Mireles in the years following the Civil War, getting into all sorts of adventures. The “gimmick”, if you will, of this series is that the novels are placed in historical settings and always feature historical characters in supporting roles.

THE COMSTOCK LODE is an early Rio Kid novel from the October 1940 issue of the magazine, although I read it in the Curtis Books paperback edition. That's my copy in the scan. The Kid and Celestino throw in with a group of immigrants whose wagon train has been attacked by Apaches and then travel on with them to the silver mining boomtown of Virginia City, Nevada, where the pilgrims hope to find their fortunes. Things don’t work out that way, largely due to the evil villainy of a gang of killers known as the Night Riders (not a very original name for a gang of pulp villains . . . but hey, I once wrote a book called THE NIGHT RIDERS, so who am I to talk?). Real-life mining engineer Adolph Sutro puts in an appearance, as do the Apache chief Victorio, army scout Al Sieber, and none other than former Virginina City journalist Samuel Clemens, already famous as Mark Twain. After a lot of riding and shooting and being framed for murder, the Kid exposes the hidden mastermind behind all the trouble and with some help from his friends cleans out the Night Riders.

I think I read this one thirty-some-odd years ago, but I didn’t remember anything about the plot, which doesn’t really matter because it’s pretty predictable anyway. I don’t read books like this for the plot, though. I read them for the same reason I watch B-Western movies: they make me feel like a kid again. Stalwart heroes, despicable villains, and action, action, action. Of course, it helps if the writing is good, too, and it certainly is in THE COMSTOCK LODE. The author, Tom Curry, created the series and wrote more of the novels than anyone else, although other authors, most notably Walker Tompkins, penned some excellent Rio Kid yarns along the way. Curry had a long, prolific career as a pulpster. A former journalist, he got his start writing hardboiled crime tales that were good enough to crack the leading magazine in the field, BLACK MASK. By the mid-Thirties he had become a steady member of editorial director Leo Margulies’ authors stable at Ned Pines’ Thrilling Group. Curry not only created and wrote the Rio Kid, he was one of the regular authors of Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole, ultimately contributing 55 Hatfield novels, the same number as series creator A. Leslie Scott. Curry also wrote novels for the other two Thrilling Group Western character pulps, THE MASKED RIDER WESTERN and RANGE RIDERS WESTERN, along with countless stand-alone novellas and short stories.

As the pulp era wound down in the Fifties, Curry retired from writing to work in industry, but in the Sixties he returned to writing for Leo Margulies again, turning out several of the Buck Duane novellas that Margulies’ Renown Publications published in the digest ZANE GREY’S WESTERN MAGAZINE under the house-name Romer Zane Grey. After writing so many Jim Hatfield novels, these novellas featuring a lone wolf Texas Ranger must have come pretty easily to Curry. During this period he also ghosted one of the Walt Slade paperback novels for his old stablemate Les Scott, under the name Bradford Scott, and wrote two of the Sundance novels under the house-name Jack Slade, RENEGADE and HONCHO. I’ve always found Curry to be a dependably entertaining Western author and am always happy to read his work.

Now, as an aside, when I started reading the paperback edition of this novel, I thought it was in really good shape for a book published by Curtis, a company notorious for publishing books that fall apart when you read them. My copy seemed nice and tight . . . but by the time I finished, the glue had come loose and the pages had separated from the cover. If there was ever a company that published more shoddily produced books than Curtis, I’ve never run across it. Even Manor Books from that era hold together better. Despite that, Curtis put out a lot of books that I’ve enjoyed over the years, and as long as the text is all there, I can live with the books falling apart. By this point, it’s almost part of Curtis’s charm.

Tomorrow as this week’s Saturday Morning Western Pulp, I’ll have the cover of this novel’s original appearance.

Darkship Thieves - Sarah A. Hoyt

There's a lot of back-story in DARKSHIP THIEVES, the first novel in Sarah A. Hoyt's Darkship series. In the future, genetically engineered and bio-inhanced individuals known as Mules take over the earth, a development that results in a bloody upheaval in which all the Mules are wiped out or forced to flee from the planet. Earth winds up being ruled by a consortium of billionaire aristocrats known as the Good Men. There are rumors that the surviving Mules have set up a colony somewhere out in the Solar System, but nobody knows for sure if that's true. But there are powertrees growing in space, some sort of bio-construct created by Mule scientists. They grow pods that are harvested to produce power back on Earth. Got all that? Because it's in place before the plot in this novel even gets started.

The narrator/protagonist of DARKSHIP THIEVES is Athena Hera Sinistra, the wild, spoiled daughter of one of the Good Men who rule Earth. An apparent mutiny aboard the space cruiser owned by her father forces her to flee into the powertrees in a lifepod. I say apparent because this is one of those books where almost nothing is what it seems to be at first and the plot twists and revelations come at an almost constant clip all the way through. Athena is rescued by a darkship from that semi-legendary Mule colony and taken back there. The darkships, hard to detect as you might imagine from the name, are piloted by genetically enchanced former humans who steal the power pods for the colony. Athena winds up in all sorts of intrigue and danger, as well as a romance with her rescuer, who's been genetically modified to have cat-like vision and reflexes.

It's all even more complicated than I've made it sound, but Hoyt makes it work, largely because her two main characters are so likable. Athena isn't exactly an unreliable narrator, but she is on the eccentric side. The plot moves along briskly, the world-building is excellent, and this novel comes to a satisfactory conclusion while still leaving the impression that there's a lot more tale to be told. There are three more books in the series, and I suspect I'll be reading them all. Recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Romantic Detective, August 1938

I don't know, the scene on that cover doesn't look very romantic to me. But it is eye-catching, and that's what pulp covers were for. The authors inside are mostly the pseudonymous regular suspects: Robert A. Garron (Howard Wandrei), Jerome Severs Perry (Robert Leslie Bellem), John Ryan (Roger Torrey), Wallace Kayton (Edwin Truett Long), and Eddie Sommers, whose only credit is his story in this issue, so that's probably not his real name, either!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, November 1946

Almost every time I see a cover from LARIAT STORY, I think, "I want to write that story!" This one is no exception. Someone beat me to it, of course. Authors in this issue include Dan Cushman, Lee E. Wells, Rollin Brown, Ben Frank, Richard Brister, and John A. Saxon.