Forgotten Small Town Sheriffs: The Clue of the Runaway Blonde/The Clue of the Hungry Horse - Erle Stanley Gardner

During the mid-to-late Forties, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote three short novels about Sheriff Bill Eldon, whose bailiwick is the small California city of Rockville. These stories originally appeared in the slick magazine THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. The first two, "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" and "The Clue of the Hungry Horse", were collected in a volume entitled TWO CLUES and then later reprinted in paperback. The third and final story in the series, "The Clue of the Screaming Woman", has been reprinted only in an Ellery Queen anthology, as far as I can determine.

Sheriff Bill Eldon is getting on in age (he's 70) and has been in office for a long time. He has some political enemies in the county, including the district attorney and other prominent citizens of Rockville, who would like to ease him out of his job and make a younger man sheriff. Their candidate is Undersheriff George Quinlan, and it's pretty obvious they believe Quinlan will be more easily controlled than Eldon, who's pretty set in his ways. Eldon doesn't know much about scientific criminal investigation, but he's a keen observer of human nature and relies on that to solve crimes.

In "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde", he's confronted with what seems like an impossible murder. A young woman has been stabbed to death, and her body is discovered in the middle of a freshly plowed field with no footprints around her. Eldon has to figure out not only who killed her but how her body got there and how the murderer got away without leaving any prints. That investigation is complicated by the above-mentioned political enemies, domestic turmoil in George Quinlan's family, the arrival of an arrogant "consulting criminologist" brought in by the district attorney, and a visit from Eldon's meddling, acid-tongued sister-in-law. Throw in evidence tampering, young love, and a secret that goes back into the past. Eldon shrewdly deals with all of it before coming up with a logical, fairly clued solution that proves he was one step ahead of the other characters and two steps ahead of the reader all along.

"The Clue of the Hungry Horse" finds Eldon investigating the death of a mysterious young woman who appears to have been kicked fatally by a horse. Of course we know it's not going to turn out to be an accident at all, but murder. Eldon is still under pressure from his political enemies, and this time he has a rich businessman from Los Angeles against him, too. There's a romantic triangle to sort out, too, along with planted evidence and a situation that makes it look very much like Eldon helped a suspected murderer to escape. But once again he gets to the bottom of everything against seemingly insurmountable odds. I don't think the solution to this one hangs together quite as well as in the other story, but it's still a good solid puzzle mystery.

I really enjoyed these two yarns, and one of the biggest reasons I did is Gardner's simple, straight-ahead prose. He's a little more descriptive in these than he is in most of the Perry Mason novels, but still, no one's ever going to accuse him of being a fancy writer. But man, can he tell a story. Sometimes that's just what you want. Now I have to hunt up that third Bill Eldon novella!

In a Flash: Up From the Deep - David L. Johnston

Six months after a catastrophic solar flare cracks the sky and bathes Earth in high radiation, killing much of the population and destroying most of humanity’s technology, the starving crew of the USS Colorado, a fleet ballistic missile submarine, is forced to surface and send a party ashore to forage for food. But instead of food, the sailors find a town in shambles, home after home filled with death, disease, high radiation, and bands of evil, violent men. Instead of food, the sailors discover the last thing they thought they would find—forbidden love.

Struggling with his Christian values and his desire to obey Navy regulations about fraternizing, Walter Jacks is blindsided by his own heart when he realizes he is falling deeply in love with smart and extraordinarily beautiful Seaman Sharon Parkers. The shore party’s mission, and Jacks’s grasp of reality, are further complicated when they find a mysterious young girl amoung the ruins—an adorable child with astonishing supernatural abilities.

While fighting to protect his shipmates, as well as his spiritual survival, in a dying world, Jacks is forced to face the question: Is the Bible true? If God’s Word is true, then where in the prophesy does His reality appear?

IN A FLASH: UP FROM THE DEEP is a riveting post-apocalyptic military thriller, the first in a series of truly epic scope from acclaimed author David L. Johnston.

Full disclosure: I edited this novel, Livia published it, and the author is her cousin. But you know how I love a book with a distinctive voice, and this one sure has it. A credible post-apocalyptic scenario, accurate military background, tons of gritty, well-written firefights, very human characters, a little bit of sex, and thought-provoking theological discussions. Where else are you going to find all that? Plus there's enough groundwork laid to indicate that this is just the beginning of a much bigger story, and I'm eager to read the sequels. So yes, I'm involved with this one professionally, but it's also still one of the best books I've read so far this year.

Overlooked Movies: Flashback (1990)

Livia's on a Netflix quest to find comedies we haven't seen, and this is one of 'em. I'm not sure how we missed it back in 1990, when we watched almost everything that came out, but it was new to us and fairly enjoyable.

Dennis Hopper plays a Sixties radical who's been on the run from the law for twenty years. When he's finally arrested, he's turned over to a young FBI agent (Kiefer Sutherland, looking like he's about fifteen years old and playing dress-up in his dad's suit) for transport from San Francisco to Spokane to stand trial. Complications and hijinks ensue, unlikely friendships are formed, secrets are revealed, and yes, everybody learns lessons. Along the way there are some decent action scenes, a good supporting cast including Carol Kane, Michael McKean, and Paul Dooley, and a good soundtrack of Sixties music. Oh, and the subtle and not-so-subtle EASY RIDER jokes, can't forget them. (I actually like EASY RIDER quite a bit, if only for the fact that it inspired those iconic issues of GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams.) Anyway, FLASHBACK is a decent action/buddy/road comedy and I had an okay time watching it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super Science Stories, March 1950

Another fine Norman Saunders cover graces this issue of SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. Inside are stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Z. Gallun, Robert Arthur, and Neil R. Jones. I've read and enjoyed stories by all of them, although I haven't read much by van Vogt, Gallun, or Jones. You don't hear that much about Popular Publications' SF pulps, but this looks like a very good issue. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Magazine, September 1936

Another excellent Tom Lovell cover featuring an angry, gun-totin' redhead on this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN MAGAZINE. And those story titles! "Wagon Train of the Damned". "A Gringo Rides to Hell". I want to read those right now. (If I actually owned this issue, I would.) A great line-up of authors, too: Luke Short, Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Cliff Farrell, and John. G. Pearsol. Looks like a great issue all the way around. 

Forgotten Books: Pulp Fiction - Robert Turner

I know Robert Turner's name as the author of scores of stories (mostly mysteries) for the pulps and digests from the Forties through the Seventies. He also wrote a couple of early Ace Double mystery novels, THE TOBACCO AUCTION MURDERS and THE GIRL IN THE COP'S POCKET, copies of which I used to have but never read. He was also an editor and literary agent at various times in his career.

So when I came across a Kindle edition of this little book of Turner's from 1948, I grabbed it. I'm always interested in reading about the pulps specifically and writing in general, and given Turner's career (which was really just getting started good at this point), he knew what he was talking about.

His main point is that rules don't matter as much in writing as making your stories entertaining, and you entertain your readers by making them feel an emotional response. After establishing that, Turner discusses how to make plot, characterization, setting, and dialogue all serve that end. PULP FICTION is not a dry how-to book, though. Turner gets his arguments across in a fast, breezy, often funny way, just like his fiction. This is a very entertaining book, as well as educational.

There's also a section about how the editorial process of pulp magazines worked. Not really anything there I didn't already know, but again, Turner tells it in a light-hearted fashion that easily kept me reading.

Some of the advice in PULP FICTION would be considered old-fashioned and not the way you'd want to do things today. I grew up reading the pulps and what are now considered vintage paperbacks (they were just paperbacks then), many of which were either reprints from the pulps or written by pulp authors who moved into paperbacks when their original market dried up. So I'm pretty much in agreement with most of what Turner has to say. I've always aimed to be more of an entertaining storyteller than anything else. I like to think that I've never stopped learning, so I read this book with great interest and believe I picked up some useful things. I also had a great time reading it. Which is kind of the point, isn't it?

The Robert Bloch Centennial: Shooting Star/Spiderweb

(The material in this post originally appeared in somewhat different form on April 24, 2008 and May 27, 2008.)

I love the old Ace Doubles. The Westerns and the science fiction doubles were fairly common in this area when I was a kid, and I read a bunch of them. But for some reason I never saw any of the mystery doubles until 1981, when I came across a couple of shelves of them in a junk store. Needless to say, I grabbed them all.

There have been efforts to revive the Ace double novel format over the years, but the Hard Case Crime release of Robert Bloch’s SHOOTING STAR and SPIDERWEB may be the most successful yet. Of course, both of these novels were actually first published as Ace Doubles, although not back to back with each other.

The narrator of SHOOTING STAR is Mark Clayburn, a Hollywood literary agent/private eye. I don’t think I’ve ever come across that particular combination before, and it makes Clayburn different from other private eyes who specialize in cases involving the movie industry, such as W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner. Bloch’s familiarity with the pulp magazine markets gives this element of the novel a welcome touch of realism. There’s also a little tuckerizing going on, for example an undertaker named Hamilton Brackett. And the whole thing is told in an appealingly breezy, fast-moving style.

Unfortunately the plot, which involves Clayburn trying to find out who murdered a cowboy movie star so that the producer who hires him can sell the dead star’s old movies to television (shades of Hopalong Cassidy), never develops into anything more than a very generic private eye plot. I kept waiting for Bloch to come up with a twist on a par with making his hero a literary agent as well as a detective, but that never happens. The writing is smooth and Mark Clayburn is a likable character, but the other characters never came alive for me. SHOOTING STAR isn’t a bad book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it’s certainly a minor entry among Bloch’s novels.

SPIDERWEB is the other half of the Robert Bloch double from Hard Case Crime. I enjoyed SHOOTING STAR, but SPIDERWEB is a darker, better book, I think.

The narrator is Eddie Haines, a radio announcer from the Midwest who heads to Hollywood in the early Fifties with the intention of being a success as a TV show producer, or an announcer if he can’t sell his pitch for a TV series. Of course, neither of those goals works out, and he’s on the verge of killing himself in despair when he meets Professor Otto Hermann, a “psychological consultant” to the movie community who’s actually a swindler and conman. Hermann recruits Eddie to join his group of henchmen and gives him a new identity as the author of a successful self-help book. Eddie realizes that the professor is a crook and that he’s turning into a crook himself, but everything still goes along fine until the professor decides to target a state senator for blackmail and use the senator’s niece as part of the plot. It just so happens that Eddie has fallen in love with the niece . . .

In noirish fashion, things get worse from there, as Eddie tries to do the right thing but it won’t quite seem to work out. Bloch keeps the story perking right along, but under the smooth prose and snappy patter is a pretty bleak look at Southern California and gullible humanity itself. SPIDERWEB is a fine novel, and Hard Case Crime has done a good thing by bringing it back into print.

Overlooked Movies: Barely Lethal (2015)

I'd never heard of this movie that came out a couple of years ago until Livia came across it while looking for comedies. The premise is pretty ridiculous: a top-secret, quasi-governmental program takes orphans and trains them from childhood to be assassins and secret agents. One of these agents, a teenage girl played by Hailee Steinfeld, fakes her own death during a mission to get out of the program, adopts a new identity as a foreign exchange student, and enrolls in a suburban high school, only to find that it's tougher than the world of international espionage. In order to prepare for this, she approaches it like a mission and "gathers intel", which consists of watching a bunch of teen romantic comedy movies. Misunderstandings and hijinks ensue, until her past eventually catches up to her in the form of a vicious arms dealer (Jessica Alba) who wants to kill her.

So yeah, it's all pretty silly . . . but the movie plays it pretty straight, and if you buy into the premise, BARELY LETHAL is a lightweight but fairly entertaining little action comedy. We've watched a lot of teen romantic comedies over the years, and this movie does a pretty good job of having fun with the stereotypes. The cast, which includes Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark on GAME OF THRONES) as a rival agent and Samuel L. Jackson as the head of the training program, is okay. Not a great film, but I enjoyed watching it and stayed awake the whole time, which says something for it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Phantom Detective, June 1940

I've read reprints of quite a few Phantom Detective novels but have owned only a few issues of the actual pulp over the years. This is one of them, although I don't have a copy at the moment. I'm not sure who the actual author of "The Phantom Hits Murder Steel" is, either, but I recall it being a pretty good story. Other authors in this issue are Ted Coughlan and Ray Cummings. This series isn't as highly regarded as some, and it can be inconsistent because so many different writers contributed Phantom novels, but I enjoyed the ones I've read.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, August 22, 1936

The hat, the cowhide vest, and the pose of the cowboy on this cover all make me think of the great Yakima Canutt. I don't know who did the art, but I like it. Inside this issue of WESTERN STORY, Frank Richardson Pierce and Bennett Foster are the best-known authors. They're joined by James W. Routh, whose name I recognize from various issues of RANCH ROMANCES, Ray Humphreys, who wrote mostly humorous Westerns, and a few other authors whose names don't ring a bell at all.

UPDATE: According to Walker Martin, the artwork on this cover is by Walter Haskell Hinton. Thanks, Walker!