Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, May 1953

This is a pulp I own and read recently. That’s supposed to be a Sam Cherry cover, but it’s not one of his better ones, in my opinion. The scan is of my copy.

Roe Richmond is an author whose work I’ve sort of avoided over the years, because I really don’t care for the Jim Hatfield novels he wrote for TEXAS RANGERS under the Jackson Cole house-name. Those stories are well-written, but Richmond made (to me) a fatal mistake in the way he approached the character, giving a character known as the Lone Wolf a whole crew of annoying sidekicks. However, I may have been too quick to brush aside the rest of his output. He wrote the lead novella in this issue of EXCITING WESTERN, and I thought it was excellent. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is the story of an outlaw gang seeking to hide out in a desolate section of northern Arizona between the Grand Canyon and the Utah border. I’ve been in this area, and desolate doesn’t even begin to describe it. The gang consists of six owlhoots and the beautiful woman who’s with one of them. Well, you know with a setup like that, a lot of tension is going to develop. Richmond adds a nice twist, making the protagonist of the story a man who has struggled with alcohol and wound up on the outlaw trail only because of his fondness for booze. This is a dark, hardboiled yarn that succeeds in making several of the characters sympathetic despite their deep flaws, and it has a very effective ending after a number of brutal action scenes. “Six Guns—Six Graves” is a top-notch tale that has me wanting to read more of Roe Richmond’s work. By the way, the same thing happened with Joseph Chadwick. I didn’t like his Jim Hatfield novels, but the stand-alones by him that I’ve read have been consistently good. I guess some authors just aren’t at their best with series work.

George H. Roulston is a name I don’t recall encountering, which isn’t a surprise since he only published half a dozen stories in the mid-Fifties. His short story in this issue, “Mission for a Stranger”, is an okay yarn about a stranger who shows up on a ranch where something mysterious and possibly sinister is going on. Not bad, but it kind of limps to an ending.

I’ve always thought Cy Kees had to be a pseudonym, but if it is, I’ve never seen that confirmed. He was fairly prolific all through the Fifties, publishing 70 or 80 stories in various Western pulps during that decade. His story “Trouble Range” is a mildly humorous tale about a grub line rider who ties a knot in a cow’s tail and the resulting ruckus with the cow’s owner. This is a very slight story, entertaining but forgettable.

Tom Roan was a prolific Western pulp author from the mid-Twenties on through the Thirties and Forties, with his stories often featured on the cover of various pulp magazines, most of them from Popular Publications. By the Fifties, his sales were dwindling and most of his work was appearing in Thrilling Group pulps. His novelette in this issue, “The Man From Calico Creek”, reflects that, as it seems like a bit of a throwback to Western pulp yarns of an earlier day with its characters such as the good-guy outlaw, the Durango Kid; hard-fighting sheriff Trigger Dan Ringo; and despicable villain Two-Gun Doc Dalton. It’s the story of an outlaw gang on the run (similar to Roe Richmond’s novella that leads off the issue), but is told in a much more old-fashioned style. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since I love the Western pulps from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, too. I’ve never been a big fan of Roan’s work but I generally enjoy it. That’s true here, as “The Man From Calico Creek” is fun to read, but like the Cy Kees story that immediately precedes it, quite forgettable.

“The Holy Freeze” is a short-short by Bob and Jan Young, a husband-and-wife writing team (I assume) who contributed fairly often to the Western pulps from the late Forties on through the Fifties, although I don’t recall encountering their work before now. This story is a Northern, a tale about the clash between a surly miner and a preacher in the Klondike. I don’t know if the gimmick around which the plot resolution centers is actually feasible, but it makes for a nice little story anyway.

Floyd Day is another author I hadn’t encountered before, not surprising since there are only three stories listed under that name in the Fictionmags Index. “Sodbuster’s Gold” in this issue is a novelette about a prospector with dreams of gold finding another sort of treasure instead. It’s a gentle, poignant story that wouldn’t have been out of place in RANCH ROMANCES. No action to speak of, but it’s very well-written and I enjoyed it.

Seth Ranger was the most common pseudonym of Frank Richardson Pierce, who usually wrote under his own name. I’ve found his work under both names to be consistently good, but “Red Trail”, published as by Ranger in this issue, is an animal story, this time about a bull moose. I didn’t mind animal stories when I was a kid—I read a lot of dog books by Jim Kjelgaard and horse books by Walter Farley—but I have a hard time with them now. The writing is fine in this one, as you’d expect from Pierce, but I couldn’t work up much interest in it and didn’t finish it.

This issue of EXCITING WESTERN wraps up with the novelette “Renegades’ Rendezvous” by Al Storm, who was really Alvin N. Scism. He wrote mostly Westerns but did a few detective and jungle yarns as well, his work appearing in a number of different pulps during the Forties and Fifties. This one is a pretty good yarn about an amoral hired gun who shows up in the town of Broken Spur thinking that he’s going to sign on as a gun-wolf for the guy who’s trying to take over the town. When he gets there, though, he discovers that he has a good reason to oppose the man he thought would be his boss, instead. As it turns out, the protagonist’s brother is the local lawman, and there’s a good-looking girl involved, too. This is a smooth, competent story, pretty hardboiled in places, and while it’s predictable I definitely found it entertaining.

Overall, “exciting” may be stretching it as a description of this pulp. The Roe Richmond novella is excellent and will prompt me to seek out more stories by Richmond. The novelettes by Floyd Day and Al Storm are good, most of the other stories okay but utterly unmemorable. Still, as with every Western pulp, I’m glad I read it, because there’s always a gem or two.

Forgotten Books: My Old Man's Badge - Ferguson Findley (Charles Frey)

Somehow I never came across this vintage paperback with its great cover by Sam Cherry, and I never heard of the author, Ferguson Findley (whose real name was Charles Frey). But Stark House will soon be reprinting it as part of the excellent Black Gat line, and I’m glad because MY OLD MAN’S BADGE turns out to be a very good novel.

Johnny Malone is a young cop in New York City whose father was also a cop. Fifteen years before this book opens, the elder Malone was murdered, and the killer was never caught. That failure of justice has eaten away at Johnny ever since. Now, after all those years, a new clue to the murderer has turned up, and Johnny, newly promoted to detective, goes undercover to infiltrate a drug smuggling and peddling ring that has some connection to the man who killed his father.

The plot in this novel is pretty straightforward, which makes it work more as a procedural and a suspense novel than an actual mystery. What elevates it is Findley’s writing, which is sharp and tough and observant. He does a great job of depicting the sleazy lower rungs of New York City society and vividly captures the squalidness of the dope ring Johnny Malone becomes part of, as well as its customers. The pace never slows down much, and Findley pulls off the neat trick of using other points of view in a book that’s primarily written in first person. He really had me flipping the pages when he got toward the end.

This was Findley/Frey’s first novel, and he wrote only a handful more after it was published in 1950 before becoming an executive with Standard Oil and evidently never writing another word. It kind of baffles me how somebody with his obvious skill could just turn his back on writing like that, but it happens from time to time. MY OLD MAN’S BADGE was published originally in hardback by Duell Sloan & Pearce, reprinted in paperback by Popular Library, and then reprinted again with a different title by Monarch. The Black Gat edition will be out soon, if it’s not already, and I highly recommend it.

Now, about that cover . . . Sam Cherry did scores of covers for pulps in the Thrilling Group, which was owned by Ned Pines, who also owned Popular Library. As a result, a lot of those pulp covers were reused as paperback covers, but Cherry also did some as originals for Popular Library. This one looks like it could have been on one of the detective pulps, but if that’s the case, I haven’t been able to find it. As always, any information on that is more than welcome. But I think it’s an original, since it does match one of the scenes in the book. And it’s a good one, that’s for sure.

Now Available: Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails - Lawrence Block

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career. His instructional books for writers are leaders in the field, and his self-described pedestrian  memoir, Step By Step, has found a loyal audience in the running and racewalking community.

Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn’s Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives.

Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails is what he’s got left over.

The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, criss-crossing  the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every “village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo.” Other travel tales share space with a remembrance of his mother, odes to New York, a disquisition on pen names and book tours, and, well, no end of bent nails not worth straightening. Where else will you find “Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon,” an assessment of that compelling writer from a numismatic standpoint? Where else can you read about Block’s collection of old subway cars?

(I'll be reading and reviewing this one soon, but really, how can you go wrong with anything by Lawrence Block? There'll be a limited edition from Subterranean Press later on, but the e-book and regular print editions are out now.)

Overlooked Movies: The Maverick Queen (1956)

THE MAVERICK QUEEN is one of those Western movies that played on TV over and over again when I was growing up, but for some reason I never watched it until now, quite possibly because when I was a kid the pairing of Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan as the leads wouldn’t have appealed to me. (More about that later.) But it’s based on a novel by Zane Grey and I like Grey’s work when I’m in the right mood, so I figured why not give it a try?

Stanwyck plays Kit Banion (good character name), who owns a saloon but is also part of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw band headed up by Butch Cassidy. Jeff Younger (Sullivan), a cousin to the notorious Younger Brothers who’s recently been released from prison, drifts into town, falls for Kit, who has just broken up with the brutal Sundance (Scott Brady), and works his way into the gang, eventually taking part in a train robbery with them. But there’s a twist (not a particularly surprising one) that threatens to keep Kit and Jeff apart as well as maybe winding up with both of them dead.

I can only give THE MAVERICK QUEEN a qualified recommendation as it’s more of a series of missed opportunities than it is a movie. (Minor spoilers ahead.) Since it was produced by Republic Pictures and the opening credits say the special effects are by Howard and Theodore Lydecker, as soon as I saw that I thought, “Hey, at least there’ll be some spectacular minature work.” Well, no. When the outlaws set out to rob the train, I thought, “That train’s going over a cliff.” Nope. There’s a little bit of stunt work (you know me, I like the bit where guys run along the top of trains), but that’s it. Why bring the Lydecker brothers onto a production if you’re not going to give them anything to do? The stunt work is pretty good, with whoever’s doubling Stanwyck and Brady doing a nice tackle from horseback, followed by a rolling fight down a hill.

What ultimately brings THE MAVERICK QUEEN undone, though, is the casting. The supporting cast is good, with Emile Meyer, Wallace Ford, Walter Sande, John Doucette, and Jim Davis on hand, and Scott Brady is top-notch in his interpretation of the Sundance Kid that’s miles and miles away from Robert Redford’s. (This movie bears no resemblance to either BUTCH CASSIDAY AND THE SUNDANCE KID or the actual history behind the story.) The leads are the problem. I like Barbara Stanwyck, but it seemed like they did everything they could in this picture to make her unattractive. Still, she tries hard and it’s almost impossible not to like her. But whoever decided to cast Barry Sullivan as the stalwart hero was really off the mark. Sullivan’s a fine villain/character actor and he might work as a leading man in some movies, but not this one. I realize I’m supposed to be talking about the movie that is, not the movie I wish it was, but dang, I kept thinking how much more entertaining this film would have been with, say, Virginia Mayo and Randolph Scott as the leads.

But that’s just me, and misgivings aside, I’m glad I finally watched THE MAVERICK QUEEN.

Two Shades of Crazy - Christine Matthews

The private eye novel is my favorite type of mystery yarn and has been ever since I discovered Michael Shayne, Donald Lam, and Bertha Cool at the bookmobile, followed fairly soon after by the Continental Op, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Shell Scott. Thankfully, there are still quite a few writers who love private eye novels, too, and continue to write them.

Case in point, a brand new novel from Christine Matthews, who has garnered a lot of readers and critical acclaim for her mysteries, thrillers, horror, and Western tales. TWO SHADES OF CRAZY is set in the Southwest, in Laughlin and Las Vegas, Nevada, and Flagstaff, Arizona, and Matthews does a fine job of capturing the setting.

Gloria Watson is a PI from Chicago who has relocated to Laughlin and works out of an office in her apartment, strictly a one-woman outfit with no secretary or assistants. She does mostly background checks and security work, but a more high-profile case comes her way when a potential client hires her to clear the name of a woman who has just been convicted of murdering her lover. It seems that Gloria’s client was obsessed with the woman, although he had no romantic relationship with her, and was outside the house where the murder took place, watching her. He didn’t see the murderer himself, but he knows she didn’t fire the fatal shots.

Sensing that something is off about her client, Gloria investigates him as much as she does the murder, and she uncovers surprising information about him that makes her debate whether she even wants to take the case. But then he dies under suspicious circumstances as well, and she feels duty-bound to get to the truth about a case that turns quite complex for one where a defendant has already been tried and convicted. Not too surprisingly, Gloria herself soon becomes the target of a killer . . .

TWO SHADES OF CRAZY is a top-notch tale of deception and tangled emotions. Instead of making Gloria Watson a first-person narrator, Matthews decides to tell her story in third person, giving Gloria a slight sense of coolness and separation from the reader that works very well while still allowing her to be a sympathetic and likable protagonist. At times the twists and turns of the plot reminded me of something that Perry Mason or Cool and Lam would try to untangle, and that’s a good thing. All in all, TWO SHADES OF CRAZY is an excellent debut in what I hope will be a continuing series. I really enjoyed it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, September 1935

I had to look at this BLUE BOOK cover by the great Herbert Morton Stoops for a while before I figured out what was going on, because at first I thought the guy in the center at the bottom of the picture, in the middle of all these knights in armor, was firing a flintlock rifle. Well, that could make for an interesting story, I figured. But then I realized it's actually a crossbow he's shooting. Still a fine cover. And inside is the usual outstanding line-up of authors, including BLUE BOOK stalwarts H. Bedford-Jones (with a story in his Arms and Men series . . . and hey, it's called "The Conquering Crossbow" . . . well, that explains everything), William J. Makin with a Red Wolf of Arabia story, and Robert R. Mill with the first story in his Shock Troops of Justice series (I have the reprints of both those series published by Black Dog Books but haven't read them yet). Also on hand are the classic Western author Willliam MacLeod Raine, Leland Jamieson, William J. Makin again with his other series featuring gypsy sleuth Isaac Heron, Sidney Herschell Small, and William L. Chester with an installment of a Kioga of the Wilderness serial. That's a really impressive issue. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Top Western Fiction Annual, 1953

This is a reprint pulp, but what a fine bunch of authors behind that Sam Cherry cover: Leslie Scott writing as A. Leslie, Louis L'Amour writing as Jim Mayo, William L. Hopson, Joseph Chadwick, Larry A. Harris, Gladwell Richardson, and Ben Frank. Even if I'd read some of the stories before, I would have picked up this one if I had a spare quarter in my pocket.

Forgotten Books: Return from Cormoral - Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

The Spring 1949 issue of DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE was the second to feature a classic-style Doc novel in the old familiar pulp size that had been restored with the previous issue. “Return From Cormoral” features an excellent George Rozen cover that’s really evocative of Walter Baumhofer’s great covers during the series’ supersaga era. This tale starts out in intriguing fashion, as well: four scientists return to civilization in Miami after having been marooned for six months on a really remote island (the Cormoral of the title) when the scientific foundation that was sponsoring their expedition went belly-up and couldn’t retrieve them. As if that’s not intriguing enough, one of the scientists is the heir to a half-billion dollar fortune . . . and he’s returned with the ability to predict the future.

However, this ability isn’t one that the scientist particularly wants—in fact, it scares him to death—so he decides to contact Doc Savage to get to the bottom of it. This leads to a couple of attempts on Doc’s life in New York, which just makes him more curious and determined to get to the bottom of things (the crooks never seem to learn not to do that), and before you know it Doc is off to Miami to investigate while his aids, the ever-lovable Monk and Ham, try to track down some leads in New York.

There are more attempts on Doc’s life, some colorful chasing around Miami, and then some globetrotting adventure as Doc, the scientist with the dilemma, and the guy’s spunky girlfriend take off for the Great White North. (Some of you are probably humming an old Rush song right now. I know I am.)

In the end, the secret behind the whole thing is a little on the mundane side, as often happens not only in other Doc Savage novels, but in yarns featuring The Shadow and other pulp heroes as well. But usually, the fun is in the getting there, and with Lester Dent’s taut, fast-paced prose sprinkled with action and humor, “Return From Cormoral” is quite a bit of fun indeed. By 1949, too much time had probably passed for the series to ever quite recapture its former glories, but this one makes a valiant try and I really enjoyed it.

Which leaves me with just one more Doc Savage novel from the original series before I’ve read them all. I’ll be getting to it soon.

Overlooked Movies: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Any time a movie gets a critical drubbing and is a failure at the box office, it makes me at least a little interested in watching it. Much of the time, my taste runs counter to both the critics and the movie-going public at large, so I always figure there’s a chance I might like such movies.

Which brings us to VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, a science fiction movie based on a French comic book. Now, the last science fiction movie based on a French comic book that I watched may well have been BARBARELLA. But this one was written and directed by Luc Besson, whose work I usually enjoy, so that was another reason to be guardedly optimistic.

The movie quickly establishes that over the new few centuries, the international space station continues growing and becomes the hub of an intergalatic civilization until it’s too big to remain in Earth orbit. So rockets push it out into space and set it on a course where it encounters even more alien civilizations and becomes the center of a huge space empire, with beings from a thousand planets living on it and sharing their cultures (hence the title).

Valerian and his girlfriend Laureline work for this space empire as some sort of intergalactic secret agents. (There’s a lot of handwavium and glossing over of details in this movie.) Their current job is to recover a creature who’s the last survivor from a planet that was destroyed thirty years earlier, or in the early part of the movie, from our perspective. This assignment leads them to uncover a sinister conspiracy and a threat to the very existence of the City of a Thousand Planets. There’s a lot of running, jumping, fighting, shooting ray guns, and speeding around in various space ships. Oh, and a shape-shifting alien played by Rihanna.

It’ll probably come as no surprise that I liked this movie. With a lot of spectacular CGI, it’s beautiful to look at, it moves really fast, and it held my interest all the way through. Some of the SF concepts are interesting, if a little goofy and over the top. Most of the reviewers who hate it complained about the acting, and I’ll admit, the two leads are miscast. Dane DeHaan as Valerian and Cara Delevigne as Laureline both look like high school kids and don’t have much range. Delevigne is really good-looking but seems to have only two facial expressions, annoyed and really annoyed. This isn’t an acting showcase, though. It’s a movie based on fast action and mind-blowing concepts, and it delivers on those at least part of the time. And let’s face it, other than a young Jane Fonda stripping out of a spacesuit and the fact that the whole movie reeks of the Sixties, BARBARELLA doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, either. I’d say that VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is actually a better film.

Whether you’d think so or not is up to you, of course, but if you’ve been avoiding this movie because of the terrible reviews and because it bombed at the box office, you might want to give it a chance some evening when you don’t have anything else to do. I enjoyed it, and if it had spawned a series (fat chance now!), I’d have watched the sequels, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: South Sea Stories, February 1940

It's been cold and dank here, so what better antidote to that than a cover depicting a nice warm beach and a beautiful island babe? That guy over there in the bushes with a gun? Oh, don't pay any attention to him. I'm sure he doesn't mean any harm. And while you're lying there on the beach, you could read an issue of SOUTH SEA STORIES like this one, which features stories by David Wright O'Brien, S. Gordon Gurwit, Orlin Tremaine, L. Ron Hubbard, and Ziff-Davis house-names Alexander Blade and Peter Horn. That sounds to me like a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.