Maneaters: Killer Sharks in Men's Adventure Magazines -- Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, eds.

I've never been a big fan of the ocean. I like sitting on the beach and looking at it, but that's about the extent of the appeal for me. I'm as big a landlubber as you're going to find. And the stories in the latest volume from the Men's Adventure Library Journal do a good job of explaining why I feel this way: there are things out there under the waves. Dangerous things.

Like all the books from editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, MANEATERS: KILLER SHARKS IN MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES, is a beautiful production featuring dozens of great pieces of artwork, including covers and interior art from some of the best artists in the genre.

The stories, mostly fictional, are also highly entertaining. The situations vary widely, but all feature perilous, usually bloody encounters between humans and sharks. My favorites were "The Giant Shark That Guarded Rommel's Treasure" (FURY, January 1961) by Peter Fall (probably a pseudonym), which reads like an early Jack Higgins adventure novel in miniature; "E Mao Ariki" (ARGOSY, July 1968) a South Seas adventure yarn by the consistently excellent author Robert Edmond Alter; and "The Madman Who Ruled a Killer-Shark Pack" (MAN'S WORLD, January 1976) by Bret Harper, also likely a pseudonym, about a husband who finds a unique way of taking revenge on his cheating wife.

In addition, each story is followed by comments from a variety of shark experts, explaining what the author got right, got wrong, or made up entirely. These commentaries are informative and a lot of fun.

Overall, MANEATERS is a great collection. Reading it isn't going to make me more likely to go in the water--just the opposite, in fact--but I had a fine time with it anyway. You know, it would be a pretty good book to read while sitting on the beach. Well up on the beach, away from the water . . .

Master of Mystery: The Rise of the Shadow - Will Murray

This is the book that prompted me to read a Shadow novel, as I mentioned a few days ago. Will Murray has written a great deal about the character over the years, and MASTER OF MYSTERY: THE RISE OF THE SHADOW collects some of the best of it, including some updated material. Two lengthy interviews with Walter B. Gibson, a history of The Shadow radio show, interviews with Theodore Tinsley, who ghosted more than two dozen of the novels, John Nanovic, who edited the series for ten years, and Graves Gladney, one of the best known cover artists for the pulp. That’s a wealth of great Shadow-related material right there. Murray rounds out the volume with articles about illustrator Edd Cartier, Gibson’s involvement with the world of magic, and The Shadow’s influence on the creation of The Batman. I’d read some of this before but had a great time reading it again. MASTER OF MYSTERY: THE RISE OF THE SHADOW is not only informative but very entertaining, and I give it a very high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, November 1945

If not for the fact that this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES was published in 1945, I'd say the blonde in this cover by Albert Drake looks like Marilyn Monroe. The authors inside are an odd mix, the best known of them remembered mostly for things other than mysteries. Emil Petaja was a science fiction author, Joe Archibald made his name with aviation stories, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner) is on hand with a rare non-Western, and Glenn Low, despite writing quite a few Western and detective yarns for the pulps, achieved his greatest success as an author of soft-core sleaze novels in the Fifties and Sixties. If you want to check it out for yourself, the whole issue is available to read on-line.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, March 1944

Now there's a cover with some punch to it! I'm not sure of the artist, but I think it may be Robert Stanley. The biggest names inside this issue are Wayne D. Overholser, Joseph Chadwick, C. William Harrison, and Ralph Berard, who was really Victor H. White. The authors rounding out the Table of Contents are Cliff Bisbee, Ralph Yergen, Le Roy Boyd, Melvin W. Holt, and James P. Webb, prolific but little-remembered pulpsters. As usual with a Western pulp from Popular Publications, there are some great story titles, including "Guardian of Satan's Range", "Gun-Prodigal's Homecoming", and my favorite "There's Hell in Thunder Valley!" I think I'm going to have to steal that and use it as a line of dialogue in a book.

Forgotten Books: The Black Falcon - Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson)

I was in the mood to read a Shadow novel, so I went for one of the early ones, “The Black Falcon”, from the February 1, 1934 issue of the iconic pulp. As the story opens, the mastermind who calls himself The Black Falcon has opened his campaign of crime already. He has kidnapped a wealthy banker, and plans are underway to kidnap another of New York City’s wealthy socialites. The Black Falcon is so arrogant that he informs Police Commissioner Ralph Weston of his plans and includes a dyed-black falcon feather with his missive.

But unknown to The Black Falcon, The Shadow is already on his trail, and even though the crime boss may pull off another kidnapping and murder or two, we know that eventually justice, in the form of The Shadow, will catch up to him.

Like many of the early Shadow novels, “The Black Falcon” has a fairly mundane crime plot at its heart. The true identity of the masked mastermind calling himself The Black Falcon is so obvious that author Walter B. Gibson doesn’t even try to maintain that mystery past the middle of the book, revealing that secret and explaining everything else about the plot in a rather awkward conversation between The Black Falcon and his chief henchman that serves as an info-dump for the reader.

However, I don’t think many readers then or now enjoy the Shadow novels solely because of the mystery angles. It seems to me that the two primary elements in the series’ appeal are action and atmosphere, and Gibson delivers on those quite well in “The Black Falcon”. There are several scenes where The Shadow appears unexpectedly, and Gibson always does a great job on those. The same is true of the shootouts between The Shadow and various hordes of gangsters. The bullets really fly in those, and I always enjoy them.

“The Black Falcon” is notable for a couple of other reasons: the actual Lamont Cranston makes one of his infrequent appearances and plays a role in the plot; and The Shadow reveals his true face to The Black Falcon, who is so horrified and stunned that for a vital few moments he falls apart like the narrator of an H.P. Lovecraft story. This story takes place well before The Shadow’s true identity was revealed to be that of aviator Kent Allard. The consensus among Shadow scholars is that Allard’s face was hideously scarred during World War I and still displayed those scars during the early days of his crusade against crime, but later plastic surgery repaired the damage. That seems plenty feasible to me.

While “The Black Falcon” isn’t in the top rank of Shadow novels as far as I’m concerned, I had a great time reading it. I enjoy Gibson’s style, I like The Shadow’s agents (Harry Vincent appears in this one), and the action scenes are very effective. If you’re a Shadow fan, it’s well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, February 13, 1937

Since it's August and hot, how about a nice snowy Mountie cover? Here's one on this issue of ARGOSY, courtesy of artist V.E. Pyles. Inside is the usual all-star lineup of authors often found in ARGOSY: H. Bedford-Jones, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Roscoe, Donald Barr Chidsey, Bennett Foster, and Frank Richardson Pierce. That featured serial, "The Redcoat Renegade" (good title), is by an author I'm not familiar with, Patrick Lee. The Fictionmags Index credits him with only five stories and doesn't mention the name being a pseudonym. If anyone has any further information about him, I'd be glad to see it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, May 1940

Many of the usual suspects are on hand for this issue of SPICY WESTERN STORIES. The cover is by H.J. Ward. Inside are stories by Laurence Donovan (twice, once under his own name and once as Larry Dunn), Edwin Truett Long (also twice, as Luke Terry and Dale Boyd), James P. Olsen as James A. Lawson, and a couple of little-known authors who might or might not have been pseudonyms or house-names, George Vail and Carson West.

Forgotten Books: The Barbed Wire Noose - Harold Adams

(This post originally appeared in slightly different form on August 24, 2007.)

This is a Depression-era mystery set in the small town of Corden, South Dakota, featuring ne’er-do-well detective Carl Wilcox. This time around, while continuing to help his parents run the hotel they own, Carl is also called on to temporarily replace the town’s one-man police force when the local cop falls sick. Naturally a murder coincides with this development, as one of the town’s more enigmatic citizens is hanged with a length of barbed wire. This results in several relatives and associates of the murdered man showing up in Corden, and one of them winds up dead, too. Throw in a blizzard on top of these crimes, and Carl has his hands full sorting everything out.

That’s one of the drawbacks in this book: the plot is pretty complicated, and while Carl eventually uncovers the murderer, I’m not sure everything really hangs together. There are some continuity glitches, too, as a character changes hair color not once but twice, and the timing of a mysterious death in the past is given as five years earlier in one reference and ten years in another. Whether those are minor quibbles or major problems pretty much depends on the reader, I suppose. They bothered me, but I still enjoyed the book quite a bit. Adams has a wonderful way with characters and dialogue, and I love the dry wit with which Carl narrates these books, as well as the convincing but not overdone sense of time and place to be found in them. I’m sure I’ll read more entries in this series, not right away, but fairly soon.

UPDATE: I don't think I ever did read any more. I had a hard time finding the next book in the series and wound up forgetting about it. Maybe I should hunt it up now.

Five Decembers - James Kestrel

FIVE DECEMBERS is an epic, ambitious novel that combines several genres and does so with impressive skill. First and foremost, it’s a hardboiled mystery yarn, and one of the best that I’ve read in years. Protagonist Tom McGrady is a Honolulu police detective who catches a gruesome double murder case in late November, 1941. A young man and woman have been killed, and one of them has a connection to a high-ranking naval officer, so the pressure is on McGrady to solve the case and catch the murderer. That investigation takes him west from Hawaii, to Wake Island and on to Hong Kong, on the trail of a clever, absolutely ruthless killer.

But yeah, I’m sure you noticed the date up there. December 7, 1941 is not a good time to be in the Far East chasing a murderer. And at that point in the story, FIVE DECEMBERS becomes a war novel, depicting with intensity and power the early days of World War II as Tom McGrady is swept up in the chaos. As time passes, however, FIVE DECEMBERS evolves into a love story, as well, and it’s a poignant and effective one.

There’s still a murder to be solved, however, and a killer to be caught, and Tom McGrady never loses sight of that as he’s determined to finish the job, whatever it may cost him. So for its final third, this novel turns back into a hardboiled thriller, with great action scenes, plot twist after plot twist, and a very satisfactory climax.

James Kestrel is a pseudonym for an author who has written several other critically acclaimed mystery novels. In FIVE DECEMBERS, he’s produced a potential classic. It’s the best book I’ve read this year and one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Great writing, characters, and plot. I give it my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Book Magazine, Fall 1948

I don't care much for falling covers. They give me the creeps. But I'll admit, this one by Rudolph Belarski is pretty effective. And there's an excellent group of writers in this issue of MYSTERY BOOK MAGAZINE, too: Fredric Brown, Patrick Quentin, Helen Reilly, Norman A. Daniels, Robert C. Dennis, and house-name Robert Wallace, who, if I had to guess, in this instance was probably Daniels, as well.