Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Romances, July 1931

WESTERN ROMANCES was Dell's answer to RANCH ROMANCES, and this somewhat awkward cover certainly looks like it could have come off an issue of RANCH ROMANCES from that era. I don't know the artist. I can't complain about the quality of the authors inside: L.P. Holmes, Leslie Scott (as A. Leslie), Frank Robertson, Lawrence A. Keating, Eric Howard, Wilton West, and a couple of forgotten pulpsters, John A. Chase and William Wills Bradford. I don't own this issue, but with Holmes, Scott, and Robertson inside, I would read it if I did.

The Shadowed Circle #5 - Steve Donoso, ed.

The fifth issue of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE is here, and as usual, this journal devoted to the iconic character The Shadow continues to be outstanding. First of all, I love the front cover by Joe Booth. It’s as good a Shadow painting as I’ve seen in a long time and perfectly captures the feeling of the pulp, right down to the wear and tear along the edges. Booth also provides a couple of pieces of interior art that are excellent, as well.

Editor/publisher Steve Donoso has put together a fine group of articles about The Shadow. Some highlights for me:

“Shadow—and Substance, Part 2” by Dick Myers continues his examination of The Shadow’s organization, how it’s put together, functions, and is paid for. This is fascinating stuff to a long-time fan. Myers’ article was written a number of years ago but is being published for the first time in THE SHADOWED CIRCLE.

“Walter Gibson’s Mysterious Shadow Sabbatical” by Will Murray takes a look at an unexplained gap in Walter B. Gibson’s prodigious output of Shadow novels. Murray knows as much or more about The Shadow and Walter Gibson as anyone alive today and always produces great articles.

Speaking of Murray, Steve Donoso’s review of his latest book, DARK AVENGER: THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE SHADOW, is top-notch and highlights the differences between this volume and the fondly remembered THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE that inspired it.

“Street & Smith’s World’s Finest” by M.J. Moran takes a look at the early novels featuring The Shadow and Doc Savage, focusing on their similarities and also their very distinct differences. Moran makes some interesting points that may run counter to the general impressions of long-time fans such as myself who have read extensively from all eras of the two series. But when you stop and think about it, he’s right.

In “The Shadow—Strange Creature in Black—The Comic Book Years: Part 2”, Todd D. Severin takes a look at some of The Shadow’s appearances in comic books that I actually remember this time around: the 1953 parody in MAD Magazine (I actually read this in a MAD paperback sometime in the early Sixties), the Archie Comics version (I bought some of these new and remember being unimpressed by them, even though I knew little or nothing of the character at that time), and the fantastic DC comics run in the Seventies by Denny O’Neil, Michael William Kaluta, and various other hands (I bought these new off the spinner rack as well and loved them, although like the change in artists from Kaluta to Frank Robbins was a real shock, an impression seemingly shared by most of the readers).

All the articles are good, but those are the ones that stood out most for me. As always, I sat down and read this new issue from cover to cover. I can’t imagine any fan of The Shadow not loving THE SHADOWED CIRCLE. I give it my highest recommendation. You can subscribe to it or buy back issues on the publisher’s website or pick up individual issues from Amazon. Next time around will be the first themed issue, devoted to The Shadow’s part-time agent Myra Reldon. I don’t know much about this character, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

Take Me As I Am - William H. Fielding (Darwin Teilhet)

The latest Black Gat Books reprint, TAKE ME AS I AM, was published originally by Gold Medal in 1952, so you know with that pedigree it’s almost certainly a good book. The author is Darwin Teilhet, who wrote it under the pseudonym William H. Fielding. I’d only vaguely heard of Teilhet and have never read anything else by him. The cover art is very familiar from having been used for fake books in countless memes, but it’s a classic image and fits this novel very well. I feel like I should know the artist, but I don’t.

As so many hardboiled and noir novels do, TAKE ME AS I AM starts with a crime. And it’s the proverbial humdinger, an armored car robbery that’s violent, fast-paced, and very effective. The crooks, led by a guy named Monk, get away with what’s supposed to be a million dollars. Unfortunately, when they pass off the loot to an accomplice, a beautiful blonde named Alma who’s supposed to deliver it to the gang’s leader, they find that it’s only a hundred thousand. Somebody’s double-crossing somebody. (To quote Steven Wright: “They offer you a penny for your thoughts, but then you have to put your two cents’ worth in . . . Somebody’s makin’ a penny.”)

Anyway, on her way to meet the big boss and hand over the hot money, Alma picks up a hitchhiker, a brawny 18-year-old guy named Bill Evans who’s got his own demons chasing him. As they travel west from Iowa (where the armored car stick-up took place) through Nebraska, odd things happen. Bill runs into a couple of other beautiful blondes, one of whom winds up dead and the other one almost meets the same fate. Coincidences and plot twists abound. Bill, who is actually a fairly bright guy but out of his depth, winds up in the hands of the bad guys but gets away. By now Alma wants the stolen dough for herself and doesn’t care what she has to do in order to keep it . . . or does she? Could she actually be falling for Bill?

Steve Lewis reviewed this novel several years ago on his great Mystery File website and compared it to the work of Cornell Woolrich. I can see that. Woolrich was from the one-damned-thing-after-another school of mystery writing, too, and that’s certainly an apt description of TAKE ME AS I AM. The plot twists pile up and take unexpected turns. The writing isn’t quite as smooth and compelling as Woolrich’s work, but it kept me turning the pages, that’s for sure. I really enjoyed TAKE ME AS I AM and galloped through the last quarter or so of it, unable to put it down until I’d finished. Great hardboiled storytelling and a great cover add up to a high recommendation from me. It’s available in both print and e-book editions.

The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies, Volume One, 1936-37 -- Lee Falk and Ray Moore

The local newspaper when I was growing up didn’t carry the comic strip THE PHANTOM, so I never knew anything about the character when I was a kid. MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, also created and written by Lee Falk, was in the Sunday paper for a while, but I didn’t know anything about the connection between the two strips and was never a Mandrake fan, anyway.

Over the years, as I learned more about comic strips, I was vaguely aware of THE PHANTOM but still hadn’t read any of the old strips. Then when I was in college, one day I went into Reader’s World, the little bookstore across the street from the campus and picked up an Avon paperback called THE STORY OF THE PHANTOM by Lee Falk, which had a nice cover by George Wilson. I knew by then that Falk created and wrote the comic strip, so it seemed like a good bet to learn more about the character.

I read that novel and loved it and wound up buying and reading all 15 books in the Avon series, which were written by Falk, Ron Goulart (as Frank S. Shawn), Basil Copper, Bruce Cassidy (as Carson Bingham), and Warren Shanahan (that may be a pseudonym, too, but if it is, I’m unaware of the actual author). Evidently, Falk actually wrote the novels attributed to him, which is a little unusual in a situation like that. Falk also wasn’t that pleased with the novels by the other authors, but I read ’em all and thoroughly enjoyed the series. I remember reading several of them while sitting on my parents’ front porch, and that was the right place for them.

So by now I knew the character, knew his back-story and some of his publication history, and as time went on I read some of the Phantom comic books (published by Charlton during that era?) and watched the Phantom movie serial with Tom Tyler playing the character.

In recent years, a publisher called Hermes Press has reprinted those novels originally published by Avon, and not only that, they’ve gone back to the character’s origins and reprinted the comic strip. I recently read the first volume, THE PHANTOM: THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES, VOLUME ONE: 1936-37. The first three storylines from the comic strip are included: “The Singh Brotherhood”, “The Sky Band”, and “The Diamond Hunters”.

“The Singh Brotherhood” takes a few days to introduce readers to The Phantom, but Diana Palmer, who eventually becomes the love of his life, appears right away, in the very first strip. She’s an adventuress and explorer on her way back to New York by ship with a load of valuable ambergris she’s discovered. What’s more, she’s located a veritable mother lode of ambergris on the ocean floor, the legendary graveyard of the whales. (Was Falk influenced by Tarzan movies where the bad guys always wanted to find the elephants’ graveyard? Who knows?) Mobsters target the ship, but The Phantom shows up and foils their plans. Turns out the mobsters were actually working for the evil Prince Achmed, who is part of the Singh Brotherhood, a fraternity of pirates that has raided and pillaged for hundreds of years.

This first long storyline finds The Phantom rescuing Diana numerous times, putting the kibosh on various Singh Brotherhood plans, and along the way telling Diana his origin story. The short version (most of you already know this): pirates marooned one of The Phantom’s ancestors on the island nation of Bengalla. (Wait, is it an island or somewhere on the South Asian mainland? I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.) The ancestor put on a mask and a costume and battled pirates as The Phantom and swore an oath that his descendants would do the same. I know there’s a timeline somewhere and The Phantom of the 1930s is the 14^th or 15^th Phantom (or something like that). Because it seems that The Phantom never dies, the natives from the jungles of Bengalla call him The Ghost Who Walks. He has a wolf named Devil as his sidekick.

Anyway, eventually The Phantom invades the secret hideout of the Singh Brotherhood and it winds up blowing up real good. But everything leads neatly into the second storyline, featuring a band of female air pirates called the Sky Band.

This storyline also involves The Phantom locating and infiltrating the hidden headquarters of the enemy. In some ways it’s a redo of the first story as The Phantom is captured and escapes, but it’s complicated by romantic rivalry between the Baroness, the leader of the Sky Band, and the beautiful Sala, her second-in-command, over the affections of The Phantom. Diana winds up playing a part in this, too.

The third storyline, “The Diamond Hunters”, definitely takes place in Africa, adding to the early confusion of where exactly all these fictional kingdoms and tribes are located. Such inconsistencies don’t bother me; I just figure The Phantom fights piracy and crime worldwide (a concept that’s really played up in the Avon novels, as I recall). A couple of prospectors stir up a war between rival tribes so they can grab a valuable diamond field. Eventually, Diana gets involved in this storyline, too, and gets kidnapped again so The Phantom has to rescue her. As the book draws to a close, the on-again, off-again love affair between The Phantom and Diana is off again . . . but we all know it won’t stay that way.

I really had a great time reading these newspaper strips. Lee Falk’s scripts are excellent, terse and well-paced and with moments of both humor and high adventure. The art by Ray Moore is great, with just enough detail and top-notch storytelling. He draws really good-looking women, too. I’ve found that some adventure strips are too repetitive when you read collections of them, but that’s not the case with these early Phantom storylines. They move right along like a well-done movie from that era. This volume is available in an e-book edition that can be read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited; that’s how I read it. Used copies of the hardcover edition are available, but they’re pricey. Later volumes in the series don’t seem to be available as e-books, only as expensive hardbacks. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll pick up any of them, but I sure enjoyed this one and if you don’t mind reading digital comics, I give it a very high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective, August 1952

Even this late in its run, DIME DETECTIVE looks like a pretty darned good pulp. This issue has a Norman Saunders cover, and the line-up of authors inside is really strong: John D. MacDonald, Richard Deming, Talmage Powell, Philip Ketchum, Larry Holden (Frederick Lorenz), Harry Widmer, Dane Gregory, and Albert Simmons. Some of those aren't as well-known as the top guys, of course, but with a Popular Publications pulp, chances are their stories are pretty entertaining.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Real Western Stories, August 1950

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross. The hat and the face look like Ross’s work to me, but maybe someone who is better than I am at artist identification can pin this down for us.

The lead novella in this issue is “Gun-Hung Range” by W. Edmunds Claussen. In a 12-year career from the mid-Forties to the late Fifties, Claussen produced around 80 stories for the Western pulps. Most of his output appeared in various Columbia Publications pulps, such as this issue of REAL WESTERN STORIES. But he also sold to some of the other publishers and authored half a dozen Western novels for Lion Books, Avon, Pocket Books, and Dodd, Mead, plus several volumes of historical non-fiction. I don’t recall reading anything by him before this novella, which uses the old plot of a villain trying to force out some small ranchers and grab their land because the railroad is coming through. The protagonist is a fairly interesting character, a rancher who is emotionally tortured because he’s married to a saloon floozy with whom he has a son but is actually in love with a beautiful schoolteacher. Unfortunately, the writing isn’t very good, with clunky prose that sometimes doesn’t flow very well and is hard to follow. The big battle at the end isn’t bad but doesn’t fully redeem the story. I have a couple of Claussen’s novels on my shelves, but I’m not going to be in any hurry to read them.

M.G. Baker published a dozen stories in various Columbia Western pulps in the late Forties and early Fifties. I suspect that the name might be a pseudonym or house name, but that’s all it is, a suspicion. Baker’s story in this issue, a novelette called “A Target For His Coffin”, is a first-person yarn, somewhat unusual for the Western pulps, narrated by the sheriff of a mining town who has 24 hours to uncover the identity of a killer and save a young visitor from the east from being lynched. It’s an okay story, a little predictable but reasonably entertaining.

T.W. Ford was a very prolific pulpster, turning out hundreds of Western, sports, and detective tales, as well as being an editor and writing a few novels, sometimes under the pseudonym Weston Clay. He has a novelette called “Boothill Brand” in this issue, and it’s a good hardboiled Western yarn in which an outlaw answers a call for help from an old flame and returns to the town where he was betrayed and framed for rustling. Plenty of action, the writing is decent (Ford was never much of a stylist), and I enjoyed this one quite a bit, not surprising since Ford was pretty consistent in his work.

Allan K. Echols is another very prolific Western pulp author/novelist. His story “Renegades Die Twice” is another pretty hardboiled yarn about the meeting between an old outlaw who’s dying and wants to make amends for his crimes and a younger owlhoot who has a clever plan. As usual in this type of story, things don’t work out as either man plans. You can see the twist coming, but it’s still effective and makes this a good story.

C.H. Cogswell authored several dozen stories during the Fifties, all appearing in Columbia Western pulps. His story in this issue, “Just One More Raid!”, is a well-written, poignant tale about an honest rancher and his best friend, an outlaw who wants to go straight and settle down, but before he does, he has to pull one more job . . . You know this story isn’t going to end well, but Cogswell does a good job with it.

Lon Williams is best remembered for his long-running series of supernaturally tinged tales about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters, but he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western stories, too, including “Poady Hangs a Multitude” in this issue. It’s about a meek little hombre who’s elected sheriff as a joke, but he comes up with a bizarre way to bring law and order to a wide-open mining camp. This one maybe stretches credibility a bit too far. It’s an interesting story but not a particularly good one.

“Gun Mission” by W.F. Day is about a young man who teaches himself to be a fast gun in order to get revenge on a man who humiliated him. But when he returns to his hometown to accomplish this, he finds himself mixed up in something more complicated and has to change his plans. Lots of action in this one, and it’s pretty well-written. Day published only a handful of stories and I don’t know anything about him, but based on this yarn, he was a decent writer.

The issue wraps up with “Boothill Medico” by Brett Austin, a pseudonym for Lee Floren. This is a short-short about a doctor having to operate on a patient he has a grudge against. The writing is decent, but it seemed to lacking a final twist it should have had.

Overall I’d say this is a below-average issue of a Western pulp with a few good stories but nothing outstanding, and some mediocre but not terrible stories. I don’t consider the time spent reading it wasted, but it’s probably the weakest issue of a Robert Lowndes-edited pulp that I’ve read so far, proving that he couldn’t always work miracles on an almost non-existent budget.

The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume Two - Will Murray

Will Murray is back with THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, VOLUME TWO, and as entertaining as the stories in the first volume were, I think this new collection is even better. Here are the stories in this one. All of them were published originally in various Holmesian anthologies.

The Singular Problem of the Extinguished Wicks
The Mystery of the Spectral Shelter
The Problem of the Surrey Samson
The Uncanny Adventure of the Hammersmith Wonder
The Repulsive Matter of the Bloodless Banker
The Adventure of the Abominable Adder
The Adventure of the Sorrowing Mudlark
The Adventure of the Emerald Urchin
The Adventure of the Expelled Master
The Conundrum of the Questionable Coins

All these stories feature some seemingly supernatural or paranormal element. Will Holmes be able to figure out these mysteries and provide logical, scientifically grounded explanations for all the strange events and grisly murders? You may think you know the answer to that, but as Murray points out in his introduction, you may have some surprises in store, too.

As an added bonus, three of the stories (The Adventure of the Abominable Adder, The Adventure of the Sorrowing Mudlark, and The Adventure of the Emerald Urchin) are actually crossover tales that feature Algernon Blackwood’s occult detective Dr. John Silence. Now, I’ve never read any of the John Silence stories, or anything else by Algernon Blackwood, for that matter, but I really enjoyed these and think it’s likely that I’ll sample some of Blackwood’s work in the reasonably near future. In addition, Holmes narrates one of the stories himself, rather than relying on Dr. John Watson to tell the tale, and that’s a nice change. Overall, Murray does a great job of capturing Watson’s voice and Arthur Conan Doyle’s style.

I’m no expert on Holmes pastiches, but I know what I like, as the saying goes, and I really enjoyed this collection, which is available in both print and e-book editions. I give it a high recommendation and look forward to the future collections of Murray’s Sherlock Holmes stories that are in the works.

There's Just One Problem . . .: True Tales From the Former, One-time, 7th Most Powerful Person in WWE - Brian Gewirtz

My time as a wrestling fan breaks down into two distinct eras. When I was a kid, one of the local TV stations showed wrestling matches from the North Side Coliseum in Fort Worth every Monday night. I was a devoted follower for a while and absolutely believed everything I was watching was completely real. I understand now why my dad, who watched with me sometimes, seemed rather amused by my enthusiasm. Out of curiosity, I looked around on the internet and found a site covering the Texas wrestling circuit in those days, and the only wrestler whose name I remembered was Pepper Gomez (not much sublety or political correctness in the early Sixties).

Almost forty years later, in the late Nineties/early 2000s, I became a regular viewer of what was then the WWF’s weekly show on UPN, FRIDAY NIGHT SMACKDOWN. This was what is now known as the Attitude Era, and some of the prominent wrestlers were The Rock, The Undertaker, Kane, the Big Show, Triple H, and my favorite, Mankind (the great Mick Foley). The whole thing was so goofy and over the top that I really enjoyed it for a few years before moving on to other things.

So when one of my friends on Facebook posted about this book, I knew I’d have to get a copy and read it for old-time’s sake. THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . .: TRUE TALES FROM THE FORMER, ONE-TIME, 7^TH MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN WWE is by Brian Gewirtz, a former sitcom scripter who became WWE’s head writer during the time I was watching and remained in that position for fifteen years. Prior to that era, the managers and the wrestlers themselves came up with most of the storylines and dialogue they used. It was unusual to have an actual writing staff shaping the way things were going to go in the matches. Gewirtz and his fellow writers (some of whom were former wrestlers) took things to a different level.

Given his comedy writing background, it’s no surprise that THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . . is a very funny book, full of just the sort of bizarre tales you’d expect when you’re dealing with such colorful, larger than life personalities. There are some poignant and dramatic moments, too, but mostly I chuckled and laughed out loud reading this book. It’s nice to get to know these characters better and get an understanding of why some of the storylines developed as they did.

I think you’d have to be a wrestling fan, at least to a certain extent, to enjoy this book. As mentioned above, I’m a casual, part-time fan at best, but I still found enough to like that I had a great time reading THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . . Now I have to go to YouTube and see if I can find some of those old North Side Coliseum matches from the early Sixties.

The Fabelmans (2022)

THE FABELMANS is a fictionalized, semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, about a boy growing up in Cincinnati and Phoenix who’s obsessed with making movies and wants that to be his career. Stuff happens, both with his ambitions and some domestic drama involving his family. That’s really the extent of the plot.

To get the negatives out of the way first, the film is long (two and a half hours), self-indulgent (there are a number of characters and scenes that come across as Spielberg getting even with people he holds a grudge against), and misfires badly at times (the scene where Sammy Fabelman’s new-found girlfriend tries to convert him to Christianity is pretty cringe-worthy).

All that said . . . Man, when the film talks about art and creatity and myth, and the conflicts between family and the passions that drive us, it really resonated with me. So much of the dynamic between Sammy and his family resembles my own life. The scene late in the movie where Sammy meets John Ford reminds me of all the writers I grew up reading, only to meet them and in some cases become friends with them later in life. I don’t want to make this post all about me, me, me, but maybe there’s some justification for that when I’m writing about a Spielberg film that’s all about him, him, him.

What I’m saying is that for all the times this film made me feel impatient or annoyed, in the end I loved it. It left me with a feeling of kinship. I can tell by reading the reviews that many people did not feel the same way. But it’s well-made, well-acted, and moves along at a pretty good pace despite its length. THE FABELMANS isn’t the sort of movie I usually watch, but I’m glad I did.

Love Camp on Wheels - Tom Harland

The third novel in TRAILER TRAMPS, the great new collection from Stark House, is LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, published originally by Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) in 1963. It’s the story of Stan Barton, a regular guy who manages a trailer park in an agricultural area of California. Many of the camp’s occupants are migratory workers and their families, but there are some full-time residents, too. Stan was in the lettuce business until automation forced him out, but he’s managed to land this nice job taking care of the trailer park.

Things get complicated, though, as they always do in these books, when Stan becomes romantically involved with three married women: his own ex-wife, a newcomer to the park, and a woman who works in the office there. Eventually the husbands of all three women cause trouble for Stan, as does the park’s owner, a lesbian who has fallen for one of the three women herself. Stan not only has to figure out which of the three he really wants, he also has to survive a threat on his life and trouble with the law.

I don’t know anything about Tom Harland and couldn’t find anything on-line about him except that he wrote half a dozen of these softcore novels for Beacon/Softcover Library in the early Sixties. I have a hunch the name is a pseudonym, but that’s all it is, a hunch. Whoever he was, he wasn’t as good a writer as Orrie Hitt and Doug Duperrault, the other two authors in TRAILER TRAMPS. His prose isn’t nearly as smooth. But he keeps the story moving along at a good pace, his depiction of the middle class lifestyle of the era is accurate, and his characters ring true.

Some of the book concerns the expansion of the trailer park, and I’ve been around enough construction projects to recognize that Harland knows what he’s talking about in those scenes. In fact, the writing is stronger in those parts, almost as if Harland was more interested in them than he was in the domestic drama.

That said, Stan Barton is a likable lug of a protagonist, despite his penchant for fooling around with married women, and you can’t help but root for him to figure things out and come up with a happy ending. I enjoyed LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS, and it makes a nice companion piece for the other two novels in this collection. This latest offering from Stark House is well worth reading.