Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, July 1933

This is a pretty grim cover by Rafael DeSoto on this early issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE. As is common with a Thrilling Group pulp, several of the authors in this one are house names: Robert Wallace, G. Wayman Jones, John L. Benton, and Kerry McRoberts. (I believe "McRoberts" went into the service during World War II and became Captain Kerry McRoberts.) The only author with a recognizable real name is William H. Stueber, who wrote some of the early Masked Rider novels. The others on hand, none of whom are the least bit familiar to me, are Maxwell Smith, Barry Brandon, and Russell Stanton. I suspect there are some decent stories in here, but I don't own a copy and this issue doesn't appear to be on-line, so I can't be sure.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, June 1947

This looks like a Robert Stanley cover to me, although, as always, I could be wrong. But I think I'm correct about there being some very good Western pulp authors inside this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE: D.B. Newton, Philip Ketchum, William R. Cox, John Reese (with two stories, one under his usual John Jo Carpenter pseudonym, one under a name I haven't encountered before, Camford Cheavly), and Robert Turner, along with the lesser known Harold R. Stoakes, Ben T. Young, Jim Chapman, Ray Hayton, and Jimmy Nichols (who was really Jhan Robbins, fairly prolific under both names but little remembered). Like all the Popular Publications Western pulps, 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE was consistently good.

The Spider: The Hangman From Hell - Will Murray

As I’ve mentioned before, I have vivid memories of how I discovered both The Spider and Operator 5: I bought the first two Berkley reprints of The Spider, THE SPIDER STRIKES! and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott, when they were packaged together in a buy-one-get-one-free deal, off the paperback spinner rack at a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where we always stopped when my parents were going to visit relatives in Blanket, Zephyr, and Brownwood. I picked up the Corinth Regency paperback reprint of the Operator 5 novel LEGIONS OF THE DEATH MASTER (by Frederick C. Davis writing under the house name Curtis Steele) off the spinner rack in Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery in downtown Azle. (Several times a week, I drive by the building where Trammell’s used to be. It’s now a Mexican restaurant, and whenever I go in there, I can look over in the bar area and see the exact spot that spinner rack used to stand.)

But I digress, as the saying goes. You know you can’t get a straight review from me without a healthy dose of nostalgia accompanying it. So, to get to why we’re all here today . . . THE HANGMAN FROM HELL is the latest novel from Will Murray teaming up the iconic pulp heroes The Spider and Operator 5, and man, is it good! One of Richard Wentworth’s associates who keeps an eye on crime in Europe for him comes to New York with some important information. But when Wentworth meets the ship he’s traveling on, he finds that his informant has been murdered. Then Wentworth’s assistant Ram Singh is attacked and nearly killed by a giant attacker wielding a hangman’s noose attached to a razor-sharp sickle. Wentworth’s investigation reveals that this attacker, a deadly assassin known as The Hangman, works for the burgeoning political terror group known as the Purple Shirts, and he’s come to the United States for the specific purpose of killing Operator 5, America’s top secret intelligence ace.

Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5’s real name, have crossed paths before and an uneasy truce exists between them. They usually have the same goal but much different methods in achieving it. Operator 5, as a government agent, has to stay within the law (mostly) while Wentworth, as the vigilante known as The Spider, takes the law into his own hands and metes out what he considers justice without hesitation. It's an explosive relationship as both of them try to track down the Hangman and find out the details of the terrible scheme the Purple Shirts are planning to coincide with a big rally in Central Park.

There’s not quite as much breakneck action in this novel as there’s been in previous Spider novels by Murray, but the investigation by our two heroes plays out with compelling urgency, and when violence does erupt, it's packed with the apocalyptic excitement that’s a trademark of the Spider yarns going back to Norvell Page, the principal author of the series back in its pulp days. Page came up with some great murder methods for his villains to use, but Murray goes him one better in this novel: the attack on New York by the Purple Shirts is one of the most ghastly I’ve encountered in pulp adventure fiction. It’s truly creepy stuff, but it’s also very effective in raising the stakes and making the reader root for Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher even more.

I also like the way Murray ties this novel in with several of the original novels from both series. It fits perfectly and naturally and there’s never a sense of it being forced into canon. This is the way to write new novels based on classic pulp series, which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect from Will Murray.

I had a great time reading THE HANGMAN FROM HELL, as you’d expect since I’m a big fan of both The Spider and Operator 5. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year and I give it a very high recommendation. And it’s put me in the mood to read some of the original pulp novels again. Whether I’ll get around to it, we’ll have to wait and see. But if I do, you’ll read the reviews here, as usual.

Halfway House - Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

A while back I read an Ellery Queen novel for the first time in many years and found that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to. My review of that book met with considerable disagreement from EQ fans. That really made me want to read another one in the series because sometimes, to be honest, if I don’t like a book it’s more my fault than the book itself. In looking over the list of EQ novels, I made an interesting discovery: I’d read all of the early novels (the ones with a place name and an object in the title, starting with THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY), and many of the later books from the late Fifties through the Sixties and Seventies, but almost none of the books from the middle period. The first one on the list that I was pretty sure I hadn’t read was HALFWAY HOUSE, from 1936, so I figured that’s the one I would try next and, if I enjoyed it, would continue on from there. (It was suggested in some of the discussion of the previous EQ review that some of the books are best read in order.)

HALFWAY HOUSE opens in Trenton, New Jersey, where Ellery has stopped over on his way back to New York. He runs into an old friend, attorney Bill Angell, who makes plans to travel to New York with Ellery after a brief meeting with his brother-in-law, a traveling salesman. This meeting is supposed to take place at an isolated house on the Delaware River. When Bill gets there, his brother-in-law is dead, stabbed in the heart. Naturally, Bill calls his old friend the great detective to help him find out what happened.

It's difficult to talk much about the plot in this novel without venturing too far into spoiler territory. Let’s just say that someone close to Bill is arrested for the murder, put on trial (in a lengthy sequence that takes up the whole middle section of the book), and convicted. But Bill and, of course, Ellery aren’t convinced that person is actually guilty, so Ellery continues his investigation and eventually uncovers the real killer—but not before pausing to interject a Challenge to the Reader, a regular feature of the EQ series in the early days.

I don’t know what sort of reputation this novel has among Ellery Queen fans, but man, I absolutely had a great time reading it. Ellery hasn’t quite shed all of his Philo Vance-like origins, but such instances are few and far between and not all that annoying. Mostly he’s a very likable protagonist. The story moves along briskly, the plot has plenty of twists and turns, the clues are planted fairly, and the writing is good enough that I was eagerly flipping the pages to find out what happened. And the Challenge to the Reader brought back a lot of good memories from when I was a regular reader of the series decades ago. (For the record, I actually did pick out the killer in this one, and it was mostly deduction, not guesswork.)

I really enjoyed HALFWAY HOUSE and am glad to see that I’m still an Ellery Queen fan. I’m going to continue with the series soon.

The Green God of Terror - Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson

Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was an interesting character in his own right: Military officer, prolific pulp author, and an important player in the creation of the whole danged comic book industry. I’m most interested in him as a pulpster who turned out scores of adventure and Western yarns. Given his background, it’s not surprising that his stories often had a military angle to them. For example, “The Green God of Terror”, his novella that’s one of the featured stories in the November 1933 issue of ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE.

The protagonist of “The Green God of Terror” is army intelligence officer Barry O’Neil, who is stationed in the Philippines. His investigation into the disappearance of a mining engineer leads him to the missing man’s beautiful sister, a fabulous emerald, a sinister Russian, and an isolated island where the Green God of Terror of the title supposedly lurks.

I’ve read several of Wheeler-Nicholson’s stories, but this one may be my favorite so far. He never takes his foot off the gas pedal, racing along from action scene to action scene, from the dark alleys of Manila to several shipboard battles to a final showdown in a hidden island temple.

No matter how over-the-top Wheeler-Nicholson’s plots get, his stories always have an air of authenticity about them. Again, not a surprise considering his background. This one is a very good example of that. His work reminds me a little of H. Bedford-Jones, although his prose isn’t quite as smooth and polished as HB-J’s.

If you’re a fan of pure, breakneck pulp adventure yarns, I give “The Green God of Terror” a very high recommendation. It’s been reprinted in HIGH ADVENTURE#194, a special issue of that long-running publication that also includes several more Wheeler-Nicholson stories. I have a copy and plan to read those stories soon. I’m looking forward to it.

The Faust Award

IAMTW’s 2024 Grandmaster and Faust Award Winner

With great pleasure, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers presents the 2024 Faust Award for Grandmaster to James Reasoner.

A veteran writer with over four decades in the publishing industry, James Reasoner has written more than 350 novels and more than 100 short stories. Although perhaps best known for westerns, he has written across many genres from mystery to fantasy to science fiction. In addition, he’s penned essays, articles and reviews. He has contributed tie-in novels to the following series: Abilene, Longarm, Lone Star, Trailsman, Cody’s Law, Wagons West, Wind River, Stagecoach Station, and Tales from Deadwood. His non‑western tie-ins include The Dead Man series, Kolchak, and Walker Texas Ranger.

This is a tremendous honor, and I’m very pleased and proud to be considered a grandmaster of tie-in fiction. My history with tie-ins as a reader goes back to the Whitman juveniles and Big Little Books of the Fifties and Sixties. I loved reading about Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Leave It to Beaver, Spin and Marty, and all the other TV shows and movies that served as the basis for those books. Those were the first tie-in novels I read, although nobody used that term then. They were just books that I enjoyed.

Then, almost 60 years ago, I went into Buddies’ Grocery and picked up an Ace paperback called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., written by somebody named Michael Avallone. From that point on, I picked up everything I could find by Avallone, and many of them were tie-in novels and movie novelizations. The Get Smart novels by William Johnston were also early favorites. I couldn’t tell you how many tie-in books I read over the years, but there were a lot.

As a writer, I had been in the business for only a little more than a year when Sam Merwin Jr., the editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, who had been buying short stories from me, asked me to try my hand at one of the Mike Shayne novellas that were published in the magazine under the house-name Brett Halliday. As Sam put it, “they run 20,000 words and pay a flat, lousy $300.” Three hundred bucks didn’t seem so lousy to me, so I told him, sure, I’d love to, and he sent me a copy of the Mike Shayne bible, which he had put together for the series’ writers. I didn’t really need it; I’d been reading the original Mike Shayne novels by Davis Dresser (the original Brett Halliday) for years and was a big fan of the series.

Sam also said for me not to worry too much about the details, just to get the story down and he’d fix anything I got wrong. As far as I could tell when I compared the published story (“Death in Xanadu”, MSMM, December 1978) with my original, he changed one word in the manuscript.

That was my first try at writing characters and settings created by other authors, and I knew right away that I had a knack for it. Since then, series work has made up the vast majority of my writing. Some highlights: Being asked to write a couple of Lone Ranger stories. The Ranger was probably my first hero. I never missed the TV show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Almost as exciting was writing a Green Hornet story. Inside the grown man typing that story was the eight-year-old kid who stayed up ‘way past his bedtime sneak-listening on a transister radio to syndicated reruns of the radio shows featuring the Green Hornet and the Lone Rangers. (The Shadow was in that same package and I’ve never written a Shadow story, but maybe one of these days.) I never missed an episode of Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and writing a Kolchak story was a great opportunity. One day my editor at Berkley called and asked if I was familiar with the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. I answered honestly that not only had I seen every episode of the series, I could sing the theme song. Luckily, I didn’t have to sing, but within minutes I was on a conference call with Chuck Norris’s brother Aaron and a couple of CBS executives in New York, and I had the job of writing three novels based on the series. Those of you who have worked on tie-in projects for properties that you love as a fan know how much pure fun it can be.

My thanks to everyone in the IAMTW. I can’t express how much I appreciate this award, but I’m truly grateful for it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sinister Stories, March 1940

SINISTER STORIES was the shortest-lived of Popular Publications' Weird Menace pulps, lasting only three issues in 1940. All three issues recycled covers from TERROR TALES. This one is particularly racy. I don't know the artist. The stories were all new, as far as I can tell. The best-known authors in this issue, at least these days, are Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer) and Robert Leslie Bellem. Some of the others were familiar names to Weird Menace fans, though, such as Donald Dale (Mary Dale Buckner) and Francis James (James A. Goldthwaite), while Raymond Whetstone, William Brailsford, and Richard G. Huzarski are all pretty obscure, at least to me. SINISTER STORIES came along at the tail-end of the Weird Menace era, or it might have lasted longer. It certainly doesn't look like a bad pulp for that genre.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales, October 1942

Wanted posters show up a lot on Western pulp covers. Usually, the outlaw depicted on the poster is standing there either shooting or about to shoot. You can't really tell if the fellow on the cover of this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES is also the one on the reward dodger, but there's a good chance he is. There are stories by some fine Western pulpsters in this issue: Philip Ketchum, William Heuman, Thomas Thompson, and Frank Bonham. Other well-known authors in this one include Joe Austell Small, R.S. Lerch, John Wilstach (better known for his adventure yarns in ARGOSY and elsewhere), Carl G. Hodges (best remembered for his mystery stories and novels), and Edwin K. Sloat. Then there are the ones I'm not familiar with--P.J. Delanoye, Roy B. Angell, and W.W. Montgomery--and house names Ray P. Shotwell and Lance Kermit. I'm going to name the hero in a Western novel Lance Kermit one of these days. I'm sure this is a good issue since the Popular Publications Western pulps were consistently top-notch.

UPDATE: As Paul Herman points out in the comments, this hombre is wearing a lawman's star, so he's not the outlaw on the wanted poster. And since there's powdersmoke coming from the barrel of his gun, I reckon we can figure he just ventilated the owlhoot in question. Dadgum it, I don't know how I missed that! Thanks, Paul.

Hell-Bent for Hollywood - Fred Olen Ray

I haven’t seen all that many of Fred Olen Ray’s movies, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen that he wrote and/or directed. I first became aware of his work in the mid-Eighties when I worked at Fort Worth Books & Video and rented out his action film ARMED RESPONSE (starring David Carradine and Lee Van Cleef) many, many times. It was a popular movie for us.

Ray has just published his autobiography, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD. I always enjoy reading about creative people, so I gave it a try. He doesn’t pull many punches in telling about his life, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Florida to his early desire to be a filmmaker to the many detours along the way to achieving his dream. It’s a compelling tale that Ray spins in straightforward, no-nonsense prose.

I especially enjoyed the sections where Ray talks about our mutual friend Terrell Lee Lankford, who wrote the scripts for several of Ray’s movies over the years. Lankford was a regular commenter here in the early days of this blog and is the author of several excellent crime novels including EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, BLONDE LIGHTNING, and ANGRY MOON. If you haven’t read his books, you really should.

But to get back to Ray, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is a wonderful book. I had a very hard time putting it down. If you want insights into filmmaking and fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories about many legendary Hollywood figures, you’ll find plenty of that in the book, along with the inspiring narrative of Ray’s own life. I have a feeling he might scoff at hearing himself described as inspiring, but that’s the way it seems to me. HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available in trade paperback and e-book editions.

Manville Moon #6: Five O'Clock Shroud - Richard Deming

“Five O’Clock Shroud” is the sixth novella about Richard Deming’s one-legged private detective Manville Moon. It appeared originally in the November 1950 issue of BLACK MASK DETECTIVE and was featured on the usual fine cover by Norman Saunders.

This one has a bit more complicated plot than the previous story in the series. Moon is hired by a wealthy supporter of a politician who is running for mayor as a reform candidate. Unfortunately, it appears that the so-called reformer is actually the big boss of the ring controlling the city’s gambling. Moon even turns up proof of that. And then the murders start, and Moon finds himself targeted for death, as well as being the target of some advances from a beautiful married woman.

Deming does a good job with the political intrigue even though it’s not that difficult to figure out what’s really going on. I’ve become quite fond of Manville Moon as a character. There’s a superb scene in which he’s taken for a ride by three killers, and even though the reader knows he’s going to survive, Deming’s writing generates some genuine suspense. Moon’s escape is pretty clever, too.

If you’re a fan of hardboiled private eye tales, this is a very entertaining series. “Five O’Clock Shroud” is available on Amazon as an inexpensive e-book. I had a fine time reading it and it gets a solid recommendation from me.