Now Available: Fear on the Fever Coast - James Reasoner

The Snakehaven saga continues with FEAR ON THE FEVER COAST! Young adventurer Jorras Trevayle is back, penetrating deeper into a dangerous world of giant serpents, sorcerers, pirates, and madmen. A deadly plague is laying waste to the land, and the secret to its cure lies within the sanctum of a vengeful wizard. Together with a group of brigands and cutthroats, Trevayle sets out to obtain that cure, but the real question is which is the biggest threat to his continued survival: the sorcerer who wants to settle a score with him, the swamp surrounding the old plantation house known as Ophidionne, or the giant serpents that roam the night searching for prey!

James Reasoner, the bestselling author of DOOM OF THE DARK DELTA, returns with the second daring exploit of Jorras Trevayle, revealing more about the perilous land known to some as Snakehaven. FEAR ON THE FEVER COAST is a tale packed with excitement and eerie thrills for readers of sword and sorcery.

(So far I've really enjoyed developing this series. I plan to write several more of them over the next year or so.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective Stories, May 1935

This early issue of SUPER-DETECTIVE STORIES sports a nice dramatic cover by H.J. Ward, and there are some fine authors inside: Richard Sale, James P. Olsen, Emile C. Tepperman, the mysterious Margie Harris (has any of Harris's work ever been reprinted?), and lesser-known Sam Kellman, John Mallory, and Charles Molyneaux Brown. This was Kellman's only credit, so it's possible that was a pseudonym. Sale, Olsen, and Tepperman are enough to make this issue worth reading if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, August 1934

(I came across this post from January 26, 2008, several years before I started the Saturday Morning Western Pulp series, so I thought I might as well get some more use out of it, modified slightly and with some comments added.)

Since I had this pulp out a couple of weeks ago to look something up, I decided to go ahead and read it. I believe it’s the first issue of LARIAT STORY that I’ve read; I own only another issue or two of this particular pulp.

It doesn’t start off particularly well. The lead “novel” (actually more of a novella) is “The Ranch of Hidden Men” by John Starr. Originally, John Starr was the pseudonym of Jack Byrne, who was the editor of LARIAT STORY at the time this issue was published. At some point, though, it became a house name, probably a year or so later when Byrne left Fiction House (the publisher of LARIAT STORY) to become an editor at ARGOSY. Byrne may be the author of “The Ranch of Hidden Men”, or he may not. Either way, it’s not a very good story. It’s the old “drifter saves the ranch from the bad guys” plot, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s so stereotypical that a story using it needs either an unexpected twist, good writing, or both. This one has neither. It has a very tired, by-the-numbers feel to it, with a lot of florid writing that just pads the word count. Even that sort of prose can be effective (see the work of A. Leslie Scott, for example), but I don’t think it works here.

The novelette that follows, “Red Chaps” by Walter Clare Martin, is even worse, a humorous Western that’s not funny at all. I have a low tolerance for humorous Westerns; I like those by W.C. Tuttle (and Robert E. Howard), but that’s about it.

Things pick up, though, with “Whispering Knives” by C.K. Shaw, a novelette with another old plot, the hunt for the pieces of a treasure map that was split up among the prospectors who discovered a mother lode of gold, but Shaw has a nice hardboiled style that makes it a readable yarn. (C.K. Shaw was actually Chloe Kathleen Shaw, one of the most successful female Western pulpsters. I need to read more of her work.) 

The four short stories that follow are even better: “Old Renegade” by Earl C. McCain concerns the hunt for a wild, killer bull in the South Texas brush country, with some rustling thrown in for good measure; “The Six-Gun Payoff” by the always-dependable Gunnison Steele (really Bennie Gardner, father of the late Barry Gardner, who was known to many of you) is an effective short-short about the redemption of an old outlaw; “Snake Sign” by Walt Coburn (one of my favorite Western pulp authors) is a murder mystery, not too hard to figure out but fun; and “The Water Cure” by E.B. Brunt is a fairly realistic cattle baron vs. small ranchers yarn set in the 1920s.

The issue is wrapped up by another “novel”, “The Fifth Horseman” by James P. Olsen. Olsen, under the name James Lawson, wrote spicy, hardboiled detective yarns about Dallas Duane, a PI who works in the Western oilfields, and I really like the stories I’ve read from that series. (I wound up reading all the Dallas Duane stories and writing the introduction for a collection of them called DYING COMES HARD, published by Black Dog Books and still available.) “The Fifth Horseman” is a little more serious. Again, the plot is one that had whiskers even in 1934: a gang of old outlaws get together again to help an old friend from the owlhoot trail who has reformed and settled down. The hero is a young outlaw who had fallen in with them. Anybody who has read very many Westerns will know how this one is going to play out, but Olsen spins his tale with such enthusiasm, including a number of over-the-top action scenes, that I found it pretty entertaining. This is the first Western story I’ve read by him, but I wouldn’t hesitate to read more.

My copy of the pulp is coverless and I can't find a picture of it on-line, so I can’t post a cover scan. (The Fictionmags Index has that cover scan now. You can see it above.) It came from the collection of Barry Gardner, who’s mentioned above. Barry collected hundreds of pulps that contained his dad’s stories, but he didn’t care that much about the condition, so many of them are brittle and coverless, like this issue. I don’t really care, either, as long as I can read them and enjoy the stories, and I have to say that despite a couple of clunkers, the August 1934 issue of LARIAT STORY is pretty darned good.

(Now, here's the gut punch from the past. Three days after I posted this, a wildfire burned down our house and my studio and destroyed this pulp along with all my others, except for a lone issue of ARGOSY that survived somehow, as well as 40 years' accumulation of books and comics. Some of you probably remember that. Definitely a low point. However, we rebuilt a bigger and better house on the same property, I have more books and pulps, by far, than I'll ever get around to reading, and my writing career has rolled along. I still miss the cats who died in that fire, but our two dogs survived and lived another six years after that. Somebody once told me that you never really get over the things you love and lose, but you learn how to get along with that loss. Lot of truth in that. Meanwhile I think that's a pretty good cover by Fred Craft, and I'm glad to be able to bring it to you today.)

A Rough Edges Rerun: The Girl in the Golden Atom - Ray Cummings

Science fiction existed long before people ever called it that, of course, dating back to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and quite possibly earlier. And there was quite a bit of it published in the pulps before the term came into existence. A couple of examples are the debut novelette by Ray Cummings, “The Girl in the Golden Atom”, originally published in ARGOSY in 1919, and its novel-length sequel, “The People of the Golden Atom”, published a year later, which were combined into the novel THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM in 1923. That novel has been reprinted numerous times, often in an abridged version.

I just read the original pulp versions, which are available in various e-book editions. Sometimes these eighty- and ninety-year-old pulp yarns don’t hold up well for today’s readers. What about THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM?

The original novelette finds five men sitting around their club (gentlemen used to belong to clubs, you know, where they would sit around and smoke and drink brandy and tell each other about their adventures): The Chemist, The Doctor, The Banker, The Big Business Man, and The Very Young Man. Yes, that’s how Cummings refers to them throughout, although eventually he does reveal their names. It seems that The Chemist has discovered by using a super-high-powered microscope that there are worlds within worlds and habitated universes within the very atoms of everything that makes up our world. He has also developed chemicals that will allow him to shrink and enlarge, so he can visit the universe he has discovered within the atoms of his mother’s golden wedding ring. In other words, Cummings was there first with the idea that sparked the plots for countless comic books and movies later on.

In the first part of the story (the original novelette), The Chemist visits the Golden Atom, falls in love with the beautiful girl he spied on there, and helps out her people in a war with an enemy city-state. He does this by growing to giant size and stomping on the enemy army. (To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.) Since he decides not to come back to our world, eventually The Doctor, The Big Business Man, and The Very Young Man use the chemicals he left behind to follow him into the Golden Atom. They find their friend there, but they also find a revolution, excitement, danger, and romance, along with a lot of shrinking to hide from enemies and growing to giant size to stomp them. There’s a lot of stomping, both deliberate and accidental, in this book, which at times provides it with some rather bizarre humor.

The first half of the book is pretty slow, an example of what some people call travelogue SF, where the characters walk around, look at stuff, and talk about the history, geography, and social customs of the world where they find themselves. There’s also a lot of pseudo-scientific discussion about the whole shrinking process. In the second half of the book, though, the revolution gets underway and the whole thing turns into a colorful, violent, fast-paced adventure that fits pretty well into the sword-and-planet subgenre of science fiction.

So, is THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM worth reading nearly ninety years later? If you’re interested in the history of science fiction, definitely. If you looking for an entertaining adventure novel, it qualifies there, too, although you have to be patient and the writing style is definitely old-fashioned. Cummings isn’t nearly the storyteller that his contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs was, and the scientific speculation seems pretty silly now, but back then it was pretty dazzling stuff, I imagine. I enjoyed the book and I think some of you would, too.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 17, 2009. I haven't read anything else by Ray Cummings since then except some of his Weird Menace stories, which were pretty good.)

The Shadowed Circle Compendium - Steve Donoso, ed.

I’ve been a big fan of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, a beautifully produced journal devoted to The Shadow, ever since it began publishing a few years ago. Now we have THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM, an even prettier volume reprinting some of the best articles from the first seven issues of the regular journal, plus half a dozen new articles that make this book well worthwhile even if you’ve read the others in their original appearances.

The highlight of the new articles, for me, is “The Shadowed Seven”, in which editor/publisher Steve Donoso asked more than twenty fans and/or scholars of The Shadow to select their seven favorite Shadow stories, the ones they would take with them to the proverbial desert island. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to this article myself.) All the different incarnations of the character were fair game for this exercise: pulps, comics, movies, and the radio show. There’s a good representation of all of those, although the pulp novels dominate the lists. I didn’t make a count or anything like that, but it seemed to me that the very first novel, “The Living Shadow”, was mentioned more than any of the others, which makes sense. After all, it established the character and set the tone for everything that was to come after. Several of the other early pulp novels were very popular, too. Even now, more than 50 years after I read them the first time, I vividly recall the great action scenes, the incredible shoot-outs between The Shadow and the hordes of gangdom, and how enthralled I was by them.

Other new articles include a look at The Shadow’s appearances in various fanzines over the past 40-some-odd years, checklists of the novels and reprints, and “The Essential Shadow Reference Collection”, devoted to the various books that have been written about the character.

If you haven’t been reading THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, the compendium is definitely a best-of-the-best volume and is likely to send you scurrying to pick up back issues of the regular journal. If you’ve been reading it from the start like me, you’ll have a great time revisiting old favorites and taking in the new material. THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM is available in hardback and paperback editions, and if you’re a Shadow fan, or a fan of the pulps in general, it gets my highest recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North*West Romances, Fall 1945

I like posting snowy covers of Northern pulps during the summer when the weather is hot. This one is by the always-excellent George Gross. This issue of NORTH*WEST ROMANCES also has some fine authors in its pages, most notably Dan Cushman, Les Savage Jr., and William Heuman. Those three are enough to make any pulp issue worthwhile by themselves. Also on hand are R.S. Lerch, Kenneth P. Wood, Larry McLane, R.A. Emberg, Paul Selonke, and Michael Oblinger. I like listing the authors' names, even the ones I've never heard of, because every so often somebody will be searching on-line for mentions of a relative, and then they email that So-and-So was their grandfather or great-uncle or something, and they're excited to see the name in a post. That always makes me feel good.  

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, May 1949

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by the very prolific Sam Cherry and is certainly quite dramatic. We know Jim Hatfield’s horse Goldy is all right, but even so, that’s quite a spill he’s taking.

The Hatfield novel in this issue is “The Wasteland Empire”, written by series creator Leslie Scott writing under the house-name Jackson Cole. It’s strictly a mining boomtown yarn. There are mentions of some cattle ranches in the area but nary a sign of any rustlers, which is a little unusual for a Scott story. Hatfield—and Scott—get to put their mining backgrounds to good use in this one, as a gold strike attracts trouble to the West Texas boomtown of Gravel Bank, and Hatfield is sent in undercover to find out who’s behind the outlawry and put a stop to it.

The identity of the mastermind is pretty obvious and Hatfield figures out who it is fairly early on, but he has to round up enough proof to take action. Along the way, there are several shootouts and ambushes and Hatfield is trapped underground and almost killed not once but twice before he brings the head varmint to justice.

As always in a Scott novel, there are vivid descriptions and over-the-top action scenes, but the plot seems a bit thinner than usual. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “The Wasteland Empire” was phoned in, but it does have a certain workman-like air about it. Still entertaining, of course. I don’t think Scott was capable of writing a story that’s not fun to read. But it’s not in the top rank of his Hatfield novels.

There are only two back-up stories in this issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The first, “Empty Holsters”, is by-lined Sam Brant, which was a frequently used house name in Thrilling Group Western pulps. I can’t even make a guess who wrote this one. There’s nothing distinctive about the style. The plot concerns a veteran lawman who has to solve a bank robbery in which his young deputy is implicated. Nothing special by any means, but it's well-written enough that I found it enjoyable reading.

The Long Sam Littlejohn series by Lee Bond was the longest-running back-up series in TEXAS RANGERS, more than 50 stories from 1936 to 1952. I’ve read a lot of them and enjoyed every one. These yarns about a good-guy outlaw pursued by a stubborn lawman and getting into one fracas after another are very formulaic, but it’s a formula I like. In this issue’s story, “Long Sam Flies a Flag”, he gets mixed up in a border dispute and a land grab centered around the Rio Grande changing course. There’s just enough action and plot to make a fine short story.

While this isn’t an outstanding issue of TEXAS RANGERS, it’s a good one, with all three stories providing enjoyable reading, and if you have a copy, it’s worth taking it down from the shelf and giving it a try.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Armed . . . Dangerous . . . Brett Halliday (Robert Terrall)

A while back I had an email conversation with an author friend of mine [probably Steve Mertz] about the relative merits of Robert Terrall’s Mike Shayne novels. When I was first reading the Shayne novels back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I didn’t know that Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, had had so many ghost-writers contributing to the series. But I did know that as the Sixties went on, I began to like the novels less, and by the Seventies, I didn’t care for them at all. Later, of course, I found out that Robert Terrall was the author of the books I didn’t like.

However, a number of people whose opinions I respect do like Terrall’s Shayne novels, and since I hadn’t read one in close to forty years, I thought I ought to do so and see if my opinion of them has changed since then.

Well . . . it has and it hasn’t.

ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . . , from 1966, is one of the books I never got around to reading back then. It’s got a nice McGinnis cover, at least on the first edition, and although Mike Shayne is nowhere to be seen, the opening section certainly has plenty of action and intrigue to recommend it. Early on, there’s a beautiful French blonde, a jewel heist, the brutal shooting of an off-duty cop, and a kidnapping. But there’s a twist coming, and I’ll admit, Terrall slipped it right past me for a good while, although I caught it before it was revealed. From that point on, there are a lot more twists, as the story takes on a much larger scale and becomes part caper novel/part thriller with international implications. It’s very well written, a little dated in some respects today but not all that much, and the pace is spectacular, leaving the reader whipping through the pages to see what’s going to happen. There’s even a bit of humor as Terrall name-checks another of his pseudonyms. This is a very entertaining novel. The problem is, it’s barely a Mike Shayne novel.

Oh, a character named Shayne plays a huge part in it, make no mistake about that, but he’s so lacking in personality that the protagonist could be almost anybody. There’s no sense that this is the same character who inhabits all the books in the series actually written by Davis Dresser. Terrall may have been a better wordsmith than Dresser was, I won’t argue that point, but Dresser’s Shayne is a fascinating character, no more honest than he has to be but with a decent core, and maybe one of the most intelligent characters in mystery fiction, who is always two steps ahead of the other people in the books and three steps ahead of the reader. I think most of the other authors who ghosted full-length Shayne novels were able to capture this to a certain extent, and Terrall did, too, at first, but as his stint on the series went on, I believe he lost his handle on the character. However, I could be wrong about this, and I plan to read more of his books to see what I think.

In the meantime, should you read ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . .? Absolutely. It’s well-written and a lot of fun. If it had featured anybody but Mike Shayne, I’d give it an unqualified recommendation. But if you’ve never read a Shayne novel before, this is definitely not the place to start.

(This post originally appeared on July 10, 2009. And despite what I said in it, I haven't read any more of Terrall's Shayne novels since then. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to most of you, who know by now that I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy.)

Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860-1960 - Christine Bold

From time to time, I get in the mood to read some non-fiction, but it’s usually non-fiction about fiction. Case in point, SELLING THE WILD WEST: POPULAR WESTERN FICTION 1860-1960 by Christine Bold, published in 1980 by Indiana University Press. A friend of mine recommended this book to me, and the author’s name was familiar. I remembered that she contributed some of the essays about various authors in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS. So it seemed like something I might enjoy.

The book has an intriguing concept: it’s an examination of the way Westerns became a mass-produced genre with a lot of constraints and rules that developed because of the way it was published, as well as how some authors of Westerns were able to achieve distinct authorial voices despite those constraints and rules. Bold starts with the dime novels and progresses through the early Twentieth Century and the pulp and original paperback eras, doing quick surveys of each of those publishing methods and then analyzing in more detail the careers of several different authors from each time period.

I’m not a big fan of dime novels, but I enjoyed reading about their origins and learned a few things. The authors Bold concentrates on in this section are Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, Edward S. Ellis, and Edward L. Wheeler. I knew quite a bit about Buntline and Ingraham (I once edited a novel in which Buntline is the main character, THE DIME NOVELIST by Clay More), but Ellis and Wheeler were pretty much new to me. Bold also discusses the different approaches of the two main publishers of dime novels, Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith.

In the section on the early Twentieth Century, Bold focuses on the big sellers—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand (Frederick Faust), and Emerson Hough—as well as Frederic Remington, who (I didn’t know this) wrote several novels as well as being a legendary artist of the American West. Brand, of course, is something of a transitional figure, bridging the early days of Wister and Grey with the pulp era that he dominated. I’ve read a lot about Wister (who originated much of what we think of as Western fiction), Grey (the first bestseller in the genre), and Brand (the first King of the Pulps), but I knew much less about Remington and Hough. Neither of whom I’ve ever read, by the way.

Moving on, Bold covers the careers of several writers who “escaped” from the pulps: Alan Le May, Ernest Haycox, Jack Schaefer, and Louis L’Amour. Le May I know mostly from the movies based on his books, although I have read the novel THE SEARCHERS (and didn’t like it as much as the movie). I’ve read and loved both of Schaefer’s novels, SHANE and MONTE WALSH. I’ve come to appreciate Haycox’s work, although I have a preference for his pulp era novellas before he “escaped” those untrimmed pages. And while I haven’t read all of L’Amour’s novels and stories, by any means, I’ve read a bunch of them. L'Amour comes in for the greatest amount of criticism from Bold. She praises his marketing abilities but doesn’t seem to think much of his writing.

The book wraps up with some brief coverage of “Anti-Western Westerns” from the Seventies such as E.L. Doctorow’s WELCOME TO HARD TIMES and Ishmael Reed’s YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE DOWN. There’s also a mention of what Bold erroneously refers to as “Playboy Westerns”, clearly a reference to the various Adult Western series published under house names. Comparing them to dime novels is fair game, I think. There are certainly similarities in the way they’re produced. But I’ve never heard anybody else refer to them as Playboy Westerns, a misnomer Bold picked up probably from the fact that Playboy Paperbacks published two of the early Adult Western series, Slocum by Jake Logan and Raider and Doc by J.D. Hardin, before those series were sold to Berkley.

SELLING THE WILD WEST is an enjoyable book with plenty of interesting insights. There are stretches where the academic density of the writing made my eyes start to glaze over a little, but for the most part it moves right along and is quite entertaining if you’re interested in the subject. Which I am, considering that a huge part of my own career has been spent writing books within a specific system and following the rules (mostly unwritten) of that system, while at the same time trying to establish my own voice and get across the things that I want to get across. That’s been a lot of fun and I think I’ve been somewhat successful at it.

Witchery Plus: A Weird Tales Trilogy - Keith Chapman

Several years ago my friend Keith Chapman published a pair of stories--a fantasy in the mold of Clark Ashton Smith and a sword and sorcery yarn--in a double volume. He's redone that book, added a third story, this time a modern-day horror yarn set in Australia, and published it as WITCHERY PLUS: A WEIRD TALES TRILOGY, which is available in both e-book and print editions on Amazon.

"Night Howl" is the new story in this volume. Chapman sold a number of comic book scripts to Charlton for their horror titles, and the original version of this story was one of them, but it went unpublished when Charlton switched over to mostly reprints. Converted to prose, it appeared first on the BEAT TO A PULP website and now is in print for the first time. It's about a pair of lovers on the run from a murder charge, and in that respect, it works very well as a noir crime yarn. But there's also a possibly supernatural element involving an old Gothic paperback featuring a heroine with the same name as one of the characters in this story. Are the bizarre events of that old paperback replaying themselves in real life? Chapman uses that question as the springboard for a very well-written tale that generates suspense all the way to the end.

Now here's what I had to say (slightly edited) about the other two stories when I reviewed them back in 2013:

"After an interesting introduction that addresses the genesis of these tales, Chapman produces a fine Clark Ashton Smith pastiche set in Smith's evil-haunted French province Averoigne, "Black Art in Yvones". A young protagonist, a beautiful blonde, and a sinister femme fetale even give this tale a slight noirish feel. In the second novelette in this collection, Chapman ventures into sword-and-sorcery territory with "Wildblood and the Witch Wife", featuring a very likable pair of adventurers reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It's set in historical England rather than a fantasy world, but there's still plenty of sorcery and action."

Although probably best known for his Westerns, Keith Chapman is one of those authors who can write just about anything and do a good job of it. He's a fine storyteller, as these stories amply demonstrate. If you've never sampled his work before, WITCHERY PLUS would be a very good place to start.