Enter Ben Haas.
Over the years I’ve read most of the books in the Fargo series that Haas wrote
under the name John Benteen, but there are still quite a few of his Sundance
series that I never got around to. The next one I hadn’t read was #6 THE BRONCO
TRAIL. This one opens with Jim Sundance, the half-British, half-Cheyenne
professional fighting man, hunting down an outlaw gang in Utah and dealing with
them in an explosive confrontation. When Sundance reports to the Mormon leader
who hired him, he finds an old friend waiting for him: General George Crook.
Sundance has worked for the army before, and now Crook wants him to find out
who’s trying to stir up a new war between the Apaches and the settlers in
Arizona. And while he’s at it, if he can convince Geronimo and his followers,
who have fled to the mountains in Mexico, to surrender and make peace, that
would be great, too.
It’s a job that puts Sundance smack-dab in the middle of danger from several
different sources: the criminal ring smuggling ammunition and whiskey to the
Apaches, the Mexican army, and Geronimo his own self. In addition to Geronimo
and General Crook, actual historical figures who play a part in the story
include scouts Al Sieber and Tom Horn. As Haas explains in an afterword, nearly
everything in the book except Sundance’s involvement is based on documented
history. It’s interesting and very effective.
Of course, the biggest appeal of these novels is the action, and I’m convinced
that except for Robert E. Howard, nobody was ever better at writing close
combat action scenes than Ben Haas. Whether it’s a brutal fistfight, a deadly battle
with knives, or a close-quarters shootout, Haas’s skill at describing these
scenes is breathtaking. The story races along at a breakneck pace, the settings
are vividly (but not long-windedly) described, and Sundance is a great
protagonist, if a bit dour.
So I went into THE BRONCO TRAIL wanting a book that I would enjoy reading, and
that’s exactly what I got. Copies of the original paperback (with a cover by Mel Crair) can be found
on-line, and an e-book edition is available from Piccadilly Publishing. I give
this one a high recommendation.
Most of the pages are taken up by a long Conan yarn called “Leaving the Garden”
written by Jim Zub with artwork by Richard Pace. It begins with a badly wounded
Conan waking up after having been buried alive following a battle. Naturally,
he doesn’t stay underground. A flashback establishes that he was traveling with
a merchant caravan ambushed by inhuman attackers. The rest of the story deals
with him recovering and seeking vengeance for what happened to his companions.
This is a good story with plenty of action broken up by the occasional poignant
moment. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Jim Zub so far. My only complaint
about this script is that “Leaving the Garden”, while it fits, isn’t the sort
of dramatic title I’ve come to expect on a Conan story. I also have to say that
the artwork isn’t to my taste at all. I suspect it’s the kind of art that
either resonates with a reader or it doesn’t. It didn’t in my case.
This issue also features the second installment of a Solomon Kane serial
written and drawn by Patrick Zircher, an adventure that finds Kane battling a
supernatural menace in his native England. Art and script are superb on this story.
So far it’s one of the best Solomon Kane comics stories I’ve read.
Despite the reservations mentioned above, there’s enough to like about this
issue of THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN that I don’t hesitate to give it a strong
recommendation for Conan and Robert E. Howard fans. It’s available in both
print and digital editions.
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.)
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
