Pulps From the Crypt

As those on the Cover-Ups and Pulp Mags Yahoo groups already know, Steve Ericson of Books From the Crypt posts a new pulp cover scan every day. This is an excellent site, with great scans and a table of contents listing for each pulp. Highly recommended.

Never Mind

The unexpected deal that I mentioned yesterday isn't going to come about after all, which is okay because I'm really pretty busy right now anyway. And there may be some even better news on the horizon, although I can't get into specifics right now. That's one thing about the life of a freelance writer: when you get up in the morning, you can never really be sure what the day's going to bring.

Out of the Blue

I emailed one of my regular editors today about a book I wrote for him, and he emailed back to ask me to write a book in a series I've never worked on before. Fitting it into the schedule required shuffling some things around, but I figured out that I ought to be able to do it. Luckily, I'm not unfamiliar with the series in question. I've read quite a few of the earlier books, so getting up to speed on it won't be a big problem. Working on something new is always great fun for me, so I'm looking forward to this.

I read THE SCOUT OF TERROR TRAIL by Walker A. Tompkins and TRAIL BOSS FROM TEXAS by Barry Cord (Peter B. Germano), a couple of those library books I checked out last week. More comments on them later, maybe, once I've written up something for one of my apazines or the WesternPulps list. I'm currently reading "Ranger Wings", an air-war novel from the AMERICAN EAGLES pulp, just because I wanted something completely different from what I've been reading.

Death Hitches a Ride

I got around to reading this Ace Double by Martin L. Weiss that I bought a few weeks ago. (You can see the cover here.) It's the story of Al Hopkins, an undercover narcotics agent on his way to a new assignment when he unwisely picks up a couple of hitchhikers. They turn out to be psychopathic killers who force him to accompany them on a deadly cross-country joy ride. Or are they more than that . . .?

There are some genuinely creepy moments in this book and a plot twist or two that I didn't see coming, but ultimately it's undone by the fact that the protagonist continually does dumb things just to keep the plot going. I lost track of how many times I wanted to yell at him. Weiss's writing is functional at best and downright awkward in many places. For a while I toyed with the idea that Weiss might be a previously unknown pseudonym for Lionel White -- the style and the plot reminded me a little of White's work -- but in the end I decided that it was unlikely. White was a better plotter than this. So what we have here is a pretty good cover but a mediocre novel, and not a very good example of the Ace Double mystery line at its best.

Leonard Sanders

I saw in the paper today that novelist and journalist Leonard Sanders has passed away. Among other books he wrote a best-selling espionage novel called THE HAMLET WARNING and a well-received historical novel about Fort Worth entitled, well, FORT WORTH. But I knew him best as the book review editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the Sixties and Seventies. Unlike some book review editors, Leonard never looked down his nose at popular fiction, and his weekly column often touched on some aspect of it. It was through reading Leonard's columns that I learned Robert E. Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, about twenty miles as the crow flies from where I lived. The Lancer paperback editions of Howard's Conan stories had started to come out, and at that time L. Sprague de Camp's intros still said that Howard was born in Cross Plains, which was, of course, incorrect. After reading that column, I had to pay a visit to Peaster myself, so that I could say I had been to the town where Robert E. Howard was born. (There's not much else to say about Peaster, even now. It's your typical wide-place-in-the-road Texas town.) Through reading Leonard Sanders' columns, I also learned that bestselling historical romance novelist Jennifer Wilde was really Fort Worth writer Tom Huff, and that hardboiled spy novelist Philip Atlee was really another Fort Worth boy, James Atlee Philips. When you're a young aspiring writer like I was at the time, it's a real boost to know that writers just down the road from where you live have been successful. It gives you hope, and that's always something young writers need plenty of.

In later years, after I was a published author myself and after Leonard had retired from the newspaper to concentrate on his fiction, we crossed paths several times at book signings and got along well. We weren't close friends, but we were certainly friendly acquaintances. And it was nice to be able to tell him how much I had enjoyed his columns and how one of them had caused me to visit Peaster just to see where REH was born. He seemed to get a kick out of that. I'm glad to have known him.

And one final Jack Slade book 

Another Jack Slade German Western 

One of the Jack Slade Westerns published by Bastei 

German Westerns

There's been some discussion the past few days on the WesternPulps list about German Westerns. By that I mean American-style Westerns, only written and published in Germany. Evidently the Western novel is still pretty popular in Germany, and the leading publisher of them is a company called Bastei. Their website features cover scans from the long-running Jack Slade series, most of which include more graphic nudity than you'll find on American paperback covers. I'll post a few if I can find some that are clean enough to keep this blog relatively family-friendly. There is also a website run by WesternPulps member Jurgen that is devoted to various German Westerns. It's in German, of course, which I don't read that well, but there's still some interesting information to be gleaned from it.

Trouble Rides the Texas Pacific