Revenge of the Sith

I know, I know. I'm the last person in the world to see the final (supposedly) Star Wars movie. I thought it had a few nice moments and was better than the second one in this trilogy. I've never managed to stay awake all the way through that one. Overall, though, I wasn't impressed. In fact, I think this entire second trilogy has a fatal flaw: Lucas is asking us to watch three long, glacially paced, confusingly plotted movies so he can tell us a story to which we already know the ending before he ever starts. I think I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about the movies if he had gone forward instead of backward. But that's just me.

Old Books

Yesterday I finished the book I've been working on, so today I gathered up all the research books and took them back to the various libraries. I own a lot of books I use for research on different subjects, but when I'm writing something like a historical novel I always have a big stack of books from the libraries, too.

But the point is that while I was out, I stopped by Half Price Books and found a few decent items in their vintage paperback section, where the pickings have been pretty slim lately. I bought:

THE NAKED NIGHT, a World War II novel by Dan Brennan, published by Lion Books in 1954. I'm not familiar with this author, but I like WWII novels and I also tend to pick up Lion Books when I find them.

WIDOWS WON'T WAIT, by Dolores Hitchens, published by Dell, no date but I'd say late Fifties, a reprint of a mystery novel originally published in hardback under the title NETS TO CATCH THE WIND. Appears to be about the widow of a murdered cop trying to catch the killer. I've never read anything by Hitchens, but I've heard good things about her work.

THE BIG HEAT, by William P. McGivern, a Pocket Books reprint probably from the early Sixties. The bag is so taped up I haven't tried to get the book out yet. I have several of McGivern's mystery novels, but not this one until now.

THE SPAWN OF THE DEATH MACHINE, by Ted White, a science-fiction novel published by Paperback Library in 1968, with a Jeff Jones cover.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, digest magazine from September 1959, with stories by Murray Leinster, Algis Budrys, and Christopher Anvil, among others. Cover by Kelly Freas.

WHY SO DEAD?, by "Ellery Queen", Popular Library, 1966, and WHAT'S IN THE DARK, by "Ellery Queen", Popular Library, 1968 -- two of the books in the paperback series featuring eyepatch-wearing cop Tim Corrigan. I've never read any of these and don't remember right off-hand who actually wrote them. Paul Fairman? Talmage Powell? All I remember is that they weren't written by Fred Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the originators of the Queen name.

Not a great haul, by any means, but not bad, especially considering that most of these were a dollar and none of them were over two bucks.

The Cisco Kid

Warning: Nostalgia is about to be wallowed in.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Cisco Kid TV series, for one specific reason. An episode of it was the first thing I ever watched on a color TV that belonged to my family when I was a kid. When I was growing up, we probably had more TV sets than most households in the early Sixties, because my father was a TV repairman and we always had several portables around in addition to the big console in the living room. But they were all black-and-white sets. There weren't enough shows being broadcast in color to make buying a color set worthwhile, according to my dad. But some relatives of ours had one, and I always wanted to go visit them so that I could sit in front of the set and stare in rapt fascination at BONANZA or THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY in color. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

Eventually I made a big enough pest of myself that my dad agreed to get a color TV. The day he was supposed to pick it up, I raced up the street from where the school bus dropped us off, but he wasn't there, and neither was the new TV. I had to wait another couple of hours before he finally got home with it, lugged it in (those old TVs were big and heavy), and set it up. But then it was ready, and when we turned it on, there were Cisco and Pancho, riding the range and chasing bad guys. It was a truly thrilling moment. Later in the evening we watched an episode of DANIEL BOONE, which was new at the time (the Cisco Kid was an old rerun even then), but Cisco was first.

All of which is my long-winded way of saying that I picked up a dollar DVD in Wal-Mart recently that has six episodes of THE CISCO KID on it, and tonight I watched one of them, the first time I've seen an episode of this series in years, if not decades. Judging by this one, it was a dollar well-spent. The plot was fairly complex, Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo Jr. were very good as Cisco and Pancho, and the color photography, much of it shot on the familiar locations where so many TV and movie westerns were filmed, was quite good for the time period. The accents and some of the jokes were a little heavy-handed and might almost be considered racist today, but I didn't find them mean-spirited at all. Leo Carrillo Jr. was just plain funny as Pancho, but he was also a competent sidekick for Cisco, not buffoonish in his actions. I've always liked sidekicks who can handle themselves in a fistfight or shootout, and you get the sense that Pancho is really a pretty tough guy.

I'm looking forward to watching the other episodes on this DVD, to see if they hold up as well as the first one.

Grifter's Game

If I was a little ambivalent toward the last Hardcase Crime book I read, Stephen King’s THE COLORADO KID, that’s not the case at all with GRIFTER’S GAME by Lawrence Block. I own a copy of the original Gold Medal edition of this novel, which was published in 1961 under the title MONA, after the beautiful young woman that the narrator, con man Joe Marlin, meets and falls for in Atlantic City while his life is already being complicated by a stolen suitcase with a fortune in uncut heroin in it. And from there, as they say, things get worse.

Though this was one of the first novels published under Block’s name, he was already a seasoned pro by 1961, having written quite a few soft-core porn novels (many of which were actually crime novels), mostly under the pseudonym Andrew Shaw. This experience shows in the writing, which is just as smooth as can be and carries the reader along quickly. Maybe the plot wasn’t quite as twisty as I expected, but it’s still compelling. And the ending is about as noirish as you’ll ever find. Dark stuff, but great.

As mentioned above, I own a copy of MONA, but I’ve never read it because it’s rather brittle and I didn’t want to damage it. This is one of the advantages of having Hardcase Crime around. Thanks to their reprint, I don’t have to take a chance with the original to enjoy this fine novel.

The Punisher: Business as Usual

I confess, I like The Punisher. Yeah, I know, he’s a hokey, comic book ripoff of Mack Bolan, the Executioner, but I was a regular reader of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN when the Punisher was introduced there, and I followed the character through his other appearances in the Marvel line and in his own series, which stopped and started a time or two and included a really nice run by Chuck Dixon and John Romita, Jr. After I stopped reading comics in the late Nineties, I lost touch with the character, though.

Now that I’ve started reading the trade paperback collections of more recent comics, one that I picked up was THE PUNISHER: BUSINESS AS USUAL, which collects six issues of a Punisher series from a couple of years ago. These stories were all written by Garth Ennis, author of the bizarre but great PREACHER series, and feature art by Steve Dillon, also from PREACHER, and Darick Robertson. The Punisher is something of a globe-trotter here, with his adventures taking him from South America to New York to Belfast, Ireland. Not surprisingly, considering that they’re written by Garth Ennis, the stories are full of over-the-top violence and groan-inducing goofiness. They also team him up with Wolverine from the X-Men, one of Marvel’s most popular characters. They’re pretty entertaining in their way, and if I run across more of these collections, I’ll probably read them.

By the way, I haven’t seen either of the Punisher movies and don’t have any real desire to do so. I’m not sure the character would work anywhere except in the comics.

The Colorado Kid

Well, I like the cover, which was painted by Glen Orbik . . .

Actually, there are several other things to like about this odd little book. One is the dedication, which reads: “With admiration , for DAN J. MARLOWE, author of The Name of the Game is Death: Hardest of the hardboiled.” Now, I happen to think that THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH is possibly the best hardboiled novel ever written, so I’m glad to see King mention it in a book with a wide readership. Maybe some people who pick up this book because it was written by King will go on to become Dan J. Marlowe fans. Another thing I like about THE COLORADO KID is that it’s short and reads very fast, and in these days when I don’t have as much reading time as I once did, that’s an important consideration. The characters are affable and the setting is well-drawn. But that ending . . .

In his afterword, King says that the book is about the nature of mystery in life, and that he thinks readers will either love it or hate it. I can see the first point, but the second doesn’t really apply to me. The mystery to me is whether I even like this book. I think I do, but I’m not sure. I don’t consider the time I spent reading it wasted, which has to count for something.

Shopping Tip

For those of you planning to go out tomorrow and participate in the biggest shopping day of the year, just a reminder that the first TALES FROM DEADWOOD novel is now available in finer bookstores and Wal-Marts everywhere. Just the thing for those readers on your Christmas list who enjoy extremely gritty historical fiction.

Nothing like a little blatant self-promotion on a holiday, now is there?

Thanksgiving

I hope all of you had a nice Thanksgiving today. I worked on the current book, as planned, and had a pretty productive day. But I also found the time to watch part of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and some of the National Dog Show (a Thanksgiving tradition in the Reasoner household). Also ate a very good turkey dinner topped off by some excellent pumpkin cheesecake. Can't beat that.

I'm reading Stephen King's Hardcase Crime novel, THE COLORADO KID. Should have a few comments tomorrow.

Sword and Sorcery

I've been a fan of the sword and sorcery genre ever since I picked up a copy of the Lancer edition of CONAN THE USURPER at Barber's Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth sometime in the mid-Sixties. Barber's, by the way, was a great bookstore that sprawled through several floors of an old building, with new books on the ground floor and used and rare books upstairs. The kind of bookstore you don't find anymore, in other words. Barber's has been closed for quite a while, and I believe all the inventory was sold to Larry McMurtry for his store in Archer City.

But to get back to sword and sorcery, I've been reading the stuff for forty years now, and there's a fine e-zine devoted to it called Flashing Swords, edited by my friend Howard Jones. There are several issues on-line, each featuring sword and sorcery stories by both new and well-established writers in the genre. The website also has a section of very good articles about the genre and the authors who have written in it. Check it out and read some good stories.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow to those of you who celebrate it. Other than turkey dinner and maybe some football watching, I expect it'll be a pretty normal work day for me. Sometimes I take holidays off from the writing and sometimes I don't. Since I'm trying to finish up the current book this weekend, this will be one of the years that I work on Thanksgiving.

10 Story Western, September 1944

I haven't posted a pulp cover in a while, so I thought I'd put this one up. It's also featured on the WesternPulps website this week. I like this one because instead of the clean-cut hero you usually find on Western pulps, this guy is one ugly, mean-looking son of a gun.

I don't know if you can make it out in the scan or not, but just below the barrel of the gun in the character's left hand is some faint pencil scribbling that reads "BW Gardner". This pulp is from the collection of the late Barry Gardner, a good friend and an absolutely wonderful fellow who was the son of Bennie Gardner, who wrote extensively for the pulps as "Gunnison Steele". Before he passed away, Barry had collected several hundred pulps with his dad's stories in them, and I wound up with the collection. Bennie Gardner wrote some very good full-length pulp Western novels, but he was really the master of the Western short-short, packing action, a credible plot, and usually a twist ending into two or three pages. Well worth reading, if you're ever flipping through a Western pulp with a Gunnison Steele story in it.