End-of-the-Month Update

WRITING

September wasn’t as productive a month writing-wise as August, but it was still pretty good. I turned out a decent number of pages, the deal with Ramble House for the short story collection came about, and Livia sold the fourth book in her Fresh-Baked Mystery series. If October goes as well, I’ll certainly be pleased.

READING

These are the books I read in September (minus a couple I read for a competition I’m judging):

THE LAST TEMPLER, Raymond Khoury
EASY COMPANY AND THE BIG GAME HUNTER, John Wesley Howard (house name)
THE BLACK PANTHER, VOLUME 2, Jack Kirby
SUPERMAN/BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES, Jeph Loeb
SUPERMAN/BATMAN: ABSOLUTE POWER, Jeph Loeb
ASSASSIN, Ted Bell
THE RAT PATROL #6: DESERT MASQUERADE, David King (Howard Pehrson)
LONE STAR AND THE CALIFORNIA OIL WAR, Wesley Ellis (Jeff Wallmann)
SOMEONE IS BLEEDING, Richard Matheson
THE GUNSMITH #302: THE FRIENDS OF WILD BILL HICKOK, J.R. Roberts (Robert J. Randisi)
FRIGHT, Cornell Woolrich
THE RUTHLESS RANGE, Lewis B. Patten
GREEN LANTERN: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD, John Broome, et al.
FANG TUNG, MAGICIAN, H. Bedford-Jones

Not a bad one in the lot. I didn’t write blog posts about all of them, because I was either too busy, too tired, or I wrote about them for the Owlhoot apa and like to have those reviews appear there first most of the time. You can read anything in that list, though, and be assured of some entertainment.

MOVIES

We saw the following movies in September: THE EX, THE MARINE, DÉJÀ VU, WILD HOGS, THE SANDLOT 3: HEADING HOME, OFF THE MAP, 300, and BELIEVE IN ME. None of them are great movies, but certainly none are terrible and all of them have something to recommend them.

On a health-related note, even though I’m on three different kinds of medication, my allergies have been bothering me all month. The past few years I’ve gotten pretty sensitive to ragweed, and this is supposedly the worst ragweed season in this part of Texas in more than fifty years. I check the pollen count numbers every day in the paper, and they’ve been higher than I remember ever seeing them, so I believe it’s as bad as the weather service says it is. The situation probably won’t improve until after the first freeze, which is at least six weeks away and quite possibly longer, since it still feels like summer here no matter what the calendar says.

Other than that, though, September was okay.

Believe in Me

Here’s your inspirational, based-on-a-true-story sports movie for this week. It’s a good one, too. Set in drought-ridden western Oklahoma during the Sixties, BELIEVE IN ME is about a young basketball coach who comes to a small-town school believing that he’s been hired to coach the boy’s team. Instead, he’s given the girl’s team to coach. The girls have never been successful and are neglected by the school’s administration, but the coach sets out to change all that.

All the typical elements of a movie like this are in place, right down to the coach’s supportive wife and the villainous head of the school board. It’s all beautifully photographed and well-acted and mostly predictable, but there are a couple of nice variations on the usual plot near the end that make this movie better than it might have been. Bruce Dern proves that he can be just as slimy and evil as a school board president as he was playing a psycho outlaw on GUNSMOKE or in John Wayne movies. Well, he’s not quite as evil here as he was in THE COWBOYS, I guess . . . but he’s still plenty despicable.

All in all, BELIEVE IN ME is a fine entry in the sports movie genre and worth watching.

Ramble House Blog

Fender Tucker, the man behind the fine small press publisher Ramble House, has started blogging. You can check it out here. In the spirit of full disclosure, Fender and I are working on a collection of some of my mystery stories from MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE and a few other places. I don't know yet when it will be out, but you can bet I'll announce it here when I do know.

Fang Tung, Magician -- H. Bedford-Jones

As I’ve mentioned here before, one of my favorite pulp authors is H. Bedford-Jones, one of three legitimate claimants to the title King of the Pulps. (The other two being Frederick “Max Brand” Faust and Erle Stanley Gardner.) This short adventure novel was originally published in the August 2, 1919 issue of ALL-STORY WEEKLY.

It’s the story of American reporter Eric Heald and British intelligence agent Major John Pendragon, who set off into the wilds of China (which were still pretty wild in 1919) to foil the plans of renegade Taoist priest Fang Tung. Fang Tung is trying to stir up a rebellion against the Chinese government, which was allied with England at the time. Along the way Heald and Pendragon pick up an ally, the beautiful daughter of an American doctor who established a hospital in China before his death, a hospital which the daughter still runs.

This story would have made a pretty good 1930s adventure movie with, say, Gary Cooper, Victor McLaglen, and Myrna Loy. Warner Oland probably would have played the villainous Fang Tung, who can control men’s minds through hypnotism. His stronghold is an island temple in the middle of a lake, complete with secret passages, torture chambers, and other good stuff like that. Our heroes get captured, escape, and get captured again in the usual pulp fashion. The pace is a little slow at times and the prose is a little old-fashioned (imagine that, old-fashioned prose in a book that’s nearly 90 nears old), but everything finally builds up to a climax that’s very dramatic and effective, even if there’s not a lot of the slam-bang action you might expect.

FANG TUNG, MAGICIAN would have to be classified as a “yellow peril” novel, and as such, it’s hardly what you’d call politically correct today. The characters are not as stereotypical as you might think, though, and Bedford-Jones was always good at providing heroes and villains of all sorts. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it requires some patience, and if you like slightly cerebral pulp adventure yarns, I recommend it. A recent, inexpensive reprint is available from my friend Brian Earl Brown, and you can find information about it here, along with info on the other pulp reprints Brian has published.

Longarm and the Golden Eagle Shoot-Out -- Tabor Evans

This book is either already out or will be any day now. Although the cover copy doesn't make any mention of it, Raider and Doc from the old J.D. Hardin series co-star with Longarm in this novel . . . for those of you who care about such things as old Adult Western series.

300

300 looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It also looks great most of the time with its mixture of CGI and very distinctive cinematography. I just wished I’d liked it more, because I really wanted to.

You probably know what the movie’s about, whether you’ve seen it or not: the three hundred Spartans who stood off a huge Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae, or the Hot Gates, as it’s referred to in the film. Having spent all my life in the same state where the Alamo is located, I’m a sucker for this kind of yarn, and I like the whole “honor and courage in the face of overwhelming odds” plot. But I thought the jerky, hard-to-follow, video-game-like battle scenes in 300 got old real quick, as did the buckets of blood being spilled. On the other hand, I really liked most of the quieter scenes where the characters are talking between the fights. There’s some excellent dialogue and acting to be found in those.

While I like Frank Miller’s work in the comics and graphic novel format, I’m starting to think that it just doesn’t translate that well to film, at least for me. I didn’t care for SIN CITY, and while I thought 300 was better, my opinion of it is still mixed. 300 is okay at best, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anybody who isn’t really interested in the subject matter.

Texas Wind Review

Nathan Cain over at the excellent Independent Crime website has posted a review of TEXAS WIND. I have to say, it's very nice to be getting reviews on this book almost thirty years after it was written.

Fright -- Cornell Woolrich

I’ve been a Cornell Woolrich fan ever since I encountered reprints of some of his pulp stories in EQMM and THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the Sixties. I’ve read many of his short stories and novelettes and enjoyed them all, but only a couple of his novels, the justly-famous THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and DEADLINE AT DAWN, which I also enjoyed. Until now. I’ve just read the recent Hard Case Crime reprint of Woolrich’s novel FRIGHT, originally published in 1950 under the pseudonym George Hopley.

FRIGHT is one of Woolrich’s historical suspense novels, set in 1915 and 1916, and he does a fine job of recreating that era without going overboard on the historical details. The very strait-laced attitudes of the time period play a part in the plot, too, helping to drive the protagonist to do the things he does. It’s difficult to go into detail about that plot without giving away too much, but let’s just say there’s blackmail, murder, paranoia, more murder, doomed love, more murder, and tragedy galore. Pretty much the essence of noir, in other words, and all told in smooth, if slightly old-fashioned prose that keeps the reader turning the pages. Yes, the coincidences and lapses in logic that Woolrich is notorious for can be found in FRIGHT, but as usual the writing and the raw emotional torment he inflicts on his characters more than make up for any flaws. There are passages in this book that I found genuinely disturbing, and I’m usually not easily disturbed by fiction. FRIGHT is one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time.

It’s also one of the best, and I have a feeling that it just might start me on a Woolrich binge. I don’t know if my heart can take it, though.

Murder By the Slice

Livia and I didn't think this one was going to be out until next week, but we spotted copies of it today in one of the chain bookstores in Fort Worth -- and took advantage of the opportunity to do a drive-by signing. (They had a couple of copies of DEATH HEAD CROSSING, too, so of course I scrawled my moniker in them.) I'm biased, naturally, but I really enjoyed MURDER BY THE SLICE. I love the voice in these books, and it's got a nice plot with lots of twists. But don't take my word for it. Run right out and buy a copy so you can see for yourself.

A Couple of Movies

Years ago we watched the first SANDLOT movie, which I remember as being fairly entertaining for a kid’s baseball movie. We missed the second film in the series, but we recently watched THE SANDLOT 3: HEADING HOME. In typical fantasy fashion, a wealthy, self-centered professional baseball player gets hit on the head by a pitch and finds his adult consciousness inhabiting the 12-year-old body of his kid self, having to relive a pivotal summer in his life and decide whether he wants to follow the same course that he did the first time. Some of the acting is pretty bad and the lines that are supposed to be funny often aren’t, but I got kind of caught up in the story anyway. Nothing here will come as any surprise, but the movie is good-hearted and pleasant enough.

OFF THE MAP is a coming-of-age story about a young, sensitive, intelligent girl who lives with her troubled but somehow still functional family in rural -- really rural -- New Mexico. It’s well-acted and the photography is beautiful. The movie is also arty, pretentious, and slow as mud at times. We picked this one up because Sam Elliott is in it and he’s one of our favorite actors, but he’s not given much to do here except sit around and mope. Kind of like the SANDLOT movie, though, I got interested in this one despite its problems. Joan Allen is good in it, and Valentina de Angelis, who plays the kid, is really good. Worth watching, but you should know going in that it’s definitely leisurely paced. However, as I mentioned to the rest of the family after we’d watched it, sometimes you just need a break from Stuff Blowing Up Real Good, Will Ferrell running around in his underwear (or less), and inspirational, based-on-a-true-story sports movies that include at least one scene where the coach makes the team run back and forth across the field, or the court, or whatever, until they’re ready to drop. OFF THE MAP fits the bill for that.