This is one of those Silhouette Romantic Suspense novels, in this case heavy on the suspense and not so much on the romance, although it’s definitely there. The heroine is a police sniper for a SWAT team in a California city, and the book opens with her trying to stop an assassin from killing a visiting dignitary, the president of the South American nation of San Baltes (“a fictional but real-sounding country”, to quote Woody Allen from WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY). She’s recruited to join a private security company hired to protect the president and immediately gets caught in the middle of an on-going feud between the head of the company (a former Navy SEAL who’s the hero of the book) and a powerful official with the Department of Homeland Security.
The action switches to San Baltes, where we get more assassination attempts, corrupt politicians, drug cartels, kidnappings, explosions, and plenty of jungle action, to the point where this novel almost begins to resemble a Mack Bolan adventure, although it never gets quite that bloody. There’s only one real twist in the plot, and it’s not hard to see it coming, but the story is well-paced enough to pull the reader on to the end.
As usual in a romance, the hero and heroine both have dark secrets in their past that make it difficult for them to connect, but when they do, the book’s lone sex scene is well-written. Brant’s prose is terse and hardboiled in the action scenes. Overall, TERMS OF ATTRACTION is a pretty entertaining novel and worth your time if you’re a fan of romantic suspense yarns.
I used to own a copy of the original Handi-Books edition of this 1950 novel by the creator of the iconic Dan Turner, but it was missing some pages and so I never got around to reading it. Luckily, Pulpville Press has reprinted it in a nice-looking, affordable trade paperback edition that uses the same cover art as the original (which is pictured alongside this post).
Bellem is a prime example of a “love him or hate him” author. I happen to love his work, and have ever since I discovered the Dan Turner stories years ago. No author has made me laugh more often. I think Bellem’s use of language is brilliant, and most of the Turner stories are very well-put-together mysteries, to boot, packing some pretty complex plots into short story and novelette lengths.
THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE proves that Bellem’s writing works equally as well at novel length and in third person. This isn’t a Dan Turner yarn. The hero is store detective Barney Cunard, who’s in charge of security at the biggest department store in an unnamed town. Barney arrives at work one rainy, hungover morning to find a nude blond female mannequin on his desk. He’s barely started trying to figure out how and why it got there when something else happens that has to be connected to this mystery. The body of one of the store’s window dressers is discovered in a bed in one of the store’s window displays, dressed only in lingerie and stabbed in the heart. Obviously, the killer replaced the mannequin with the corpse and left the mannequin on Cunard’s desk for some unfathomable reason.
But this is one of those novels where very little that seems obvious turns out to be true. The plot twists and turns with dizzying speed as all the action takes place in just a few hours. In that short period of time, there are several more murders and a kidnapping. Cunard gets hit on the head and knocked out, guzzles rye, runs around in the rain, and finally figures everything out from clues that Bellem cleverly plants along the way. Of course, as a veteran of the Spicy pulps, Bellem manages to find excuses for several of his female characters to wind up in various stages of undress. This novel reads very much like it could be an expansion of one of Bellem’s hundreds of pulp stories, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not. He also tuckerizes at least one obscure pulp author who must have been a friend of his, and there may be more such instances that I missed.
Bellem has been mentioned as a possible influence on Richard S. Prather, and there are definite similarities between Bellem’s Dan Turner and Prather’s Shell Scott. I think Prather was a slightly better writer, giving some of his novels a more serious undertone than you’ll find in Bellem’s work, but Bellem’s stuff is laugh-out-loud funny, well-plotted, and very much worth reading in my opinion. I had a great time reading THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE and I suspect some of you would, too. Highly recommended.
This is another movie I’d barely heard of, but we took a chance on it. I enjoy a good show biz comedy now and then.
However, THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD isn’t really a comedy, although it’s fairly amusing in places. I guess it’s what they used to call a comedy-drama, before TV merged those words into the slightly less cumbersome but more irritating (at least to me) “dramedy”. It’s the story of a young man, played by Colin Hanks (Tom’s son), who quits law school because he hates it and winds up working as the road manager for a washed-up mentalist/magician named Buck Howard (John Malkovich). Buck, who is openly based on the Amazing Kreskin, as a note at the end of the movie reveals, is eccentric and hard to work for, to say the least. In that respect, this movie reminded me somewhat of a good one from the Eighties, MY FAVORITE YEAR. At one point in his career, Buck was a favorite guest on The Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson, as Buck always adds when he mentions it), but he’s fallen on hard times and been reduced to playing shows in small towns across America. His dream is to get back to The Tonight Show and also to perform in Las Vegas.
There are a lot of celebrity cameos in this one, from Jay Leno to Jack Carter and Bill Saluga (those of you who know who Bill Saluga is, raise your hand; I can still quote his most famous bit). Tom Hanks shows up playing, surprise, the kid’s dad. The script is good, the actors do a fine job, and while the movie definitely has a low-key feeling to it, I enjoyed it and found it well worth watching.
This is another story from the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY. Robert Carse was a prolific author for the pulps and later on turned out quite a few paperback historical novels, as well as the novelization of the movie MORGAN THE PIRATE, which I didn’t think was very good. Carse’s specialty in ARGOSY was the French Foreign Legion story, and “The Whip” is a top-notch example, a ripping yarn if there ever was one.
The Whip of the title isn’t an actual whip, but rather the name of a group of Hungarian terrorists who are out to overthrow the king in the years following World War I. They set up an assassination attempt, but the young man chosen to perform the killing has an attack of morals at the last minute and backs out, so the king survives and the young man has to go on the run to escape the vengeance of his former comrades in The Whip. He figures he can spend the rest of his life hiding in the French Foreign Legion.
Well, you don’t have to have read much adventure fiction to know that sooner or later, our hero’s past is going to catch up to him, in the person of his former friend who is now the deadliest assassin in Europe. But the fact that “The Whip” is somewhat predictable doesn’t detract too much from the entertaining nature of this story. Carse’s prose is lean and tough enough that it could have almost been written yesterday, without any of the supposed purple prose the pulps were famous for. (And that purple prose was never as prevalent in the pulps as their detractors made it out to be, for that matter.) “The Whip” is a fine story, and it, along with Theodore Roscoe’s “I Was the Kid With the Drum”, make this issue of ARGOSY a definite keeper if you ever run across it.
As for the rest of the issue, well, ARGOSY is somewhat problematic for a reader today because of all the serials that ran in the magazine. There are installments of three serials in this issue: a Northern by Frank Richardson Pierce, one of the top authors in that genre; a sports yarn by Judson Philips, who wrote a lot of those before becoming much better known as a mystery author under his own name and the pseudonym Hugh Pentecost; and the concluding installment of a novel about Sheriff Henry Harrison Conroy (think W.C. Fields in the Old West) by one of my favorites, W.C. Tuttle. Good stuff, I’m sure, but I didn’t read any of them because I don’t have the other installments. There’s a horse racing story by Richard Sale (normally a dependable author, but I didn’t care for this one); a story by David Gardner about drilling gas wells that’s okay; a comedy about a magician by Edgar Franklin, a long-time contributor to ARGOSY; and a short-short humorous crime story by the inelegantly named Nard Jones, who went on to write at least one Gold Medal novel in the Fifties. None of the shorts are particularly memorable.
But the stories by Roscoe and Carse are well worth your time and make this issue worth picking up. This is the first issue of ARGOSY I’ve read in a while, but you can bet I’ll be sampling more of them soon.
Theodore Roscoe is probably best known (among those of us who remember him at all) for a fine series of French Foreign Legion stories about an old Legionnaire named Thibault Corday. These ran in the pulp ARGOSY during the Thirties, and a few of them were collected in a small press volume called TOUGHEST IN THE LEGION back in the Eighties.
But Roscoe wrote a lot of other things for ARGOSY besides Foreign Legion yarns, among them this novelette that takes place in a small upstate New York town called Four Corners, during the early days of the Twentieth Century. That’s such a striking cover image (by Emmett Watson, by the way) that it makes me wonder if the editor at ARGOSY had the cover painting to start with and asked Roscoe to write a story around it. Despite the words “Mystery Novelet” on the cover, you look at that Norman Rockwell-esque picture and expect some lazy, gentle piece of Americana from bygone years, don’t you? Sort of like a visit to Mayberry, only from an even earlier era, right?
And that’s what you get . . . if Andy and Opie had to solve a particularly gruesome case of murder involving spiritualism, adultery, a bass drum, and a dead cat.
“I Was the Kid With the Drum!” is one of the weirdest concoctions I’ve read in a while. It’s narrated in Huckleberry Finn-like fashion by Bud Whittier, the twelve-year-old son of Four Corners’ sheriff. One night while he’s getting into mischief where he’s not supposed to be, behind one of the town’s spookiest old houses, he discovers the bass drum that belongs to the drummer from the town’s band playing by itself. The next day, the drummer’s wife turns up missing. More strange stuff happens, mixed in with the preparations for the big marching band contest among the towns in the area that will take place at the Labor Day County Fair. Bud’s job is to help the drummer carry the big drum, but he’s more interested in playing detective.
If you read this story, you’ll think that you have everything figured out pretty early on, but Roscoe is mighty tricky. He throws a lot of plot twists into approximately 15,000 words, and this is one of those stories where you’ll look back and see that all the clues were there, only Roscoe was slick enough to slip some of them right past the reader. He slipped them past me, anyway, and came up with a really entertaining and satisfying tale. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places, but you have to expect that in a story written nearly 75 years ago.
Now, I understand that you can’t just run out and pick up a copy of the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY on my say-so. But if you already have that issue in your pulp collection and haven’t read it yet, my recommendation is that you do so. Or if you happen to run across a copy in a flea market or an antique mall or at a pulp show and remember that distinctive cover painting, grab that sucker if it’s not priced too high. I’m going to be reading the other stories in it and will probably have a few words about them in due time.
If you couldn’t tell by the increasing snarkiness of my comments about some of the movies we’ve been watching, I’m getting a little tired of special-effects-laden movies full of blood, sex, and cussin’ and rather short on things like an interesting plot and characters.
So we watched a movie with, as far as I could tell, no special effects at all, and very little blood. There was some sex (not much, really) but a lot of cussin’. Interesting plot and characters, though.
TRUCKER is the story of a long-haul truck driver named Diane, well-played by Michelle Monaghan, who abandoned her husband and one-year-old son a decade earlier because she couldn’t stand to be tied down by a family. As the movie opens, though, her ex-husband is dying of cancer and the second wife can’t take care of the boy, so Diane, much against her will, has to raise her own son for a while. Emotional fireworks ensue.
This is a pretty slow-moving film, but it’s very well-acted by everyone, including Nathan Fillion as Diane’s neighbor and friend who is obviously in love with her. Everyone in the story is deeply flawed and wounded but ultimately tries to do the right thing. It’s not exactly heart-warming, but it comes close a time or two. The photography, featuring a lot of impressive vistas of the western United States, is beautiful.
Overall, I liked TRUCKER. It’s not the sort of movie that makes you sit up and say, “Wow, that was a great film!” But I enjoyed it and thought it was a nice change of pace from our usual movie fare. I can recommend it, as long as you remember that nothing Blows Up Real Good.
The deadline to throw your name into the electronic hat for the drawing to win a couple of my Adult Westerns is midnight tonight. That's Central Standard Time in the good ol' U.S. of A. I'll announce the winners tomorrow.
A couple of classics: Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother" and Gary P. Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" (sometimes known as "Home With the Armadillo"). I bellowed out these songs many a time while running around with friends in the Seventies.
I've never been a big concert-goer. Back in the Seventies, though, when I was going to college in Denton, I went to a few shows on campus since they were free. I saw Willie Nelson a couple of times that way. But the best concert I attended there featured Michael Murphey and Steve Fromholz, who at the time were part of the so-called "outlaw country" movement of singer/songwriters in Texas. Murphey is better known now as Michael Martin Murphey and does a lot of traditional Western music (much different from "country and western" music, which is often really neither of those things). Fromholz, who was also part of a duo known as Frummox with Dan McCrimmon, never became well-known, although he appeared as an actor in at least one movie starring Willie Nelson. He was also the official Poet Laureate of Texas at one time. I have no idea what he's doing now.
He and Michael Murphey were both great at that concert, and I had a fine time. "Texas Trilogy" is probably Fromholz's best song, although I'm also fond of a humorous tune called "Rest Area Waltz". My friend Leland DeBusk was at that concert with me and became a big Fromholz fan, even learning to play "Texas Trilogy" on the guitar. And Murphy's "Cosmic Cowboy" really sums up the era. Leland could play that one, too. He's gone now, bless his heart, but the music's still here and makes me think of him. "Ridin' the range and actin' strange . . ." Good stuff from 'way back when.
This is one of those Silhouette Romantic Suspense novels, in this case heavy on the suspense and not so much on the romance, although it’s definitely there. The heroine is a police sniper for a SWAT team in a California city, and the book opens with her trying to stop an assassin from killing a visiting dignitary, the president of the South American nation of San Baltes (“a fictional but real-sounding country”, to quote Woody Allen from WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY). She’s recruited to join a private security company hired to protect the president and immediately gets caught in the middle of an on-going feud between the head of the company (a former Navy SEAL who’s the hero of the book) and a powerful official with the Department of Homeland Security.
