Peacemaker Award Nominations Announced

PRESS RELEASE 03/31/11
For Immediate release:

Western Fictioneers (WF) is pleased to announce the nominations for the first annual Peacemaker Awards.

Nominees for the 2010 Best Western Short Story Award are listed in alphabetical order:

“Left Behind” by Carol Crigger from the anthology Roundup! Great Stories of the West (La Frontera Publishing

“This Old Star” by Wayne Dundee from the anthology Bad Cop…No Donut (Padwolf Publishing)

“Two-Bit Kill” by C. Courtney Joyner from the anthology Law of the Gun (Kensington) .

“Scourge of the Spoils” by Matthew P. Mayo from the anthology Steampunk’d (Daw Books, Inc)

"Catch a Killer by the Toe" by Pete Peterson published by Untreed Reads

++++
Nominees for the 2010 Best Western Novel Award are listed in alphabetical order:

Manhunt (Berkley) by Lyle Brandt (Berkley)
Avenging Angels by Lyle Brandt (Berkley)
Settler’s Chase by D. H. Eraldi (Berkley)
Long Ride to Limbo by Kit Prate (Western Trail Blazers)
Wulf's Tracks by Dusty Richards (Berkley)
Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler (Dorchester)
++++
There will be no Best First Western Novel Award awarded this year as there were not enough entries to complete the field of judging.
The Peacemaker Awards will be announced June 23rd, 2011 in Bismarck, North Dakota. A place and time will be announced at a later date.
Western Fictioneers (WF) was formed in 2010 by Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional Western writers, to preserve, honor, and promote traditional Western writing in the 21st century. Entries were accepted in both print and electronic forms. The Peacemaker Awards will be given out annually. Submissions for the 2011 awards will be open in July, 2011. Submission guidelines will be posted on the WF web site. For more information about Western Fictioneers (WF) please visit:
http://www.westernfictioneers.com/
or
http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/

Gang Girl/Sex Bum - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

I’ve known for a good many years that Robert Silverberg actually wrote the scores of softcore erotic novels published between the late Fifties and the mid-Sixties under the name Don Elliott. A few years ago I read and enjoyed LOVE ADDICT, the first Don Elliott novel and the first book published by Nightstand Books, the first and probably best-known softcore imprint published by William Hamling. I was surprised at how good LOVE ADDICT was, although I shouldn’t have been, of course, since I already knew what a good writer Silverberg was (and is).


In a few days Stark House Press will be publishing GANG GIRL/SEX BUM, the first reprints of any of Silverberg’s Don Elliott novels. GANG GIRL, originally published in 1959, was his second book for Nightstand, while SEX BUM came out a few years later in 1963. Both novels are rise-and-fall stories.

The protagonist of GANG GIRL is Lora Menotti, a tough and experienced sixteen-year-old gang member from New York who has to find herself a new gang to run with when her family moves to a different neighborhood. Given Lora’s willingness to use sex to get what she wants, it doesn’t take her long to insinuate herself into the Cougars, and she doesn’t settle for being a junior member, either. She sets her sights on being the deb of the gang leader and actually running things as the power behind the throne.


I’m not a huge fan of “juvie” novels, but this is a good one. The details of gang life come across as realistic, whether they actually are or not, and Lora is a fine if unsympathetic character, dominating the book with her fierce and ruthless ambition. There’s quite a bit of sex but even more graphic violence, and the fact that it’s so unsettling is a tribute to Silverberg’s skill as a writer.


SEX BUM is more of a hardboiled crime novel. Set in upstate New York, it centers around Johnny Price’s rise from being a small-town punk to becoming a powerful man in the New York Syndicate, double-crossing and stepping on anybody he has to in order to get what he wants. As in all tragedies, though, Johnny sets his sights too high and ultimately has to pay a price for his ambition, as Lora does in GANG GIRL.

With its upstate New York setting and heel-as-protagonist, this one actually reminded me of an Orrie Hitt novel, although Silverberg doesn’t use any of the other familiar Hitt plot elements. Nor is there the deus ex machina happy ending often found in Hitt novels. Which is not to say that Silverberg’s approach is better, just different. And equally compelling and entertaining.


Silverberg’s prose is some of the smoothest I’ve ever encountered. I would sit down to read a chapter or two and find myself halfway through the book before I knew it.  Every so often there’ll be some small inconsistency (a girl’s small breasts are mentioned in one chapter, while in the next chapter the same girl has “big boobs”, for example), but that can be chalked up to the speed with which the books were written, usually six days apiece. Plenty of other writers have been guilty of the same thing. (Raises hand sheepishly.)


These are hugely entertaining books, and Stark House is to be commended for bringing them back into print. Adding to the book’s appeal is a fine introduction by Silverberg (an expansion of his famous essay “My Life as a Pornographer”) and an equally informative afterword by author and scholar Michael Hemmingson, plus a bibliography of Silverberg’s erotic novels as Don Elliott and those published under other pseudonyms. I hope GANG GIRL/SEX BUM is only the first of many Don Elliott reprint volumes. In the meantime, I have the original editions of a couple of other Elliott novels, so I may read them soon, too. These two are highly recommended.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Condemned

How long has it been since you saw a good “women in prison” movie? If it’s been too long, you can remedy that by watching Oren Shai’s CONDEMNED. It’s a short film with only four characters, but it’s very well-made and made me want a feature version, complete with all the back-story and more about what happens to Prisoner #1031 (Margaret Anne Florence). The performances are good, the production values are top-notch (the movie is very well-photographed), and the music is great. Plus you get vintage paperbacks and some fine noir dialogue.


CONDEMNED is available on-line several places, but the main page for it is here. Do yourself a favor and check this one out if you haven’t seen it already. Highly recommended.

Top Suspense Anthology

I’ve just read the first anthology published by the Top Suspense Group, a gathering of fine writers who have joined forces to provide consistently excellent mystery, suspense, horror, and Western e-books. There are twelve authors currently involved, and in this anthology they’ve brought together a variety of stories, some reprints and some new, that share the quality of being top-notch entertainment. Here’s the line-up:


Unreasonable Doubt by Max Allan Collins
Death’s Brother by Bill Crider
Poisoned by Stephen Gallagher
Remaindered by Lee Goldberg
Fire in the Sky by Joel Goldman
The Baby Store by Ed Gorman
The Jade Elephant by Libby Fischer Hellmann
The Big O by Vicki Hendricks
The Chirashi Covenant by Naomi Hirahara
El Valiente en el Infierno by Paul Levine
A Handful of Dust by Harry Shannon
The Canary by Dave Zeltserman
The Chase by Top Suspense Group


What sets TOP SUSPENSE apart from many anthologies I’ve read is that there’s not a weak story in the bunch. They’re all good. I had read some of them before but read those again and thoroughly enjoyed them. Since I’m friends with many of these writers and have known some of them for decades, I hesitate to start listing favorites. That said . . . I really enjoyed Joel Goldman’s Depression-era crime story “Fire in the Sky”, Ed Gorman’s haunting “The Baby Store”, Vicki Hendrick’s Florida-set noir “The Big O”, and “The Chase”, a slightly crazed and highly entertaining round-robin story written by the authors in 250-word chunks. I had to laugh several times because I could almost see the authors at their computers cackling fiendishly as they set something up for the next author in line to tackle. Having been involved in several “collaborative novels”, I can tell you that sometimes that set-up works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In “The Chase”, it works really well.


TOP SUSPENSE is one of the best anthologies I’ve read in quite a while and well worth your attention. Highly recommended.

So Close the Hand of Death - J.T. Ellison

I’m not a big fan of serial killer novels, but I read one now and then. And J.T. Ellison is another of those writers I don’t really know, but we have lots of mutual friends. So I picked up her newest novel about Nashville homicide detective Taylor Jackson, SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH, and gave it a try. I’m glad I did.


I’ll admit that at first I had a little trouble getting into this one, because there’s a lot of back-story. As with quite a bit of current mystery fiction, it might be better to read this series in order (which I intend to do, now that I’ve sampled it). But Ellison does a good job of bringing new readers up to speed, and once I had all the characters straight, the rest of the book really races along.


In this one, Taylor Jackson has to track down a serial killer she’s encountered before. The Pretender, who apprenticed himself to a killer Jackson took down in a previous book, mimics the murder methods of famous serial killers of the past. To make things worse, it appears that he’s taken on apprentices of his own and has followers carrying out murders in various places across the country. Complicating things even more is a true-crime blogger who may have figured out who The Pretender is, and he definitely knows who she is.


There are a few soap opera undertones – Jackson works with an FBI special agent and profiler with whom she has a romantic relationship – but for the most part the book is a straight-ahead procedural filled with nice details about how the authorities track down serial killers and punctuated with bursts of well-done action. Taylor Jackson is a fine character, plenty tough but not unrealistically so, and Ellison produces some good, hardboiled prose.


As I mentioned above, if you haven’t been reading this series, you should probably start at the first. But if you have, you certainly don’t want to miss SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH. (Ellison’s other novels, which I assume all feature Taylor Jackson, are ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS, 14, JUDAS KISS, THE COLD ROOM, and THE IMMORTALS.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, June 1944

This is certainly an odd cover, one of the few I've seen other than issues of MASKED RIDER WESTERN where a character is wearing a Lone Ranger-style mask.  And then there's the badge on the shirt underneath the torn shirt.  Really makes you want to find out what it's all about, doesn't it?  I'd say a cover like that has done its job.

Forgotten Books: Girl Possessed - Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughey)

(I'm kind of swamped these days, so from time to time I'm going to be re-running some posts from the early days of this blog, before there was a Forgotten Books series.  I hope they'll be new to many of you, and to those who have seen them before, my apologies.)


For an author who is remembered today (if at all) as a Western writer, based on the evidence of this book Dean Owen could also write a pretty good crime novel. The plot of this book is very much in the Gold Medal style: an earnest but not too bright lunk of a hero runs into a beautiful dame who's maybe no better than she has to be; hero makes one wrong decision that sets in motion a chain of steadily worsening events including murder; and then things get even worse. If there's a drawback to this book, it may be that it hews too closely to this well-established plotline and doesn't provide any real surprises along the way. But Owen tells his story in a terse, fast-moving style that's very appealing to me and gives the reader a good picture of a man who's gone past the end of his rope.


And how about that cover, hey? Pretty spicy stuff.


This novel was published by Gold Star Books, a short-lived company headquartered in Derby, Connecticut. In its three years or so of existence, Gold Star published quite a few crime novels, including American editions of some of the Hank Janson novels, which were hugely successful in England. Gold Star is best known, though, as the publisher of several Tarzan pastiche novels which appeared under the pseudonymous byline "Barton Werper" (actually the name of a character in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels). If I'm remembering the story correctly, these Tarzan novels were lightly rewritten plagiarisms of some of Burroughs' novels. I recall seeing the Barton Werper books on the paperback rack at Tompkins' Drug Store, where I bought a lot of books and comics and digest magazines in the mid-Sixties, but for some reason I never bought any of them. That sort of surprises me because I was a big Burroughs fan by then. I sort of wish I had picked them up, because they're semi-collectible now, but I don't want them badly enough to go looking for copies.


I've wandered off the subject. GIRL POSSESSED is good enough that I'll definitely read more of Dean Owen's mystery novels under his various pseudonyms (most notably Dudley Dean and Owen Dudley). Luckily I already own most of them.


(Update:  Since this post, like the others I'll be re-running, is from before the fire, I don't have all those Dudley Dean and Owen Dudley mysteries anymore.  But I do have some I've picked up since then, and I still plan to get around to reading them.  One of these days.)

The Green Hornet: Year One: The Sting of Justice - Matt Wagner

I’ve written here before about listening to the syndicated reruns of THE GREEN HORNET radio show when I was a kid during the early Sixties, watching the Green Hornet TV series later that same decade, and writing a Green Hornet story of my own for the anthology published last year by Moonstone. So you know about my fondness for the character.


I recently picked up a trade paperback reprinting of the first six issues of the comic book series THE GREEN HORNET: YEAR ONE, published by Dynamite Entertainment. This volume is entitled THE STING OF JUSTICE and employs flashbacks to tell the story of The Green Hornet and Kato beginning their battle against the criminal underworld in Chicago in 1938, as well as fleshing in their backgrounds and explaining how they met. The script is by Matt Wagner, author of the great SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE comics series, and the art is by Aaron Campbell.


I really like the fact that the main story is set in the Thirties, as it should be. This is clearly the radio character, and Wagner’s script and Campbell’s art do a fine job of capturing the era and staying true (for the most part) to the continuity and atmosphere of the radio show, while telling a more hardboiled story than most of the broadcasts from that era. Also, without ever coming right out and saying it, there are a couple of things eagle-eyed readers will spot that are nods to the fact the Lone Ranger was the original Green Hornet’s great-uncle.


My only complaints are minor ones. The story is set in Chicago, and while I don’t believe the city was ever identified in the radio show, I thought it was understood to be Detroit, home of the radio station where the Green Hornet originated. Also, I can’t believe six entire issues went by without one scene of a newsboy yelling, “Extry! Extry! Green Hornet still at large!” I know, I know, the guys on the rebooted HAWAII FIVE-O don’t like saying “Book ’em, Danno”, either (and the snarky comments they made about it in interviews before the show ever aired sort of prejudiced me against it). Sometimes you can just be too post-modern and ironic for your own good, damn it. Anyway, I plan to read future collections from this Green Hornet series, and that newsboy better show up sooner or later.


In the meantime, I liked this one a great deal and thought that overall it was a faithful adaptation and expansion of the original. If you’re a Green Hornet fan, you really should read it.

The Demon Cross - Nathan Shumate

Nathan Shumate runs the excellent Pulp of the Day website. I’ve been a subscriber to it for years, getting a cover image in my email every day. Not all of them are exactly what purists like myself consider pulps, but hey, I love vintage paperbacks and men’s sweat mags, too, so it’s all good. Very good, in fact.


But in addition to this fine work, Shumate is also a writer, and his new e-book, THE DEMON CROSS, is a top-notch horror/private eye yarn. PI and single mother Rennie Avalon tends to get involved in cases that have a supernatural angle to them, and in this one she’s hired to recover an ancient book that contains dangerous information. (That’s right. It’s a wandering book job.) Naturally things get both complicated and dangerous. How could they be anything but with neo-Nazis and demons involved?


The pace in this one really races right along, which I always like, and Shumate does a good job with the characters as well. Despite all the fantastic goings-on, Rennie Avalon doesn’t come across as some sort of super-heroine but rather more of a realistic character who’s reasonably tough when she needs to be but certainly not perfect. The supporting cast consisting of her daughter and various people who help her with her cases is well-drawn, too.


THE DEMON CROSS reminds me of the pilot episode of a good TV series. Shumate has more Rennie Avalon novels coming, and I plan to read them. Recommended.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Dead Don't Dream

My memories of Hopalong Cassidy from when I’m a kid are of the TV show, of course, as well as the early films that starred William Boyd in the iconic black outfit and hat (Hoppy being one of the few good guys who wore black).


But years later, I discovered that in the series’ final years, there were a number of entries in which Boyd wore a tan suit and cream-colored hat, and the plots took on a definitely hardboiled, mystery-oriented tone. One of the best of these is THE DEAD DON’T DREAM, which is a great noir title that would have been just as much at home on a Gold Medal paperback.

Boyd’s sidekicks in these later films are Andy Clyde as California Carlson and Rand Brooks as Lucky Jenkins. In this one, our heroes find themselves staying in an isolated frontier hotel where a murder takes place, and that killing is only the first of several. This film is actually structured more like a Charlie Chan movie than a Western (which I guess makes Andy Clyde the Mantan Moreland character) and is nicely photographed in sinister black-and-white.


THE DEAD DON'T DREAM and the other Cassidy movies from this era are nice, tight films that pack quite a bit of plot into running times that seldom went much over an hour. When the Hopalong Cassidy TV show was at its height in the early Fifties, some of the movies from the late Forties, like this one, were edited down to fit into a half-hour TV episode, which meant cutting them by almost two-thirds once you account for the commercials. I’ve seen those episodes, and they make almost no sense at all. But the original versions are well worth watching. I believe some of them are available on Netflix, including this one.