A Nice Find

I don't normally take part in the "New in the House" series, as a number of my friends and fellow bloggers do, but I came across something today I have to share. One of the items from my collection that I really regretted losing in the fire was a hardback copy of a Mickey Spillane novel (I don't remember which one) that Bill Crider took to the Milwaukee Bouchercon when Spillane attended and got signed for me. I've always appreciated Bill doing that for me. Well, today I was in Half Price Books browsing through their nostalgia section when I saw a paperback copy of what I consider to be Spillane's best novel, ONE LONELY NIGHT. I pulled it off the shelf to look at it, even though I have a policy of not buying books I've already read, and it had a sticker on it that said "Signed". Of course I had to open up the bag and take a look at the inscription, which starts off (wait for it), "Hi, James." Not me, naturally, but still, there it was in Mickey Spillane's handwriting: "Hi, James."


Yes, it came home with me. And I had to sit down and read the opening chapter again, one of the very best opening chapters in all of mystery fiction. For my money, the only one that can match it is the opening chapter of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, and that's only because that chapter has such a great last line. I'm not sure anything will ever equal the impact the first chapter of ONE LONELY NIGHT had on me when I read it the first time on the front porch of my sister's house in 1970. Reading it today, it's still great. And I have a signed Spillane again.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled - David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker, eds.

A few days ago I mentioned that I'd bought the new anthology BEAT TO A PULP: HARDBOILED and was eager to read it. Well, now I have, and the verdict is that editors David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker have put together a really fine collection of stories that is well worth your time and money.

The book begins with a good introduction by Ron Scheer about the origins of the hardboiled genre and proceeds to thirteen stories of various sorts of crime, mayhem, and suspense. Some stand-outs for me:

"Obstruction" by Glenn Gray is a suitably graphic story about crime in an autopsy room that manages to be funny, gross, and violent at the same time. Gray's writing has a unique voice, always a good thing.

"Ric with No K" by Patricia Abbott is another story with an excellent voice. If there's a better short story writer around these days than Patti Abbott, I haven't run across him or her.

"Black-Eyed Susan" by Thomas Pluck is short and mean and well-written. I don't think I've read anything by this author before, but I'll be on the lookout for his name now.

And my favorite story in the anthology, "Bull's-Eye View" by Wayne D. Dundee, a novelette featuring Joe Hannibal, one of the most enduring and appealing PI characters of the past 25 years. This is the sort of story for which the word "hardboiled" was invented: fast, gritty, with good characters and a fully-realized setting, the spiritual descendant of Hammett's Continental Op stories.

There's 'way too much good short fiction being published these days for me to keep up with all of it, but BEAT TO A PULP: HARDBOILED provides a great sampling of some of the best authors. Highly recommended.

Aaaaannd . . . Never Mind

The old layout's back, sort of.  Maybe someday I'll learn.

New Layout

Well, I was messing around with the templates on Blogger, and I can't seem to get the old one back. This one doesn't look too bad. At least it's simple and not too busy. And let's face it, if I try to improve things, chances are I'm just gonna make it worse. So I'll let it stay, at least for now.

The Hungry - Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon

I don't read a lot of horror novels, as I've mentioned before, but when I do, I go more for action-oriented horror rather than slow-paced psychological horror. And action is what you get in THE HUNGRY by Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon. Set in the wide-open spaces of Nevada, this novel tells the story of an outbreak of rampaging zombies, their condition caused by experiments at a top-secret government lab. (That's not a spoiler, by the way.) Trying to survive and maybe even stop the zombies is a small group of human survivors led by the local sheriff, Penny Miller.

Miller is at the center of this novel, and she's a great character: tough, determined, possessed of a wicked sense of humor, a real valkyrie in a bloodstained wedding dress. For a novel with a ton of gory action, THE HUNGRY is actually pretty funny in places, due to the skill with which Booth and Shannon develop the characters. Everybody is believable, and the reader can't help but root for Penny and her allies.

Booth and Shannon keep things moving along at a really fast pace, making this a perfect book to read in a sitting or two. It seems likely there'll be a sequel, and I certainly hope so because I'm ready to read it.  Recommended.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild Western Novels, January 1936

No, not WILD WEST WEEKLY, which was also a fine Western pulp magazine. WILD WESTERN NOVELS was part of the Red Star group. I don't know how many issues there were, but this is the first one. That's a pretty bland cover, but what a line-up of authors: Clarence E. Mulford (with a story about Hopalong Cassidy and the rest of the Bar 20 crew), Harry Sinclair Drago, Alan LeMay (author of THE SEARCHERS, of course, but a prolific pulpster long before that), and pulp veterans Stephen Payne and Jack Bertin. I would have been happy to read it, that's for sure.

Forgotten Books: The Tired Gun - Lewis B. Patten

THE TIRED GUN is a very appropriate title for a Lewis B. Patten novel, because there's a distinct strain of world-weariness that runs through most of his work. If not for the happy endings demanded by the Western market during the era Patten was writing, his vision of the frontier probably would be regarded as even bleaker than that of H.A. DeRosso. And those so-called happy endings often wind up with the protagonist irreparably damaged, emotionally, physically, or both. The hero wins, but pays a high price to do so.

This novel, published in hardback by Doubleday in 1973 as part of its Double D line and reprinted in paperback by Signet a year later, is told in first person, something of a rarity for Westerns, although Louis L'Amour did it frequently in his books, notably the Sackett novels. The narrator of THE TIRED GUN is Sam Court, who was once the marshal of the little town of Cottonwood Grove, Kansas. Six years before the novel opens, a personal tragedy drove Court to leave Cottonwood Grove and take up the life of a hired gun. As the book begins, he's on the run, being pursued by a wealthy, vengeful rancher whose brother Court killed in a gunfight. The killing was self-defense, but the rancher doesn't care about that. He's determined to hang Court anyway.

Finding himself near his former hometown, Court makes the fateful decision to return there briefly. Events conspire to keep him there, however, until his pursuers catch up to him, and during that time Patten uses flashbacks to fill the reader in on how Sam Court came to be in this perilous situation.

There's not a lot of action in THE TIRED GUN, but there's a heck of a lot of HIGH NOON style suspense and tension as Court waits for almost certain death to catch up to him. Patten believed in really piling the trouble on his protagonists, so it's not enough that Court has to deal with the danger catching up to him from behind. He finds fresh problems in his old hometown, too. While I was reading this book, I thought that Patten had buried Sam Court in such a deep hole there was no way he'd ever get out of it, but when the action finally does explode at the end, Patten does a great job of resolving everything.

Patten began writing in the early Fifties, and by the Seventies, his work had become pretty inconsistent. He's at the top of his game in THE TIRED GUN, though. If you want to read a hardboiled, noirish traditional Western that packs a lot into 50,000 words, this is about as good as they come. Highly recommended.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled

This one's already on my Kindle, and I'm eager to read it. Looks like a great line-up.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Maybe because last night was Halloween, I started thinking about this movie. Not only was it the first Abbott and Costello movie I ever saw (at least that I remember), it may well have been the first horror movie I ever saw. Because despite being very funny, it's definitely a horror movie, too, with some really creepy moments. When I was growing up, it ran frequently on the local TV stations, and I watched it every time it was on. So did my friends, and we'd talk about it at school the next day. There was a time in my life I knew most of the bits by heart. It turned me into a fan of Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., too. It was only later than I found out the Frankenstein Monster was played by Glenn Strange, who I knew then as Sam the bartender on GUNSMOKE and Butch Cavendish in the three-part origin episode of THE LONE RANGER.


I don't own a copy of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, so I didn't watch it again last night, but I did watch the trailer and several clips on YouTube. And it's still great fun. I don't know that it's my favorite A&C movie (I'm awfully fond of BUCK PRIVATES, too), but it's right up there.

Dark Harvest - Norman Partridge

Since today is Halloween, it seemed appropriate to post about a Halloween novel. I decided to read Norman Partridge's DARK HARVEST for two reasons: he has a reputation as a very good writer, and it was handy, sitting in a stack just a couple of feet from my computer. It was a good choice.

DARK HARVEST is one of those novels that takes place in only a few hours of time, something I always like. Set in 1963 in a quiet Midwestern town, it's about a strange ritual called the Run. It seems that every Halloween, a pumpkin-headed monster known as the October Boy rise from the cornfields outside of town and for reasons unknown tries to reach the church in the middle of town. Opposing him are all the boys from the ages of sixteen to nineteen, who compete to see who can kill the October Boy (or Sawtooth Jack or Ol' Hacksaw Face, as the monster is sometimes called).

To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with that setup. It seemed like something out of a low-budget horror movie (not that there's anything wrong with that). But Partridge turns it into something else with a number of nice plot twists and some excellent writing. I usually don't care much for books written in present tense, but if an author can make it work, I don't mind, and Partridge does. A little more sense of the time period might have been nice, but the story hurtles along so well, that's not a real problem.

This is a fairly recent book, coming out in a hardback from Cemetery Dance in 2006 and a trade paperback from Tor in 2007 (the edition I read). I don't know if there's a mass-market edition, but there may be. It's well worth reading, and if you're in the mood for a Halloween novel tonight and have a copy on your shelves, you should definitely give it a try.