Robbers Roost Free Today for Kindle

ROBBERS ROOST, the first of three novels I wrote in the Powell's Army series, is free today for the Kindle. This is a good series about a team of three investigators for the Army in the Old West. If you haven't given it a try yet, this is the perfect chance.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, October 1934

Speaking of Weird Menace pulps, which I was a couple of days ago, here's one with a striking cover and a fine line-up of authors: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Carl Jacobi, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts. This issue must have caused a shudder or two among its readers . . . although I'm not sure how many of those readers, even in the Thirties, found these stories all that genuinely scary.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Pioneer Western, August 1937

Here's another short-lived Western pulp, but I'm not sure why it wasn't more successful. That's a pretty good cover, and the line-up of authors -- Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Cliff Farrell, and John G. Pearsol, among others -- is certainly sturdy enough to carry a magazine. Maybe the word "Pioneer" just wasn't action-packed enough. With yarn-spinners like that in its pages, though, I certainly would have picked it up if I'd had an extra dime in my pocket.

Forgotten Books: The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s - Robert Kenneth Jones

I've mentioned the Weird Menace pulps a couple of times recently, and that prompted me to pull this book down from my shelves and read it. Originally published by FAX Collector's Editions in 1975, a reprint edition is still available from Wildside Press.

Jones does a great job of covering the history of this fascinating sub-genre, starting with Popular Publications changing the direction of DIME MYSTERY from traditional mystery reprints to original Weird Menace yarns. Leo Margulies, editorial director of Ned Pines' Thrilling Group of pulps, gets a chapter to himself for his creation of THRILLING MYSTERY, which provided direct competition to Popular and DIME MYSTERY. From there Jones explores all the other publishers in the field and also provides a great deal of information and critical analysis about the writers who were featured in the Weird Menace magazines. I learned several things I'd never run across before, including the fact that four prolific pulp authors - Hugh B. Cave, Arthur Leo Zagat, Wyatt Blassingame, and John H. Knox - lived in a tiny fishing village in Florida at the same time. Million-words-a-year man Arthur J. Burks gets a whole chapter to himself.

Being a writer, I love this kind of stuff. I'm always interested in learning about how other writers lived and worked. Jones talks a great deal about the different themes used in the Weird Menace pulps and how the best writers learned to get around the formulas dictated by the editors and craft many excellent, unusual stories.

After a run of about seven years in the 1930s and early 40s, the Weird Menace pulps faded away, a development that Jones writes about as well. His respect and affection for the genre shows through and makes THE SHUDDER PULPS a fine piece of pulp history. If you're interested in such things, you need to check it out. I had a great time reading it.

One interesting side-note: in his acknowledgments at the front of the book, first published 37 years ago, remember, Jones thanks none other than Walker Martin, one of the leading pulp fans in the world and frequent commenter on this blog. I got a kick out of that, too.

The Guns of Vedauwoo - Wayne D. Dundee

U.S. Marshal Cash Laramie is sent out to locate a shipment of stolen guns in the Vedauwoo area of Wyoming where the rocky terrain is treacherous and enshrouded in mystical beauty. In his quest, Cash goes up against an amoral opportunist looking to stir up discord in the region by selling the weapons to a group of Native Americans.

I just read this one and thoroughly enjoyed it, which comes as no surprise since Wayne Dundee is one of the most reliable authors around. As usual, he supplies nice twists in the plot, well-drawn characters, and plenty of action. That's a nice cover, too. Highly recommended.

Brownwood, The Burma Road, John Wesley Hardin, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Just typing that post title makes me feel a little like Karnak the Magnificent, except that I don't have a punchline for it. Sim-sallah-bim! Oh, by the way, nostalgia ahead, so consider yourself warned.

I mentioned the other day that I went down to Brownwood last week for a family get-together. Here's one of the pictures from that gathering. That's my brother Harold to my left, my sister Norma to my right, my cousin Robert on Harold's other side, and my cousins Pam, Lafreda, and Frances. Sitting in front is my uncle, Fred Reasoner. Fred is the only one of my uncles still living. My aunts have all passed away. While we were eating, Fred told several stories about his service in World War II. He was in the army and drove in truck convoys over the Burma Road from Burma to China, which is some of the most rugged terrain in the world. It's kind of amazing to me that a young man can be sitting at home in Zephyr, Texas, and a few months later be on the other side of the world driving a truck over a road with a cliff on one side and a drop of hundreds of feet on the other, so close that you can't even see the ground when you look out the window. There's a reason they're called the Greatest Generation.

By the way, if you ever find yourself in Brownwood, stop at the Section Hand Steakhouse to eat lunch. Great chicken-fried steak.

Going to and from Brownwood, I drove through the town of Comanche, which means I passed within a block of the place where John Wesley Hardin shot and killed Brown County deputy sheriff Charley Webb. Although accounts vary, I suspect that Webb was there to ambush Hardin, and while you couldn't exactly call the killing self-defense, in this case at least I don't think Hardin was quite as bad as he's sometimes painted. Right there on the corner of the square the old hanging tree still stands, where a mob lynched Hardin's brother Joe and his cousins Bud and Tom Dixson.

The square in Comanche is also where a Rexall drugstore was located in the 1960s, and it was in that drugstore that I bought the issue of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. digest magazine containing the novella "The Pillars of Salt Affair", which was written by Bill Pronzini under the Robert Hart Davis house-name. Although Pronzini has written much better and much more important novels and stories since then, this U.N.C.L.E. yarn remains my favorite of his work, because I still remember sitting in an old brown armchair in my aunt's house in Blanket and racing through it as fast as I could turn the pages, totally enthralled by the adventure. I've never reread it. I'm not sure I want to. Why take a chance on spoiling such a wonderful memory? One of my great hopes as a writer is that someday something will spark a memory in one of my readers and make them think, "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that book by Reasoner. What a good time that was!"

Such were some of my thoughts driving those Central Texas highways last week.

Shamus Banquet Update

Tickets are still available for the PWA Shamus Banquet in Cleveland during Bouchercon. The event is Friday night, Oct. 5. Tickets are $60 for dinner, a cruise, and awards. Email Bob Randisi at RRandisi@sbcglobal.net for tickets and details.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Get the Gringo

Mel Gibson may be pretty much persona non grata in Hollywood these days, but he still manages to get movies made somehow, and while GET THE GRINGO, which Gibson produced, co-wrote, and stars in, appears to have gone straight to DVD, it's actually a pretty good action film. I'd never even heard of it when Livia brought it home from Redbox, so it was overlooked as far as I'm concerned.

Gibson plays an American criminal who escapes over the border into Mexico with several million dollars in stolen loot. Unfortunately, he escapes by crashing his car through the border fence and is immediately captured by Mexican police, who take the money for themselves and make sure Gibson's character disappears into the Mexican judicial system. He winds up in a huge prison in Tijuana where the inmates' families live with them, creating a sort of enclosed community. Corruption and violence run rampant, of course. Gibson befriends a ten-year-old boy whose late father was one of the inmates and who is being kept there, along with his mother, by the criminal kingpin who actually runs the prison.

The plot takes a lot of twists and turns along the way, and several things that are mentioned in passing wind up paying off much later, which is a technique I really like. As you might expect, GET THE GRINGO is a very gritty film, with lots of bloody violence and a ton of cussing, but it all works in context and builds up to an effective ending. It's a good movie, one you might have easily overlooked, too, and is worth watching.

New This Week

Several new books came in this week, starting with REDHEADS DIE QUICKLY, the first collection of Gil Brewer's short fiction, edited by David Rachels and published by the University Press of Florida. All the stories in this book come from assorted detective pulps and digests published during the 1950s. It took me a while to become a Brewer fan, probably because I didn't really like the first novel of his that I read (WILD!), but his work has won me over. He was one of the great noir novelists of his era. (Actually, come to think of it, the first Gil Brewer novel I read was one of his IT TAKES A THIEF novelizations in the Sixties, but that doesn't really count because I didn't have any idea then who Gil Brewer was, just a name on a book, and I was crazy for anything and everything in the secret agent/espionage vein.)

Now for some pulp reprints, starting with three from Black Dog Books. BRING 'EM BACK DEAD collects the first three novels from the long-running Dan Fowler series, which were originally published in G-MEN. These are by George Fielding Eliot, the creator of the series. I've read quite a few Dan Fowler novels and enjoyed all of them, but I don't think I've read any of these three. The introduction in this volume is by best-selling thriller writer Matt Hilton. DUSTY AYRES – INVASION OF THE BLACK LIGHTNING likewise reprints the first three novels in a series, although Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds didn't last nearly as long as Dan Fowler. I read the first novel in this series many, many years ago in the Corinth Regency paperback reprint, but I have no memory of it except that I liked it. The author is prolific pulpster and boys' books author Robert Sidney Bowen, and the intro in this one is by publisher Tom Roberts. IN THE NAME OF HONOR by Albert Payson Terhune is a historical adventure novel originally published in THE ARGOSY in 1908. Terhune is best known for his dog stories, but he got his start in historical fiction.

Moving on, we have four volumes from Altus Press. BETTER THAN BULLETS is Volume 1 in The Complete Adventures of Thibaut Corday and the Foreign Legion by Theodore Roscoe, who was one of the best writers in the pulps. The Thibaut Corday series, which appeared in ARGOSY, is top-notch adventure fiction all the way. This volume reprints the first six stories from the series, and I look forward to getting the others. I've read scattered Corday stories, but now I can read the whole saga from the start. Altus Press has also started a series called TERROR TRIOS, with introductions by John Pelan, each of which reprints three novellas from the Weird Menace pulps by a specific author. The three volumes so far are DEVILS OF THE DARK by Hugh B. Cave, DEATH UNDERGROUND by Wyatt Blassingame, and SPAWN OF THE FLAMES by Wayne Rogers (whose real name was Archibald Bittner). I love Weird Menace stories when I'm in the right mood for them, and these look like dandies. Anyway, you can never go wrong with Hugh B. Cave, a fine writer and a real gentleman with whom I traded a number of emails during the last few years of his life.

As if that wasn't enough, last week I paid a visit to a used bookstore where I'd never been, J&E Recycled Reading in Brownwood (I was down there for a family get-together). It's a good store overall, but it has an excellent Western section. Not many vintage paperbacks, but a lot of Eighties series books that just don't show up much around Fort Worth anymore. I bought too many to list, but some highlights are a couple of Ernest Haycox books (one novel and a collection of two novellas from SHORT STORIES), some Sundance novels by Peter McCurtin, a couple of Lassiters by Jack Slade (also, in this case, Peter McCurtin), and some Gordon D. Shirreffs. To top it off, a good friend sent me a stack of Westerns by William Hopson, a writer whose style could be a little odd but whose books are generally very good. And of the ones my friend sent, I'd read only one, so it's a real treasure trove for me.

Now my only problem is finding the time to read some of these great books! If I start blogging a little less, you'll know I'm up to my ears in fiction . . .

New Websites

Livia and I have had a lot of trouble with our websites lately. The ones we'd been using just up and disappeared, and the domain registry company wouldn't respond to emails. Livia had to start over, design new sites, and register them with a different company. But now www.jamesreasoner.com and www.liviajwashburn.com work again, and I think she did a great job on the new sites. Check 'em out!