Now Free for Kindle: Witch Got Your Tongue - Livia J. Washburn

Livia's urban fantasy novel WITCH GOT YOUR TONGUE is now free for the Kindle for a limited time, in celebration of Halloween. Also the sequel A PECK OF PICKLED WARLOCKS has been reduced in price to $2.99. I'm not exactly an unbiased reader, of course, but I think these books are fast, funny, and very entertaining. If you've been meaning to check them out but haven't gotten around to it yet, now's the perfect time.

The Canyon - Frank Leslie (Peter Brandvold)

Since today is Halloween, what better to talk about than a ghost story? THE CANYON is a new novella from Peter Brandvold writing under his Frank Leslie pseudonym, featuring Yakima Henry, the hero of half a dozen Leslie novels. In this one, Yakima is on the run from a trio of bounty hunters who want to bring him in for a crime for which he's wrongly accused. While heading for Mexico, his route takes him to Skull Canyon, where he meets a beautiful woman who warns him not to continue on that path. But does Yakima heed that advice? You know he doesn't . . .

This story doesn't have quite as much action as a Brandvold yarn usually does, but it's got plenty of sinister atmosphere and Pete does a great job on that, too. He's one of the best writers in the Western field today and never disappoints. He has a sure touch with the Weird Western as well, as this story and his novel DUST OF THE DAMNED prove. If you want to read an excellent spooky story tonight while you're waiting for the trick-or-treaters, I highly recommend that you check out THE CANYON.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Nightmare (Gorgon's Trophy Room)

I've posted this clip before, but I really like it and it certainly seems appropriate, what with tomorrow being Halloween. NIGHTMARE was the title of the weekly monster movie showcase on one of the local TV stations when I was growing up, and I think you can see from this clip that for ultra-low-budget local TV, it was pretty darned good. It scared the bejabbers out of me when I was a kid and still gives me the creeps. The actor playing the host, Gorgon, is the great Bill Camfield, who also hosted the early morning kids' show SLAM BANG THEATRE as Icky Twerp. (There are lots of Twerp clips on YouTube, if you're interested in seeing them.)

The Bells of El Diablo - Frank Leslie (Peter Brandvold)

I've said many times before that you can't go wrong with a Western by Peter Brandvold, whether he's writing under his own name or his pseudonym Frank Leslie. THE BELLS OF EL DIABLO, his most recent novel under the Leslie name, is further proof of that.

In the closing days of the Civil War, Confederate guerrilla James Dunn, haunted by a battlefield tragedy, deserts the cause and heads west with Crosseye Reeves, a former mountain man who was a sharecropper on the plantation owned by James's father. James is on a mission that he hopes will redeem him, a quest to find the former fiancé of his late brother. He catches up to her in Denver City, but that's just the start of an adventure that carries the three of them deep into the dangerous heart of Mexico in search of three bells cast of solid gold . . . the Bells of El Diablo, so called because they're supposed to be cursed and will bring death – or worse – to anyone who seeks them.

This is the stuff of which epic novels are made, and Brandvold does a great job with it. James and Crosseye are fine characters, as is the beautiful Vienna McAllister, the catalyst for their perilous journey into Mexico. As usual, there's plenty of well-written action as the protagonists encounter outlaws, corrupt Rurales, and savage Yaqui and Apache Indians. Also as usual, Brandvold paints the settings with an uncanny vividness that puts the reader right in the middle of that action. The plot barrels along to a nasty but very effective twist at the end that left me eager to read more about these characters.

You won't find a gritty, hardboiled action Western that's better than THE BELLS OF EL DIABLO. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation.

New This Week

Print books first this week, an odd assortment, as usual:

WAR STORIES, VOLUME 1 – A trade paperback reprinting four long comic book stories set during World War II, written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by several different artists. Ennis has written a lot of good stuff, including the series PREACHER, which I read in the seven or eight paperbacks collecting the whole run. His work probably isn't to everybody's taste – it runs toward the grotesque and profane – but I nearly always find it interesting. And of course I'm a long-time fan of war comics.

THE BIG WESTERNER, Robert Easton – This is the fine biography of Frederick Faust by his son-in-law Robert Easton. I read it years ago and hadn't replaced the copy I lost in the fire, but Half Price Books had a copy in the clearance section for $2. It's well worth that just for the extensive Faust bibliography included in it.

MAD STRIKES BACK! – This one is really odd, because it has an extra "Phony MAD Paperback" cover taped onto it, which you can see in the scan. It extends onto the spine as well, although the back cover is the regular one. This is a collection of parodies from the first couple of years of MAD Magazine, with an introduction by Bob and Ray. Some great stuff in here, such as "Prince Violent" with art by Wally Wood; "Ping Pong" with art by Bill Elder; "Poopeye", also by Elder; "Teddy and the Pirates" with Wood doing a great pastiche of Caniff; and "Manduck the Magician" with Elder taking on Lee Falk's creation. I've read some of these stories before, but I'm looking forward to reading them again. The copy I bought is a 14^th printing from October 1963. Those of you who are fans of vintage paperbacks will know exactly what I mean when I tell you that it smells great.

MR. TOMORROW, Con Sellers – This is perhaps the oddest of all, what appears to be a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by Con Sellers. For those of you not familiar with his work, Sellers wrote a bunch of Sixties soft-core erotica for such houses as Novel Books and Merit Books. In the Eighties he wrote a good family saga/historical novel centered around a whorehouse called KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, as well as a series of historical novels about World War II that ran for several volumes. What little I've read by him has been pretty good. MR. TOMORROW was published by Papillon Books, an outfit I've never heard of, and copyright 1974 by Aware Press, Inc., another one that's a complete mystery to me. This novel will definitely get a Forgotten Books post, if I can get around to reading it. I'd venture to say that "forgotten" is an understatement.

Now, on to the new e-books:

THE CANYON, Frank Leslie (Peter Brandvold) – a brand-new Weird Western novella starring Brandvold's series character Yakima Henry. A review of this one will be coming soon.

HARD BITE, Anonymous-9 – The novel-length expansion of a great story that first appeared on BEAT TO A PULP (I think; I make no guarantees about my memory).

BIG MARIA, Johnny Shaw – a new novel by the fine writer behind BLOOD & TACOS.

Looks like a good line-up all around this week.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Horror Stories, February 1935

With Halloween coming up this week, got to have a horror cover, so why not an issue of HORROR STORIES itself, with a striking cover and a fine line-up of authors: Hugh B. Cave, Arthur Leo Zagat, Ray Cummings, Paul Ernst, and Arthur J. Burks among others. If you want a Weird Menace pulp, this issue had to be one of the best.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Six-Gun Western, September 1948

As some of you can probably tell just by looking at that cover, SIX-GUN WESTERN is another entry from Trojan Magazines, publisher of the Spicy line of pulps. This is a pretty typical cover for that line, but the authors in this issue make it interesting. There are a number of prolific Western pulpsters represented, including H.A. DeRosso, Frank C. Robertson, C. William Harrison, and Lee Floren, plus well-known science fiction author and critic James Blish. I've never read any of Blish's Western stories, but I read quite a bit of SF by him when I was younger. Just one more example of the fact that cross-genre authors are nothing new.

Forgotten Books: Raider of the Seas - Warren Hastings Miller

Despite all the pulps I've read over the past 45 years or so, there are still a lot of pulp authors whose work I've never sampled. Until recently, Warren Hastings Miller fell into that category. I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of him until Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books published a volume of Miller's South Seas adventure yarns called RAIDER OF THE SEAS, which is now available in an e-book edition as well as its original print edition. Roberts provides an excellent introduction about Miller's life and work.

The stories in RAIDER OF THE SEAS feature Jim Colvin, the big, two-fisted captain of a tramp steamer, and his small but smart and scrappy chief engineer Johnny Pedlow. They encounter a dangerous array of pirates, wreckers, feuding sultans, and murderous natives but survive by a combination of courage, cunning, and fighting prowess.

A pair of unusual women also play important roles in these tales. Miss Jessie, who by her description sounds a lot like Aunt Bee from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, is an American expatriate who can clean out a table full of tough sailors at poker or use a rifle to gun down a marauding pirate with equal coolness and skill. Lai Choi San is based on an actual female Malay pirate who also served as the model for Milton Caniff's classic character The Dragon Lady a few years after these stories of Miller's were published originally in the pulps FRONTIER STORIES and ALL-FICTION. (One side note: FRONTIER STORIES, which later became a Western pulp, started out as a magazine featuring stories in exotic settings all over the world, not just the Old West.)

Miller's style isn't fancy, nor are his plots complicated. But the stories race ahead with the sort of driving urgency that the pulps did so well, and they have an undeniable air of authenticity. Miller was personally familiar with these settings and was an expert on boats and sailing, including so much detail that sometimes a non-sailor like me doesn't really know what he's talking about. It's all clear enough from context, though, and anyway, the action doesn't slow down long enough to worry about things like that.

I don't know if any more collections of Miller's stories are in the works, but I'll certainly read them if they are. I really enjoyed RAIDER OF THE SEAS and give it a high recommendation.

Now Available -- Six-Guns and Slay Bells: A Creepy Cowboy Christmas

The new Western Fictioneers anthology, SIX-GUNS AND SLAY BELLS: A CREEPY COWBOY CHRISTMAS, is now available in both print and e-book editions from Amazon, as well as an e-book edition for the Nook. It's a Christmas anthology, but with its supernatural theme it's perfect for Halloween as well. As usual with WF publishing projects, it's a little out of the ordinary. I'm not sure anybody has ever done a supernatural Western Christmas anthology before. But it worked out really well, and I'm not just saying that. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and LIBRARY JOURNAL agree and have published very positive reviews of the book. My story features Cobb, my Texas Ranger character who always seems to get involved in offbeat yarns, and Livia's story brings back Buffalo Newcomb, who starred in a couple of her novels and several short stories. If you're a fan of Weird Westerns or know someone who is, be sure to check out SIX-GUNS AND SLAY BELLS.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Pirate Radio

I have a minor connection with radio broadcasting going back to the mid-Sixties when my father was the co-owner of a small-market station (KHRB in Lockhart, Texas, for those of you with really long memories who lived in that area 45 years ago). I wasn't exactly raised around radio, but I spent quite a bit of time around people who worked in that industry and did some production work myself when I was in college. As a result, WKRP IN CINCINNATI is one of my all-time favorite TV shows, and as I like to tell people, it's not really a sitcom, it's almost a documentary.

Which is my long-winded way of getting around to the fact that we just watched PIRATE RADIO, a film that came out a few years ago and didn't make much of an impact, but one that I had high hopes for since it concerns radio broadcasting in England in that same era, the mid-Sixties. British radio never played rock and roll in those days, so it was up to pirate radio stations located on ships anchored off the coast to provide popular music. PIRATE RADIO is about the crew of disc jockeys who worked on one such ship, along with the 18-year-old godson of the station manager, which allows writer/director Richard Curtis to work a coming-of-age angle into the plot.

Obviously, any combination of radio and wacky DJs is going to show some WKRP influence, and there's plenty of that to be found here, most blatantly in a scene where the lone American DJ known as The Count (excellently played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) tries to say a word that's not supposed to be said on the radio. ("Oh, and by the way, Cincinnati . . . Booooger!") Hoffman's performance is very Johnny Fever-esque all the way around, but that's not a bad thing. The rest of the cast, led by Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, and the great Nick Frost, is very good, too.

PIRATE RADIO captures the era pretty well, especially in the reaction of assorted listeners to the music. I remember listening to a transistor radio with the sound turned down really low after I went to bed and was supposed to be asleep, tuning slowly through the AM band and picking up distant stations on the skip. As you might expect, the music in this movie is great, heavy on the British invasion (obviously) but with quite a bit of American rock as well. The comedy is more whimsical than laugh out loud funny, but it had a smile on my face most of the time. This one is well worth watching, especially if you're of a certain age like me. ("*Cough* Geezer! *Cough*") I really enjoyed it.