Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 15 Story Detective, August 1950

Nice tense cover on this fairly late pulp, and a fine line-up of authors inside: Robert Martin, Frederick C. Davis, Talmage Powell, William Campbell Gault, and Richard Deming, among others. That's almost an all-star issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: The Rio Kid Western, Fall 1944

The Rio Kid is one of my favorite Western pulp series. This cover features a nice portrait of the Kid (really Captain Bob Pryor) and his sidekick Celestino Mireles. The thing that sets this series of novels apart is that they're based on historical incidents and several historical figures appear in each novel, complete with portraits and mini-biographies in sidebars scattered through the story. In this yarn, the historical characters are Leland Stanford, George Hearst, Black Bart, and Wyatt Earp. Tom Curry created the series and wrote most of the novels, and the ones not by Curry were written by top-notch pulpsters such as Walker A. Tompkins, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughey), and C. William Harrison. Many of the novels were reprinted in paperback by Curtis Books and Popular Library. I haven't read all the Rio Kid novels, but I've read most of them, including this one. This issue also includes stories by Archie Joscelyn, Richard Brister, Ben Frank, and Ben T. Young. This is putting me in the mood to read another Rio Kid novel.

Forgotten Books: Sin in Their Blood - Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)

(Sorry about another rerun. I'll have some new posts eventually. This one originally appeared in slightly different form on April 2, 2007. Another difference since then is that an e-book reprint of this novel is now available.)

This early (1952) novel by Ed Lacy was published by Eton Books, an imprint of Avon.
It starts out as pretty standard stuff. Tough private eye Matt Ranzino returns to his home town (an unnamed city on the west coast) after serving in the army during the Korean War. He discovers that his former partner, who was sort of a shady character to start with, has turned downright crooked and is involved in an elaborate blackmail scheme. The ex-partner has also taken up with Matt’s ex-girlfriend. Matt is unsure whether or not he wants to be a PI again, but before you know it, he’s mixed up in a complicated murder-suicide case. But then Lacy takes what could have been a generic Fifties private eye novel and turns most of the conventions of such tales upside-down. Matt Ranzino turns out not to be the usual tough guy PI after all. I can’t say much more than that without ruining the book, but those of you who have read some of Lacy’s other novels or even read much about him can probably guess some of what I’m talking about.

I have to give Lacy, whose real name was Leonard Zinberg, credit for trying to do something different, but as far as I’m concerned SIN IN THEIR BLOOD is a book that’s more interesting than good. Everything is so heavy-handed that it just didn’t work that well for me, a problem I've run into in other novels by Lacy. However, the prose is very slick and fast-paced, and the ending is so over-the-top that it almost saves the whole book. I enjoyed this novel despite its flaws.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Michael Shayne, Private Detective

It's been a long time since I watched a Mike Shayne movie. Despite my connection to and fondness for the character, I've never sought out the film adaptations, just seen one every now and then. But I picked up a set of four of the movies starring Lloyd Nolan as Shayne and recently watched the first one, MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE.

This movie is based on the second novel in the series, THE PRIVATE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL SHAYNE, and the script is pretty faithful to the book in some ways, working in most of the complicated plot that involves gamblers, horse racing, a spurned blonde, and tampering with the evidence in a murder case. Beautiful socialite Phyllis Brighton, who wound up marrying Shayne in the books, is on hand, too, and very well played by Marjorie Weaver. Shayne plays fast and loose with the law, of course, and bedevils his adversary Peter Painter until he solves the case and drops the killer right in Painter's lap.

But the screenwriters make some changes that don't really help the movie. For some reason they move the action from Florida to California, which wasn't necessary because most of the movie was filmed on soundstages. Cut in a little stock footage of palm trees and the ocean and the whole thing could have passed for Florida just fine. Shayne's reporter friend Tim Rourke and police chief Will Gentry are nowhere to be found.

The main difference between book and movie, though, is in Lloyd Nolan's portrayal of Shayne. Even though the character does many of the same things that Shayne does in the book, for the most part his flippant, light-hearted attitude is very different from the tough, straight-ahead Mike Shayne of the novels. Only occasionally do we get a glimpse of just how unlucky anybody is to have Shayne for an enemy.

One thing Nolan gets right, though, is the character's chemistry with Phyllis. Watching the two of them verbally spar is very reminiscent of the books. Other than that, Nolan's version of Mike Shayne is pretty much the "generic private eye" that Shayne is sometimes accused of being, a claim that I very much disagree with when it comes to the books, of course.

All that said, I enjoyed watching MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE quite a bit. The pace is very fast, and the production values are pretty good for a movie that falls somewhere between an A and a B picture. As I recall, this is the only one of the Shayne movies that's based on one of the novels, although some of the others are based on novels by other writers featuring other private eye characters. I'll definitely be watching the others I have.

Writing Update

September was a slight improvement on August: one less day in the month but 20 more pages. And for the most part I thought the work was pretty good. Some of it I thought was crap, but Livia read it and said it was fine. I traded some e-mails with my principal editor today and have everything pretty well lined up until sometime next spring. It's always good to have the schedule settled. Now all I have to do is write a bunch.

Now Available: West of the Big River: The Forty-Niners - Charlie Steel

The fifth West of the Big River novel is now available from Western Fictioneers. You can read all about THE FORTY-NINERS by Charlie Steel here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Book Magazine, Fall 1947

You want a femme fatale? I got your femme fatale right here. Cigarette? Check. Gun? Check. Provocative pose? Check. Hapless male victim? Check. And on top of that, this issue features a story by William Irish, who as we all know was really Cornell Woolrich. Other authors in this issue include Robert J. Hogan of G-8 fame, Richard Brister, who was best known for his Westerns, O.B. Myers, a prolific contributor to the air-war pulps, and Roger Fuller, who was really popular novelist Don Tracy. MYSTERY BOOK isn't a very well-known pulp these days, but this looks like a good issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western, March 1945

"You knuckleheads!" This is one of the rare Western pulp covers that has some goofy humor to it. There's a good line-up of authors inside, too: William B. Cox, Tom W. Blackburn, Frank Bonham,  and Ray Gaulden, among others. There's a story by Gordon Steele, the only credit listed for him in the Fictionmags Index, and I have to wonder if he was really Bennie Gardner, much better known as Gunnison Steele. I've read quite a few issues of 10 STORY WESTERN (not this one) and it was a consistently entertaining Western pulp.

Forgotten Books: The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece - Erle Stanley Gardner

I don't have anything about Patricia Highsmith today. I've tried to read her work in the past, but unfortunately she's one of those authors whose work just doesn't resonate with me. Instead I'm going with this rerun of a post about another classic mystery author. This post originally appeared in slightly different form on March 1, 2007.

Erle Stanley Gardner piles up the complications early on in this Perry Mason novel from 1936, when Mason was still a grinning, wise-cracking tough guy, at least part of the time. In this one we have a millionaire with the bad habit of sleepwalking with a bloody carving knife in his hand; his beautiful, astrology buff niece; a hypochondriac, black-sheep-of-the-family half-brother; a golddigging ex-wife; a crackpot inventor who may be a crook; and assorted other hangers-on and shady characters. Everybody winds up spending the night in the millionaire’s Hollywood mansion, including Perry Mason, and in Gardner’s version of an Agatha Christie/old English house sort of mystery, somebody winds up dead. Mason’s sleepwalking client is charged with the murder, so Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake plunge right in with the usual mix of snappy banter and questionable legal shenanigans to prove the client innocent and uncover the real murderer.

Gardner is in pretty good form in this one. The story zips along really fast, the wisecracks are funny, and there are some nice long courtroom scenes in the final third of the book. I had the murderer pegged pretty early on, which is unusual for me when it comes to Gardner’s books. I sometimes have trouble figuring out what happened even after Mason has explained everything. But I’ve discovered over the years that for books that are so plot-heavy and supposedly light on characterization, it’s not the plots I remember from them. The fun is in the pace and dialogue and the interaction among Mason, Della, and Paul Drake. And, of course, in watching Mason confound the long-suffering Hamilton Burger and Lt. Tragg (or in this case, Sergeant Holcomb, who hadn’t been replaced by Tragg yet). THE CASE OF THE SLEEPWALKER’S NIECE is only an average entry in the series but a perfectly enjoyable way to spend some time.

True Hollywood Noir: Filmland Mysteries and Murders - Dina Di Mambro

I've never been much of a reader of true crime books, but TRUE HOLLYWOOD NOIR: FILMLAND MYSTERIES AND MURDERS, a new release by journalist Dina Di Mambro, is just the sort of volume to attract my attention. Ever since I started helping Livia research her Lucas Hallam stories and novels, I've been interested in the early days of Hollywood, which certainly included their share of scandals.

Di Mambro starts with several of those, including the murders of William Desmond Taylor and Thelma Todd, along with the mysterious deaths of Thomas Ince and Paul Bern, Jean Harlow's husband (both of which may well have been murder, too).

She carries this theme up almost to the present day with chapters on the death of Johnny Stompanato that involved Lana Turner (a story I first encountered in a highly fictionalized version in one of Harold Robbins' novels, back in the days when I was reading a lot of Harold Robbins); the suspicious deaths of George Reeves and Gig Young; the lurid murder of Bob Crane; the drowning death of Natalie Wood; and the murder case involving Robert Blake and his con artist wife who wound up dead. Di Mambro does a fine job of presenting the facts in these cases and exploring the various theories about them in a fast-moving, entertaining style. I remember all the more recent ones, of course. As a big fan of the Superman TV show, I vividly recall hearing that George Reeves had died. Everybody I knew back then accepted the suicide theory. We were kids, what did we know? I'm convinced now that he was murdered, and that Thomas Ince was, too, to go back to one of the first chapters in the book.

The longest chapter and one of the most interesting is about the life and times of mobster Mickey Cohen, one of the most powerful and notorious figures in the West Coast underworld during the Forties and Fifties. I never knew much about Mickey Cohen other than his appearances, usually as a supporting character, in various movies and novels set in that era. Not long ago I saw the movie GANGSTER SQUAD, which apparently was almost all fiction. Di Mambro bases much of her chapter about Cohen on interviews she conducted with Jim Smith, one of Cohen's long-time associates. As you might expect under those circumstances, it's a fairly sympathetic portrayal but never becomes a complete whitewash of Cohen's criminal activities.

I'm in no position to know what's true and what's not about these cases, but as a reader I found TRUE HOLLYWOOD NOIR very entertaining. It does a good job of capturing both the glamour and the sordidness of Hollywood, and I found it hard to put down.