Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All-Novel Western, December 1940

ALL-NOVEL WESTERN seems to be going for a bit of a RANCH ROMANCES look with this cover, which isn't a bad thing, of course. It's hard to say much about the contents since three of the five authors -- Ronald Flagg, Clint Douglas, and Paul Adams -- are house names, and the other two -- William A. Langford and Chess Pitt -- I've never heard of. One thing to note: they have the Flagg name reversed on the cover, so somebody made a mistake pasting it up, I guess, and nobody caught it. I do like some of the titles: "Stepson of the Outlaw Clan", ".45 Frameup", and "The Trigger Trail-Blazer".

Forgotten Books: Liar's Kiss - Eric Skillman

I’d never heard of this graphic novel from 2011, but I came across a copy and saw that it has blurbs from Charles Ardai and Sean Phillips, so I figured it would be worth a try. The plot has a classic noir set-up: low-rent private eye is hired by a rich guy to keep tabs on his beautiful trophy wife. Instead of doing his job, the private eye begins having an affair with the trophy wife. And then, of course, the rich guy winds up dead, the cops think the wife killed him, and the private eye has to find the real killer to clear her name.

LIAR’S KISS makes heavy use of some elements we’ve come to expect from such stories. The protagonist, private detective Nick Archer, comes across as pretty much a stereotype. Not only does he have a name that could have come out of a Fifties Gold Medal or Dell First Edition novel, he wears a trenchcoat and a hat (it’s not a fedora, no matter what the people in the book call it), he smokes and drinks too much, he has a loyal secretary, he gets hit on the head and knocked out. The cops hate him, and the trophy wife is the sort of femme fatale you can never really trust. The plot gets pretty complex, with the origins of the current case stretching back years to two more deaths. We’ve certainly seen all this before.

But scripter Eric Skillman has a really nice twist saved up, the sort that makes you look back at what’s come before to see how the groundwork was laid. The dialogue is great, the story is well paced, and it also does a fine job of playing with the reader’s expectations. The art by Jhomar Soriano is good, too, and I especially liked the way he varied his style between the main story and the flashbacks. LIAR’S KISS is very enjoyable and well worth reading, especially if you’re a fan of noirish private eye tales. Recommended.

Level 7: Danger Close - Nathan E. Meyer

If you’re looking for an action-packed alien invasion yarn with likable protagonists and plenty of despicable villains, both alien and human, you won’t go wrong with LEVEL 7: DANGER CLOSE, a novelette by award-winning action/adventure author Nathan E. Meyer. This serves as a companion piece to Meyer’s forthcoming Level 7 novel THE JUDAS PROTOCOL. Both are based on a science fiction/horror game published by Privateer Press, the company that does the Iron Kingdoms game.

The Level 7 universe centers around a sinister pact between the U.S. government and a race of aliens known as the Ghin who have been on Earth secretly for decades. In DANGER CLOSE, another race of aliens hostile to the Ghin arrives and attacks a New Mexico town close to an abandoned Ghin base. Most of the story involves the grunts sent to battle these new aliens, as good military SF should.

And this is very good military SF indeed. Great action scenes abound, but Meyer doesn’t neglect the characters, either, although at this length there’s a limit to how much he can explore them. It’s all very entertaining and inventive, and I’m looking forward to reading the full-length novel based in this setting. Recommended.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

As often happens, this one is overlooked only in the sense that I didn’t see it until now. THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL isn’t the sort of film I usually watch: a light drama about a group of British retirees living in a rundown hotel in India. Nothing blows up real good.

But I enjoyed it quite a bit anyway. It’s well-written, funny, and touching. The cast, full of stalwart British characters like Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, and the great Maggie Smith, is excellent. This is just a nice, sweet movie that’s a two-hour cure for all the crap in the world. I think you have to have achieved geezer status, or at least be fast approaching it, to fully appreciate it, though.

Now Available: Outlaw Ranger: Gun Devils of the Rio Grande - James Reasoner

My latest Outlaw Ranger novel, GUN DEVILS OF THE RIO GRANDE, is now available in both e-book and print editions. I had a great time writing it, and with any luck there'll be more Outlaw Ranger books in the future. The print edition includes as a bonus the Outlaw Ranger novella THE LAST WAR CHIEF, which wasn't long enough for a print edition of its own. That's a pretty good deal, if I do say so myself.

I've also done a little work on a new series of Western novellas, but when those will be available, I have no idea.

 

Now Available: Ranger Law, Bandit Blood - David Hardy

The Texas Rangers had their hands full cleaning up the border country. Bandits raided across the Rio Grande with impunity, rustling cattle, killing settlers, and terrorizing the countryside. But a handful of men armed with Colts, .50 caliber Sharps rifles, and pure guts would ride in and restore law and order to the border—or die trying! 

Based on actual events, acclaimed Western author David Hardy’s novella RANGER LAW, BANDIT BLOOD is another gritty, exciting tale of the violent frontier. Ride with the Rangers and smell the gunsmoke as they take on overwhelming odds and battle not only bandits but also the Mexican army. David Hardy writes it like it was, recapturing the wild times along the border with all its danger and fury!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: North-West Romances, Summer 1948

I don't know if the scene depicted in this Allen Anderson cover is actually in Dan Cushman's "Waif of the Wilderness Pack" or any of the other stories in this issue of NORTH-WEST ROMANCES, but if it is, I want to read it. Unfortunately, I don't own a copy of this issue, so I'll have to be content with enjoying the cover. The other authors in this issue include a couple of guys named Jack London and Robert Service, who knew a thing or two about writing Northerns.

The WesternPulps Yahoo Group

I founded the WesternPulps Yahoo Group 17 years ago today. I always forget to say anything about it on the group, so I scheduled this blog post to make sure I didn't forget this year. When I founded the group it wasn't on Yahoo. It was on something called E-Groups, I think. Then it became One List. Or maybe it was the other way around, I'm not sure. But eventually Yahoo swallowed up whatever service it was on, and there we still are.

Of course, email groups are dinosaurs in this day and age, even older than blogs. But I have a great fondness for WesternPulps. It limped along with hardly any posts for the first year or so, then a fellow named Kent Johnson (who has since passed away) joined and started promoting it and posting all the time, and he really jump-started the group. For a while it was pretty high-traffic, reaching a high of 703 messages in February 2002. These days 50 messages is a good month.

Still, I think it's a very worthwhile group, if for no other reason than the wealth of information to be found in the files and archives. I also love it because of all the friends I've made through the group, many of whom are regular readers of this blog and are also my friends on Facebook now. But WesternPulps was there first, and it's going to stay around as long as I can possibly manage it, maybe until I'm just posting messages to myself again, the way it started.

But in the meantime, if you want to come say howdy to an old social media dinosaur, the group can be found here.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, November 1942

I'll bet that cover caught a few eyes on the newsstands back in 1942, and with authors inside like Walt Coburn, Rollin Brown, Jay J. Kalez, and Bart Cassidy (quite possibly Harry Olmsted, but hard to say for sure because Bart Cassidy was a house name), I'll also bet this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE was well worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Phantom Raiders - Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden)

I wrote about Luke Short (Frederick D. Glidden) last week, and this week we’ve got a collection of pulp novelettes by his brother Jonathan Glidden, who wrote under the name Peter Dawson. Although Jon Glidden never achieved quite the same level of fame and popularity as Fred did, he was a successful and well-regarded Western author for many years, his novels selling well enough in paperback that after his death, Bantam hired another author to write several more books that were published under the Peter Dawson name. I’ve enjoyed his work for many years, starting with the novel TRAIL BOSS, which I read all the way back in seventh grade almost five decades ago.

PHANTOM RAIDERS, published in large print by Center Point back in 2008, reprints five excellent novelettes from a variety of sources, starting off with “Retribution River” from the September 1948 issue of WESTERN STORY. As Jon Tuska mentions in his story notes, this was Jonathan Glidden’s last publication in WESTERN STORY, which had serialized his first novel THE CRIMSON HORSESHOE some eight years earlier and published many of his shorter works. This one is a fine, fast-moving story about a rancher framed for rustling who goes on the owlhoot and discovers that’s an even more dangerous line of work.

“Cutbank Welcome”, first published under the somewhat misleading title “Cutbank Welcome for Wet-Cattle Thieves” in the November 1940 issue of BEST WESTERN, also concerns a rancher who’s been framed, but for the more serious crime of murder. This one has a particularly effective opening as the rancher is about to be  lynched.

“Signed on Satan’s Payroll”, which originally appeared in the March 1938 issue of STAR WESTERN, also centers around rustling, but it has an interesting twist on the usual big ranchers vs. small ranchers plot, and it throws in a well-depicted blizzard for good measure.

“The Matched Pair”, which was the last piece of short fiction Jon Glidden wrote, was published under the title “The Devil’s Pardner” in the September 1956 issue of ADVENTURE, well after that magazine had ceased to be a pulp and had become a men’s adventure magazine, although obviously it was still running some fiction. This story is a change of pace for Glidden, as it’s more of a domestic drama that reminded me of some of Ernest Haycox’s stories. It’s very well written and has a poignant ending.

“Phantom Raiders” is another story that first appeared under a long-winded and misleading title, “When Blood and Guns Brand a Man’s Backtrail”, in the February 1941 issue of WESTERN NOVEL AND SHORT STORIES. It’s about a lone outlaw continually frustrating the efforts of a gang of desperadoes and has a really nice hardboiled tone about it. One word of warning: the dust jacket copy gives away the big twist in the story, although it’s not anything an experienced reader of Westerns won’t have figured out anyway.

All in all, this is a really fine collection and well worth reading. The cover scan is from the edition I own and read, but it’s pretty bland. I would have included some of the original pulp covers, too, since you can never go wrong with a Western pulp, but none of them seem to be on-line. The September 1956 issue of ADVENTURE is, however, so here’s that cover, with the Peter Dawson story featured prominently.