Coming From Black Gat Books: You'll Get Yours - William Ard

A dark room...a warm woman...a cold knife... It begins at the end of the line with a killing. But it had started simply enough when press agent Archie St. George hires private investigator Barney Glines to retrieve some missing jewels stolen from his beautiful client, Kyle Shannon. Glines knows he's being set-up for something but he goes along with the exchange out of curiosity more than anything. That and Kyle Shannon. Turns out that the real jewels are a cache of nude photos of Miss Shannon, who is now being blackmailed. Soon Glines finds himself in a dead woman's room who's been shot with his own gun and the police are jumping to conclusions. It's beginning to look like whoever's behind the blackmail wants to make sure that Glines is the fall guy. Unless Glines can find him first.

I've actually reviewed the original edition of this fine private eye novel twice already on the blog, first back in 2006 and then a couple of years ago as a Forgotten Books post. I enjoyed it and am glad to see that Black Gat Books is making it available again. Good cover on the new edition, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, April 1949

I keep telling guys, never trust a suit of armor. Nine times out of ten, there's a killer hiding inside it. But do they listen to me? No. But if they did, there wouldn't be a story, would there? Day Keene is the biggest name in this issue of DETECTIVE TALES, at least he is unless you know that one of the other authors, John Lane, was really John D. MacDonald. C. William Harrison has a story in here, too, but I think he was best known as a Western pulpster. The other authors are either house-names or writers I've never heard of, like Philip Weck and Robert Zacks. So I can't guess at the overall quality of the fiction, but I like the cover and I'm sure the stories by MacDonald and Keene are good. (I wish somebody would do a complete collection of JDM's pulp detective yarns.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, July 1947

I keep posting about issues of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE because I love the covers, the authors, and the story titles. This cover scan, like most featured here, comes from the Fictionmags Index. The lead story in this issue is by one of the most prominent authors in the Fiction House Western pulps of this era, Les Savage Jr., and the title, "Six-Gun Bride of the Teton Bunch" is pure greatness as far as I'm concerned. It was also the title story in the Barricade Books collection of stories by Savage that was published in the Nineties. Other top authors featured in this issue include L.P. Holmes, D.B. Newton, Dan Cushman (also a Fiction House top-liner), and Ray Gaulden. That's a pretty impressive line-up.

Forgotten Books: Wayward Girl - Orrie Hitt

WAYWARD GIRL starts out about as bleak as any Orrie Hitt novel I’ve read so far. The protagonist, Sandy Greening, is a 16-year-old prostitute and heroin addict who lives with her drunken, slutty mother and is a member of the Blue Devils, the local gang of young hoodlums who are at war with a rival gang, the Black Cats. Sandy was raped by a neighbor when she was 14, she has to fend off the advances of her mother’s drug-dealing boyfriend, and when the leader of the Blue Devils kills a guy during a rumble, she’s hauled in by the cops for questioning in a murder case!

With all that going on, it’s a little surprising that when Sandy does finally get in trouble with the law, it’s a simple prostitution bust that gets her sent to a reform school. That reform school is a progressive one that tries to rehabilitate the girls sent there. At least it is on the surface, but the school has some criminal secrets of its own . . .

As you’d expect from a novel published by Beacon Books in 1960, WAYWARD GIRL gets pretty doggone lurid. And after a little bit of a slow start, man, does our old friend Orrie Hitt keep the pedal to the floor. This book races along and is hugely entertaining. Brian Greene, who contributes the introduction to the Stark House volume that reprints this novel and another Hitt tale, THE WIDOW, compares WAYWARD GIRL to a drive-in movie, and that’s pretty accurate. I can see it being filmed in gritty black-and-white.

What elevates it from the usual story like this, though, is the theme of sympathy for the underdog that runs through most of Hitt’s novels. He doesn’t sugarcoat things, and he doesn’t blame society for the characters’ problems. They bear the responsibility for their own actions and bad decisions. But there’s also a sense of understanding what led them to those actions and decisions, and Hitt seldom comes right out and condemns his protagonists. They usually find their way back to the possibility of happiness, at least. Hitt’s novels are like no others in the so-called sleaze genre, and while some are better than others, I’ve never read one that failed to leave me both entertained and emotionally moved. If you’ve never read his work, WAYWARD GIRL would make a decent starting place. If you’re already a Hitt fan, like me, you’ll want to grab this new reprint right away.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, July 1, 1939

Another fine, colorful Rudolph Belarski cover on this issue of ARGOSY, one of my favorite pulps. This issue features an installment of the serial "Seven Footprints to Satan" by A. Merritt (reprinted from its original appearance in ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1927), plus a South Seas novella by Allan Vaughan Elston and stories by Garnett Radcliffe, Walter C. Brown, and more serials by Walter Ripperger and Howard Rigsby. I'd love to have a complete run of ARGOSY from the Twenties and Thirties. So many great serials . . . 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Ranch Stories, Summer 1951

Like RANCH ROMANCES, THRILLING RANCH STORIES may have been aimed at a slightly more female readership, but at least during the Fifties it featured quite a few hardboiled Western action yarns. In this issue, with a good cover by Sam Cherry, there are stories by Walker A. Tompkins, Wayne D. Overholser, Giff Cheshire, Paul Evan Lehman, Cibolo Ford, and Samuel Mines.

Forgotten Books: Hot Lead For Gleaming Rails - Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame)

I’ve seen the name Van Cort in the table of contents in numerous Western pulps and have read at least one story under that name that I recall. I enjoyed it, too. I found out recently that Van Cort was a pseudonym for Wyatt Blassingame, a prolific and well-respected author of Weird Menace and detective tales for various pulps. (I believe he was also the brother of well-known literary agent Lurton “Count” Blassingame.) I don’t think I’ve read any of Blassingame’s work under his own name, although I have a couple of collections of it, but I did just read his short Western novel “Hot Lead for Gleaming Rails”, published in the August 7, 1937 issue of WESTERN STORY (with the first name of the pseudonym misspelled), and thought it was very good.

The protagonist of this violent yarn is Lee Carey, a young man who works for the railroad obtaining right-of-way for new lines. He returns to the town and the valley where he grew up and still owns an abandoned ranch, with the intention of building a spur line into the area, but he’s also out for revenge on the crooked cattle baron who ran him out years earlier. Along the way he helps out a young newspaper editor and the man’s wife and child, so Lee decides that starting a newspaper and getting his new friend to run it will help him mold public opinion in favor of the railroad. He also meets a beautiful young woman who’s come to the area to search for her missing father, but she winds up throwing in with Lee’s old enemy the cattle baron. One more complication is the presence of the Laredo Kid, an old friend of Lee’s who has turned outlaw. Having the Kid on his side may be more hindrance than help for Lee.

Blassingame does a fine job of weaving these strands together into a fast-paced plot that includes a number of shootouts and bushwhackings, culminating in an epic battle. Even while he’s doing this, however, he manages to work some moral complexity into the story, as not everything turns out to be as black and white as it appears at first. The good guys are not always sympathetic, and all the bad guys aren’t stereotypical villains. Blassingame writes in a smooth, clean style as well, without the overdone dialect and flowery descriptions that sometimes show up in Western pulp stories. This reads more like a novel that would have been published by Gold Medal in the Fifties.

As far as I can tell, Blassingame wrote only a couple of full-length novels as Van Cort, but I’m going to hunt down copies of both of them. “Hot Lead for Gleaming Rails” is available in an e-book collection, which is where I read it, and if you’re in the mood for a good hardboiled Western yarn, I recommend it.

Coming From Stark House: Hostage for a Hood/The Merriweather File - Lionel White

HOSTAGE FOR A HOOD
Cribbins has the heist planned down to the last detail. He and Santino are driving one of the cars, on their way to hold up an armored car to remove its quarter of a million dollars. The only thing Cribbins doesn't plan on is being run into by Joyce Sherwood's Chevy. All they can do after that is quickly take over Joyce's car, including Joyce and her dog, and finish the job. When her husband Brad comes home and finds no Joyce and no dog, he knows something is wrong. He calls the police, but they only put him off, assuming that a missing wife could have run off with somebody. Brad knows different. But can he find her before the cops put so much effort into solving the armored car hold that they lose sight of the missing wife who is now part of the same crime?...before Cribbins decides he doesn't need a hostage anymore....before Santino finally flips out and starts to use his knife....?

THE MERRIWEATHER FILE
Ann Merriweather thinks someone is trying to kill her. She shares her fears with an old friend of the family, her lawyer friend Howard Yates, but though he believes her, there is nothing he can do. Then Ann's husband, Charles, is found by the cops with a flat tire by the side of the road and a murdered body in his trunk. The man had been shot. Charles is held for questioning, then arrested, and Howard agrees to take the case. But nothing is as it seems. The police quickly determine that the murder occurred at the Merriweathers' house. But Charles has an alibi. He was gone from the house all night. And Ann was asleep under the heavy influence of some sleeping pills. But someone killed the man in the trunk, and the more Howard discovers about the case, the less inclined he is to assume the innocence of his client.

I've enjoyed everything I've read by Lionel White. I think I may have read HOSTAGE FOR A HOOD years ago, but I'll be reading it again in this reprint.

West of Hell - Brett Halsey

Brett Halsey has had a long, successful career as an actor in movies and TV, but he’s also written a number of novels over the years and in fact, according to his website he thinks of himself as a writer who acts, rather than an actor who writes. I tend to agree with him. His latest novel, and his first Western, WEST OF HELL, is a well written and solidly entertaining yarn.

The protagonist is bounty hunter Chris Tracy, who uses his manhunting skills to finance his on-going search for his younger sister, who was carried off by outlaws who raided the family farm years earlier. A veteran of the Civil War, Chris is a decent but highly dangerous man when he needs to be. In this book, he teams up with a friend from the war and an old desert rat in a quest to recover some ancient golden figurines hidden in the New Mexico Territory wilderness. These little statues, known as the Golden Apostles, date back to the days of Spanish rule over the territory.

Naturally, several hardcases are after the valuable statues, too, and along the way Chris and his companions also run into a shady gambler and the man’s wife and stepdaughter. This trio complicates things quite a bit, too, and eventually tragic violence breaks out.

WEST OF HELL is a pretty gritty book, the sort where you never really know who’s going to survive and who isn’t, and Halsey springs a number of unexpected plot twists as well. This one doesn’t play out in some respects as you’d probably expect. Having written and read so many Westerns, I’m generally pretty confident that I have a good idea what’s going to happen. In WEST OF HELL, not so much.

Halsey does a fine job of developing the characters and depicting the landscape. It’s easy to imagine him playing Chris Tracy in a Spaghetti Western version of this tale from the Sixties, when Halsey was in Europe making some of those films. He admits in an afterword that that experience was an influence on the writing of this book.

I enjoyed WEST OF HELL quite a bit. It’s a good hardboiled Western and could easily be the first of a series. I wouldn’t mind a bit if it was. Recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Fiction Stories, July 1931

You don't hear as much about the Dell pulps as you do about some from other publishers, but from what I can tell, they were consistently high quality productions. This issue of ALL FICTION STORIES, Dell's general adventure fiction pulp, sports a good cover by H.W. Reusswig, and inside you'll find a great group of authors: H. Bedford-Jones, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Tom Curry, and Seven Anderton, among others. Looks thoroughly enjoyable to me.