Now Available: Death Bakes a Pecan Pie - Livia J. Washburn

It’s time for the Harvest Festival again, and Phyllis is determined to bake a killer pecan pie.

Hollywood comes to Weatherford, Texas, as a movie company arrives to shoot scenes for a film based on the novel by Phyllis Newsom’s friend Eve. But movie fantasy turns to deadly reality as a murder recreated for film turns out to be the genuine article, and once more Phyllis has to track down a cunning killer to see that justice is done.

DEATH BAKES A PECAN PIE is the fourteenth novel in the critically acclaimed and best-selling Fresh Baked Mystery series. Phyllis and her friends tackle another complex case with all the humor, camaraderie, good-hearted warmth, and delicious recipes that have made readers around the world fall in love with this series.

Recipes included!

Overlooked Movies: 13 Ghosts (1960)

I remember when the movie 13 GHOSTS played at the Eagle Drive-In Theater, just up the road from where I lived as a kid, but I didn't see it then and never watched it in all the years since then. But Svengoolie showed it this past weekend, and I figured with Halloween coming up, this would be a good opportunity for me to watch it after all this time. I'm glad I did. It's a pretty enjoyable little movie.

The plot is simple: a family that's down on its luck (dad Donald Woods, mom Rosemary DeCamp, hot teenage daughter Jo Morrow, and plucky, inquisitive adolescent son Charles Herbert) inherit a spooky old house complete with creepy housekeeper (who else but Margaret Hamilton). The cast also includes a very young Martin Milner as a lawyer. Woods' eccentric old uncle who owned the place supposedly collected ghosts, a dozen of which share the house with the new occupants. Strange things happen, accompanied by special effects that are pretty simple, even for the time period, but effective despite that. There's a human mystery to go along with the supernatural one, but you'll figure it out right away, not that that really matters.

The appeal of this movie, which was written by Robb White (better known as a novelist) and directed by the legendary gimmick-meister William Castle, is that everybody has tongue planted firmly in cheek and seems to be having a great time making it. The movie's not really scary, although it does attain semi-spooky levels from time to time. Personally, I'd rather watch something like that than some gory, super-serious modern horror film, but that's just me. I recall some of my friends talking about 13 GHOSTS on the playground at school, and I'm glad I finally know what they were talking about.

Monday Memories: Halloween

Halloween was a pretty big deal when I was young. As I’ve mentioned before, I lived on a circle, and depending on who had moved in or out, there were between 15 and 20 kids of trick-or-treating age in the neighborhood, plus others who came from nearby neighborhoods on that night. So it wasn’t uncommon to see several dozen kids dressed in costumes wandering around the circle on Halloween. Almost all the houses gave out candy, although usually one or two didn’t. My friends and I had a great time and I looked forward to Halloween for months beforehand . . . admittedly, mostly for the candy, but I enjoyed figuring out what costume I wanted to wear, too.

One year my mother made me a ghost costume out of an old sheet. That happened to be the year it was cold and rainy, but I went out anyway and by the time I got home my ghost costume was mud up to the knees. Well, like I said, it was an old sheet, so it went right in the trash.

Those good times lasted until I was about twelve. Nobody older than that trick-or-treated in those days. It wasn’t cool. So I became the official dispenser of candy at our house for a few years, until I was in high school and went running around with my friends instead. We were basically good kids so we never really got into any trouble (although there were a few times we came close). One of the local TV stations also showed monster movies on Halloween most years, so I watched a lot of those, too.

One year during high school, a friend of mine decided to dress up as Dracula. He came over to my house to hang around in the shadows near the front porch and jump out to scare the kids when they came up to trick-or-treat. When he got there, he decided to act like he was going to suck my blood, and I put out a hand to ward him off. Unfortunately, his costume had several straight pins in it, and one of them went right into the ball of my hand. We had some real blood that Halloween to go with the fake stuff. But it was a minor injury and the rest of the evening went well. Many scares were delivered to the neighborhood kids.

That was also the evening I tried to get a little romance going with one of the girls who lived on the circle, but there were no tricks or treats in that area.

Halloween was pretty much a non-factor for me during my college years. I’m sure there were parties, but I didn’t go to them. I might have watched a monster movie for nostalgia’s sake now and then. And after Livia and I got married, we lived in the country, so we didn’t have trick-or-treaters to deal with. When our kids came along and got old enough to want to trick-or-treat, we took them over to the circle and I walked around with them and recaptured a little of that old magic for a while. But it was already not nearly as big a deal as it had been when I was growing up. More houses were dark, and there weren’t as many kids out.

We also took the girls to various “Fall Festivals” at church, which by some coincidence just happened to fall on October 31 . . .

Now, I haven’t even seen a trick-or-treater in close to twenty years. I don’t know if the kids who live over on the circle ever get out and do that or not. I hope the tradition lives on somewhere and is as fun and innocent as it was all those years ago. I kind of doubt it . . . but I hope so anyway.

Skills to Kill -- Brian Drake

Brian Drake has started making a name for himself as an action writer over the past few years, and his new novel SKILLS TO KILL, the first in the Steve Dane series, ought to solidify his position as one of the best new writers in the genre. Steve Dane and Nina Talikova are former intelligent agents, Dane for the United States and Nina for Russia, who have retired from their perspective agencies and teamed up, both professionally and romantically, to make their way through the dangerous world of international espionage as freelance operatives.

SKILLS TO KILL opens with the two of them getting involved in the kidnapping of a Mafia don’s daughter in Italy, but that’s just the first move in a globe-trotting adventure as Dane and Nina try to track down and bring to justice a mysterious, deadly arms dealer known only as the Duchess. Along the way they encounter old friends and enemies alike, and sometimes there’s a question just which is which—with survival riding on the answer.

This novel features plenty of action scenes told in Drake’s excellent fast-paced, hardboiled style. Dane and Nina are likable protagonists, and it’s very easy to root for them. SKILLS TO KILL is dedicated in part to the late men’s adventure novelist Jerry Ahern, and it’s easy to see his influence although Drake has his own distinctive voice. This is a thoroughly enjoyable adventure yarn. There will be at least two more books in the series, and I’m looking forward to them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Mystery Stories, November 1936

With Halloween coming up this week, we have a Weird Menace cover today, of course. This one is by H.J. Ward, on an issue of SPICY MYSTERY STORIES that features the work of the usual suspects in a Spicy pulp: Robert Leslie Bellem, under his own name and one as by Jerome Severs Perry; Victor Rousseau with three stories, one each as by Lew Merrill, Hugh Speer, and Clive Trent; E. Hoffmann Price; Edwin Truett Long writing as Carl Moore; and something of an oddity, a story by William B. Rainey, normally a Wyatt Blassingame pseudonym but in this case ghosted by Frank Gruber.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western, February 1941

Now that's an action-packed cover! I don't know who the artist is, but I really like it. There's a great bunch of authors in this issue of DIME WESTERN, too: Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner), Ray Nafziger, and Grant Taylor (also Ray Nafziger). Looks like a fantastic issue!

UPDATE: Reputable sources here and on Facebook have informed me that this cover is very likely the work of Rafael De Soto.

Forgotten Books: The Manitou - Graham Masterton

I always try to read some horror fiction for the Forgotten Books post closest to Halloween, and this year it’s THE MANITOU, the debut novel from prolific horror, mystery, and historical novelist Graham Masterton. This book was published in 1976 and was very successful, selling enough copies that they turned up in used bookstore overstock well into the Eighties. When I owned a used bookstore during the era, I always had multiple copies on my shelves. I never got around to reading it until now, though. (There’s also a movie adaptation from 1978 that I’ve never seen.)

I knew that a manitou is an American Indian spirit, so I was expecting something set in the West, but nope, nearly the entire book takes place in Manhattan. The narrator is a slightly shady fortune teller and tarot card reader who knows he’s a charlatan but still believes, at least somewhat, in mediums, psychics, and assorted other supernatural stuff. He gets drawn into the case of a young woman who has a strange tumor growing on the back of her neck at an impossible rate. X-rays reveal that the growth is not so much a tumor as it is a living creature of some sort that doesn’t belong there. The whole business quickly turns into a deadly threat that might wind up wiping out the entire city if the protagonist and his friends can’t find a way to stop it.

Even if you haven’t read this book, if you’ve read much horror fiction at all (especially from the Seventies and Eighties), you can predict pretty much everything that’s going to happen. The plot’s on the thin side and doesn’t have any real twists to it. There’s not much characterization, either. We don’t even find out any real background on the narrator.

But what THE MANITOU does have going for it is a breakneck pace, an interesting historical background, and some sly humor, especially in the gory scenes that crop up now and then. These are over-the-top enough that they become a little tongue-in-cheek. I’ll give Masterton credit: he knows how to keep the reader turning the pages. I’ve never been a fan at all of brooding, psychological horror. THE MANITOU is anything but. Evidently there are several sequels. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to reading them, or any more of Masterton’s numerous other horror novels . . . but I enjoyed this one enough that I might.

Overlooked Movies: Lone Star (1952)

I keep coming across Westerns that I somehow never saw on TV when I was growing up. LONE STAR is a big budget A picture from 1952 starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Broderick Crawford. The plot concerns the struggle within Texas in 1845 over whether to remain an independent republic or join the United States.

Gable is a somewhat shady operator working on behalf of former president Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barrymore in his final role) to bring Texas into the Union, mostly because that will ignite a war with Mexico and Gable's character stands to make a fortune from a government beef contract if that happens.

Opposing him is Broderick Crawford, who wants Texas to remain a republic because he has a shady plan to become its president. He and Gable are mortal enemies, but there's also an undercurrent of friendship and respect between them, largely because when they first meet, they wind up fighting off a Comanche war party in an excellent action scene.

Caught between them is fiery newspaper editor Ava Gardner, who inherited the paper she edits and publishes from her father. (As we all know from movie history, every newspaper in the Old West was run by a beautiful young woman who inherited it from her father or husband, usually after said father or husband was murdered by the bad guys.)

Speaking of movie history, LONE STAR really plays fast and loose with it, as well as the geography and terrain of Texas. But that's to be expected from Hollywood. Anyway, you don't watch a movie like this to learn anything. You watch it to enjoy Crawford's hulking nobility, Gardner's sultry beauty, and Gable being, well, Clark Gable, as pure a Movie Star as there ever was. Plus a good supporting cast that includes Barrymore, Beulah Bondi, and Ed Begley; a fast-paced script by old pro Borden Chase (based on one of his magazine stories, the credits tell us, but I don't know which story); and plenty of good action scenes leading up to a stirring ending. LONE STAR is entertaining, well-made hokum, and most of the time, that's plenty good for me. I enjoyed it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, March 4, 1939

Lots of red to catch a potential reader's eye in this ARGOSY cover by George Rozen. Complete novelettes by Frank Richardson Pierce and Paul Ernst are pretty good selling points, too, along with serial installments by Allan Vaughan Elston, George Washington Ogden (a reprint of a serial from ALL-STORY in 1918), and Marco Page.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western, January 1946

"We gotta get this shipment through tuh the coyote, Tex!"

Okay, this is one of my favorite Western pulp covers so far. Frantic powder-burning action, injury to a hat, reins in the teeth, and great detail (that's a keg of Gut Buster Whiskey XXX under the canvas). Sam Cherry, working for Popular Publications instead of the Thrilling Group for a chance, really outdid himself on this one. Inside are stories by Harry F. Olmsted, Giff Cheshire, Joseph Chadwick, Eli Colter, and Miles Overholt. Pretty good lineup to go with that great cover.