Reading and Writing Update

I said for years that I was going to slow down on the writing, but I never managed to do it to any meaningful degree. Well, age and circumstances have done it for me. Halfway through the year, I'm on pace to write just a hair more than half a million words this year. I realize that's still pretty productive, but it's half of what I used to do, and the frustrating part is that I'm still working almost as many hours at it. Getting the pages done just takes me longer.

But on the reading front, I've read 80 books so far this year, which is pretty good, I think.

Reading or writing, we do what we can do and move on to whatever's next, I guess.

The Art of Ron Lesser, Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens - Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and J. Kingston Pierce, eds.

THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS is the latest fantastic art book from the editing combo of Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, joined this time by crime fiction expert J. Kingston Pierce. This book really got its start from a series of interviews with Lesser conducted by Pierce. Expanded versions of those interviews are included in this volume, along with features on Lesser’s favorite models (including his wife; that's her on the cover above) and reproductions not only of dozens of paperbacks for which he did the covers but also the original paintings which were used on those covers.

In a word, beautiful.

But of course, I’m going to say more than a word. Any book with Bill Cunningham handling the production is going to be very well done, and DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS is no exception. This is a substantial hardback volume, and the cover reproductions are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Those covers looked great on spinner racks, but they look even better at the large size made possible by a book like this.

The text put together by Bob Deis is informative and entertaining. I knew who Ron Lesser is but knew very little about him. Pierce’s interviews and Deis’s features provide plenty of background about Lesser’s life and career.

What really strikes me about this book is realizing how many of those paperbacks with Ron Lesser covers I bought over the years! I could flip through the pages and say, “Yeah, I had that one and that one and that one . . .” Clearly, Lesser’s covers helped sell those books to me. I’m certainly guilty of misidentifying some of his covers as being by Robert McGinnis, as Deis mentions is common. In recent years I think I’ve gotten a little better eye for such things. I’m happy to have those earlier misconceptions of mine cleared up, because Ron Lesser deserves all the credit he can get for being a substantial part of my reading life.

This is just the first of several planned volumes on Lesser’s career. It concentrates on the covers that feature beautiful women. Later volumes will zero in on Lesser’s work for Western, war, and adventure paperbacks. I can’t wait to see them. If you’re a long-time paperback fan and want to relive some glorious days, I give DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS my highest recommendation. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

13 French Street - Gil Brewer

13 FRENCH STREET was the second novel written by Gil Brewer to be published by Gold Medal in 1951. It went on to be the bestselling novel of Brewer’s career with more than 1.2 million copies sold. And that number continues to rise, as it’s paired with SATAN IS A WOMAN in the latest Brewer double volume from Stark House.

It's easy to see why 13 FRENCH STREET was so successful. It’s such an intense depiction of sexual obsession that the readers of the early Fifties probably hadn’t ever encountered anything like it before. The narrator is Alex Bland, an archeologist and straight-arrow kind of guy who lives up to his name. He goes to visit his old army buddy Verne Lawrence, who lives at the title address just outside a midwestern city. Verne is married to beautiful, dark-haired Petra, who has been corresponding with Alex and has formed a friendship with him. Or at least, that’s what Alex thinks.

When he steps in the door and meets Petra in person, things immediately change. Lust seems to erupt in both of them. Verne isn’t himself because of some business reverses, and to take care of them, he has to leave Alex and Petra there alone, except for Verne’s elderly mother, who spies on the would-be lovers.

The first half of this novel kind of meanders along with not much happening except Alex wanting Petra and Petra teasing him mercilessly. But the book is so well-written that the slow burn works and keeps the reader turning the pages. Then, abruptly, murder and blackmail complicate things, as they so often do in these books, and 13 FRENCH STREET races to a harrowing conclusion that’s still oddly satisfying for all its bleakness.

This is probably the best-written Gil Brewer novel I’ve read. Some of the images are stunning in their simple poetry. Petra is the personification of evil in many ways, but Brewer makes her too complex to write her off as that and nothing else. I think she’s a reflection of the darkness under the narrator’s placid surface. If somebody like Alex can do the things he does, what are the rest of us capable of if driven by the right (or wrong) urges? Starting out, Brewer wanted to write mainstream novels, and in 13 FRENCH STREET he comes close, although combined with crime and suspense.

This isn’t necessarily the sort of book you feel good about when you finish it, but it sure does stick with you. For that reason, I give 13 FRENCH STREET a very high recommendation, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.

The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure Megapack - E. Hoffmann Price

Thank goodness for the Spicy pulps! I don’t know of a better cure for the reading funks in which I sometimes find myself, when I don’t have the attention span to tackle a novel and none of them I have on hand appeal to me, anyway. But a Spicy pulp yarn that I can read in half an hour or less . . . yeah, now that I can handle.

For a while now I’ve been working my way through THE E. HOFFMANN PRICE SPICY ADVENTURE MEGAPACK, reading stories between other things. Price is a long-time favorite of mine, one of those writers who could tackle almost any genre and do a good job of it. The stories in this collection certainly provide a wide variety in their subject matter:

“Satan’s Daughter”, SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, January 1936 – Ancient evil in a Middle Eastern archeology dig

“Pit of Madness”, SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, April 1936 – Devil worshippers in Paris

“The Walking Dead”, SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, November 1935 – Zombies (what else?) in the Louisiana swamps

“Every Man a King”, SPEED ADVENTURE STORIES, November 1943 – Political intrigue and civil war in 14^th Century Samarkand

“Revolt of the Damned”, SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES, March 1937 – Drug smuggling and gang war along the California-Mexico border.

“Crystal Clues”, SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES, August 1936 – Hardboiled detective yarn set at a hot springs resort featuring hotel dick Cliff Cragin (which I first read as Cliff Clavin, which would have been a totally different story . . . but not necessarily a bad one).

“Night in Manila”, SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES, November 1935 – A two-fisted Yank soldier goes undercover to bust up a smuggling ring in the Philippines.

“Murder Salvage”, SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES, April 1941 – Private eye yarn featuring Price’s series character Honest John Carmody tangling with murder and a stolen car racket.

“Triangle With Variations”, SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES, August 1935 – A man is murdered, and the man who’s in love with his wife sets out to find the killer.

“Scourge of the Silver Dragon”, GOLD SEAL DETECTIVE, December 1935 – A G-Man goes undercover to bust up an opium smuggling ring in California and Arizona.

“Drink or Draw”, SPEED WESTERN STORIES, December 1943, and “She Herded Him Around”, SPICY WESTERN STORIES, February 1941 – These are entries in Price’s long-running series of humorous, tall-tale Western yarns about wandering gunfighter Simon Bolivar Grimes.

“You Can’t Fight a Woman”, SPICY WESTERN STORIES, January 1939 – Starts out as a Romeo-and-Juliet/cattlemen vs. nesters story, becomes a chase the bad guys to El Paso story before circling back to the original plot.

“Short-Cut to Hell”, THRILLING ADVENTURES, January 1939 – A wagon train yarn featuring drifting peddler/tinker Saul Epstein, who appeared in three other stories by Price. Epstein is a supporting character in this one and I suspect in the other stories with him, as well.
 
Of course, some of these stories are better than others. Here are some highlights.

Despite being a novelette, “Revolt of the Damned” is a hardboiled, large-cast mini-epic about the drug trade along the border with enough plot for a full-length novel. It rockets along from character to character at a breakneck pace in a yarn filled with double-crosses, revenge, brutal murders, and an apocalyptic climax. This is just a terrific story, one of the best things I’ve ever read by Price.

“Murder Salvage” is the first of Price’s Honest John Carmody stories I’ve read. A private detective who got his nickname because he was a cop who got kicked off the force for not going along with corruption, he’s a good character and I’d happily read more about him. This particular story has a nice, twisty plot and good supporting characters.

“Triangle With Variations” has a good twist with the protagonist who’s in love with a married woman setting out to find her husband’s murderer so that he can pursue her in good conscience. Note that Price’s first published story, which appeared in the June 1924 issue of DROLL STORIES, is also called “Triangle With Variations”, but it’s a totally different story.

“Scourge of the Silver Dragon” is a solid action tale with a confusing but interesting bit of business in it: the sinister criminal mastermind and the type of opium that he’s smuggling are both known as the Silver Dragon. Plenty of good shootouts and fistfights in this one.

I read all the Simon Bolivar Grimes stories years ago, including “Drink or Draw” and “She Herded Him Around”, and even wrote the introduction to a collection of some of them, so I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t reread them this time around. But the Grimes series is consistently entertaining and well worth reading. If you haven’t tried them, you should pick up NOMAD’S TRAIL from Black Dog Books, the collection I just mentioned.

“You Can’t Fight a Woman” is interesting because, in addition to being a well-written, action-packed yarn, one of the characters mentions being from Cross Plains, Texas. I’m sure nearly all the readers of SPICY WESTERN STORIES read right past that, but it jumped out at me, of course, since Cross Plains was the home of Price’s friend Robert E. Howard, who had been gone five years at the time this story was written. A nice Easter egg in a good story. (Price, as you’ll recall, was the only person to meet REH, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith in person.)

“Short-Cut to Hell” has a small romance element, but it’s really not a spicy yarn, which isn’t a surprise considering that it appeared originally in THRILLING ADVENTURES. But this story of a wagon train journey and the dangers along the way has a nice epic feel, and the character of Saul Epstein is a good one, serving as sidekick and behind the scenes manipulator much the same way as John Solomon in that series by H. Bedford-Jones. This is an excellent story and shows that Price could write a serious, hardboiled Western when he wanted to.

Overall, THE E. HOFFMANN PRICE SPICY ADVENTURE MEGAPACK is a top-notch collection full of fast-paced, entertaining stories. Well worth the time to read, and it makes me glad that I have several other megapacks of Price’s work on my Kindle, ready for the next time I need one of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, August 1941

I don't think this cover is as good as many others by Herbert Morton Stoops, but this is an important issue of BLUE BOOK anyway. It's the last one that was a true pulp. Trimmed, maybe, but still a pulp. The next issue it went to the larger quarto size. As usual with BLUE BOOK, H. Bedford-Jones is well-represented in the Table of Contents with three stories, one under his own name and one each as by Gordon Keyne and Michael Gallister. Also contributing to this issue are Richard Wormser, Georges Surdez, Lemuel de Bra, Robert R. Mill, Raymond S. Spears, Jacland Marmur, and little-known writers John Upton Terrell, George Agnew Chamberlain, Charles Wellington Furlong, and George Weston. With Bedford-Jones anchoring their stable, BLUE BOOK always had good authors in its pages.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Famous Western, Summer 1944

That's a nice dramatic cover on this issue of FAMOUS WESTERN, although the hand holding the knife looks 'way too large to me. It's almost as big as the other guy's head! There are some good authors inside, including T.W. Ford, Joe Austell Small, Wilbur S. Peacock, and Archie Joscelyn. Also on hand are Lee Floren, Brett Austin (Lee Floren), Lee Thomas (also Lee Floren), Charles S. Richardson, the completely unknown to me James Lebur (he published a dozen stories in various Western pulps, but I don't recall ever coming across his name before), and house-name Cliff Campbell. Hmm, wonder if that could be Lee Floren? I wouldn't rule it out.

Blonde Bait - Stephen Marlowe

Stephen Marlowe is best remembered for his long-running series of paperback originals about private detective/international troubleshooter Chester Drum. But he also wrote science fiction under his birth name, Milton Lesser, and various pseudonyms, big historical novels late in his career as Stephen Marlowe, and numerous non-series noir and suspense novels, also as Marlowe. One of those stand-alones is BLONDE BAIT, originally published by Avon in 1959 with cover art by Ernest Chiriacka under his pseudonym Darcy. Stark House has just reprinted it under the great Black Gat Books imprint.

There’s at least one other noir novel entitled BLONDE BAIT, this one by Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg). I reviewed it more than ten years ago and had some reservations about it. But if ever there was a title that fit a genre, BLONDE BAIT is it. It goes together perfectly with noir. The blonde in this case is Bunny Kemp, a beautiful, unhappily married woman who pays a visit to a ski resort in upstate New York where our narrator, Chuck Odlum, is also unhappily married (to the resort’s owner) and runs the ski school there. Bunny and her husband have a secret, though, and once Chuck gets involved with her, things quickly spiral out of control and more than one brutal murder occurs. You know how it goes in noir novels.

I really enjoyed this BLONDE BAIT. Marlowe was a top-notch writer, skillfully mixing character, setting, and plot to create a fast-paced novel that careens along from one complication to another in a series of harrowing scenes. As Gil Brewer did in SATAN WAS A WOMAN, which I read recently, Marlowe uses nature to great effect, making the snowy setting almost a character in itself.

I’m glad Black Gat Books has reprinted this novel. It’s one I never came across, never even heard of as far as I recall. It’s an excellent yarn, and if you’re a fan of Fifties hardboiled noir, you shouldn’t hesitate to snap up this BLONDE BAIT. It's available in paperback and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Dragnet, August 1930

That's a pretty dramatic cover by Don Hewitt on this issue of DETECTIVE DRAGNET, although the guy being choked looks strangely untroubled by what's going on. And yes, that's a swastika on the cover, before it had the sinister implications it would a few years later. Philip Ketchum, writing as Carl McK. Saunders, is probably the best-known author in this issue, although Irving Stone, later a bestselling historical novelist, has an early story in these pages. I'm assuming it's the same Irving Stone, but I don't know that for sure. Eugene A. Clancy and William H. Stueber are names that some Western pulp fans will remember. Also on hand are Jack Compton, R.E. Alexander, and James Howard Leveque, all of whom produced a considerable number of stories for the pulps but are pretty much forgotten now. DETECTIVE DRAGNET was originally called THE DRAGNET MAGAZINE and eventually changed its name to the one under which it's best remembered, TEN DETECTIVE ACES.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, April 1939

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment, so I took a picture of my copy instead, and that’s it above. The cover is by Carl Reiter, and all I know about him is that he did a few pulp covers. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m a long-time fan of the pulp TEXAS RANGERS and have been reading the Jim Hatfield novels published in it for more than 50 years, since I discovered them in paperback reprints in the Sixties.

This issue is from fairly early in the series’ run, when most of the Hatfield novels were written by either Leslie Scott, the series creator, or Tom Curry. “Vaquero Guns” is one of Curry’s entries, and as usual in his novels, it features a secondary hero. In this case, it’s drifting cowboy Jerry Farmon, who starts the action off by searching for a missing friend of his, a deputy sheriff who disappeared while on the trail of an escaped killer. But Hatfield, a Texas Ranger who’s known as the Lone Wolf, is soon involved, being sent by his boss, Captain “Roarin’” Bill McDowell, to West Texas to break up a gang of masked marauders that has been raiding settlements along the border.

When Hatfield arrives on the scene, he quickly discovers that there’s a violent feud going on between the biggest ranch in the area, the Square A, and everybody else in the region. The Square A’s crew is composed of vaqueros imported from Mexico, and they’re the ones who have been raiding the settlements. Or are they? Could something else actually be going on, something more sinister behind the scenes?

After a long series of gunfights, fistfights, captures, and escapes, Hatfield uncovers the truth and exposes the criminal mastermind who will have been obvious to most readers from very early on in the novel. That’s the main problem with this one. Even for a pulp yarn, everything is just too predictable.

Even so, there are some things to like about “Vaquero Guns”. The opening scene, which features a nighttime escape from a train, is very evocative and well-written. The action scenes are always good in a Curry novel, and the big battles have a nice epic feel. There are clever callbacks to previous Hatfield novels written by Curry. And Hatfield himself is a great character as always, mostly superhuman but still likable and believable. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who hasn’t read a Hatfield novel before, because it really is one of the series’ weaker entries, but as an old-timer, I found it enjoyable reading.

Moving on to the back-up stories, “White Hat for an Outlaw” is by Robert E. Obets, who, under that name and as Bob Obets, wrote scores of stories for various Western pulps between the mid-Thirties and the mid-Fifties. Almost completely forgotten now, he was a solid writer, and his story in this issue is very good. It’s about a young outlaw infiltrating a company of Texas Rangers to lead them into a trap, then having to decide whether he wants to continue on the owlhoot trail or go over to the side of law and order. I liked it quite a bit.

“Gun-Gang Plot” is by an even more forgotten writer, Anson Hard. It’s about a saloon swamper who witnesses a confrontation between a gang of stagecoach robbers and a stranger who might be a Texas Ranger. This one has a twist ending I should have seen coming but didn’t, and again, I enjoyed it.

Syl MacDowell is best remembered for his humorous Swap and Whopper series and the Sheriff Blue Steele series he wrote under the pseudonym Tom Gunn. But he wrote plenty of traditional, stand-alone Western tales, too, including “West of the Pecos” in this issue, which finds a young Ranger trying to rescue the sister of a dead pal from a life of shame and degradation as a soiled dove, although MacDowell is never quite that blunt about what’s going on. This one is well-written and also has a twist ending that’s a little more of a stretch but still effective. I don’t care for Swap and Whopper but have enjoyed everything else I’ve read by MacDowell, including this one.

Given that the Hatfield novel isn’t one of the best and it takes up most of the pages, this is probably a below-average issue of TEXAS RANGERS. Of course, I’m still glad that I read it. If you’re a long-time Hatfield fan like me, you’d probably enjoy it, too.

The Brushpopper and the Lady - Les Savage, Jr.

RANCH LOVE STORIES lasted only one issue in 1950. A pretty blatant attempt by Interstate Publishing to compete with the long-running RANCH ROMANCES, it seems to have been a spectacular failure. It’s hard to understand why, though, since the lone issue had a cover by Norman Saunders and some fine writers who contributed stories.

One of those authors is Les Savage, Jr., whose novella “The Brushpopper and the Lady” is the featured story in this issue and is almost long enough to have been reprinted as an Ace Double. Maybe it would have been, if not for Savage’s early and untimely death. Thanks to the good folks at the PulpGen Archive, though, this story is available again as a downloadable PDF, and being a long-time fan of Les Savage, Jr.’s work, I was quick to grab a copy and read it.

As you might guess from the title, “The Brushpopper and the Lady” is set in the South Texas chaparral country, as are several of Savage’s novels. Hugh Mitchell is the foreman of the vast Broken Shield ranch, which was owned by an English expatriate who was like a father to Mitchell. The man has passed away, leaving the ranch to his niece, who comes from England to claim her inheritance. But something about the whole situation seems wrong to Mitchell, and things are complicated by the heiress’s wastrel cousin and a greedy gambler in the nearby town who has his eyes on taking over the ranch himself. It doesn’t help that Mitchell seems to be falling in love with Lady Agatha. And then the specter of murder rears its ugly head.

This is a fast-paced yarn with plenty of action, including a couple of the brutal fistfights for which Savage’s stories are known. The plot has several effective twists and turns, and while I had a pretty good idea what would happen, I wasn’t sure how things would play out until the end. The overall tone is hardboiled, and while the romance element is fairly strong, as you’d expect from RANCH LOVE STORIES, it never overpowers the action.

“The Brushpopper and the Lady” is a really good story. If you’re a Les Savage, Jr. fan or just a reader of traditional Westerns, I think there’s a good chance you’d enjoy it. I certainly did. Check it out on the PulpGen Archive.