Disaster

This will probably be the last post on this blog for a while. Our house and studio burned down yesterday, everything is lost except our dogs and the clothes on our backs, but Livia and the girls and I all okay. I'm writing this on the local library's computer. Books, pulps, comics, all my work, gone. This is totally overwhelming.

But we will come back, better than ever. Sure would appreciate some thoughts and prayers along the way, though.

Thank you all.

Longarm and the Dwarf's Darling -- Tabor Evans

LONGARM AND THE DWARF’S DARLING is another good entry in the Longarm series by Peter Brandvold, writing as Tabor Evans. In this one, Longarm is sent to Wyoming to track down a missing witness in a murder case. The defendant is the dwarf of the title, the villainous Titus Turley, whose hired guns have just about taken over the town of Chugwater and murdered the mayor. The courageous sheriff of the town has the dwarf locked up in jail, but if Longarm can’t locate the missing witness (who happens to be a beautiful woman, of course) by the time the circuit court judge arrives, the sheriff will have to release Turley to continue his reign of terror. Naturally, the dwarf’s gunmen are on the witness’s trail, too, with orders to kill her before Longarm can find her and bring her back.

With a set-up like this, you know there’ll be plenty of action in the book, and as usual on that score, Brandvold doesn’t disappoint. He writes some of the best shoot-outs in the business, and his eye for detail, his tongue-in-cheek humor, and his knack for dialogue make this novel a fast, very entertaining read. After not reading any Longarms for a while, I’m having a great time getting back into the series these days.

We Are Marshall

We hadn’t watched an inspirational, based-on-a-true-story sports movie for a while, so we gave WE ARE MARSHALL a try. It’s the story of what happened after a plane crash in 1970 wiped out all but four of the players on the Marshall University football team and all but one of the coaches. I remember quite well when this actually happened, but I didn’t follow the story the next year when Marshall resumed its football program with a new head coach and a team made up of freshman, sophomores, and walk-on players, so the rest of the story was new to me.

Although director McG, with his hipster sensibilities, would seem like an odd choice to helm an aggressively old-fashioned movie like this, WE ARE MARSHALL is slick, very well-made, and effective, even though it’s also somewhat depressing. The cast is excellent: Matthew McConaughey and Matthew Fox as coaches, David Straitharn as the university president, DEADWOOD’s Ian McShane as the father of one of the players killed in the plane crash. And the soundtrack is great, a cross-section of the songs I used to hear on the radio all the time in those days. (KXOL 1360 AM in Fort Worth, for those of you might care. There were two major rock stations in Fort Worth in those days, KXOL and KFJZ 1270 AM, and just like there were people who preferred the Beatles and people who preferred the Rolling Stones, there were KXOL listeners and KFJZ listeners, and very little crossover between the groups. At least among the people that I knew . . . but I digress.)

I wouldn’t put WE ARE MARSHALL in the top tier of inspirational sports movies, but it’s pretty entertaining and worth watching. The script springs a nice twist near the end that I liked a lot. If this is the sort of movie you enjoy and you haven’t seen it yet, you should definitely check it out.

Lariat Story, August 1934

Since I had this pulp out a couple of weeks ago to look something up, I decided to go ahead and read it. I believe it’s the first issue of LARIAT STORY that I’ve read; I own only another issue or two of this particular pulp.

It doesn’t start off particularly well. The lead “novel” (actually more of a novella) is “The Ranch of Hidden Men” by John Starr. Originally, John Starr was the pseudonym of Jack Byrne, who was the editor of LARIAT STORY at the time this issue was published. At some point, though, it became a house name, probably a year or so later when Byrne left Fiction House (the publisher of LARIAT STORY) to become an editor at ARGOSY. Byrne may be the author of “The Ranch of Hidden Men”, or he may not. Either way, it’s not a very good story. It’s the old “drifter saves the ranch from the bad guys” plot, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s so stereotypical that a story using it needs either an unexpected twist, good writing, or both. This one has neither. It has a very tired, by-the-numbers feel to it, with a lot of florid writing that just pads the word count. Even that sort of prose can be effective (see the work of A. Leslie Scott, for example), but I don’t think it works here. The novelette that follows, “Red Chaps” by Walter Clare Martin, is even worse, a humorous Western that’s not funny at all. I have a low tolerance for humorous Westerns; I like those by W.C. Tuttle, but that’s about it.

Things pick up, though, with “Whispering Knives” by C.K. Shaw, a novelette with another old plot, the hunt for the pieces of a treasure map that was split up among the prospectors who discovered a mother lode of gold, but Shaw has a nice hardboiled style that makes it a readable yarn. The four short stories that follow are even better: “Old Renegade” by Earl C. McCain concerns the hunt for a wild, killer bull in the South Texas brush country, with some rustling thrown in for good measure; “The Six-Gun Payoff” by the always-dependable Gunnison Steele (really Bennie Gardner, father of the late Barry Gardner, who was known to many of you) is an effective short-short about the redemption of an old outlaw; “Snake Sign” by Walt Coburn (one of my favorite Western pulp authors) is a murder mystery, not too hard to figure out but fun; and “The Water Cure” by E.B. Brunt is a fairly realistic cattle baron vs. small ranchers yarn set in the 1920s.

The issue is wrapped up by another “novel”, “The Fifth Horseman” by James P. Olsen. Olsen, under the name James Lawson, wrote spicy, hardboiled detective yarns about Dallas Duane, a PI who works in the Western oilfields, and I really like the stories I’ve read from that series. “The Fifth Horseman” is a little more serious. Again, the plot is one that had whiskers even in 1934: a gang of old outlaws get together again to help an old friend from the owlhoot trail who has reformed and settled down. The hero is a young outlaw who had fallen in with them. Anybody who has read very many Westerns will know how this one is going to play out, but Olsen spins his tale with such enthusiasm, including a number of over-the-top action scenes, that I found it pretty entertaining. This is the first Western story I’ve read by him, but I wouldn’t hesitate to read more.

My copy of the pulp is coverless and I can't find a picture of it on-line, so I can’t post a cover scan. It came from the collection of Barry Gardner, who’s mentioned above. Barry collected hundreds of pulps that contained his dad’s stories, but he didn’t care that much about the condition, so many of them are brittle and coverless, like this issue. I don’t really care, either, as long as I can read them and enjoy the stories, and I have to say that despite a couple of clunkers, the August 1934 issue of LARIAT STORY is pretty darned good.

Batman and the Monster Men

BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN is a trade paperback reprinting a six-issue miniseries published by DC a couple of years ago, but the chapters flow together so well it might as well be a true graphic novel. The story is an updated retelling and expansion of a story from very early in Batman’s career, originally published in the early Forties before Robin came along. As such, it recaptures the grim, hardboiled feeling of those first Batman yarns and does a fine job of it.

This is the story that introduces Professor Hugo Strange, one of the first master villains to cross paths with Batman. Obsessed with his research into genetic manipulation, Strange resorts to crime to finance his experiments. Having transformed mental patients into hulking monsters by altering their DNA, he uses them to carry out robberies. Also weaving through this story is Bruce Wayne’s romance with Julie Madison, his first girlfriend in the comics, and subplots involving organized crime in Gotham City, in which characters who were created later are retconned into the original Hugo Strange story. This is the sort of revisionist history I don’t really mind, since it expands on what went before more than really changing it.

This series was written and drawn by Matt Wagner, who was also the author of the long-running SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE comic book, one of the very best in the past twenty years. I don’t know if the various story arcs from that series have been collected in trade paperbacks (I suspect they have), but they’re well worth hunting up and reading. So is BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN, which I enjoyed a lot.

Japanese A Peach of a Murder

Livia got copies of the Japanese edition of her novel A PEACH OF A MURDER the other day. It has a pretty cool cover, I think. She's had books translated into Japanese before, but I don't believe I ever have. I do have an Italian edition of a men's adventure novel that I co-wrote many years ago, though.

At Greenleaf Cemetery

From left to right: Dennis McHaney, Todd Woods, Dave Hardy, Gary Romeo, Indy Cavalier, Rob Roehm. This shot was taken at the grave of Tevis Clyde Smith.

Left to right: Rob, Dennis, Indy, Dave, Todd, Rusty, Gary. The cemetery moved in this portable awning over the Howard gravesite for the weekend.

The historical marker at the Howard gravesite. Sorry it's not very easy to read in this photo. Anyone who knows me very well can tell you that I'm not much of a photographer.

The Howard headstone. Yes, that's my shadow.

More Photos

Indy guarding the cake with a broadsword. That's Jack Baum in the white shirt, and I'm shooting the picture over Rusty's shoulder (not an easy thing to do).

Howard's room, where all his stories were written. You can't really get a sense from this picture of how narrow and cramped the room really is. The typewriter on the desk isn't Howard's actual typewriter (that belongs to a collector in California, I believe) but it's the same model. Usually during Howard Days his room is roped off, but since the crowd was so small for this gathering, we were able to walk into it and stand by the desk. It's quite a feeling for a fan.

Birthday Bash Photos

The birthday cake and decorated table.

A close-up shot of the cake. (It was very good, by the way.)

Bill "Indy" Cavalier and Gary Romeo in the kitchen of the Howard House.

Bob's Birthday Party

On Saturday, a small but enthusiastic group of fans gathered in Cross Plains to commemorate what would have been the 102nd birthday of Robert E. Howard. (The actual anniversary of Howard’s birth is Tuesday, January 22.) In addition to several members of Project Pride, the local civic organization that has done so much to keep Howard’s memory alive, in attendance were: Russell Andrew, Barbara Barrett, Jack and Barbara Baum, Rusty Burke, Bill “Indy” Cavalier, Dave Hardy, Dennis McHaney, James Reasoner, Rob Roehm, Gary Romeo, and Todd Woods. If I’ve forgotten anyone, I certainly apologize.

I drove down to Cross Plains during the morning, arriving a little before eleven o’clock to find everyone scattered through the various rooms of the Howard House, enjoying animated conversations. Although the day was clear and pretty, it was a little too chilly to gather outside in the back yard pavilion, where most of the activities during the annual Howard Days gathering in June take place. I said hello to everyone, admired the birthday cake sitting on a table in the kitchen, and began circulating, trying to catch up with everyone since I missed last year’s Howard Days and hadn’t seen any of them since the World Fantasy Convention in Austin more than a year ago.

After a while, several of us adjourned to the nearby Subway for lunch, where the conversation continued, of course. Then it was back to the Howard House, where we cut the birthday cake and enjoyed it. Later in the afternoon most of the group caravaned down to Brownwood, where we visited Howard’s grave in Greenleaf Cemetery. This was the first time I’d been to the gravesite since the late Eighties, when Bill Crider (who lived in Brownwood at the time) took me to see it. While we were there yesterday, we also visited the grave of Tevis Clyde Smith, who was probably Howard’s best friend, and walked around the cemetery looking at some of the other old graves, including that of Noah T. Byers, an early Texas pioneer who served as the armorer to Sam Houston’s army during the Texas Revolution in 1836. The Texas Declaration of Independence was written in Byers’ blacksmith shop in Washington-on-the-Brazos. It certainly made for an interesting afternoon for a Texas history buff like me.

Everyone else headed back to Cross Plains for supper after that, but I left from Brownwood and came on home. My route took me through Dublin and Stephenville, where numerous UFOs were spotted last week, but I didn’t see a thing out of the ordinary. One of the businesses in Dublin had a portable sign out front, though, that read “Aliens Welcome”.

The gathering also served as a launch party of sorts for Dennis McHaney’s new book RETURN TO BEAR CREEK, as he hand-delivered copies to several of us there who had pre-ordered it. Published in a limited edition of 50 copies, it’s a very nice volume devoted to Breckinridge Elkins, the larger-than-life hero of many humorous Western stories by Howard. RETURN TO BEAR CREEK contains an introduction by Dennis, articles by Rob Roehm and Mark Finn, and facsimile reprints of six Elkins yarns from the pulp ACTION STORIES, along with reproductions of the covers of those issues. I don’t know if any of the copies of this book are going to be available to the general public, but it’s certainly worth having if you’re a Howard fan.

All in all, I had an excellent time. The small, informal nature of the gathering reminded me a great deal of the first few Howard Days I attended, which are some of my favorites. I’m glad the event has grown and attracted as many attention and as many attendees as it has, but a more low-key get-together like this is great fun, too. The weather in January is always iffy, of course, but I hope we’re able to have some more of these birthday parties in the future.