Perfect Crime Books is a new small press publisher, and it’s getting off to a great start with several fine volumes, including a brand-new novel by Robert J. Randisi.
Jake Gilmartin is a veteran New York City cop who finds himself in trouble when evidence of corruption surfaces against him. He’s suspended from the force, and things get even worse when an intruder shows up at his apartment one night and tries to kill him. Jake fights back and the would-be assassin winds up dead. That’s when Jake discovers that the man lying dead on his kitchen floor is another cop, a man Jake had considered a friend.
And this is just the prologue.
Most of the book is narrated by Jake’s son Rob, a gunnery instructor in the army who was also an investigator in the Military Police for a while. With no one left to trust, Jake calls on Rob for help finding out who framed him and wants him dead, even though Rob hates his father for cheating on Rob’s mother and breaking up their marriage years earlier. Reluctantly, Rob comes to New York to help Jake and finds himself mixed up in a complex and dangerous tangle involving organized crime, cops who may or may not be trustworthy, a beautiful female cab driver, and a number of colorful denizens of New York City. The scope of the plot eventually expands to cover decades of time and thousands of miles as Rob and Jake wind up facing almost overwhelming odds.
As always with a book by Bob Randisi, the pace really rockets along in this one with plenty of good dialogue and action. There’s a little humor, some very nice character bits, and an intriguing back-story that’s ripe for further exploration in a sequel, although this novel stands alone just fine. Although it’s thoroughly contemporary, I got a sense of some Gold Medal influence in the book, including the great title. It’s no secret that Bob and I have been friends for thirty years, but I try very hard not to let that influence my opinion when it comes to books by my friends. You can take my word for it: THE BOTTOM OF EVERY BOTTLE is a very good, tough cop thriller, and I recommend it highly.
Unseen since it was first serialized in the early pulp ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY, Perley Poore Sheehan’s novel ABU, THE DAWN-MAKER is the story of a slave revolt and native uprising on the coast of East Africa. Abu, a white barbarian with the soul of a poet, is the slave of an Arab merchant. When he finds a mysterious golden talisman called the Double Eye, only to have it taken away from him by the merchant, who then gives him a beating, Abu breaks free and goes on a rampage. Seeing what’s going on, the Arab’s other slaves join in the rebellion, and the result is a brutal bloodbath during a party at the merchant’s house.
I don’t know if Robert E. Howard ever read this story, but it’s certainly possible. In the opening chapters, Abu is very reminiscent of Conan and other Howard heroes as he wreaks havoc on his enemies and leads a rebellion against the rich, powerful, and evil masters of the unnamed African nation where the story takes place. There’s slaughter right and left for a while, but then Abu emerges victorious and has to deal with ruling an unexpected kingdom while also trying to expand it. There’s also the matter of Khadija, the beautiful blond prisoner who was supposed to be the bride of the overthrown Arab merchant. She and Abu fall in love at first sight, but Abu has sworn a vow of poverty, sobriety, and chastity until he has spread his empire over the entire world and freed all the slaves everywhere.
Well, you know that’s not going to work out.
From that point, the story’s pace slows down considerably, but it never loses the reader’s interest. Long-time pulpster Sheehan packs in enough political intrigue, African mysticism, unrequited romance, and inevitable tragedy to keep things percolating nicely. Eventually, the British authorities get wind of what’s going on and send warships steaming toward the African coast to deal with the rebellion. The action heats up again, and everything leads to a powerful, if somewhat puzzling, ending.
As you’d expect from a story published 95 years ago, the writing is a little old-fashioned in places, but a lot of it is surprisingly terse and modern. There’s also some of the casual racism of the time period, although it’s not as prevalent as you might expect. Still, you should be aware of it if you’re considering reading this story.
Which you can do without having to hunt up six issues of an obscure pulp magazine published in 1915, thanks to Beb Books, which has it scheduled for an upcoming reprint. ABU, THE DAWN-MAKER is an entertaining blend of action and epic drama that often reads more like a mainstream historical novel than a blood ‘n’ thunder pulp yarn. If you’re the type of reader who can put your mind in early 20th Century mode, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it, too.
Going on the assumption that a large group of well-educated, well-read people will know something about everything, can anybody tell me why I wake up yelling from nightmares at least twice a week and have for years, and more importantly, what the heck can I do to stop it? (I generally don't remember my dreams, but the ones that wake me up tend to linger in my memory.)
I'm happy to say that Courtreporter.net has chosen Rough Edges as one of its 50 Best Blogs for Crime and Mystery Book Lovers. You can read about the rest of their choices here. It's a stellar line-up, and I'm pleased and honored to be part of it. (And yes, that post title is 'way too easy, but it's early and that's the best I can come up with.)
Some of you have already weighed in with your favorable opinions of THE HURT LOCKER, and I’m glad to say that I concur: it’s a very fine film, worthy of its Best Picture nomination, and I sort of hope it wins.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, it’s the story of a small group of soldiers in Iraq who work as bomb disposal experts. There’s not really much of a plot. They go out and deal with a bomb, they go out and deal with a bomb, they get trapped in a desert firefight while they’re on a mission to dispose of a bomb, they deal with an Iraqi civilian who’s forced to be an unwilling suicide bomber, etc. Between missions, we get a little background on the three main characters, but not much. And this is one case where the technique works just fine. The harrowing details of these soldiers’ day to day lives are very effective.
Along the way there’s also a countdown to the end of the team’s rotation in Iraq. Even though that’s a bit of a cliché, it adds to the realism of the film. There are plenty of explosions, but they’re not the sort of fancy, pyrotechnical Stuff Blowing Up Real Good so common in films. They’re loud and dusty and grim and dangerous, sort of like real explosions must be.
The acting is fine all around, but Jeremy Renner, who was really good as a cop in the short-lived TV series THE UNUSUALS, is great as the new sergeant who comes in and takes over the team after the previous team leader is killed in an explosion early on. He’s good enough that I need to find out what other movies he’s been in.
I also liked the fact that THE HURT LOCKER doesn’t seem to have any political axes to grind. It’s really more of an old-fashioned GI movie about this handful of soldiers, the way they interact, and the job they do. And it doesn’t hurt that it has some of the most suspenseful scenes you’ll ever see.
I think this is far and away director Kathryn Bigelow’s best film, and it’s the only thing I’ve watched lately that may hold up over the years as a great film. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.
No, not me personally. It’s the title of a movie.
You know those romantic comedies where the guy and the girl are obviously meant for each other but are kept apart by some stupid misunderstanding and the girl has these two wacky gay sidekicks and they all live in New York City which is clean and charming and filled with people who are colorful and eccentric but still friendly and helpful and the guy and girl get together at the end and everybody goes “Awwww”?
Well, this is one of those movies.
But the script is pretty funny in places, and the cast does a good job, which makes I HATE VALENTINE’S DAY a passably entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.
Lou Cameron is an important figure in paperback history for a couple of reasons. First of all, he had a long career stretching back into the Fifties as an author of paperback originals in a wide variety of genres: mystery, war, adventure, science fiction, TV tie-ins, and movie novelizations. Then, in the mid-Seventies, he created the most popular and prolific Adult Western series in LONGARM. It wasn’t the first Adult Western series – there’s considerable debate about which one deserves that title – but since the first book was published in 1978, the series has rolled along for more than thirty years with a new title every single month (sometimes two in one month), until there are nearly 400 regular Longarm novels, plus 27 oversized Longarm Giant novels, with more to come and no end in sight. The books don’t sell like they used to (at their peak, the Longarm novels sold more than 100,000 copies each, a number that’s almost unheard of today when you’re talking about Westerns), but they still move steadily off the shelves. Several Spur Award-winning authors have contributed to the series under the Tabor Evans house-name. Cameron himself falls into that category, having won a Spur in 1976 for his novel THE SPIRIT HORSES. Longarm is one of the great success stories in genre paperbacks, and it came after Cameron already had quite a reputation as an author.
Cameron didn’t concentrate solely on Longarm after creating the series, though. He contributed to a few other Adult Western series, including a couple that he created and wrote all the books himself: STRINGER under his own name and RENEGADE (really more of an adventure series set in Central and South America, although they were marketed as Westerns) as by Ramsey Thorne. He also wrote a few stand-alone traditional Westerns for Gold Medal (by then an imprint of Ballantine), which brings us to THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL.
This novel from 1988, which as far as I know has never been reprinted, has a fairly traditional plot. In the mid-1890s, a young cowboy named Matt Taylor rides into the town of Freewater, Colorado (which actually straddles the state line between Colorado and Kansas) looking for a crooked trail boss who absconded with the wages owed to Matt and the other cowhands who drove a herd of cattle up the Ogallala Trail. Matt winds up finding the man he’s looking for, but that’s just the beginning. He becomes the deputy to Freewater’s town marshal, a legendary gunman named Big Bill Burton who carries one of the long-barreled revolvers of the title. Matt quickly grows into the job of being a lawman, stopping a bank robbery and engaging in a couple of shoot-outs that gain him a reputation and some enemies who want him dead.
The story sort of ambles along in episodic fashion as Matt deals with a number of criminal cases that arise while he’s wearing a badge in Freewater. He also romances a couple of beautiful women, the town schoolmarm and the local doctor. Since this is a traditional Western, the courting is very decorous, not at all like Cameron’s Longarms. The plot works its way toward an ending that you’ll likely see coming, although Cameron does throw in a nice little twist as he wraps everything up.
So why should you read THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL? There are several reasons. Despite the predictability of the plot, Cameron peoples it with some colorful and well-drawn – and in the case of his hero Matt, very likable – characters. Not everybody turns out to be exactly what you expect them to be. Also, episodic or not, the book never really slows down. Cameron had plenty of experience at keeping the reader flipping the pages, and it shows here. There are some nice cameo appearances by actual historical characters such as Charlie Siringo, Will Rogers, and Bill Tilghman, and a brief bit that offers a clue as to the later history of one Custis Long, aka Longarm. If Cameron says something about ol’ Custis, you have to take it as gospel, in my opinion.
What I really like most about this book, though, is Cameron’s distinctive voice. For much of his career, he wrote in a pretty standard action paperback style, but over the years it began to evolve into a more colorful use of language. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it reminds me of the dialogue in the TV series DEADWOOD, without all the cussin’. This makes it easy to identify the Longarms that Cameron wrote (and to be honest, he got to the point where he overdid it in that series, in my opinion), but it works perfectly in THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL, making everything in the book sound absolutely and grittily real. You might not like it – the style is eccentric enough so that I can see how it might rub some readers the wrong way – but I think this is one of the best Westerns I’ve read in a good long while, and I highly recommend it.
I’d heard a little about this movie before we watched it. Some people say it’s a spoof of Spaghetti Westerns, others claim it’s a modern attempt to make a new Western in the style of the Italian films. I’m here to tell you it’s not really either of those things. I have a hunch that my opinion will be solidly in the minority, but I think SHOOT FIRST AND PRAY YOU LIVE is about nine-tenths of a great film.
More importantly for Western pulp fans, most of the time it’s a very faithful adaptation of Frederick Faust’s novel LUCK, which started out as an ARGOSY serial in 1919 under the pseudonym John Frederick, then was published in book form under that name as Faust’s third published novel in 1920. Later, it was reprinted under its original title, as well as under the title RIDERS OF THE SILENCES, as by Max Brand. The film version follows the plot of the book accurately, as far as I recall from reading it a number of years ago, and uses big chunks of dialogue that really sound just like Faust’s work, so I assume they’re straight from the book, or almost so.
The plot finds a young man called Red Pierre falling in with an outlaw gang and enlisting their help in his vengeance quest against a notorious gunfighter named Bob McGurk, who killed Pierre’s father and raped his mother. The movie doesn’t tell the story in a traditional linear fashion, however, instead looping around and around with flashbacks and even flashbacks within flashbacks. Everything makes sense in the end, but this is a movie where you have to pay attention to follow it.
Most of the movie is played absolutely straight and works very well indeed. But every so often writer/director Lance Doty opts to drag in some oddball stylistic flourish, like including a flashback to Red Pierre’s childhood that’s animated (according to an interview, that was cheaper than hiring a child actor) or running a long sequence in reverse. Bits like this probably appeal to more modern viewers (one review I read compared it to PULP FICTION), but to a traditionalist like me, they seemed too jarring.
I’m willing to overlook those moments I didn’t like, however, because there were so many things I liked a lot about this movie. The cast, which includes almost nobody you’ve ever heard of except maybe Jim Gaffigan, James Russo, and Richard Tyson (who was also in THREE O'CLOCK HIGH, which we watched recently) does a fine job. Despite being shot quickly on an extremely low budget, the movie looks great. The music, which deliberately echoes the work of Ennio Morricone, is pretty good most of the time.
Mostly, though, I really liked SHOOT FIRST AND PRAY YOU LIVE because overall it’s probably the most faithful adaptation of a Frederick Faust Western ever. From the moment very early on when the narrator starts talking about the mountain desert, you know you’re in Faust country. And it made me realize for the first time that what Faust was doing, decades before the genre was even invented, was writing the literary equivalent of Spaghetti Westerns. Think about it . . . larger-than-life stories set in a mythological West featuring nearly superhuman heroes and villains . . . that’s a good description of both Spaghetti Westerns and Faust’s novels. Watching this movie really made me want to pick up a Max Brand novel and read it from a whole new perspective.
A lot of viewers may watch this movie, scratch their heads, and go “Huh?” But I loved it, and I hope they make the sequel that’s promised at the end. I’m pretty sure there’s a sequel to the novel LUCK, too, but I can’t recall the title at the moment. I’ll have to search it out and read it.
THE STEPFATHER is a remake of a movie from the Eighties that was written by Donald E. Westlake, about a serial killer who seduces widowed or divorced women, worms his way into their families, and then winds up slaughtering everybody before moving on and doing the same thing all over again. The original starred the excellent Terry O’Quinn in the title role. I recall watching it when it came out and remembered the basic plot. I assume I thought it was okay without being overly impressed by it.
So why the remake? A whole new generation of viewers since then, of course, and the fact that the filmmakers could switch the sex of the teenage protagonist (it was a girl in the original) and sign Penn Badgley from TV’s GOSSIP GIRL to play the hero.
Does it work? Not too well, as far as I’m concerned. The cast is pretty good, and of course any movie with Sela Ward in it is worth watching to a certain extent (although they deliberately deglamorize her here, it seems like). The action scenes are well-staged and don’t have any of that quick-cut editing I don’t like, but the creepy moments don’t generate much real suspense or any scares because it’s so obvious what’s going to happen. The whole thing feels very by-the-numbers. And there are a couple of big holes in the plot that make you wonder how this supposedly brilliant serial killer keeps getting away with it when he’s so sloppy.
All that said, THE STEPFATHER isn’t terrible. It’s not all that gory, which is a plus for me, and it moves right along. Don’t rush out to rent the DVD and don’t expect a classic if you do watch it, but this one does manage to fall into the amiable time-waster category.
If the Sixties and Seventies were the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints because of all the mass-market paperbacks coming out then (Doc Savage, The Shadow, G-8, Jim Hatfield, and many others), then this must be the Silver Age. There are a number of small presses reprinting great pulp novels and stories, many of which haven't seen the light of day for decades. One of the best is Black Dog Books, published by my friend Tom Roberts. The new Black Dog Books website has just launched, s
o check it out. Tom produces some beautiful volumes filled with great stories by Lester Dent, H. Bedford-Jones, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and many other fine authors. I don't think you can go wrong with any of his books.
