David Cranmer's Blog, page 119

Chris La Tray Has Excellent Taste

Just in Time for eBook October. Thanks, Chris.

Short Sharp Interview

Paul Brazill's Short Sharp Interview with David Cranmer/ Edward A. Grainger. Hey, that's me!

Seven Books Worth Your Time

DIG TEN GRAVES by Heath Lowrance: "Heath Lowrance follows up his classic debut, THE BASTARD HAND, with a searing collection of hard-boiled, dark fiction. The blackest of noir permeates the pages of DIG TEN GRAVES and oozes into its dark alleyways, its blood stained streets and its rain soaked gutters - even the crevices on the faces of its battle scarred and booze battered protagonists." -- Paul D Brazill.

THE CHAOS WE KNOW by Keith Rawson: "The Chaos We Know is a pulp-fueled debut w/ dopers, cops, husbands and wives. boyfriends & girlfriends, psychos & sadists, sand-storming through the potholes & shithouses of Arizona, leaving barnacles of the self centered, the down trodden' & the surviving. Keith Rawson is the new garbage-tongued satirist of filth, deviance & violence for the new underclass." -- Frank Bill.

THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC by Lawrence Block: Lawrence Block's 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan).
And it's MattScudder who's been largely reponsible for Block's lifetime achievement awards: Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), The Eye (Private Eye Writers of America), and the Cartier Diamond Dagger (UK Crime Writers Association).

But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it's all here, from a pair of late-70s novelettes (Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady) through By the Dawn's Early Light (Edgar) and The Merciful Angel of Death (Shamus), all the way to One Last Night at Grogan's, a moving and elegiac story never before published. It was short fiction that kept the series alive on the several occasions when the flow of novels wass ingterrupted, and short stories that took Scudder down different paths and showed us unmapped portions of his world.

CHOKE ON YOUR LIES by Anthony Neil Smith: A new novel by the author of PSYCHOSOMATIC, YELLOW MEDICINE, and HOGDOGGIN'. Smith presents his homage to one of his favorite detectives, Nero Wolfe, but written for the "internet porn" generation.

Octavia VanderPlatts is wealthy, powerful, and "comfortable with her weight"--or to hear her say it, a "rich fat b****." Her IQ is at the genius level, and she uses it to manipulate and frighten anyone who tries to get in her way. She controls an empire built on discrimination lawsuits won against some of the nation's top companies. On top of that, Octavia doesn't care one wink what people think of her.

PULP MODERN Edited by Alec Cizak: The inaugural issue of Pulp Modern, a quarterly dedicated to crime, fantasy, and western fiction. Includes new stories by Jimmy Callaway, James Duncan, C.J. Edwards, Garnett Elliott, Melissa Embry, Edward A. Grainger, Glenn Gray, David James Keaton, John Kenyon, Chris La Tray, Yarrow Paisley, Matthew Pizzolato, Thomas Pluck, Stephen D. Rogers, Sandra Seamans, Copper Smith and a classic tale by pulp fiction pioneer Lawrence Block.

FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER by Matthew J. McBride: Sometimes solving a crime takes a hard guy who's not afraid to work outside the law, and PI Nick Valentine swerves through the underbelly of St. Louis looking for answers. With every law he breaks, every drink he takes, and every Oxycontin he snorts, Valentine lurches closer to finding the truth. Or floating facedown in the Missouri River.

THE TRADITIONAL WEST (A Western Fictioneers Anthology): The classic American Western returns in this collection of brand-new stories by some of the top Western writers in the world today. Robert J. Randisi, Dusty Richards, James Reasoner, Larry D. Sweazy, L.J. Washburn, Jackson Lowry, Larry Jay Martin, Kerry Newcomb, and many other members of Western Fictioneers, the only writers' organization devoted solely to traditional Western fiction, take readers from the dusty plains of Texas to the sweeping vistas of Montana and beyond, in the biggest original Western anthology ever published!

Now Available: Adventures Of Cash Laramie And Gideon Miles Vol. II

Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Vol. II continues to chronicle the tales of two unorthodox 19th century U.S. Marshals. With seven more adventures, this collection includes the novella "Origin of White Deer" where the outlaw marshal leaves his Arapaho home as a teen to find his roots in the lawless town of Cheyenne, Wyoming. These noir tales infuse the Western genre with a fresh perspective on topics like race relations and social justice while still delivering pulse-racing action in the tradition of Wanted: Dead or Alive and Gunsmoke.

Volume II is now available.

Pulp Modern

The inaugural issue of Pulp Modern, a quarterly dedicated to crime, fantasy, and western fiction. Includes new stories by Jimmy Callaway, James Duncan, C.J. Edwards, Garnett Elliott, Melissa Embry, Edward A. Grainger, Glenn Gray, David James Keaton, John Kenyon, Chris La Tray, Yarrow Paisley, Matthew Pizzolato, Thomas Pluck, Stephen D. Rogers, Sandra Seamans, Copper Smith and a classic tale by pulp fiction pioneer Lawrence Block. (Edited by Alec Cizak)

I'm very honored to be with this crew. My story (writing as Edward A. Grainger) is "The Wicked" and features an older Cash Laramie in 1911's New Orleans.

Adventures II Foreword by Alec Cizak

The western is one of those things. Like rock and roll. Like theater. Jackasses in coffee houses everywhere are always pronouncing it dead. There's seductive evidence to suggest that diagnosis correct—Hollywood has a hard time prying its big fat wallet open to finance a western (never mind that the goddamn town was practically built on the genre). The only way television could get a western going in this day and age was by shuffling it off to the 'naughty' corner of cable and filling its character's mouths with non-stop profanity. Stroll into most book stores (the ones that still exist, speaking of a dying species) and you'll probably find one shelf of westerns with the safe, traditional names on the spines. Here's the problem, though, here's why there's no authoritative signature on that particular death certificate: The western is not dead. People read them, people watch them, and people like Edward A. Grainger (aka David Cranmer) are fueling the genre with fresh stories and characters that satisfy both old and new conventions.

Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles has been out for a short time and garnered enough attention to demonstrate that there is not only sustained interest in the western, but new blood ducking in to take a peek and, if we are to believe the avalanche of praise Grainger's first collection has received, liking what they see. And why not? Without the self-conscious posturing of postmodernism, Grainger has, in fact, crafted a postmodern west that takes into account the conspicuous absence of non-white, non-protestant members of the American family. Grainger is not one, I suspect, to bellow about "political correctness" and "inclusion" and "diversity" and all the other buzz words that college campuses and public service announcements like to drill into our heads in effort to keep the masses civilized. Like that old adage about faith, them that shout the loudest, we should assume, believe the least. No, Grainger very quietly sits wherever it is he writes and creates stories about the old west that fill in a lot of spaces left by previous generations of writers and filmmakers.

I compared Volume I to John Ford's The Searchers and I stand by that comparison. Like The Searchers, Grainger's stories address America's racial and ethnic realities in a straightforward manner so refreshingly free of self-consciousness that one is able to read the stories purely for entertainment or as the subtle political statements that they are. Grainger has, in short, achieved that great balance between form and function. In my opinion, this should be the goal of any serious artist.

On the surface, these are entertaining tales. Cash Laramie is part Dirty Harry, part Billy Jack. Of course, he walks the Earth a hundred years before those great vigilante characters of the 1970s. He benefits from a more relaxed attitude towards rogue justice. The result is a character who punishes bad guys the way all of us, deep down, would prefer. Thus, men who abuse children are dispatched without all the pesky paperwork and legal acrobats criminals benefit from today. Bigots who hang people simply because they don't like the color of their skin are brutally tortured and left for dead. In Volume II, Cash continues his brand of "outlaw" justice, repositioning that tricky line between "right" and "wrong." We are also treated to the story of Cash's origin. Gideon Miles does not play as significant a role as he did in the first collection of stories, but his appearance here reinforces my belief that Edward Grainger is telling tales of the west in a much more honest manner than any writer or filmmaker has attempted before and he is doing so without begging for an "atta' boy!" from the coffee house crowd.

There are some who would argue that Cash Laramie's "outlaw" justice is just that—beyond the borders of the law and therefore suspect. I think they are missing the point. American mythology is twisted in contradictions that brutal lawmen like Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles untangle with gut decisions we all wish we could execute every time we watch in horror as the justice system fails to discipline someone who is obviously guilty. These stories nurture a basic human desire to create a world that makes sense emotionally. In that way, they are a kind of medicine, don't you think?

Alec Cizak
August, 2011

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Thanks, Alec.

Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Vol. II will be released very soon with seven more stories featuring my 19th century antiheroes. Three tales are brand new, including the novella "Origin of White Deer" where a young Cash leaves his adoptive family to head into Cheyenne and find his roots.

Crime Fiction Lover

Short story eBooks: Our top 8 crime collections.

BEAT to a PULP #143: Silas' Good Run by Matthew C. Funk

Silas woke, put his hand on his AK-47, and inhaled the smells around him. It was how he got his bearings in the morning. As a Catholic, Silas knew rituals were important.

Wallpaper glue, sweat, and newsprint: these scents meant he was at his Law Street apartment. He smelled crude oil and the fecal stink of the Mississippi. That just meant he was still in the Ninth Ward.

Matthew C. Funk with Silas' Good Run.

Cash Laramie Returns

The outlaw marshal is at Naomi's top The Drowning Machine. I think this one turned out pretty darn good and will be included in Vol. II of ADVENTURES which will be out in a couple of weeks. Your comments are welcomed.

Introduction to Riding the Pulp Trail by Laurie Powers

My grandfather, Paul S. Powers (1905-1971) was a prolific and successful pulp fiction writer from the mid 1920s until the late 1940s. The majority of his work was published in WILD WEST WEEKLY, a Street & Smith magazine, where his popular characters Sonny Tabor and Kid Wolf appeared regularly for fifteen years. But he was also an accomplished writer of horror, detective, noir and romance tales. Some of his first works were published in WEIRD TALES, known as the publisher of the finest horror and fantasy fiction of the 20th century. Powers' proudest achievement, however, was his novel DOC DILLAHAY, a novel based on the life of his father as a pioneer physician, which was published by Macmillan in 1949.

This collection, however, is a collection of westerns that are quite different from my grandfather's work with WILD WEST WEEKLY. To explain, I need to give you a little background.

I didn't know of my grandfather's pulp fiction career until 1999, when I ran an Internet search on the only pen name I knew of, Ward M. Stevens. Over the next six months, I discovered that he had written hundreds of stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY. But my search did end there. I also found my grandfather's other children – my aunt and uncle - that I hadn't seen in 35 years. When I reunited with my aunt Pat in June of 1999, she gave me two large boxes filled with my grandfather's personal papers that had been stored in her attic since Paul's death in 1971. In there, among many other things, was Paul's unpublished memoir, PULP WRITER: TWENTY YEARS IN THE AMERICAN GRUB STREET that he had written in 1943. In 2007, 64 years after it was written, PULP WRITER was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

In 2001, my aunt handed me another box. It was a small box, something that would be used to store documents. She said it was unpublished manuscripts; I thought she said they were rejects from WILD WEST WEEKLY. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't look at the stories until eight years later and it wasn't until a friend, David Cranmer, casually asked mentioned in an email that "wouldn't it be great if we could find some of your grandfather's unpublished works and get them published now." My thoughts immediately went to that little box that had been stored in my closet.

When I opened it up and began to read them, I was shocked to discover that these stories weren't rejects from WILD WEST WEEKLY. Rather, there were many stories that were written after WILD WEST WEEKLY had shut down. In addition, there were many stories that weren't westerns at all. There were almost 30 stories in that little box. Five of them appear in this collection. The sixth new story, "By the Neck Until Dead," is a Sonny Tabor story that was intended to be published in WILD WEST WEEKLY in 1943, but never appeared because of the magazine's suspension.

The remaining six stories in this collection were published in magazines such as THRILLING WESTERN, TEXAS RANGERS, EXCITING WESTERN, RIO KID WESTERN, and THRILLING RANCH STORIES in the late 1940s. Paul did write many other stories for other magazines, such as for WESTERN STORY MAGAZINE, but these six reflect a good variety of themes and represent some of his best post-WWW work.

Two of the published stories, "A Pard for Navajo Jack," and "Judgment Day on Whisky Trail," appeared in THRILLING WESTERN in 1947 and 1948. "Hangnoose for a Prodigal" appeared in THRILLING RANCH STORIES in March 1948. "Buzzards Hate Bullets" was published in EXCITING WESTERN in November 1947. All of these aforementioned magazines were under Leo Margulies' editorial care at Standard Publications. The two other stories, "Boothill is My Destination," that appeared in TEXAS RANGERS in December 1947, and "Death is Where You Find It" in RIO KID WESTERN in August 1949, were imprints of Better Publications.

All of the stories in this collection reflect a new style that my grandfather had to adopt in the early 1940s. His earlier, WILD WEST WEEKLY style was developed and honed over the 15 years he wrote for the magazine. It was geared towards adolescents that read WWW and was full of the "blood and thunder" indicative of the westerns that were churned out during that period. It was a highly lucrative trade for my grandfather; but it also put him at an extreme disadvantage when he had to change course and relearn his craft when the old style was no longer popular. No longer were heroes to be the semi-super human cowboys who survived hundreds of bullet wounds and shoot targets with jaw dropping speed and accuracy. They were now to be more mature and sometimes with a darker look on life. Heroes that for years were clean-cut, highly moral and almost puritan in their habits were replaced by lead characters who drank, smoked, and swore.

Still, Paul managed to adapt. The editor that most often corresponded with Paul was Marguiles. While there were several rejection letters in the box, once I studied the pattern of published stories during that period, I found that Margulies published as many stories during that time as he rejected.

Paul's output in the late 1940s was merely a fraction of the amount that he wrote for WILD WEST WEEKLY, but it was for a good reason. While he was writing these stories, he was also writing DOC DILLAHAY. When the time came in 1943 to finally start on that book, nothing was going to stop him, not even the lucrative money he knew he could make writing for WESTERN STORY, EXCITING WESTERNS and THRILLING RANCH STORIES. I like to think that despite the drastic drop in income he experienced during this period, he probably relished the change of pace in writing these new stories and the freedom from the pressure of turning out Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, Freckles Malone, and Johnny Forty-five stories every single week.

Before turning you loose on this wonderful collection, I'd like to thank a few people. First off, a deep gratitude to my aunt, Pat Binkley, who has entrusted me not only with the personal papers but also with the privilege of sharing her father's life story through this book and other publications. I can only hope that I am doing it justice. Thanks also to David Cranmer who, as I mentioned before, started this whole ball rolling in getting these new stories in print. His support has always kept me going. Matt Moring of Altus Press has been an enthusiastic and patient partner in the process of getting these stories out of my closet and into the public's hands.

I want to thank my friends in the pulp fiction community and those who have followed my blog, www.lauriepowerswildwest.blogspot.com, many of whom expressed interest and support in getting these stories published. Many of them are leading historians and collectors of pulp fiction magazines. They are also some of the nicest people I have ever met. In particular I'd like to thank Ed Hulse, Walker Martin, Barry Traylor, Jack Irwin, Steve Kennedy, Jack Cullers, John Locke, and Will Murray for their generosity in sharing their extensive knowledge.

And finally I'd like to thank Gary Dobbs, a fine Western writer in his own right, who came up with the great title for this collection. I couldn't think of a more fitting title for this collection than RIDING THE PULP TRAIL.

Check out Laurie's Wild West.