Ed Gorman's Blog, page 100

Bill Crider's Murder Most Fowl Now Available as an E-Book!

Now Available as an E-Book!


















Amazon.com: Murder Most Fowl (Dan Rhodes Mysteries) eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store   Following Booked for a Hanging, Anthony Award-winner Bill Crider brings back his amiable, computer-phobic sheriff Dan Rhodes to investigate a murder that may or may not be related to a recent wave of emu-rustling. For an officer of the law, Blacklin County, Texas, used to be pretty peaceful, but now, what with the emu-rustling, cockfights, and protests at the new Wal-Mart store — not to mention murder — Sheriff Dan Rhodes has his hands full. Hit hard by the collapse of his little hardware store, Elijah ("Lige") Ward has taken to chaining himself to the Wal-Mart doors and generally making a nuisance of himself. And when Lige's dead body turns up, floating down a river in a portable toilet, Rhodes finds he has quite a case to investigate. What was the connection between Lige and chickens? Lige and the Palm Club? And was he involved in the area's emu thefts? It seems that raising emus ("taste like steak, not chicken") is a booming business, so much so that emu ("calmer than ostriches and more resistant to disease") are being stolen left, right, and center by would-be emu ranchers with little respect for the law. From theft to murder, the local crime spree seems unstoppable. But with a little help from the computer foisted on him by aging deputies Hack and Lawton, plus some good old-fashioned detective work, Rhodes just may be able to straighten out his county.
And for those who have Nooks, it's here.

Ralph Dennis He coulda been a contenda From the gret Johnny aRue's Crane Shot

First, let me give Popular Library's Hardman series my highest recommendation.

In all honesty, Ralph Dennis' adventures of unlicensed P.I. Jim 

Hardman and his black sidekick Hump Evans don't really belong in the "men's adventure" genre. All twelve books are more like detective novels than slam-bang sleaze and action. Hardman has been compared toSpenser and Rockford, and I would go along with that.

However, because Popular Library packaged them as men's adventure, including numbering the titles and giving them violent painted covers, I'll cover them as such here. But whichever genre you like better, you should definitely seek out the Hardman books.

They were written by Atlanta-based author Ralph Dennis in the 1970s. Instead of getting into Dennis' bio, I'll send you to mystery writer Richard A. Moore's excellent article on him.

As for 1974's DOWN AMONG THE JOCKS, the fifth Hardman novel, well, it's pretty darn great. It begins with Hardman and Evans viewing an 8mm film Hump received anonymously in the mail. It features one of Hump's former NFL teammates, a real asshole named Ed Cross, in bed with two women. That same night, Cross is found beaten to death, and the prime suspects are Hump and four other guys who received the same film. The theory is that Cross sent the film to men whose girlfriends or daughters he had slept with as a "screw you." That's the kind of guy Ed Cross was.

Laura Lippman: By the Book the New York Times

Laura Lippman: By the Book


The author, most recently, of “After I’m Gone” likes books steeped in the quotidian. “You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading ‘Mildred Pierce.’ ”What’s the best book you’ve read recently? My reading life is like an airport where a bunch of planes circle in a holding pattern, then — boom, boom, boom, several come in for a landing. So I have three: Helen FitzGerald’s “The Cry,” Elizabeth Hand’s “Illyria” and Tom Nissley’s “A Reader’s Book of Days.”  “The Cry” tackles the toughest subject in crime fiction, the death of an infant, and it surprised me, which is rare when I’m reading crime fiction. Hand’s book is a Y.A. literary mash-up of “Flowers in the Attic” and Noel Streatfeild’s “Theater Shoes.” Nissley’s book offers monthly reading lists, and I’m a sucker for such lists. January includes H. P. Lovecraft, Zadie Smith and Arthur Hailey — what’s not to love? Your husband is David Simon, creator of “The Wire” and co-creator of “Treme.” Do you share the same taste in literature? Has either of you opened the other up to different kinds of book or favorite authors? I don’t read enough nonfiction, and David tends to read fiction as homework for new projects. (A bunch of books about the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade showed up in the house recently.) But David’s reading more novels by women, and I’ve started Sheri Fink’s “Five Days at Memorial.”Both of you are former journalists. How has that experience affected your sense of story? To what extent do your novels arise from the reporting you did at The San Antonio Light and The Baltimore Sun? In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction. Twenty years as a reporter left me with a healthy but not obsessive desire to get things right, as did Mary McCarthy’s “The Fact in Fiction,” a seminal essay for me. It also left me with a real distaste for anyone who fabricates, or passes off nonfiction as fiction, and yes, I’m sorry but that includes David Foster Wallace.Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer. Edward Eager wrote a series of children’s books that are in danger of being forgotten. But they’re divine, stories about ordinary kids who stumble on magical things — a coin, a lake, a book, a thyme garden, a well. The magic changes them, they try to change the magic, the magic moves on. Great female characters, too — strong, smart, capable, not killjoys. “Half Magic” is his masterpiece, but I have a soft spot for “Knight’s Castle,” which is set in Baltimore.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/boo...

HALO FOR HIRE: THE COMPLETE PAUL PINE by Howard Browne

HALO FOR HIRE: THE COMPLETE PAUL PINE by Howard Browne


HALO FOR HIRE: THE COMPLETE PAUL PINE by Howard Browne


Howard BrowneOver on Rara-Avis there's a letter about the late writer and editor Howard Browne.

If you were an adolescant science fiction-fantasy reader in the Fifties Howard was likely one of your favorite people. He edited both Amazing and Fantastic, the Ziff-Davis publishing twins that offered the kind of adventure sf only a teenager could love. Early in the decade he edited Fantastic when it was upscale with stories by Ray Bradbury, John Collier, Shirley Jackson, etc. But nobody bought it so Ziff-Davis ordered it back to its gaudy past--action stories with purple Venusians, lots of rays guns, hard-boiled interstellar dudes and innumerable lovely interstellar babes. I loved it. For five years those were my two favorite magazines. Later I'd learn that most of the stories I especially liked were by Robert Silverberg. Some of them hold up pretty well today.

Late in my teens I started reading Howard's "Halo" series of mysteries. They owed a lot to Chandler (he insisted they owed a lot to James M. Cain too) but eventually they got rolling on their own entirely. They are well worth reading. He was a good writer line by line and a much better plotter than Chandler.

I mention all this because when I began editing Mystery Scene one of my goals was to get Howard in the magazine. He was somebody I'd always wanted to meet (via phone). He ended up writing three or four pieces of his autobiography for us. He was a great storyteller and a prescient judge of character.

I probably talked to him fifteen times over the years, sometimes at length. A lot of the talk was pretty funny and pretty cynical on both our parts. But then one night he called to say that he wouldn't be finishing his autobiography for the magazine as planned. His wife had died and he said he would never write again. He said that one night he'd gotten out of bed and gone to the bathroom and when he came back a few minutes later she was dead.

He spent his final days in a nursing home. California people put on a big birthday party for him. I'm sure he got a hell of a kick out of it. A great guy, a fine writer.

Here's a long obituary by Jack Adrian no less.


Independent, The (London), Nov 15, 1999 by Jack Adrian
HOWARD BROWNE was that unusual beast, a writer who not only succeeded on both sides of the editorial desk, but who was equally at home in two quite disparate genres, hardboiled detective fiction and SF/ Fantasy. His fantasy, in particular, was of the swashbuckling kind, a million miles - or rather, bowing to the genre, a million light years - from his tales of mean streets, mainly written under his pseudonym John Evans (one of many: others included Lawrence Chandler and Lee Francis).

He successfully jumped media, too, as well as genres, turning, when the pulp magazines began to wither and die in the early 1950s, from writing punchy, riveting prose to creating compelling screen- and tele-plays. And, like all able fictioneers, even at an advanced age he could still turn disaster into triumph - two rejected screenplays, "The Violent World of Jake Lingle" and "A Bowl of Cherries", upon which he had lavished much care and attention, he transformed into a brace of fine late (very late: he was then in his mid-eighties) novels, Pork City (1988) and the hilarious Scotch on the Rocks (1991).

Howard Browne was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a baker, in 1908, and began his education in Lincoln, Nebraska. However, he dropped out of high school and rode the rails (i.e., hid in the boxcar) to Chicago to seek his fortune. He worked as a legman, or stringer, for a local newspaper before, at the age of 21, securing a post as department-store credit manager, a position he held for over a decade and which gave him an unparalleled insight into the psyche of his fellow men.

for the rest go here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi...

The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding JAKE HINKSON

The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding JAKE HINKSON










Ed here: One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Jake Hinkson's fiction and non-fiction is because they're informed by tropes and styles that work away from the standard material we see so much of today. His championing of Margaret Millar and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding tells you that he's a man we should listen to if we really love and admire noir as a form.we don'tt seeJake Hinkson:

If you trace the roots of literary noir back far enough, eventually you’ll run into the unlikely figure of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Though in recent years she has been overlooked in the rush to canonize folks such as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Holding was just as pivotal in the development of noir as a distinct literary genre. Like Cain and Woolrich, she didn’t write about hardnosed good guys very much. Before the term “roman noir” had even been coined, her specialty was isolated and desperate characters with profoundly poor decision-making skills.In her time, Holding sold well and was highly regarded by her peers. No less an authority than Raymond Chandler called her “the top suspense writer of them all.” The critic Christopher Morley wrote of one of her books, “This is the kind of thing I recommend to a few like myself who find the purest refreshment in hallucinations and horrors, in damnation, dipsomania, and dismay.” And looking back on her career, the great Anthony Boucher(namesake of the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention) noted, “Before anybody had ever heard of ‘pyschological novels of suspense’ Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was writing them, and brilliantly.”So why has she been largely forgotten today? Well, for one thing, she struck a decidedly matriarchal figure. Born in Brooklyn in 1889, she married a British government officer named George E. Holding in 1913, she gave birth to a daughter and son and traveled around the world with her husband. Something about Holding’s life smacks, on first glance, of the cozy English mystery tradition. Secondly, she was a woman in a distinctly masculine field—and she wasn’t a hard-living broad like Patricia Highsmith, either. She was a lady, educated at Miss Botsford’s School and Miss Whitcomb's, and a government official’s wife. By the time “noir” became a term critics were tossing around, she was a plump grandmother in her sixties. None of that matters, though. I’d wager everything I own in the world that if you could have sidled up to Holding at some stuffy dinner party and asked her what she was really thinking the answer would have been darkly funny and perceptive. Her books remain impressive today. Her best, undoubtedly, is the masterpiece The Blank Wall (1947). The book tells the story of Lucia Holley, a married mother of two living in a quiet coastal town in California. Without telling anyone where she’s going, one day Lucia drives the family station wagon to a cheap hotel in town to see a man named Ted Darby. He’s a shady character, all sleazy charm and insinuations, who has being seeing Lucia’s teenaged daughter, Bee. Lucia wants him to stay away from her daughter, so Darby smiles and suggests that he might be open to a little monetary persuasion. Lucia throws his offer back in his face, confident that when she tells Bee about Darby’s offer, the girl will end the relationship herself. When Lucia discovers Darby’s dead body the next morning, however, The Blank Wall becomes truly fascinating. Lucia disposes of the corpse, unsure exactly what has transpired, but suspecting that she is covering up a murder. Once the body is found by the police, Lucia is the only one who knows what happened—up to a point, because even she doesn’t know exactly what happened. Things get worse with the arrival of a hood named Donnelly who has some love letters written by Bee to Darby. He wants cash or the letters will go to the police.
for the rest go here:
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/...

Harry Cohn-You had to stand in a long line to hate him

It's Red Skelton’s quip on the death of Harry Cohn that is best remembered. Hearing that most of Hollywood turned out for the service, Skelton noted, “Well, it only goes to show you that if you give the people what they want, they’ll come out for it."Ed here: I  understand why people hated Harry Cohn. The Cohen Brothers had a great time massacring him in "Barton Finke." He was a true blue bastard. But he sure made great copy.WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT HARRY COHN
Posted by Susan Doll on February 10, 2014   Movie Morlocks


I recently picked up a used audiotape of the biography of Harry Cohn by Bob Thomas,  King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn . First published in 1967, the book was revised in 1990 with additional interviews and material; in 2000, it was republished, including an audiotape edition with a forward by Peter Bart. King Cohn is not groundbreaking in structure or shocking in content, but I did learn a great deal about the meanest movie mogul in Hollywood as well as the love of his life, Columbia Pictures.
Most of the Golden Age movie moguls started at the bottom in the movie business and worked their way up to head of production at their studios. While Cohn was no exception, I discovered that his entrance into the film industry was quite unique. He was working as a song plugger for sheet-music publishers when he had a brilliant idea to increase sales. The latest songs were routinely plugged at movie theaters between films by the house orchestras who played them while slides of pretty pictures were shown to the audience. Cohn believed that audiences would respond better to movie footage than slides, so he began to produce footage for theaters to project during the songs.  To maximize the effect, Cohn learned to match the content of the images to the songs’ lyrics. Jack Cohn, Harry’s brother, worked for Universal Pictures at the time, and he showed Cohn’s innovation to studio owner Carl Laemmle. Laemmle was impressed enough to give Harry a job.  Eventually, Harry and Jack left Universal to form their own production company.
I knew that Columbia began as a Poverty Row studio, but I did not realize that it never moved out of Poverty Row. Instead, it gradually swallowed up the small studios on Beachwood between Sunset Blvd. and Fountain. The name was changed to Columbia in 1924. Prior to this it was called C.B.C. Film Sales, which stood for (Jack) Cohn, (Joseph) Brandt, and (Harry) Cohn. Brandt was a long-time friend from New York City. Harry bought out Brandt’s shares in 1932. The original studio space still exists at this address, though it is now called Sunset-Gower Studios.
A few months ago, I wrote about a romantic comedy called If You Could Only Cook. One of my knowledgeable readers commented that the film was erroneously attributed to Columbia’s powerhouse director, Frank Capra, by the studio’s marketing department in England. They used Capra’s name to promote the film, and Capra ended his relationship with Columbia over the matter. I discovered there was more to the story, at least according to Thomas. Capra’s films had pulled Columbia out of Poverty Row and made the studio a major player in the industry. But, when Capra latched onto his dream project, Lost Horizon, in the mid-1930s, the experience did not go as smoothly as his previous films. The first previews for Lost Horizon were a disaster, because the audience laughed inappropriately at what Capra had intended to be serious scenes. His solution was to cut the first two reels, which he personally threw in the Columbia incinerator. Lost Horizon became a critical and popular success, but the studio did not make as much money the year the film was released as it had in the past. Columbia’s bankers back east pressured Cohn about the loss of revenue, and his response was not to pay Capra his very high salary until he started another film. The director was understandably angered over this arbitrary condition regarding his salary. When the mistake with If You Could Only Cook occurred, he told his lawyer to use it to get him out of his contract with Columbia.

In the late 1940s, Fred Karger brought Marilyn Monroe to Cohn’s office to sing for him, because she was about to appear in the musical Ladies of the Chorus. She was so nervous she called her Christian Science practitioner for moral support. The normally gruff and coarse Harry Cohn softened when he heard that because someone close to him had been involved with Christian Science. He put Monroe under contract for six months but then dismissed her after her option was up, because, “She can’t act.”

A Donald Westlake Pro-File from 2006

A Donald Westlake Pro-File from 2006
Gormania
Sunday, March 05, 2006

Pro-File: Donald E. Westlake
Donald E. Westlake

DONALD E. WESTLAKE has written numerous novels over the past thirty-five years under his own name and pseudonyms, including Richard Stark. Many of his books have been made into movies, including The Hunter, which became the brilliant film noir Point Blank, and the 1999 smash hit Payback. He penned the Hollywood scripts for The Stepfather and The Grifters, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The winner of three Edgar awards and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Donald E. Westlake was presented with The Eye, the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, at the Shamus Awards. He lives with his wife, Abby Adams, in rural New York State.

Ed here: As I've said before, I believe that Don Westlake is flat out the best crime ficton writer of our time--the most skilled, the most daring and the most accomplished. I think he's wrtten a number of masterpieces but of them all I'd have to say that The Ax is probably his best for sheer brilliance of craft and relevance to our time. Here are a few review quotes to remind you of just how fine that book is:

Charles Taylor has this to say about Westlake's The AX:

"The murderous characters that unnerve us the most are the ones we can feel close to, the ones who make us feel protective of them, make us realize what human traits we share with them. No one has ever captured those qualities better than Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates in Psycho. And though he's a very different character, the middle-aged businessman in Donald E. Westlake's devastating novel The Ax who, after he's laid off, resorts to killing the competitors for the job he desperately needs, makes us feel the horror of seeing murder as necessity (talk about a thriller that really represents our contemporary dark side; nothing Harris has written can touch The Ax.)

"If there were a different set of values at work in our glum society, Westlake would have won National Book Awards and Pulitzers...[and] there would be statues of him in every municipal park."
-Washington Post Book World

"No one can turn a phrase like Westlake."
-Detroit News and Free Press

"Westlake is one of the best crime writers in the business...inventive, suspenseful, muscular, angry, horrific."
-Los Angeles Times
The Ax


Pro-File: Donald E. Westlake


Tell us about your current novel.

1. I'm breaking my own rule again. For 25 years or more, my rule has been
to limit myself to 1 Dortmunder in every 3 Westlake novels, in an effort to
keep the series from growing flat or thin or anything else bad -- which
I've seen with people sometimes who go to the well too often. So, when I
finished THE ROAD TO RUIN I was supposed to write 2 non-Dortmunders, but for
a couple of months the only story I could think of was another damn
Dortmunder, so I finally gave up and wrote it, and that was WATCH YOUR BACK!
So now I'm supposed to do 2 from column B again, and hit me with a brick if
I'm not hanging out with John, three times in a row. It's 284 pages so far
and does not yet have a title, not even YOU AGAIN?

Can you give us a sense of what you're working on?

2. Right now I'm working on page 285, with very little success so far,
except I think one of them -- or maybe both of them -- will go out that
window onto the roof next door. Which will give me an even bigger problem
on page 286.

What is the greatest pleasure in your writing career?

3. At the party after the New York premiere of THE GRIFTERS, I went over to
say congratulations to Stephen Frears, but before I could speak he grabbed
my elbow and leaned in close and said, "Wull, we got away with it." That's
the greatest pleasure, not in writing, which is its own greatest pleasure,
but in the writing career. Year after year, we get away with it.

What is the greatest DIS-pleasure?

4. The greatest displeasure in my writing career used to be my occasional
indentured servitude in Hollywood, but now it is the ramshackle mess that
has become of New York publishing. Doesn't anybody here know how to play
this game?

Do you have any advice for the publishing business?
5. Pay attention.

Are there two or three writers you'd like to see in print again?
6.
There are specific books from uneven writers, but I don't want to do a
list, so I'll make one stand for them all. I believe Joel Townsley Rogers'
THE RED RIGHT HAND should be reissued every 5 years forever.

Tell us about writing your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

7. Well, I wrote a mystery I called THE CUTIE, a title which died along the
way, which would have been better if it had died for a better title, instead
of for THE MERCENARIES. I was represented by Scott Meredith then, which was
very much like being a cow on a dairy farm, and Henry Morrison was his
assistant. He wanted to send my cutie to a paperback house, but I said I
wanted it in hardcover. He told me there were only 2 hardcover houses at
that time worth thinking about, Simon & Schuster and Random House, neither
of which would want it. I insisted, and he said, okay, we'd waste the time
and then sell it paperback.
So it went to Clayton Rawson at S&S, who was personally insulted that
anyone would send him such trash (s'truth). Then it went to Lee Wright at
Random, who called Henry and said it was a near miss, she was sending it
back but wished I lived in New York so she could talk with me. "He lives in
New York! He lives in New York!" It was arranged I'd meet with her and
pick up the manuscript. Henry said to me, "LISTEN to her!" So I spent two
hours listening to her and she made me see the bad pulp habits that had led
me astray, and it was agreed I'd rewrite and she'd look at it again. I did,
she did, and she bought it. She was the best editor I ever had, very smart
and very funny, and she knew her business. She once told me she was such a
sucker for story that she had to read a manuscript 3 times before she could
get objective about it and be of use. Look for an editor like that, eh?
The suits were always oafish, of course; they made her also be the cookbook
editor, though she'd never cooked anything in her life. She once said, "I
walk into the kitchen and my thumb starts to bleed, and I haven't even
picked up the can opener yet."
posted by Gormania at 3:10 PM
4 Comments:

Duane Swierczynski said...
Not to turn all fanboy here... but let's face it; I am a fanboy. For some, Clapton is god. For me, it's all
about Donald Westlake. Couldn't agree with you more about THE AX. That was the book that,
in 1997, set me searching for everything else with his name on it.
And then I learned about this Richard Stark guy...

Francis Fyfield Novels only $2.99 on e books

LET’S DANCE(Witness Impulse; March 4, 2014; $2.99 ebook)When Isabel Burley returns home to care for her mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, she finds a bemused, angry old woman, prey to the threats of failing memory, the inability to run her household - and the local villains who are eyeing her isolated home. But as the villains close in, Isabel finds herself struggling with her own emotions. She thinks she has come home to do some good, but is she really looking for the love she lacked as a child? Alienated by her mother’s growing eccentricity, the two women become locked in a relationship of love, conflict and simmering violence, with roots that go deep into the past. [image error] Let's Dance Frances FyfieldMarch 4, 2014Witness ImpulseElectronic book textFiction / Crime$2.99 USD
SHADOW PLAY(Witness Impulse; March 18, 2014; $2.99 ebook)The odd, vaguely menacing little man called Mr. Logo is a familiar figure in the old court building in London. Although frequently brought before the judge for indecent assault, he is invariably acquitted due to lack of evidence. He is especially familiar to Helen West, the take-no-prisoners lawyer who has just failed for the fifth time to prosecute him. Now he is off-limits to her until his next appearance in court. Yet, when she befriends Rose, the young, compulsively secretive and promiscuous clerk in the office, Helen unwittingly sets in motion events that will dangerously complicate her connection to Mr. Logo and push his rage and dark passion to lethal extremes.“Fyfield is a wonder…An intricate and surprise-filled plot.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review [image error] Shadow Play Frances FyfieldMarch 18, 2014Witness ImpulseElectronic book textFiction / Crime$2.99 USD
I hope you enjoy these egalleys, and will consider them for a review or spotlight this March. If you’d like to request an interview or guest post with Ms. Fyfield, please let me know. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have trouble downloading the titles, or have any other questions.
Thank you, and happy reading!
Andrea Hackett

Pay The Devil Jack Higgins by Ben Boulden

PAY THE DEVIL by Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins)  by Ben Boulden

Pay the Devil is the seventh novel published by Harry Patterson.  It was released as a hardcover by Barrie Rockcliff in 1963, and it languished out of print for nearly four decades until it was reissued in mass market in 1999.  I haven’t been able to corroborate this, but the paperback reissue has the feel of a light reworking; the dialogue, particularly in the opening chapter, has that peculiar light wispy droll of Mr Patterson’s later work—
“‘I’d say so, Josh.  Let me have that spyglass of yours, and I wish you wouldn’t call me general.  I only had one hundred and twenty-three men left in the brigade when General Lee gave me the appointment.  Now it’s more like twenty.’”
There is also the oddity of the protagonist’s man servant—former slave—Joshua who is referred to, both in narrative and dialogue, as “Josh” in the prologue and “Joshua” throughout the rest of the novel.  My guess is Mr Patterson added the prologue for the mass market issue, and (perhaps) lightly touched up the remainder. 
Clay Fitzgerald is a worn out Confederate surgeon and cavalryman.  He has been at war four long years, and as the novel opens he joins General Lee on his march to surrender to Ulysses S. Grant.  General Lee summarily releases Clay and his men from duty, and they quietly slink away before the surrender. 
Clay inherited a family estate in the West of Ireland called Claremont, and he and Joshua make the journey as something like a long overdue vacation. Unfortunately the Ireland they find is less than an idyllic playground.  It is inhabited by a poverty-stricken working class, and an abusive ruling landowner class.  On arrival Clay is disinterested in the politics of the place, but circumstance and conscience prohibits neutrality.  Clay takes the identity of a local folk hero called “Captain Swing,” and metes out a sort of vigilante justice.
Pay the Devil is the longest, and most complexly plotted of Mr Patterson’s early work.  It is something of a gothic with its Irish moors, night rides, and even a forbidden romance.  The setting is beautifully rendered by Mr Patterson with his usual deft, and almost lyrical prose—
“Clouds moved over the face of the sun and a great shadow spilled darkness like a fast-spreading stain across the ground.”
The historical aspect of the novel is also nicely rendered.  The description of General Lee on his march to surrender.  The idea of Irish Home Rule, and even better the names of the secret societies that advanced the idea, “Fenian Brotherhood,” and “Ribbonmen.”  The contempt the landowners had for the working class; primarily protestant vs. Catholic.  The primary antagonist, Sir George Hamilton, summed the gentry’s view of the Irish—
“‘But the standards one would apply in England cannot be applied here.  These people are animals.’”          
However, there are also elements of the novel that are flat.  The narrative is too reliant on dialogue to set up major plot twists, setting, and character development.  The antagonists—land owners—are described as nothing short of the embodiment of evil, while the working class are something close to trodden angels.  A little too black and white even for an adventure novel, but forgivable because of the swift action and the well-developed setting.
Pay the Devil is not an example of Mr Patterson’s better work, but it is an entertaining novel.  It has an abundance of action.  The Captain Swing concoction is something akin to Zorro.  And there are several entertaining vintage slang words, including “lucifer” matches, “moonlighters,” and a wonderful summation of 19th century cesarean section as “a form of homicidal witchcraft.”

50 YEARS AGO: HOLLYWOOD TURNS A CIVIL WAR TRAGEDY INTO A GLENN FORD COMEDY

50 YEARS AGO: HOLLYWOOD TURNS A CIVIL WAR TRAGEDY INTO A GLENN FORD COMEDYby Fred Blosser 
Jack Schaefer is best remembered now for SHANE, but he also wrote a memorable short novel about the Civil War in the American West.  COMPANY OF COWARDS (1957) is a riveting story about tragedy and redemption that begins with a harrowing battle in Grant’s 1864 Virginia  Campaign and ends with a clash between troops and Indians on the High Plains.  In usual Hollywood fashion, when MGM released a movie version seven years later, Schaefer’s dramatic novel became a comedic Western starring Glenn Ford.
Here’s the story that Schaefer wrote:
On the fourth day of the Battle of the Wilderness, Union Capt. Jared Heath is ordered to lead his exhausted troop of infantry against a larger, entrenched Confederate force.  Bleakly calculating that few if any of his men would survive the charge, he refuses to advance.  Although Heath is an exceptionally brave and capable officer, three days of continual front-line fighting and losses have pushed him beyond endurance.  He submits to a hasty court-martial, expecting and prepared to face a charge of disobeying an order.  Too late, he learns that, instead, the charge is cowardice in the face of the enemy. 
Found guilty, Heath is bucked and tied in the courtroom.  A spiteful commanding officer orders his troops to file past and spit on him.  Disowned by his family and despised by the service, he is busted down to Private and assigned to an ambulance detail.  He has to walk behind the wagon when it goes out to pick up wounded soldiers on the battlefield -- the driver won’t let him ride.
Only one fellow officer, Major Foster, reviewing his prior record of leadership and bravery in combat, believes that he deserves a second chance.  Foster convinces the high command to form a “company” composed of Heath and six other former officers (and one non-com) convicted of desertion and malingering, and wrangles a way to get them back into honorable service. 
Bonding under Heath as “Company Q,” the unit is detailed to garrison duty out West, where the war has left the frontier Army short of manpower.  Ultimately, the chance to win back their self-respect comes when they’re dispatched into the Texas Panhandle as part of an expedition under Colonel Kit Carson to disperse Kiowa and Comanche raiders near a place called Adobe Walls . . .
It could and should have been source material for a John Ford movie in the late 1950s, with Jeffrey Hunter as Heath and Richard Widmark as  Foster.  In fact, I wonder if Schaefer himself wrote the novel with one eye on the hope that Ford might film it; Company Q’s topkick, Hugo Zattig, is the spittin’ image of Victor McLaglen’s feisty non-coms in Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy.  There are plenty of roles for the rest of Ford’s old stock company as well.
For greater box-office appeal, Ford probably would have added a romantic element to Schaefer’s stark narrative, maybe casting Vera Miles or Constance Towers as a sweetheart back home who never lost faith in Jared Heath.  At least this change would have been relatively minor in the scheme of things.  I don’t know whether Ford was ever aware of the novel; it isn’t mentioned in any of the books about Ford that I’ve read.   In real life, when COMPANY OF COWARDS actually made it to the screen in 1964, it bore only glancing resemblance to the novel.  Under the title ADVANCE TO THE REAR, the movie retains the names of some of Schaefer’s characters, but turns the somber story into a military comedy like OPERATION MAD BALL and THE WACKIEST SHIP IN THE ARMY. 
In this version, amiable Capt. Heath (Glenn Ford) commands a company of misfits (including Jesse Pearson, Andrew Prine, and Alan Hale Jr.) who are brave enough, just not very competent.  After a battlefield debacle, the troop and its buffoonish senior officer, Col. Brackenby (Melvyn Douglas), are exiled to the Dakotas to occupy a remote fort.  On the way Heath meets a sexy Rebel spy posing as a hooker (Stella Stevens) and foils a plot by a Confederate guerilla (James Griffith) and a Harvard-educated Indian chief (Michael Pate) to incite an uprising.
Ford is charming as Heath, but the Heath of Samuel A. Peeples’ and William Bowers’ screenplay is tailored to the laid-back sort of character that the actor played in POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES and THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE’S FATHER.  The seething, tightly wired Glenn Ford from THE BIG HEAT, JUBAL, and Budd Boetticher’s THE MAN FROM THE ALAMO would have fit right in with Schaefer’s original novel, but not with the broad comedy of the movie.
TV fans will see similarities to F TROOP and THE WILD WILD WEST, which debuted on the tube the following year.  And there’s a GILLIGAN’S ISLAND convergence of the Skipper and Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus plays a Union general) a few months before the S.S. Minnow began its fateful trip. 
The New Christy Minstrels’ Randy Sparks composed the soundtrack.  One of the tunes, “Today,” was a Top 20 hit for the group in May 1964 as the British Invasion was just gearing up.   The film was less successful; Howard Thompson’s review in THE NEW YORK TIMES called it “a warmed-over brew of slapstick and pratfalls.”   Still, on its own terms, apart from the question of whether a movie should remain faithful to a novel it’s based on, and in hindsight of even worse movies since, it isn’t a complete failure.  It runs occasionally on the TCM channel, and Warners released a print-on-demand DVD edition last year.