James Reasoner's Blog, page 6

Review: The Bullet Garden - Stephen Hunter

Years ago, I read Stephen Hunter’s novel HOT SPRINGS, the first book in his Earl Swagger series. I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I read the sequel PALE HORSE COMING, and loved it, too, although I thought it wasn’t quite as good as HOT SPRINGS. When the third book in the series, HAVANA, came out, I read it, of course, and it was okay, but not nearly as good as the first two. And after that, I never read anything else by Hunter, although I’ve always intended to and I actually own most of his books.

But then I noticed that there’s a fourth Earl Swagger novel called THE BULLET GARDEN, and it’s a prequel to the others, taking place during World War II, so I had to give it a try. THE BULLET GARDEN is set during summer 1944, after D-Day but well before the Battle of the Bulge. The American forces have gotten bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy because a mysterious German sniper—or snipers—seems to be able to see in the dark and is eliminating American officers and NCOs, destroying morale and making it impossible for the Americans to advance. Gererals Eisenhower and Bradley want somebody to figure out what’s going on with the sniper and put a stop to it, and who better to do that than Earl Swagger, a Marine sergeant who has already made quite a reputation for himself fighting in the Pacific.

All this is established fairly quickly, and the rest of the novel follows Earl as he’s flown to England, made a major in the relatively new OSS, and launches an investigation into the sniper problem while trying to navigate the tricky back channels of politics and espionage, an area which is not one of Earl’s natural talents.

Hunter’s reputation is that of a guy who writes really well about guns and shooting. This is absolutely correct. His action scenes are very realistic and have an undeniable air of authenticity. THE BULLET GARDEN is full of great characters and scenes and bits of dialogue.

But the plot is incredibly slow to develop and muddled by page after page of description and background that’s well-written but doesn’t really do anything except show off Hunter’s prose. I’m no fan of stripped-down modern writing. I don’t mind some telling instead of showing. A lot of modern thrillers devoid of description and oh-so-careful never to mention the weather or use a speech tag other than “said”—and as few of those as possible—strike me as bland and all sounding alike. But dang, Hunter really goes overboard in the other direction in this book. It’s just too blasted wordy. Then he adds an unpleasant subplot that may be necessary for the overall story arc but really comes across as anticlimactic. There are also several cameos by real-life writers that skirt right up to the edge of being too cutesy but don't quite go over it.

Despite all that, as I said above there are some great scenes, some thrilling, some heartbreaking, that I suspect will stay with me. I still love Earl Swagger as a character and he’s in fine form in this novel. There’s enough real suspense that at times I was flipping the pages, in a hurry to find out what was going to happen. If you’ve read the first three books in this series, by all means you should read THE BULLET GARDEN, too. It’s available on Amazon in e-book, audio, hardcover, and paperback editions. But like HAVANA, it’s just okay.

Also, this novel isn’t just a prequel to the other Earl Swagger books, but it's also a prequel to Hunter’s first novel, THE MASTER SNIPER, published more than forty years ago. I happen to have a copy of that one. I think I’ll have to read it soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, July 1935

Nobody could accuse TERROR TALES, or any of the other Weird Menace pulps, for that matter, of being subtle and restrained. That's certainly true of this cover by John Howitt, which is one of the more lurid that I recall. The lineup of authors inside this issue is pretty much an all-star one for this genre: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst, Nat Schachner, and James A. Goldthwaite writing as Francis James. All those guys wrote other things, too, of course, but they were prolific and well-regarded contributors to the Weird Menace pulps.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, March 1946

Since LEADING WESTERN was published by Trojan, making it a Spicy Pulp at least by association, you'd expect the covers to have attractive women on them, and the March 1946 issue is no exception. I don't know who painted this cover, but if I had to guess, I'd say H.W. Scott. The big galoot with the dangling quirly looks like his work. Inside this issue, the only author you've likely heard of is Giff Cheshire, whose story made the cover. The other writers on hand are Adolph Regli, Frank D. Compagnon, Henry Norton, and Mark Lish. Norton and Lish sound vaguely familiar to me, the other two not at all. I don't own this issue and wouldn't want to venture a guess as to its quality, but the cover is okay.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: West on 66 - James H. Cobb

Take a Korean War vet who’s an LA county sheriff’s deputy in 1957, have him leave Chicago after visiting relatives and head back to California along Route 66 in a souped-up hot rod, drop him down in the middle of a mystery involving several murders, vengeful gangsters, a fortune in missing loot, and a beautiful young woman on the run, and what do you have? The ingredients of a vintage Gold Medal novel, right?

Nope. WEST ON 66 by James H. Cobb was published by St. Martin’s in 1999. The plot is fairly complex, the pace races right along (as you’d expect in a book that features several fast cars), and Kevin Pulaski, the narrator/hero, is extremely likable. The action scenes are very good; there’s a long, explosive scene near the end that’s just wonderful, so much so that it overshadows the rest of the book a little. While WEST ON 66 isn’t quite the pitch-perfect recreation of an era and a writing style, it’s darned close to that level. My biggest complaint is that in a few places the author gets a shade too cute for my taste, such as when the hero is searching for a pay phone to make an important call and thinks that it sure would be handy if somebody invented a phone you could carry around in your pocket. I’m sure I do that myself sometimes, too.

I’m not a big reader of near-future techno-thrillers, but Cobb’s debut novel, CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN, is great, probably the best novel I’ve ever read in that genre. It’s pretty easy to find and well worth looking for. So is the sequel, SEA STRIKE, which is almost as good. I imagine the other two or three books in the series are, too; I just haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m glad I came across WEST ON 66, though. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on October 17, 2008. Looking at Amazon, I was a little surprised to see that WEST ON 66 is still available as an e-book, and it's even on Kindle Unlimited. So are all five of the books in the series that begins with CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN. I read the first two in that series but never got around to the others. I'm tempted to read them now, but I'm afraid too much time has passed. I really recommend WEST ON 66, though, as well as CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN and SEA STRIKE. Great books. There were six short stories featuring Kevin Pulaski published in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE between 2004 and 2009. I thought they had been collected in a book, but apparently not. I'm sure they're worth reading, too. Cobb passed away in 2014.)

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

Johnny Stevens is a private detective working for an agency in New York. His boss sends him to Miami Beach on what seems like a simple assignment: Johnny is supposed to keep tabs on a doctor who may be blackmailing a young wastrel/playboy who happens to be the son-in-law of a canned food tycoon. The client is actually the public relations firm that represents the father-in-law. Johnny doesn’t know what the outcome is supposed to be and doesn’t really care. His assignment is just to keep track of where the doctor goes at night and who he sees. Just a simple shadowing job, right?

Well, you know it’s not going to stay simple, and sure enough, there’s a murder attempt the first night Johnny is on the job. On the second night, the killer succeeds, and even though the murder takes place in front of 300 witnesses, Johnny finds himself on the spot for it and has to figure out who the real killer is in order to clear his name. That’s not the only murder before this case is wrapped up, either. Throw in several beautiful young women for Johnny to juggle, some gangsters, gambling dens, and nightclubs, and you have all the elements for a highly entertaining private eye novel of the sort that I grew up reading.

SHAKEDOWN was published originally in hardcover by Henry Holt in 1952 and reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in 1954. The by-line on the book is Ben Kerr, but the actual author was William Ard, the popular Fifties writer who passed away in 1960 at the much too young age of 37. In addition to the stand-alone mystery and suspense novels and a two-book series featuring PI Barney Glines that he authored as Ben Kerr, he wrote a well-regarded series under his own name featuring PI Timothy Dane and a couple of books starring ex-con Danny Fontaine. He started a series starring private eye Lou Largo but wrote only part of the first book before dying. Lawrence Block completed that book, and John Jakes wrote several more under Ard’s name featuring Lou Largo. Ard’s most successful work during his lifetime may well have been the Western series he wrote in the late Fifties starring adventurer Tom Buchanan, published under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Ard wrote five of those and started the sixth one, which was completed by Robert Silverberg. Used copies of the Buchanan novels were easily found in used bookstores when I was a kid, and I eagerly bought and read all of them, without having any idea who actually wrote them, of course. Nor did I care, at that point.

The fine folks at Stark House Press are about to reprint SHAKEDOWN and another of Ard’s Ben Kerr novels, THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY, in a double volume with an excellent introduction by Nicholas Litchfield. I’ll be getting to THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY soon, but for now I can give this book a high recommendation based on SHAKEDOWN. It’s very fast-paced, written in a breezy, entertaining style, and Johnny Stevens is a likable protagonist, tough but not overly so, smart but not brilliant, quick with a quip and charming with the ladies. I’m a little surprised that this is his only appearance, but hey, Ard was busy with other things. I love this kind of book and always will. I had a really good time reading SHAKEDOWN.

Review: Overboard - George F. Worts

I have a bit of a history with this book. I first saw it in the Nineties, in the dealers’ room at ClueFest, the fondly remembered mystery convention in Dallas. My attention was drawn to that great cover by Rudolph Belarski, and although I’d never heard of the novel, I knew that the author, George F. Worts, was a well-regarded writer for the pulps. Since that copy wasn’t too expensive, I bought it.

And then it sat on my shelves, unread, until it went up in smoke in the Fire of ’08.

Time went by and I didn’t replace that copy of OVERBOARD, but then one day somebody posted the cover on Facebook in one of the paperback groups, and that prompted me to look around and see if I could find an affordable copy on-line (an option I didn’t have back in the Nineties when I bought it for the first time). I had checked a few times before that and found that generally, copies cost more than I wanted to pay. But this time, I found one that wasn’t cheap, but it was within my price range. So I snapped it up, and when it arrived I took it out of the plastic bag, figuring I would read it at last.

The first 60 pages were missing. Which hadn’t been mentioned at all in the listing for it.

Well, I got my money back, but I still couldn’t read the book. If it had been just the first page or two, maybe I would have plowed ahead. But not with that big a chunk of the novel gone. I wasn’t even going to attempt it. Maybe, I thought, maybe I just wasn’t meant to read OVERBOARD. So more time passed.

And then somebody posted that cover again, and I went and checked and found a decently priced copy and took the plunge again. The cover was printed slightly off register (you can see it in the scan, which is my copy), but I didn’t care all that much as long as the book was intact and readable. By now I was determined to read OVERBOARD.

And so I have, probably thirty years after I bought it the first time. Other than that printing glitch, the copy I got is in very nice shape. But is the book actually any good, you might ask?

It absolutely is.

The protagonist is a young woman with the odd name Zorie Corey. (The reason for the name does get an explanation of sorts in the novel.) She lives in a university town in the Midwest and makes a living typing theses, dissertations, and research papers for students and professors at the school. She’s engaged to a somewhat dull and controlling professor of psychology. She lives a meek little life (Worts actually goes a little overboard, no pun intended, on her meekness, but ultimately there’s a reason for that, too) and would like to experience some actual romance and adventure before she settles down to married life.

Well, you know where this is going, don’t you? Her fiancé’s grandfather, a retired admiral, blows into town and wants Zorie’s help writing a book about his life. Her fiancé’s rakehell older brother, who’s been kicked out of the Navy because he’s a Nazi sympathizer, shows up, too, as well as a couple of sinister strangers.

Before you know it, Zorie is whisked off onto a ship bound for Hawaii, where the admiral owns a beautiful estate. Her fiancé and the fiancé’s brother are on board, too, as are the sinister strangers and a beautiful young woman who seems to think that Zorie is actually someone else. Despite the brother being a Nazi sympathizer, Zorie is falling for him, anyway. Then, while taking a stroll on deck on a dark night, someone grabs her and throws her overboard. Through a stroke of luck, she survives that murder attempt, but then, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor . . . 

That’s the first half of the book, and up to then, it’s been a lighthearted but very well written romantic suspense yarn. Things turn a lot more serious after the ship reaches Hawaii and the scene shifts to the admiral’s plantation. Intrigue and danger continue to swirl around Zorie, but the stakes are higher now. There’s still some romance, but suspense dominates the second half of the book, and it’s pretty doggoned nerve-wracking in places.

The big twist that shows up late probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but Worts’ prose is so smooth and entertaining that it doesn’t really matter. OVERBOARD is colorful, humorous, exciting, and just plain fun to read. I stayed up after midnight to finish it, and that hardly ever happens these days and hasn’t for years.

Worts is best remembered for three series he wrote for the pulps: adventure yarns featuring wireless operator Peter Moore, a.k.a. Peter the Brazen; two-fisted Singapore Sammy Shay; and mysteries featuring lawyer Gillian Hazeltine. I’ve read the Singapore Sammy stories and loved them. I have all the Peter the Brazen stories and need to get to them soon, and I have some of the Gillian Hazeltine stories, too.

But this stand-alone mystery novel, which was published in hardcover by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1943 and reprinted in that iconic paperback by Popular Library in 1950, is superb and well worth reading, too. I’m very glad I finally got around to it. I have a hunch that OVERBOARD will be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, May 1938

Herbert Morton Stoops painted all different sorts of covers for BLUE BOOK, including action-packed scenes like this one. While some are better than others, of course, he was a great cover artist and I've never seen one I didn't like. The fiction in BLUE BOOK was just as consistent as the covers. Of course, it helps when you have three stories by H. Bedford-Jones in an issue. In this case, there's one under his own name, one with his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Also on hand are adventure pulp stalwarts Fulton Grant, Leland Jamieson, Warren Hastings Miller, William J. Makin (with a Red Wolf of Arabia story), William L. Chester (with an installment of a Kioga serial), and lesser-known writers Carl Cole and C.M. Chapin. This is the only story by Carl Cole listed in the Fictionmags Index. Who knows, maybe he was H. Bedford-Jones, too. You can't rule it out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, First August Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat tattered copy in the scan. The cover art is by Clarence Doore. His signature is visible in the lower left corner. It’s not one of Doore’s best covers, in my opinion, but it’s certainly not bad.

Giff Cheshire is a hit-or-miss author for me. Most of what I’ve read by him has been entertaining but a little bit too much on the bland side for my taste. Some of his stories are more hardboiled and are pretty good. His novella that leads off this issue, “Torment Trail”, is very hardboiled and is an excellent yarn. The protagonist, Cleve Gantry (great name for a Western hero) is partners in a hardscrabble ranch with young wastrel Nat Cole (maybe not as good a name, since Nat “King” Cole, one of my father’s favorite singers, was already very popular by the mid-Fifties). Cole pulls a robbery and frames Gantry for it. Gantry breaks out of jail and sets out to track down Cole, partially to clear his name but mostly because he wants to kill the no-good hombre. Gantry’s vengeance quest is complicated, though, by Cole’s beautiful sister and some other hardcases who are after the loot from the robbery. Set mostly in the desert—and Cheshire makes good use of that setting—this is a fast-moving, suspenseful story with some good action scenes, a fine protagonist, and a very gritty tone. I really enjoyed “Torment Trail”, which is easily the best thing I’ve ever read by Cheshire.

D.S. Halacy Jr. wrote several dozen Western and detective stories for the pulps. I’d read one story by him in the past and thought it was okay but nothing more than that. His story in this issue, “The Five Hundred Dollar Shot” is about a down-on-his-luck rancher who is willing to go to any lengths to provide for his family, even if it means going after a wanted outlaw for the reward. This is a pretty bleak story with a mostly unlikable protagonist, but it doesn’t turn out exactly like you might expect and that’s usually a good thing. So it’s nothing special, but it is a readable yarn.

“Bachelor Trouble” is by Lewis Chadwick, who wrote only half a dozen Western stories, all published in 1955 and 1956. An old rancher decides that one of the cowboys who works for him is going to marry his daughter, but the cowboy doesn’t go along with that idea. That’s all there is to the story, but it’s decently written and everything is resolved in a pleasant enough manner.

James Clyde Harper was reasonably prolific, turning out approximately 50 stories in a career that lasted from the early Thirties to the mid-Fifties. But I didn’t care for his story “The Phantom Rifle” in this issue. It’s a mystery in which a group of settlers with a wagon train try to start a town, only to have several of their number murdered by a mysterious rifleman. The writing struck me as clumsy, and the motivation for the plot just wasn’t believable considering the place and time. This one is a clear miss as far as I’m concerned.

W.W. Hartwig published only three stories, all in RANCH ROMANCES. “The Bride’s Father” in this issue is the last of them. It’s a pure romance yarn about a young cowboy courting the daughter of a railroad tycoon. This is a well-written story with good characters, and although I thought the author could have done a little more with it, I liked it quite a bit.

Alice Axtell was the author of about thirty stories, all of them in RANCH ROMANCES in the Forties and Fifties. Her story “Big Man” is about the feud between a big rancher and the owner of a smaller spread. Their clash takes some nasty turns, and there’s more riding on it for the little rancher than just his business. The girl he wants to marry is watching to see how he handles this problem. This is another story that’s pure romance, but it’s well-written and I enjoyed it.

There are also installments of two serials, “Longhorn Stampede” by Philip Ketchum and “The Vengeance Riders” by Jack Barton, who was really Joseph Chadwick. Ketchum and Chadwick were both fine writers and I’m sure these are good stories, but as I’ve mentioned before, I have the novel version of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS and will get around to reading it one of these days, and I may have a copy of LONGHORN STAMPEDE, too. If I don't, there's a good chance I will have in the reasonably near future.

Rounding out the issue are the usual features—Western movie news, pen pals, astrology—and a somewhat Western-themed crossword puzzle completely filled out in pencil by one of the previous owners of this copy. Only a couple of erasures, too, so a pretty good job. Somehow, things like this make me feel a closer kinship to the person who owned this one originally. I can just imagine her—or him, RANCH ROMANCES is bound to have had some male readers, too—sitting at a kitchen table in 1955, working the crossword puzzle after a long day. That could be all wrong, of course, I have no way of knowing, but it’s an image I find appealing.

Overall, this is a fairly solid issue of RANCH ROMANCES. There’s only one outstanding story, but the Cheshire novella is really good and all the other stories except the one I didn’t like are well-written and entertaining, if not particularly memorable. If you have a copy, it’s worth reading. You might even want to do the crossword puzzle if somebody hasn’t beaten you to it. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Suitable for Framing - James Atlee Phillips

Like last week’s THE FAST BUCK, James Atlee Phillips’s novel SUITABLE FOR FRAMING concerns treasures looted during World War II. That’s where the similarities end, though. In SUITABLE FOR FRAMING, the things everybody is after are fabulously valuable paintings, rather than jewels. And SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is much better written than THE FAST BUCK.

The narrator in this novel is Jesse Barker, a journalist who gets finagled into joining a scheme to smuggle some paintings out of France following World War II and sell them to a Mexican general Barker happens to know. Most of the book takes place in the Mexican mountain town of Hidalgo, and Phillips paints a very vivid picture of this setting. As anybody who has read very much in this field will expect, the plot falls apart and becomes a maze of double-crosses, and of course there’s a beautiful woman involved, and Barker gets hit on the head and knocked out several times. Plus you get a colorfully eccentric (and really evil) villain, Mexican wrestlers, spooky scenes set in graveyards, and a considerable amount of action.

I’ve always liked Phillips’ novels about espionage agent Joe Gall, which he wrote under the name Philip Atlee, although the plots in them sometimes get so complicated that I can’t keep up with them. I also really like his early novel PAGODA, which introduces Joe Gall when Gall was still a pilot, rather than a spy. SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is a little lighter weight than those books but shares many of their virtues: crisp prose, good descriptions, and hardboiled action. One thing that annoyed me was Phillips’ habit of paraphrasing what his characters are saying, rather than just quoting the dialogue, but I sort of got used to that technique after a while. As a rule, though, I don’t like that. I liked the book overall, though, and I think if you’ve read and enjoyed Phillips’ other novels, you’ll enjoy this one, too.

(This post first appeared on October 3, 2008.)

Review: Hell Range in Texas - J.E. Grinstead

Recently I read some pulp stories by J.E. Grinstead that I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up a novel by him and give it a try. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is a 1958 paperback from Avon that was published originally under the title LAW OF THE TRAIL as a 1940 hardback by Dodge Publishing, one of the lending library publishers. This is probably an expansion of Grinstead’s novella “The Law of the Trail Herd”, which appeared in the September 1926 issue of the pulp THE FRONTIER. The Avon paperback I read (that’s my copy in the scan) says that it’s revised, but I don’t know what that revision consisted of. It’s possible Grinstead just went back to the pulp version after adding material to make it longer for the hardback edition. That’s pure speculation on my part, however, just the sort of thing that makes sense to me.

This story takes place in Texas (of course) in the days following the Civil War when the cattle industry is just getting started in the state and herds have started being driven up the trails through Indian Territory to the railhead in Kansas. The setting is a little unusual, though, in that the action takes place along the Little River in central Texas, rather than in West or South Texas like most Westerns. I’ve driven across the bridge over the Little River just south of Cameron, Texas, many times, and I’ve always thought it was a scenic stream and would make a good setting for a Western. That’s what Grinstead has done.

Most trail bosses in Western fiction are the protagonists, or at least sympathetic characters, but not Shag Sanders in this novel. He’s the bad guy in the first half of the book, stealing cattle from local ranchers as he heads north and buying rustled stock cheaply from outlaws. Old cattleman Montgomery Jackson (who, just as you suspect, has a beautiful daughter) is determined to put a stop to this, leading to a gun battle with Sanders and his crew shooting it out with the cowboys from Jackson’s spread.

However, one of Sanders’ men, young and gun-handy Frank Carleton, goes over to the other side and throws in with Jackson and his bunch, becoming a staunch ally in Jackson’s clash with a rival rancher who works with the crooked trail drivers. Matters are complicated by the fact that Jackson’s beautiful daughter is supposed to marry the rival rancher’s son.

You might also suspect that all this is going to lead up to a big showdown, and you’d be right. Along the way, Grinstead gives us plenty of colorful characters and Old West dialogue without getting too heavy-handed about it.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, but my memory was playing tricks on me and I was absolutely wrong about that. However, he was a newspaperman in Texas in the early 20th Century, owning and publishing the newspaper in Kerrville, Texas, a hundred miles or so southwest of where this novel is set, and he was also involved in politics. No doubt he knew quite a few old cattlemen who had been around during the era about which he wrote in his fiction. Because of that, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Grinstead’s work that I enjoy.

However, based on this novel, he may be one of those writers who’s better at shorter lengths. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is pretty slowly paced, and there’s not as much action as there might have been. The action that’s there is sometimes not very well-written, either. Late in the book, there’s a long chase scene/gun battle that really drags and is hard to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s always a possibility.

I give this novel thumbs-up on the setting, characters, and dialogue but found it disappointing because it didn’t capture my interest and drag me along in the story the way I like for fiction to do. I’ll certainly continue to read Grinstead’s stories when I come across one in a Western pulp, and I’ll probably enjoy them. I’ll even check my paperback shelves sometime and see if I have any more of his novels. But I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.