James Reasoner's Blog, page 9

Review: Knight of Darkness: The Legend of The Shadow - Will Murray

Will Murray has written more non-fiction about The Shadowthan anyone else, and whatever he wants to write about the character and hisadventures, I’ll gladly read because it’s always entertaining and informative.Such is the case with KNIGHT OF DARKNESS: THE LEGEND OF THE SHADOW, the latestvolume of Shadow scholarship from Murray.
This book collects a wide assortment of articles about The Shadow written byMurray at various times in his career. There are several behind-the-sceneslooks at the creation of the pulp character, including an examination ofexactly how the series was plotted by author Walter B. Gibson, editor JohnNanovic, and Street & Smith executive Henry Ralston. I’ve read a bunchabout The Shadow over the years, much of it by Murray, but I learned somethings I didn’t know from these articles.
Murray also writes about Gibson’s very prolific career in comic book scriptingand his work with various famous magicians. Other articles take a look at thedifferent movie incarnations of The Shadow, from the Victor Jory serial all theway up to the Alec Baldwin movie in the Nineties. The radio show comes in forextensive discussions, as well, and I’m always interested in reading about thatversion since it was actually my introduction to the character. Murray coversall the comic book versions, most of which I remember reading. Well, not theones in the Forties, although I have read some reprints of them. But I sureremember those from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.
As always, all these articles are well-written and great fun to read. Inaddition to that, there are dozens of superb illustrations by Michael WmKaluta, the artist most associated with the Shadow comic books, and the greatFrank Hamilton, whose fine work graced the pages of pulp fanzines for manyyears. This is an excellent volume all around and I had a great time readingit. It’s available on Amazon in a handsome trade paperback edition. I thinkthere’s at least one more volume of Shadow non-fiction to come from Murray, andI’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, June 1945

Is that a great big cat, or are those little-bitty spacemen? I don't know, but it's a striking cover by Robert Gibson Jones anyway. Several of the usual suspects are on hand in this issue of AMAZING STORIES, including Richard S. Shaver, Chester S. Geier, Berkeley Livingston, Frances M. Deegan, Don Wilcox, and surely the best-known name in the issue, at least as far as we remember them today, the great Edmond Hamilton. There's also a short story by William Hamling, who would go on to be the publisher of the Fifties digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as hundreds if not thousands of pseudonymous soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, and many other authors who became famous in other fields. It never hurts to recall that Hamling was a science fiction guy starting out.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: All Western Magazine, August 1936

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copyin the scan, with a cover by Arthur Mitchell, an almost forgotten butconsistently pretty good artist who did most of the covers for ALL WESTERNMAGAZINE. This was Dell’s flagship Western pulp (maybe its only Western pulp, Idon’t really know), and although I haven’t read many issues, they’ve all beengood so far.

This issue leads off with the novella “Deuce of Diamonds”, the second in ashort-lived series by Charles M. Martin about a drifting cowboy andtroubleshooter known as Roaming Reynolds. There are three stories in theseries. I don’t have the first one, but I do have the third one in addition tothis one and will be getting to it soon, I expect. In this one, Reynolds andhis sidekick, a 16-year-old cowpoke called Texas Joe, drift their way into arange war when they interrupt a setup by two hardcases intended to result inthe death of a rancher’s son. This leads to a bunch of action in the nexttwenty-four-hour span, including ambushes, fistfights, the discovery of arustled herd, and a stampede.

Martin, who also wrote a lot for the pulps as Chuck Martin, has a distinctivestyle that I enjoy, although he does get pretty heavy-handed with the “Yuhmangy polecat” dialect. And his plots are very traditional, nothing thatWestern pulp readers haven’t encountered many times before. But he spins hisyarns with such enthusiasm that I can’t help but enjoy them. Martin was acolorful character who supposedly made little grave markers for the villains hekilled off in his stories and planted them in his backyard. I like his work,but reading it is always a slightly bittersweet experience for me because, likeWalt Coburn, he eventually committed suicide. Making a living in the pulpsdefinitely took a toll on some writers.

Sam H. Nickels was another Western pulp author who turned out hundreds ofstories, many of them in a long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY about acouple of cowboys nicknamed Hungry and Rusty. He also wrote many stand-alonestories under the house-names common in that pulp. Now and then he published astory under his own name in a different pulp, such as “Mud in Mooney’s Eye” inthis issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE. The protagonist is known as Mournful Mooneybecause of his sad disposition, which is caused by his habit of running afoulof the law. Mooney, despite not looking like much, is hell on wheels when itcomes to shooting and fighting. He seems like he ought to be a seriescharacter, too, but as far as I know, this is his only appearance. In it, he’shired as a lawman to tame a wild town. The results are entertaining, if notparticularly memorable. Nickels was a decent writer.

Harry F. Olmsted is one of my favorite Western pulp writers. He’s almostcompletely forgotten because he never wrote any novels, but he turned out morethan 1200 pieces of shorter fiction. His story in this issue, “Empty Shells”,is about a sinister gunfighter who turns up in a frontier town looking for theson of a local rancher who has just taken over the spread after his fatherpassed away. Clearly, the gunman is there to settle a score with the young man,who was something of a shady character himself, running with outlaws, beforecoming home and trying to settle down. Of course, Olmsted is too good a writernot to put a twist on what seems apparent. The prose is spare and clean, thedialogue isn’t overloaded with dialect (although there is a little), and thesuspense builds steadily throughout this one. “Empty Shells” is an excellentstory and a good example of why I enjoy Olmsted’s work so much.

Carson Mowre is better remembered as a pulp editor rather than a writer, but heturned his hand to fiction, too, now and then, and published several dozenstories, most of them Westerns. He contributes a novelette, “One Night in TenSleep”, to this issue. As the title indicates, all the action takes place inone night in the frontier settlement of Ten Sleep, where a stranger calledTennessee Parker rides into town and finds himself in the middle of a war betweena crooked judge on one side and a crooked sheriff and deputy on the other.Parker plays the two sides against each other (I was reminded a little ofHammett’s RED HARVEST) because he has an agenda of his own that doesn’t becomeclear until the end of the story. This one features some of the most brutal andgraphic violence I’ve encountered in a Western pulp yarn. It has interestingcharacters, the pace is swift and never really lets up, and I really enjoyedit. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of Mowre’s fiction.

I normally don’t read the non-fiction features in Western pulps, but one inthis issue caught my attention. It’s “The Blond Cossack” by Ed Earl Repp, whosework I usually enjoy. This is an interesting article about an outlaw known asRussian Bill, who was part of the Cowboy faction in Tombstone along with theClantons and Johnny Ringo. Russian Bill claimed to be the son of a princess andtold people he was forced to flee from Russia for political reasons after beinga Cossack there. Whether there was any truth to that story remains unknown, butRepp’s recounting of it is vivid and interesting. Repp was known to useghostwriters and the prose in this is a little toned down from his fiction, soanother writer may have had a hand in it, but the Cossack parts of it read likeRepp’s work to me.

I love S. Omar Barker’s cowboy poetry and the non-fiction columns he wrote forRANCH ROMANCES and TEXAS RANGERS, but his fiction usually isn’t to my taste.For ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE, he wrote a series of humorous stories about ayarn-spinning old cowboy named Boosty Peckleberry. In this issue’s “All Ears”,Boosty is telling his bunkhouse mates about an alcoholic mule named Napolean.I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it all the way through this one. This sortof stuff just doesn’t resonate with me, but I’m sure plenty of readers found itfunny and charming because Barker was very popular for a long time.

Like Charles M. Martin, J.E. Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in hislife, and his stories have a ring of authenticity. “Six-Gun Music” begins witha violent encounter in a saloon between a down-on-his-luck stranger and a localgunman/bully, and that leads to rustling and ambushes. I’ve enjoyed what I’veread by Grinstead in the past, and this is one of his best stories.

Galen C. Colin is another very prolific pulpster who’s mostly forgotten today.His story “Death Takes the Trail” is actually a dying message mystery, althoughnot a very complicated or clever one. It leads to a good action scene, though.While I’ve read better by Colin, this is an okay yarn.

Overall, this issue of ALL WESTERN MAGAZINE is a solidly entertaining Westernpulp. The stories by Olmsted, Mowre, and Grinstead are the best, and the othersare all enjoyable with the exception of the S. Omar Barker tall tale, and otherreaders might like that a lot better than I did. I have several more issues ofALL WESTERN on hand and will be getting to them soon, I hope.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review (Plus Bonus Rerun Comments!): Shootout at Picture Rock - Joseph A. West

(First, here's my original post, which appeared on August 5, 2010)

I made the email acquaintance of Western author Joseph A. West a while back, and since I try to read books by people I know, I picked up his 2006 novel SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK. Set in 1877, the book’s protagonist is Deputy U.S. Marshal John Kilcoyn, who works out of an office in Dodge City that he shares with Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson. One of Kilcoyn’s old enemies, a former lawman turned outlaw, comes back to haunt the marshal by kidnapping Dodge City’s doctor and the doctor’s beautiful daughter, who, as it happens, Kilcoyn intends to marry. With the outlaw holding his hostages for ransom, Kilcoyn sets out to rescue them, along with Bat Masterson and a young Irish photographer who is new to the West.

Well, that’s enough plot for a book right there, you say. But no, Kilcoyn is also being hunted by a renegade Cheyenne war chief because he killed the chief’s son in battle. The marshal also has to deal with a family of crazed, perverted sodbusters who make a business of robbing and killing travelers, somewhat like the infamous Bender family. Oh, and did I mention that while all this is going on, there’s also a killer blizzard bearing down on Kansas?

I had a great time reading this book. West has the knack of piling more and more problems on his hero until the reader really has to wonder how he’s going to get out of it. SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK has a nice epic feel to it, even though the actual scale of the story isn’t really that large. There’s plenty of action, the characters are well-developed (including an interesting portrait of Bat Masterson, one of my favorite real-life Western characters), and there are some nice twists relating to who lives and who dies (not everybody you’d expect). This is an excellent traditional Western, and lucky for me West is a fairly prolific author, having written more than thirty novels so far with more to come. I plan to read more of his books very soon.

(And I did read more of his books and enjoyed them, both under his own name and under a couple of different house-names. Joe West was a good guy and a fine writer. When this review first appeared, he responded in the comments, which I'll paste below, followed by a couple of my comments.)

Joe: 

James, thank you for the kind words. You do me great honor.

SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK began its life as the 7th novel in my GUNSMOKE series, but my publisher and Universal couldn't agree on financial terms. Finally my editor said: "The hell with it, we'll publish the book as a stand alone." Then, with many a merry quip, he added: "Big hurry, Joe. Change the names and send it back to me yesterday."

Of course, there was a lot more involved than simply changing Matt Dillon to Kilcoyn. I had to saw the novel apart then rebuild it, the deadline hanging over my head like the proverbial sword.

In the end, poor, ink-stained wretch that I am, I got the job done and Shootout was the result.

Ah, I love the publishing business so much, just sitting here thinking about it brings a tear to my eye.

Me:

Joe,

Thanks for the story behind the story. Now that you mention it, I can see how this one began life as a Gunsmoke novel, but that thought never crossed my mind when I was reading it. You did a good job turning it into a stand-alone. Back in the early days of our careers, my wife and I had to rewrite a hundred thousand word novel literally overnight. This was long before computers, so we had to retype all 400 pages of the manuscript in about sixteen hours. We had only one typewriter, so we took turns at it, typing as fast as we could and rewriting as we went along. Finished at dawn, slept for a couple of hours, then got up, took the pages to have them photocopied, and overnighted them to New York.

Yes, you've got to love the publishing business.

And me again:

I may have told this story here before, but when I finished the final draft of my first novel, Livia and I took the manuscript to a drugstore that had a coin-operated photocopy machine and fed nickels into it for a couple of hours as we copied every page, one at a time. I feel nostalgic about those days, but I wouldn't go back to them.

(SHOOTOUT AT PICTURE ROCK is out of print, but affordable used copies are available on Amazon.)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Golden Dawn - Carlos Dengler

 

Sometimes on a dark night of the soul, you need music that's soothing. Or at least I do.

Review: Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author - Willard M. Oliver

I never get tired of reading about Robert E. Howard and hiswork. I’ve read several biographies and books about his writings andcountless articles on those subjects. So I am definitely the target audiencefor ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR, the massive new REHbiography by Willard M. Oliver published by the University of North Texas Pressin hardcover and e-book editions. (It doesn’t hurt that I’m a graduate of UNT,or as it was known when I went there, North Texas State University.)

I really enjoyed the other biographies I read, even the deeply flawed DARKVALLEY DESTINY by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and JaneWhittington Griffin. It was the first real REH bio, and a friend of mine helpedthe de Camps with the research. Plus we didn’t really know at the time aboutmuch of the stuff they got wrong or misinterpreted. Anyway, before I wander offin the weeds . . .

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR will likely beconsidered the definitive REH biography from now on, since it’s exhaustivelyresearched, extensively footnoted, and brings together in one place all theinformation that’s available about Howard’s life, plus adding some things thatI’ve never come across before in nearly 60 years of being a Howard fan.Academically, I just don’t see how anybody could ever top this volume.

However, I’m not an academic. I’m a guy who likes Howard’s yarns and have eversince I spotted the Lancer edition of CONAN THE USURPER in Barber’s Bookstorein downtown Fort Worth lo, those many years ago. And I feel a strong kinshiptoward Howard dating back to the moment I opened that paperback with its purple-edgedpages and read in L. Sprague de Camp’s introduction that Howard was from CrossPlains, Texas—a town I’d heard of all my life because both sides of my familycome from the same general area in west central Texas. I mean, here was a guyfrom a little town in Texas who forged a career as a writer when everythingseemed stacked against him, and that was exactly what I wanted to do!

So what I look for in a biography of Robert E. Howard is a sense of who he was,what he did, how and why he did it (as much as it’s possible to figure out thewhy), and the same feeling I get when I stand in the Howard House in CrossPlains and look into that tiny room where Bob lived and worked . . . and thisnew book delivers on that. It delivers on that magnificently, in prose that’sclear, straightforward, sometimes poignant, and very compelling.

I haven’t been to Cross Plains for Howard Days in a number of years and I’venever met or been in contact with Will Oliver, so I say this not as a friend ofhis but as a long-time reader and fan of Howard’s work.

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR is the best book I’veread this year. For Howard fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Colombiana (2011)

I’ve enjoyed many of the action movies written and/ordirected by Luc Besson, but I hadn’t come across this one until recently.Besson co-wrote it with Robert Mark Kamen (the guy who wrote the originalKarate Kid movie), and it has a pretty simple premise: in 1994, a ten-year-oldgirl in Bogota, Colombia, sees her parents murdered by killers working for acartel crime boss. She grows up and becomes a professional assassin (played atthat point by Zoe Saldana) who only kills targets who actually have it coming.She’s really working to get revenge on the cartel boss responsible for herparents’ murder, who by now has moved to the United States and become an assetfor the CIA. The fine character Lennie James is the FBI agent who’s on Saldana’strail.

It's a standard but workable plot, but really it’s only there as a frameworkfor almost non-stop action scenes. Gunfight, chase, parkour, parkour, parkour,gunfight, chase, more parkour. The thing is, it’s all very stylishly filmed,and even though it’s over the top (plenty of “Sure, why not?” moments), thecast manages to sell it. Saldana is sexy and athletic, Lennie James does a goodjob as the dogged investigator, and the bad guys are suitably despicable. Isthat enough for a couple of hours of entertainment? It was for me.

Review: Misfit Lil Fights Back - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

I’m a long-time fan of Keith Chapman’s Western novels aboutMisfit Lil, also known as Miss Lillian Goodnight. I recently read the thirdbook in the series, MISFIT LIL FIGHTS BACK, originally published by Robert HaleLtd. in 2007 under Chapman’s Chap O’Keefe pseudonym, reprinted in large printby Ulverscroft in 2008, and now available in e-book and trade paperbackeditions on Amazon with a cover by Michael Thomas that really captures thecharacter.

Misfit Lil is an Arizona rancher’s daughter who was a tomboy growing up. Sheprefers wearing buckskins to fancy dresses and is happiest riding the range andgetting into adventures. Her father sent her to a finishing school in Boston totry to turn her into a lady, but it didn’t take. Even though she’s semi-estrangedfrom her father, she stays true to her nature when she returns home and canusually be found getting mixed in one ruckus or another. She can outride,outshoot, and outfight most men, but she’s definitely female and has a crush onarmy scout Jackson Farraday, who considers himself too old for her and resistsher advances.

In MISFIT LIL FIGHTS BACK, all hell is breaking loose in Arizona Territory.Cattle are being rustled, rifles are being smuggled to renegade Apaches, corruptionruns deep at the local Indian Agency, and a pair of hired killers show uplooking for a young man who’s involved with the local madam and a flashygambler. Lil has a couple of shootouts early on which get her neck-deep in thiswhole mess. She’s convinced all of it is connected and is determined to uncoverthe truth—if her investigation doesn’t get her killed first.

Chapman’s books are always fast-paced, but this one is a whirlwind! Lots ofaction, a twisty but logical plot, and great protagonists in Lil and JacksonFarraday. Chapman just keeps piling on the problems until it seems like it’sgoing to take a real slam-bang climax to straighten everything out, and thenthat’s exactly what he gives us.

I really enjoyed reading this book. If you’re a fan of traditional actionWesterns, I give it a high recommendation and hope that there’ll be more MisfitLil novels in the future.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, January 1945

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: The Last Pale Light in the West - Ben Nichols

 

I love raspy-voiced singers and world-weary songs like this. They resonate pretty strongly with me.