Rough Edges

In “Winchester Express to Boothill”, the lead novella by Lee Floren, his pair of drifting heroes, Buck McKee and Tortilla Joe, are on their way to help an old friend who has run into trouble and summoned them. That’s a common set-up in Floren’s novels and stories. Blackbeard Smith has a horse ranch in Montana, and he’s been bushwhacked and confined to a wheelchair by his injury. Not surprisingly, he has a beautiful daughter. A range war is brewing with a neighboring spread that’s owned by another beautiful young woman. Not far away is a mining boomtown, and that’s connected somehow, too. Our intrepid pair hasn’t been on hand long when somebody takes a shot at Buck and tries to kill him.

Floren was a regular contributor to DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. My opinion of his work has improved slightly in recent years, but this particular yarn is maddening in its inconsistency. I actually like Buck and Tortilla Joe quite a bit. As a cowboy detective, Buck is a very low-rent version of Hashknife Hartley, and Tortilla Joe, despite the stereotypical way in which Floren writes him, is a pretty smart, tough, capable hombre. The plot is interesting and so are the characters. There are some nice action scenes. But man, the whole thing is really muddled, as if Floren forgot what he was doing from scene to scene. Some bits are vivid and well-written, and some are so clunky and repetitive that they’re wince-inducing. And those two opposites can be on the same page! By the time I got to the end of this one—and I did finish it, no problem—I still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Call it an interesting misfire, which, unfortunately, describes all too much of Floren’s work.

Fortunately, next up in this issue is a long novelette by Roe Richmond, usually a dependable author when he’s not doing series characters. “War on the Chippewa” is a timber Western, a sub-genre where I haven’t encountered Richmond so far. It’s about two brothers, prodigal sons who return to help out their father in a rivalry with another timber baron. This is an excellent yarn with a lot of colorful background, emotional heft, and gritty action. At times it reminded me of Dan Cushman’s timber Westerns, and that’s a good thing. My only complaint is that the ending is maybe a little less dramatic than it could have been. But still a very good story.

Noel Loomis is a well-regarded author in both Westerns and science fiction. I haven’t really read that much by him in either genre, but he seems pretty consistent. “There Are No Trees in Kansas” is kind of an odd title, but it works in this story of a crusading newspaper editor’s clash with a crooked saloon owner who has a distinctive feature: his right hand is missing, cut off by Indians when he was a young man, and instead of a fake hand or a hook, like you usually find with characters like this, he has a short length of chain with a two-pound iron ball attached to it. That’s a pretty vicious weapon in a hand-to-hand fight! That colorful bit of business is probably the best thing about this story, but it’s an okay tale with some nice action and I enjoyed it.

I’ve always figured Harrison Colt had to be a pseudonym, but if that’s the case, no one has ever identified the author who wrote under that name, as far as I know. His story in this issue, “Gunsmoke Samaritan”, is about a rancher who’s framed for murder when, against his better judgment, he gets involved in a clash between two of his neighbors. This story moves along very nicely, is well-written, and has a likable protagonist.

Lauran Paine was an extremely prolific author of Westerns, especially novels. Although he published around a hundred stories in the Western pulps during the Fifties, he wrote more than a thousand novels, most of them published only in England under many different pseudonyms. Late in his life, quite a few of his novels were published in the United States by Walker Books under the name Richard Clarke and reprinted in paperback by Ballantine. I’ve read very little of his work. But his story in this issue, “The Challenge”, is excellent. It’s about a rancher who goes to work as an undercover deputy to infiltrate a gang of train robbers. The prose is straightforward and effective, the action is hardboiled. Just a good yarn.

W. Edmunds Claussen is a hit-or-miss author, for sure. Stories by him that I’ve read have ranged from okay to not very good. “Guns at La Paz” in this issue falls into the okay group. Set during the Civil War in Arizona, it's about a cavalry officer who’s being sent back to Washington, but before he goes, he and a friend of his who’s a civilian scout try to get to the bottom of an Apache ambush that wiped out a patrol. There’s some nice action in this one and a plot twist that’s predictable but still effective because it’s unusual for a Western pulp. It could have been a lot more unusual, but if it had, it probably would have rendered this story unpublishable. I don’t think Claussen will ever be one of my preferred authors, but so far he’s at least worth trying when I come across one of his stories.

Overall, this is a pretty decent issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN. While several of the stories have flaws, they’re all entertaining and held my interest just fine. I’ve read quite a few issues of this pulp over the past couple of years, and the reason for that is simple: most of my pulps are either in storage or hard to get to for other reasons, and I had a big stack of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN issues handy. I think there are four or five more unread issues in this batch, so I’ll continue spacing them out.

When you just read the bare bones of that plot, it’s easy to say that QUEENPIN is something of a gimmick book: taking a standard, Gold Medal-type noir plot and inverting it so that the protagonist is female instead of male. Funny thing is, when you actually read the book you don’t really get that sense at all because Abbott is so good at creating characters and dragging you along with them as things get worse and worse. The setting of this one isn’t quite as well defined as it is in her other two novels; maybe it’s set in the Fifties, like DIE A LITTLE and THE SONG IS YOU, or maybe it’s the early Sixties, but either way it’s emphatically Not Now. The world of race tracks and night clubs through which the narrator moves is vividly rendered, and the dialogue that could have sounded like a parody of that era comes across as real and natural.

What it comes down to is that Megan Abbott is just a fine writer. Short, fast, and mean, like good noir fiction is supposed to be, QUEENPIN is her best book yet, and it’s easily one of the best novels I’ve read this year. And as usual with her books, it has a great cover by Richie Fahey.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on December 28, 2007. In it I mention Megan Abbott's first two novels. Her fourth novel was BURY ME DEEP, inspired by the infamous Winnie Ruth Judd trunk murders, and I really liked it, as well. As far as I know, those are her only historical crime novels, and I give all of them high recommendations. They're all still in print and well worth your time. And QUEENPIN is one of my favorite books of the past twenty years.)

I haven’t been a fan of Chuck Dixon’s work for quite that long, but he’s still one of my favorite authors. So when I heard that Dixon was writing a novel set on Burroughs’ Mars, I was thrilled and looked forward to reading it.

GUNS OF MARS did not disappoint me. In the least.

This novel is set on Barsoom approximately a thousand years after the era of Burroughs’ hero John Carter. Mars, already a dying planet in Carter’s day, has become even more inhospitable. Water is scarce and the most valuable commodity on the planet. As the novel opens, Kal Keddaq, a fugitive Thark (the four-armed warrior race created by Burroughs), is trying to reach the northern pole where the ice still provides a source of water. But a human bounty hunter is on his trail, and so is a mysterious figure whose identity and motivation Dixon plays close to the vest for a while.

The bounty hunter captures Kal, who escapes but then is captured by the other member of our trio of main characters. In this back and forth, Kal and the bounty hunter discover a clue to the location of a hidden source of the best water on the planet, and that becomes the prize that everybody is after, including a number of other enemies and untrustworthy allies they encounter along the way.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should, because GUNS OF MARS is very much a Spaghetti Western set on Burroughs’ Barsoom in its latter days. And it’s hugely entertaining, told in vivid, fast-paced prose that takes advantage of Burroughs’ creation while at the same time cleverly adding to it. The characters are all interesting, the action is plentiful and suitably gritty, and I just had a great time reading it. This is a Front Porch Book for sure, like so many of those other great adventure yarns I read back in those days.

GUNS OF MARS is available on Amazon in an e-book edition at the moment. I believe a print edition is in the works. I started my reading this year with Max Allan Collins’ RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, a superb variation on another old favorite of mine, and now I’ve followed that up with Chuck Dixon’s visit to Barsoom. I don’t expect the rest of the year to live up to that, but it’s a spectacular beginning, for sure, with both books strong contenders to be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.

And certainly they weren’t considered salvage markets by veteran Western pulpster J. Edward Leithead, who had at least two stories in nearly every issue of those two pulps during the Forties, one under his own name and one under his most common pseudonym, Wilson L. Covert. I’m confident he wrote these specifically for the Ace pulps and never sent them anywhere else.

The story under Leithead’s name was nearly always a novelette. In this issue, it’s “Roundup of the Plundering Shotwells”, about a family of owlhoots, a father and six sons, but the seventh son wants nothing to do with being an outlaw. In fact, he’s in love the local sheriff’s daughter. But a clash with another gang draws our protagonist into gun trouble anyway, and it’s a bloody, fast-moving tale with several good plot twists, plenty of action, and a satisfying showdown at the end. Leithead is one of my favorite Western pulp authors, and this is a really nice example of his work.

The short story “Blizzard Boomerang” is by another of my favorites, Joseph Chadwick. It’s a little unusual for him in that it’s set in the snowy High Sierras during winter instead of somewhere in the hot Southwest, where his stories are usually set. It’s not a typical plot, either, as it’s about the clash between two men who deliver mail and freight to the remote mining camps, one by dogsled and the other on skis. This is a well-written, emotionally involving story, as you’d expect from Chadwick.

Kenneth L. Sinclair was a fairly popular Western pulp author but is forgotten today. His story, “Trail of the Invisible Herd”, is another story set during the winter and involves getting a herd to some grazing land even though the local range hog has blocked it off with a fence. This one is okay, reasonably entertaining, but the resolution of it seems pretty far-fetched to me. Maybe it’s not, Sinclair may know what he’s talking about, but I wasn’t convinced.

Frank Triem published dozens of Western pulp stories during the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties but is probably even more unknown today than Kenneth L. Sinclair. His story in this issue, “Say It With Sixes”, is about a young lawman waiting nervously for the return of an outlaw he knows is going to try to kill him. Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar. But here’s the interesting thing. This issue of WESTERN TRAILS was published six months earlier than the issue of COLLIER’S that contained John M. Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star”, from which the movie HIGH NOON was made. The similarities are definitely there. Given the timing, I really don’t think Cunningham took any inspiration from Triem’s story. I believe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a striking one.

J. Edward Leithead’s second story in this issue is “Calaboose Cache” under the Wilson L. Covert pseudonym. It’s about a cowboy who returns to his hometown and is forced by circumstances to become the local lawman. He has to deal with a deputy he doesn’t trust, two competing gangs of outlaws, and the missing loot from a bank robbery that has to be recovered to keep the town from being ruined. It’s a complex yarn and pretty entertaining, although I didn’t think it was as good as the novelette under Leithead’s real name.

D.B. Newton is another longtime favorite Western author for me. His stories are always well-plotted, have plenty of action and interesting characters, and his prose is clean and sounds authentic without going in for overdone dialect. His novelette “Cowpoke on a Pistol Payroll” is about a down-on-his-luck cowboy who finally gets a job, only to find that he’s the bait in a scheme to start a range war. This is an excellent story that’s almost all action. Really enjoyable.

I’ve found Giff Cheshire to be an inconsistent Western author, but most of his stories are pretty good and occasionally I run across one that’s excellent. “.45 Merrymaker” in this issue falls into the pretty good category. The protagonist is a young cowboy who plays the guitar and sings, and his friend is a bearded old-timer who plays the fiddle. I have no way of knowing if Cheshire intentionally based them on Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes, but close enough for me! The plot is reminiscent of a B-Western, too, with a couple of swindlers out to bilk a town by promising to build a phony railroad. However, the way our heroes go about foiling that scheme requires a heapin’ helpin’ of willing suspension of disbelief, almost too much so. In the end, I cut Cheshire enough slack to enjoy the story.

“Four Horsemen From Hades” is a great title, and it goes with an entertaining story by Willard Luce, another forgotten pulpster who published 18 stories during the Forties and Fifties. An old-timer who works as the night watchman at a dam construction project in the Pacific Northwest has to solve a payroll theft in order to clear his son’s name. The plot is pretty easy to figure out, but Luce’s writing is smooth enough and his protagonist likable enough to elevate this one.

This is a good issue of WESTERN TRAILS, worth reading if you have a copy of the actual pulp. If you’re a member of the WesternPulps email group, you can find the PDF in the Files section of the group’s website.

So recently I was poking around ABE and decided to search and see if I’d recalled the title correctly. It took only a moment to discover that I had. Cheap copies of DOOMED DEMONS are plentiful. The author is Eustace L. Adams (which I had totally forgotten) and the publisher is Grosset & Dunlap (likewise). Those two items were enough to tell me that it’s what was referred to in those days as a “boy’s adventure book”, a juvenile novel with lots of action and derring-do and a relatively young hero. Grosset & Dunlap was a well-known publisher of such books, and Eustace L. Adams was the author of the long-running Andy Lane series in that genre, as well as writing numerous adult novelettes and serials for such pulps as ARGOSY.

Adams spins this episodic yarn in a breezy, fast-paced style for the most part, including some excellent aerial combat scenes. When a lot of authors start describing dogfights, I have a hard time following the action, but not here. The images Adams creates are clear and quite striking. Since this is a boy’s book, there’s no sex or cussin’ but plenty of violence. It is a war novel, after all. Although it’s not dwelt on in detail, characters die right and left, including some sympathetic ones. Then the book’s tone takes a sharp, very effective turn toward bleak realism near the end.

I wouldn’t recommend DOOMED DEMONS to everyone, but if you remember reading books like this as a kid or if you’re a fan of World War I aviation yarns, I think you’d get a real kick out of it. I know I did, and this is one instance where I’m glad I revisited my childhood.

(This post originally appeared on a somewhat different form on December 24, 2007. When I reread DOOMED DEMONS back then, I discovered there are several more books featuring Jimmy Deal and Pooch Malloy. I found and ordered copies of all of them. I also ordered all of Adams' Andy Lane books. And in the nearly two decades since then, I have not read a blasted one of them. What is wrong with me?)

And if, by some chance, you’ve never read Hammett’s novel, stop right now and read it before you read this review, and absolutely don’t tackle Collins’ novel until you’ve read the original, because they’re both, of necessity, full of spoilers. I mean it!

The action starts a week after the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, in December 1928. The dead Miles Archer’s desk has been removed from the office of Spade & Archer, and Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s secretary, has put up a Christmas tree in its place. (Does that make this a Christmas novel? It sure does!)

A potential client pays a visit to Spade’s office. She’s Rhea Gutman, Casper Gutman’s daughter, and she wants to hire Spade to find the real Falcon. The one in Hammett’s novel was a fake, remember? Rhea is the first of four clients who give Spade a retainer to find the dingus. The others are Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan, Corrine Wonderly, the younger sister of femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Steward Blackwood, an official from the British Museum who claims that institution is the true owner of the Falcon.

Spade plays all these characters against each other. He has run-ins with the cops. A dead body turns up. Spade is hit on the head and knocked out, and he’s captured by a gunman who wants to kill him. This is great stuff in the classic hardboiled private eye mode, the kind of thing that Dashiell Hammett invented, along with Carroll John Daly. Stylistically, Collins’ fast-moving, straight-ahead prose isn’t quite as stripped down as Hammett’s, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark.

Being constrained to use only the elements to be found in the original novel’s pulp serialization turns out to be a good thing. Collins is able to bring on-stage characters who were only mentioned before and invent new ones who fit perfectly in that setting. The resolution of the mystery and the way the book wraps everything up are extremely satisfying.

A number of years ago, I read and loved Joe Gores’ prequel novel SPADE & ARCHER. RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON is even better. I’m glad Max Allen Collins wrote it, and I’m grateful to Hard Case Crime for publishing it. It’ll be out officially in e-book and hardcover editions tomorrow. For hardboiled fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

“Alias Adam Jones” is a rather bland title for one of W.C. Tuttle’s rollicking adventures of hapless range detectives Tombstone Jones and Speedy Smith. (The editors of EXCITING WESTERN loved the word “rollicking”.) In this novella, one of Tombstone’s long-winded, colorful lies causes Speedy to be kidnapped, and that plunges the boys into a complicated case of rustlers, inheritances, and mistaken identities. This plot is actually a little easier to figure out than some in the series, and a few late developments come from ’way, ’way out in left field, but the whole thing races along in wonderful fashion and Tuttle’s dialogue had me laughing out loud in places. This series is pretty formulaic, but the more I read of it, the more I love it.

“The Marshal of Goldfork” is a stand-alone novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, another of my favorite Western pulpsters. Set in a California mining boomtown during the Gold Rush, it’s about the final showdown between the local lawman and a saloon owner, both of whom were badly injured in a shootout with each other five months earlier, before the town was snowed in for the winter. Now it’s the spring thaw, and the lawman has recovered from his injuries and is back to settle the score and bring law and order to the town. Tompkins was great at keeping a story racing along, and he does so here, creating some interesting characters in the process. This is an excellent yarn.

Joseph Chadwick is yet another favorite of mine. His novelette in this issue, “The Indian Ring”, is about a hardboiled Arizona rancher who takes on the web of corruption involving the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the army, and various crooked business interests. Chadwick was one of the best at tough, gritty action, and this is a fine story that could have been expanded into a top-notch novel if he had chosen to do so.

Next up is “Too Smart for His Own Good” by Andrew Bronson, who published 15 stories in various Thrilling Group Western pulps during the Forties and Fifties. This story about a cowboy trying to recover a ranch payroll that was stolen from him is the one illustrated by Sam Cherry’s cover. In fact, it matches that cover painting so exactly that I have a hunch it was written to match. And the fact that all of “Bronson’s” stories appeared in Thrilling Group pulps leads me to suspect he might have been editor Charles S. Strong, who, as Chuck Stanley, did a feature in EXCITING WESTERN called “The Cowboy Had a Word For It”. Strong wrote a number of Western novels under the Chuck Stanley name, too, and was perfectly capable of knocking out a short story overnight to fit a cover painting. Pure speculation on my part, of course. The story itself, in this case, is entertaining but not particularly memorable.

I haven’t read a great deal by Richard Brister, but so far he’s proven to be a pretty dependable Western author. His story “Bandy Legs” is an offbeat yarn about a rivalry between two storekeepers that turns deadly. This is a well-written and suspenseful story that I enjoyed.

Cliff Walters is another very prolific Western pulpster who is forgotten these days. “Broad Shoulders” is about a big, powerful hombre who could accomplish a lot if he tried, but nothing seems to move him to either working or fighting. That changes during the course of the story in a fairly predictable way. This is a minor tale but entertaining.

“Crisis on the Curly Q” is by Don Alviso, who wrote several dozen stories for the pulps, nearly all of them Westerns. It’s a humorous story about a ranch cook who goes on a drunken bender and loses the wagonload of supplies he’s supposed to be taking back to the Curly Q spread. I wasn’t sure I was going to finish this one, but I stuck with it and it turned out to be mildly amusing. Absolutely unmemorable, though.

The issue wraps up with “Men of Their Word” by William O’Sullivan. It’s about two Irish prospectors who are partners but still scrap with each other all the time. They have to put aside their differences to keep from being swindled by a couple of slickers. This is another story that’s pretty lightweight but reasonably enjoyable.

Overall, this is a good issue of EXCITING WESTERN, although any issue without Navajo Tom Raine and Alamo Paige seems a little lacking to me. However, two very good stand-alone stories by Walker A. Tompkins and Joseph Chadwick makes up for that, and I always enjoy Tombstone and Speedy. So if you have this issue on your shelves, it’s worth reading. You can also find the whole issue on-line if you want to check it out that way.