Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, May 1943

I like the cover by Harold McCauley on this issue of AMAZING STORIES. It's hard to go wrong with a floating skull and a sexy redhead, even though she's probably evil. I mean, she's the "Priestess of the Floating Skull", which sounds pretty sinister. The author of this featured story is Edwin Benson, which was a Ziff-Davis house-name, so there's no telling who actually wrote it. Perhaps Leroy Yerxa, who also has a story in this issue and was very prolific, or Robert Moore Williams, also on hand under his own name. Other authors in this issue are Nelson S. Bond (with a Lancelot Biggs story), Ross Rocklynne, and Festus Pragnell, a name that's always sounded like a pseudonym to me but evidently wasn't. None of these authors are particular favorites of mine, but I'm sure I would have enjoyed this issue anyway, had I plucked it off the newsstand in 1943.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, September 1948

Ah, the old "shooting behind your back while your hands are tied and you're burning the ropes on a candle" trick! The bad guys never see that one coming. This is probably a Sam Cherry cover, but that's not confirmed. What I can confirm is that there are some good authors in this issue, leading off with one of W.C. Tuttle's Tombstone and Speedy yarns, which ran for a long time in EXCITING WESTERN, and followed up by stories by D.B. Newton, Chuck Martin, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Robert J. Hogan, and a Navajo Raine story under the Jackson Cole house-name.

Forgotten Books: Frisco Flat - Stuart James

See, I thought this book was about an apartment in San Francisco. Nope, not at all. It’s set in California, but that’s about the only thing I got right. Frisco Flat is actually the name of the small town where Frankie Cargo grew up. (And isn’t Frankie Cargo a great name for a protagonist? I wonder if he’s related to Clutch.)

At any rate, Frisco Flat is on the coast, with farms to the east and the Pacific to the west, so it’s both an agricultural town and a fishing town. Frankie grew up there, the son of a fisherman, then went off to the Korean War, and when it was over, he knocked around various places for six years before finally returning to his home when he gets the news that his father has died.

We’ve all read enough of these books to have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. Frankie quickly runs afoul of the local law and discovers that sinister things are going on in Frisco Flat. For one thing, his father was murdered. The local big shot tries to buy the fishing boat Frankie inherits, and when Frankie refuses to sell, the boat is vandalized. The beautiful brunette who’s moved into his house is a hostess in the local honkytonk and also the mistress of the corrupt sheriff. There’s a beautiful rich blonde who wants to help Frankie, but can she really be trusted? His best friend from childhood and the other fishermen in the area are counting on him to break the hold of the bad guys who have moved in and taken over, so he can’t just cut his losses and leave.

Unlike most of the authors who wrote for Monarch Books, Stuart James seems to have used his real name on this and the eight other novels he wrote in his career: three movie novelizations from the Sixties, three hardboiled sleaze novels (this one and two for Midwood), also in the Sixties, and three thrillers in the Eighties from Bantam. This information is from my friend David Spencer, who has read and collected them all. Why the long gap in the middle of his career and why he didn’t write more, I have no idea. It’s a shame, because based on FRISCO FLAT, he was pretty darned good. The plot in this one is fairly standard, but as I’ve said many times, the appeal of a book with a traditional plot lies in how well the writer handles those elements. James does a good job. This book is a little better written, a little more literary in places, if you will, than many of the hardboiled novels from that era.

On the other hand, while FRISCO FLAT moves along well, it doesn’t have quite the same sort of propulsive storytelling you find in books by Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer, for example, nor does James have his plot as tightly under control as, say, Day Keene usually does. Unless I missed something, he never completely resolves one of the main plot points. But hey, Raymond Chandler didn’t know who killed the chauffeur, either. I enjoyed this one enough that I won’t hesitate to read the other couple of books by Stuart James that I have on hand.

Now, a word about that cover. When I first looked at it, I thought that maybe Tom Miller had painted it, because it reminded me of covers by Miller on some of the other Monarch Books. However, this one isn’t on Lynn Munroe’s checklist of Miller’s covers, and I trust Lynn completely in such matters. Also, FRISCO FLAT was published a couple of years earlier than Miller did most of his work for Monarch. So I don’t know who painted this cover, but it’s a really good one anyway.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): The Palm Beach Story (1942)

We’ve caught up with another Preston Sturges movie neither of us had ever seen until now. THE PALM BEACH STORY, from 1942, opens with a credit sequence that’s unusual for the time period, the significance of which doesn’t become apparent until much later in the film. (And there are competing theories about that credit sequence, too, which I’m not going to get into because, frankly, they make my head hurt and I’m not getting paid for this, you know.)

Anyway, stalwart inventor Joel McCrea and beautiful Claudette Colbert get married, and after five years they’re broke and about to get kicked out of their apartment (which is so ritzy you wonder how they ever afforded it in the first place, but you don’t ask questions like that about a movie like this) because McCrea can’t sell any of his inventions, and if you ask me, the one they keep talking about in the movie is so cock-eyed I can understand why nobody would ever invest in such a crazy idea. So Colbert decides that she’s just holding McCrea back and they ought to get a divorce, even though they get a reprieve on the rent from a chance encounter with a rich Texan who calls himself the Weinie King (an absolutely hilarious Robert Dudley). McCrea doesn’t want a divorce, but Colbert runs away, finagles her way onto a train bound for Palm Beach because a taxi driver tells her that’s a good place to get a divorce (this is the kind of movie where a lot of finagling goes on), runs into a bunch of drunken, gun-toting millionaires (I’d say that this makes sense in the context of the movie, but well, not so much, but it does get Willliam Demarest and Chester Conklin on screen for a little while), and then meets an innocent young gazillionaire played by Rudy Vallee, who’s great in the part, and of course Vallee falls for her and she decides to get the money out of him for McCrea’s invention, but then McCrea shows up and Colbert pretends that he’s her brother so he won’t mess up her plans, and Vallee’s hot-to-trot countess sister (played by Mary Astor, who I seem to recall had quite a reputation for being hot-to-trot in real life) falls for McCrea, but she already has a suitor played by the hilarious Sig Arno, and then . . .

I tell you, Preston Sturges is a bad influence. The whole movie barrels along a-mile-a-minute like that. Sturges gets fine performances from his cast and there are a lot of very funny lines. I really enjoyed this one. My favorite screwball comedy is BRINGING UP BABY, and while THE PALM BEACH STORY never reaches that level, it’s still very good.

Oh, and Franklin Pangborn plays the manager of the apartment house in New York City, so there’s that to recommend it, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Book Magazine, Summer 1938

This issue of a lesser known pulp (lesser known to me, anyway) has a colorful, distinctive cover and a nice line-up of authors inside. Two of the stories are reprints, including the lead novel, A. Merritt's "Creep, Shadow!" The other reprint is one of Theodore A. Tinsley's Amusement Inc. yarns from the pulp BLACK ACES. The non-reprints include stories by Erle Stanley Gardner and Franklin H. Martin, so . . . pretty good stuff. I think Gardner must have loved writing for the pulps, otherwise why would he have continued to do so after he'd already started enjoying a lot of success with Perry Mason? By the way, the big guy in the green hat on this cover reminds me a little of Broderick Crawford.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Leading Western, August 1949

I don't know the cover artist on this issue, but it's a pretty good one, and given that LEADING WESTERN was published by Trojan, no surprise that there's a pretty girl on it. Frank C. Robertson is easily the biggest name among the authors. The others are a mixture of lesser known real authors (Cliff Walters, Spencer Frost, Art Kercheval), house-names (Paul Hanna, Stan Warner), and one interesting pseudonym: Mark Mallory, who was actually science fiction writer Mack Reynolds.

Forgotten Books: Master of the Lash - Ford Bowne (Forrest R. Brown)

I was vaguely familiar with the name of Western writer Ford Bowne, probably because late in his career, he published at least one novel with Manor Books, the publisher of my first novel. I’d never read anything by him, but when I came across a 1974 novel entitled MASTER OF THE LASH, I was intrigued enough to buy it and read it. The results were .  . . mixed.

First of all, MASTER OF THE LASH sounds more like the title of a plantation novel, but this is definitely a Western. The protagonists are a young U.S. marshal with the unlikely name of Sudbury Pinkham and his old geezer sidekick Joe Enright. They aren’t really on law business, though. They’re answering a summons for help from an old flame of Pinkham’s, a Chinese girl who was bought from her impoverished parents by evil cattle baron Fritz Hein, a German immigrant with a fondness for whips (hence the title of the book). Hein has in turn sold the girl to another, slightly less evil cattle baron, but now she’s disappeared after smuggling out a note to Pinkham, who worked on Hein’s ranch as a young man. Then there’s the shadowy hombre who calls himself Will of the Willows, whose motives for getting involved are a mystery. Follow all that? The plot actually gets a lot more complicated, full of tragedy and melodrama, an old murder, a will written in German, a deadly booby trap, and a bloody, high country showdown between two men wielding whips.

This is a seriously weird book. It was published by Lenox Hill Press, a small publisher whose books were marketed almost exclusively to libraries. It was similar to Arcadia Press and Avalon Books, the best-known of such small library publishers. As such, the language is remarkably clean; I don’t think there’s a single damn or hell in the book. But there’s plenty of gory violence, as well as a scene where Hein strips Lotus, the Chinese girl, naked and puts her over his knee to spank her. It’s implied that he whipped her naked in the past, too. Clearly, the publisher didn’t care about any of that.

On the plus side, there are a number of lurid, over-the-top scenes, which are always okay with me. The plot has a lot of layers to be peeled away, and the characters, while mostly unsympathetic, are interesting. Hein in a thoroughly despicable villain, but he holds some surprises, too. MASTER OF THE LASH has the makings of a pretty good book.

What keeps it from following through on that is that Ford Bowne just wasn’t a very good writer. Some scenes are written in such a clumsy manner that I had to read them more than once just to figure out what was going in. The dialogue is oddly formal and stilted much of the time. There are some excellent moments here and there—the final showdown with whips is great, for example—but they’re too few and far between.

Ford Bowne was actually a writer named Forrest R. Brown, who published a dozen or so stories in the Western pulps under his own name and the Bowne pseudonym. He wrote an equal number of Western novels for Lenox Hill Press, Arcadia Press, and Manor Books, along with a few volumes of historical non-fiction. MASTER OF THE LASH is from fairly late in his career. Maybe his earlier books are better. I found enough oddball stuff to like in this one that I might try another book by him at some point, but I won’t be in any hurry to do so. If you’re a casual Western reader, there are a lot better books out there to read than MASTER OF THE LASH, but it's not totally without interest. Just consider yourself warned.

(That's a picture I found on-line. My copy doesn't have a dust jacket.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Saucy Detective, May 1937

What a bizarre cover on this issue of a short-lived pulp that seems to have had some connection with the Spicy line. Robert Leslie Bellem has a story in here, under the name Reeves L. Black. The only other author names I recognize are Lawrence Sternig, who became much better known as a literary agent, and Lars Anderson, really Thelma Ellis, author of the original Domino Lady stories. Others on hand are John Beck, Roger Orange, Gig Lockhart, Donald Hogarth, Cliff Everard, Pierre Monte, Peg Dougherty, and Mildred Walsh, some or all of whom may be pseudonyms or house-names. It's not every day you see a gorilla--or Bigfoot, I dunno--packing heat.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 10 Story Western Magazine, March 1942

The cover on this issue of 10 STORY WESTERN MAGAZINE is more proof, as if we needed it, that the barber shop was one of the most dangerous places in the Old West. I don't know who painted this one, but I like it quite a bit. There's the usual fine bunch of writers inside the magazine, too: Tom W. Blackburn, Frank C. Robertson, Tom Roan, Leslie Ernenwein, Art Lawson, Glenn Wichman, Dabney Otis Collins, and James C. Lynch. No Olmsted or Coburn, surprisingly. But solid pulpsters, for sure.

Forgotten Books: 14 Seconds to Hell - Nick Carter (Jon Messmann)

I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the secret agent boom in books, movies, and TV during the Sixties. As a freshman in high schoool, I came across a book called HANOI, part of a series of spy adventures starring a secret agent named Nick Carter, a name that also functioned as the series by-line. I was familiar with the original, dime novel version of Nick Carter because I’d read an anthology of those old detective stories a year or so earlier, and I had already learned enough about publishing to realize that this new Nick Carter was a house-name, although I had no idea who wrote the books, of course.

All that mattered to me was that HANOI was a great yarn, full of sex and violence and all the other stuff that appealed to my 14-year-old brain. (My 67-year-old brain isn’t that much different, but that’s neither here nor there.) I bought and read every Nick Carter novel I came across all the way through high school and on into college, getting many of them new off the paperback spinner rack at Lester’s Pharmacy.

14 SECONDS TO HELL, which was published in 1968, is one that I missed somehow, and I’d never read it until recently. It’s a fairly early entry in the series, #37, although the books themselves weren’t numbered at that point. (There are 261 Nick Carter novels in this modern incarnation.) During this part of the series’ run, the books are in third person and Nick is usually referred to as Nick, something that makes him a pretty likable and approachable character. He works for a super-secret government agency called AXE, where he carries the Killmaster designation. (Any resemblance to James Bond’s 00 status is entirely not coincidental.) His boss is David Hawk. He carries a Luger that he calls Wilhelmina, a dagger called Hugo, and a tiny gas bomb he’s dubbed Pierre. (There’s a reason the weapons have names, which I’ll get to later.)

In this novel, a tenuous world peace is threatened by the insane scheme of a Red Chinese scientist, Dr. Hu Tsan, who has a secret base in China from which he intends to launch seven nuclear missiles at the free world. Nick’s job is to destroy that base and the missiles, and since Russia doesn’t want a nuclear war breaking out, they assign one of their top agents to team up with him. That agent, of course, is a beautiful blonde, and she and Nick team up in more ways than one, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The Russian girl has a secret which the cover copy totally gives away, but it’s pretty obvious so that spoiler doesn’t actually ruin much.

The first half of this book is a little slow, since it’s mostly about Nick trying to reach the evil scientist’s base and overcoming a few relatively minor obstacles along the way. The pace picks up considerably at that point, with a lot going on leading up to a slam-bang climax. The problem is, when that climax is over, there are still thirty pages left in the book, so even though there’s a little more action, it feels tacked-on to pad out the wordage.

Overall, though, 14 SECONDS TO HELL is a pretty entertaining book, and it’s not just because of its nostalgia value, either. The author behind the Nick Carter house-name is veteran paperbacker Jon Messmann, and this is the first of fifteen novels he wrote for the series in a two-year span, making him the most prolific Nick Carter author during that particular stretch. Messmann went on to create the Trailsman Adult Western series and write more than a hundred of those novels, many of which I’ve read. His style is pretty easy to recognize in this book. He tends to write long paragraphs and fairly long chapters, but despite that, his stories move along very well. I think the pacing problems in 14 SECONDS TO HELL are probably the result of its being his first entry in this series. I remember some of his later Carters, such as THE LIVING DEATH, THE AMAZON, THE SEA TRAP, and OPERATION SNAKE being excellent. Really, though, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him, since he has a good touch with characters and plot and writes good action scenes.

I mentioned the weapons Nick carries and the fact that they have names, and to get back to that . . . I may have written about this in other posts, and some of you know the background already, but for those who don’t, this Nick Carter series was packaged, starting out, by Lyle Kenyon Engel. In interviews, Engel claimed to have created it, but having worked for Book Creations Inc., the book packaging company he founded later on, I suspect his contribution consisted of saying, “Hey, that James Bond stuff is selling well. We should do a secret agent series.” The author hired to write the books was Michael Avallone, and my hunch is that all the details about the character came from him. Avallone was a long-time fan of the pulps and surely remembered the pulp version of Nick Carter, and possibly the dime novel detective before that. He was also a big fan of the pulp series The Avenger, in which the hero carried a pistol and a throwing knife he called Ike and Mike. (Don’t ask me which was which, I don’t remember and I’m not going to look it up.) I’m certain that’s where Hugo, Wilhelmina, and Pierre came from. AXE and Nick’s boss Hawk both sound exactly like things Avallone would have come up with. It’s no secret that Mike and I were friends and corresponded for a number of years, and we probably talked about all this in our letters, but again, that’s too long ago and I don’t recall all the details. But I’m confident that’s what happened and I believe the whole basis of the series came from Avallone, even though he wound up writing only two heavily edited novels and part of another one before he and Engel had a falling out.

Also, ‘way back at the beginning of this post, I mentioned the novel HANOI, the first Nick Carter I read. I had no idea who the author was then, but now I know it was written by Valerie Moolman, the series’ first editor who also wrote or co-wrote a dozen books in the series, including the first eight, so along with Avallone, she really set the tone for everything that came later. Those Nick Carters are her only published fiction, as far as I know, although wrote some non-fiction books and worked as an editor for many years. I owe her and Mike Avallone a debt of gratitude for their work on a series that was one of my favorites and entertained me for a long time . . . and as this post proves, still entertains me today.