Forgotten Books: To the Heart of the Storm – Will Eisner

 Forgotten Books, Graphic Novels, Will Eisner  Comments Off
Jun 142013
 
This post originally appeared in slightly different form on November 13, 2005.
I've talked here before about Will Eisner, specifically his work on the classic comic strip The Spirit. (Of course, callingThe Spirit a comic strip really isn't accurate, but it's not exactly a comic book, either . . . but I'm getting sidetracked.)

TO THE HEART OF THE STORM really does deserve the name "graphic novel". Told in flashbacks as a young recruit, an artist named Willie, rides a troop train in the early days of World War II, it's the story of Eisner's own family and his childhood and adolescence growing up as an artistically talented youngster in Brooklyn and the Bronx. One of the themes is the anti-Semitism that Eisner and his family encountered, but that's hardly the whole story. This book is filled with touches that are universal to childhood: being picked on by bullies, having to care for a younger sibling, dealing with parents, etc. It's great stuff, wonderfully written and drawn, and ultimately quite moving. I highly recommend it.

Forgotten Books: The Opium Ship & Mr. Shen of Shensi – H. Bedford-Jones

 adventure fiction, Forgotten Books, H. Bedford-Jones, pulps  Comments Off
Jun 072013
 
Parts of this post originally appeared in different form on February 11, 2006.


THE OPIUM SHIP originally appeared as a serial in the famous pulp magazine THE THRILL BOOK in July and August of 1919. As I’ve said on numerous other occasions, Bedford-Jones is one of my favorite pulp authors. This is one of his sea-going yarns, about a couple of financially strapped Irishmen, former aviator Gerald Desmond and consumptive fiddler Michael Terence O’Sullivan, who wind up being shanghaied onto a ship where all sorts of deviltry and double-crossing is going on.

Between mutiny, opium smugglers, a hurricane, a couple of shipwrecks, two beautiful women in danger, and adventures on a deserted island, the pace never lets up for very long. Bedford-Jones keeps the story galloping along in his usual clean, spare prose (anybody who claims that all pulp fiction was overwritten must have never read Bedford-Jones) and throws in several surprising plot twists along the way. While THE OPIUM SHIP probably doesn’t belong in the very top rank of Bedford-Jones’s work, it’s quite entertaining and well worth reading.

It's soon to be available in a new reprint from Beb Books, along with "Mr. Shen of Shensi", a novella by Bedford-Jones that also appeared in THE THRILL BOOK in October 1919. This one finds explorer and unofficial secret agent James Kenrick on the trail of the mysterious Mr. Shen, a Chinese scientist, mystic, and professional troublemaker, who appears to have invented a new ray that blacks out all light, similar to the weapon featured in the Shadow novel "The Black Hush" sixteen years later. ("The Black Hush" is one of my favorite Shadow novels, by the way, well worth reading.) Mr. Shen has brought his gizmo to San Francisco, obviously bent on causing some sort of mischief with it, and it's Kenrick's job to find him and stop him.

This is a fast-paced adventure yarn blending espionage, superscience, and a touch of the supernatural, and it's a lot of fun. Combined with THE OPIUM SHIP, this volume is a good introduction to Bedford-Jones' work in a couple of different genres . . . but of course he wrote many other kinds of stories as well. As a storyteller, Bedford-Jones was one of the best, and you can see why in these two exciting tales.

Forgotten Books: The Lure of "Adventure" – Robert Kenneth Jones

 Forgotten Books, Non-fiction, pulps, Robert Kenneth Jones  Comments Off
May 312013
 
Robert Kenneth Jones, who wrote THE SHUDDER PULPS, a study of the Weird Menace pulps, also produced this slim volume about one of the leading general fiction pulps and in the opinion of some the best pulp magazine ever, ADVENTURE. I don't quite agree with that assessment, but ADVENTURE certainly belongs in the top five or six pulps.

Jones concentrates on the magazine's first fifteen years, from 1910 to 1925, an era generally acknowledged as ADVENTURE's golden age. He takes a look at the work of some of its best-known writers, such as Talbot Mundy, W.C. Tuttle, Arthur O. Friel, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Walt Coburn, Harold Lamb, Georges Surdez, Hugh Pendexter, H. Bedford-Jones, and many others. He also discusses the magazine's letters column, "The Campfire", the site of many spirited discussions between the magazine's writers and readers, and its other features such as "Ask Adventure", a source of advice and information on just about any subject under the sun.

One of the most entertaining parts of this book is the section on legendary editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman. Hoffman had a number of idiosyncracies, such as the persistent misspelling of some words (one has to wonder if Robert E. Howard, known to be an ADVENTURE reader, picked up his spelling of "surprize" from Hoffman) and his editorials railing against the government.

There are a few minor mistakes here and there, but when this book was first published in 1989 research wasn't nearly as easy as it is now, and Jones, along with the other pulp scholars of that era and earlier, deserve a great deal of credit for paving the way with books like this. THE LURE OF "ADVENTURE" also includes a lot of black-and-white cover reproductions. Sure, you can find good color scans of many of those covers on-line now, but you couldn't back then and as far as I'm concerned they contribute quite a bit to the book's charm.

I believe a reprint of this volume is still available from Wildside Press. It has a plain cover, but the interior is a facsimile reprint of the original 1989 edition from Borgo Press. THE LURE OF "ADVENTURE" is an entertaining, informative book, and if you're a pulp fan it's definitely worth reading.

Forgotten Books: The Case of the Sunbather’s Diary – Erle Stanley Gardner

 Erle Stanley Gardner, Forgotten Books, mystery fiction  Comments Off
May 242013
 

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on July 20, 2007.

This Perry Mason novel was originally published in 1955, an era during which Gardner’s work was still consistently good, although as far as I’m concerned his best books were published during the Thirties and Forties. The edition pictured is the first paperback, from February 1958. I have no idea why there was a three-year gap between the William Morrow hardback and the Cardinal paperback.

As for the story itself, it starts off in a typically intriguing Gardner fashion: Perry Mason receives a phone call at his office from a young woman who wants to hire him. It seems that she lives in a trailer, the small kind that can be pulled behind a car, and while she was out sunbathing -- nude, of course -- somebody stole the car and trailer, literally driving off with her home. She wants to hire Mason to bring her some clothes and find out who stole the trailer.

Well, you know there has to be a lot more to it than that in an Erle Stanley Gardner book, and of course, there is. It turns out the young woman is the daughter of a man who is serving time in prison for masterminding an armored car robbery, and wouldn’t you know it, the nearly four hundred thousand dollars in loot that was stolen in that robbery has never been found. The daughter is convinced that her father is really innocent and wants Mason to prove it. Meanwhile, various factions are equally convinced that the daughter really knows where the money is hidden. Sure enough, once Perry Mason gets involved in the case, it’s only a matter of hours before there’s a murder, and Mason’s client is arrested and charged with the crime.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping up with the plot in this one, something I often have a hard time doing in a Gardner novel. I spotted some clues, recognized some misdirection, and was convinced that I had the solution figured out. Then, with only a few pages left in the book, Gardner throws in a perfectly logical twist that I never saw coming at all. I wound up being about half-right in what I figured, and for a Perry Mason novel, that’s not bad, I suppose.

This book is also interesting because of the trailer angle. Gardner was known for going off to the desert and staying for weeks at a time in a trailer, so he puts his knowledge of such things to good use here, throwing in a few nuggets of information about how such trailers are set up and what they’re worth.
The Mitchell Hooks cover on the paperback edition is okay, but if ever a book was crying out for a McGinnis cover, you’d think that one with a title like THE CASE OF THE SUN BATHER’S DIARY would be it.

UPDATE: And sure enough, there was a later edition with a McGinnis cover, which you can see below.


Forgotten Books: The Bad Man of the West – George D. Hendricks

 Forgotten Books, George D. Hendricks, Non-fiction  Comments Off
May 172013
 

I didn't even know there was a paperback edition of this book until I came across a copy not along ago and snatched it up. I used to have the hardback edition. It's a great Old West reference book and excellent reading in its own right, even if you're not doing research. Instead of just recounting the lives of various outlaws and gunfighters, the author delves into the causes that made them the bad men they were and does a fine job of it, while still providing a lot of biographical information along the way.

I'm also fond of this book because the author, George D. Hendricks, was one of my professors at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). For years his signature class was "Life and Literature of the Southwest", and I was fortunate enough to be in one of those classes. We got along well and I learned quite a bit. The big research paper I did for him was called "The Texas Rangers in Fact and Fiction". I'm not sure what he thought of it, since I did a considerable amount of babbling about the Lone Ranger, Jim Hatfield, and the TV show "Laredo", but looking back on it now the subject matter seems pretty appropriate. I enjoyed the class and was glad I got to take it, and I'm glad I found this copy of Dr. Hendricks' book, too.

Forgotten Books: Hawke – Ted Bell

 Forgotten Books, mystery fiction, Ted Bell  Comments Off
May 102013
 

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on August 18, 2007.

Recently I got the urge to read a long book, which is rare for me, and at nearly 600 pages in the Pocket Books Premium edition, Ted Bell’s debut thriller HAWKE certainly fits the bill. When I was younger and had more time to read, I plowed through many a doorstopper novel without really thinking about it. The summer between eighth and ninth grades I read all three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-back-to-back, something I’d never attempt today. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO? GONE WITH THE WIND? No problem.

But to get back to HAWKE, I thought, well, I’ll try it, and if I don’t like it, or if it’s taking too long to read, I’ll just stop. I liked it right away, though, and had no trouble sticking with it to the end. It’s just the sort of over-the-top, swashbuckling, action-adventure/espionage novel that I enjoy. Lord Alexander Hawke is a handsome, debonair playboy/billionaire businessman/freelance secret agent who takes on dangerous assignments for the American and British governments. A lot of the reviews compare him to James Bond, but to me he seems like more of a tribute to Derek Flint and Amos Burke (for those of you with long memories), with just a touch of Austin Powers but not nearly as silly. This book involves a military coup in Cuba that replaces Fidel Castro, a giant Russian stealth submarine, and biological warfare.

But that’s not all, to quote the late-night TV pitchmen. In addition to the secret agent stuff, you also get a storyline involving murder, revenge, and hidden pirate treasure. If that’s not enough, there’s also plenty of Clancy-ish technobabble about weapons, good and evil mercenaries, some big battles, and a climactic swordfight (well, a machete fight, but that’s close) that’s a dandy. You can tell that Bell had a lot of fun writing this book, and I had a lot of fun reading it. I was interested in Bell’s work because I read his story in the THRILLER anthology and thought it was one of the best ones in that book. He didn’t disappoint me with HAWKE.

Is the book too long? Yeah, probably. But the padding isn’t too blatant and for the most part the pace clips right along. A while back I read a thriller by another big-name writer that had a pretty good plot, but all the way through it I kept thinking “Nick Carter could’ve handled this problem in a third as many pages -- or less!” That didn’t happen with HAWKE. There are three more books, so far, starring Alex Hawke, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading all of them.

One reason I’m sort of interested in books like this right now is that I recently finished writing a big international thriller (a ghost job) with lots of short chapters, a big cast, and several interconnected storylines. It’s an appealing format, although I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it as either a writer or a reader. If I can ever find the time I might try to write one of my own, one of these days.

UPDATE: I read the second book in this series and liked it, too, but I never got around to the others, and even though I have all of them, I think, I don't know when or if I'll get around to reading them since my attention span is so lousy these days I often have trouble reading short novels, let alone behemoths like the ones Bell writes. As for the connection with my writing, I'm still ghosting the occasional big thriller (working on one now, as a matter of fact, and have a couple more lined up) but still haven't done anything like that under my name. Like reading the rest of Ted Bell's books, I don't know when or if I'll get around to it.

Forgotten Books: The Best of Spicy Mystery, Volume 1 — Alfred Jan, ed.

 Forgotten Books, pulps, Weird Menace  Comments Off
May 032013
 


THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY is a great collection of stories from certainly the most risqué of the Weird Menace/Shudder Pulps.

I've written before about the Weird Menace genre, and while it could be extremely formulaic, the stories in this volume show that it didn't always have to be. For one thing, there's considerable variety in the settings, instead of just the creepy old house like you'd expect. "Fiend's Fiest" by Robert Leslie Bellem takes place entirely in a ritzy high-rise apartment. "Lorelei of Lynnwold Light" by Harley L. Court (also Robert Leslie Bellem) is a locked-room mystery set in an isolated lighthouse set six miles off the coast. One fairly large hole in the plot keeps it from really working as a locked-room mystery, but it's still an entertaining, very atmospheric story. John Bard's "The Second Mummy" takes place partially in the Mexican jungles.

Not that there aren't creepy old houses to be found in these stories, too. They figure prominently in "Murder From Nowhere" by Jerome Severs Perry (Bellem again) and "Mistress of Vengeance" by Justin Case (really Hugh Cave, who contributes a very well-written story as you'd expect).

A Weird Menace collection requires at least one mad doctor and some bizarre science, too, and we get that in "Bat Man" by Lew Merrill (really longtime pulpster Victor Rousseau), which has a twist ending that's predictable but also pretty creepy and effective. There's also a doctor in Robert Leslie Bellem's "Mirror Magic", but he's not crazy so much as desperate to find a cure for the mysterious malady that's killing him, no matter what the cost.

Of course, most of the authors who wrote Weird Menace stories wrote other things, too. Hugh Cave wrote every type of pulp story under the sun, and Robert Leslie Bellem was almost as versatile. Rex Norman, whose story "Dance of Damballa" closes out this volume, was really John A. Saxon, a prolific contributor to the Western pulps whose career goes back to the early Twenties. His voodoo yarn is a good one, too, proving that a top pulpster could write just about anything.

THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, VOLUME 1 is a fairly recent book, having come out last year from Altus Press, but the Weird Menace genre itself is almost forgotten. I'm glad some of the stories are being reprinted, because I really enjoy them. In fact, I'm ready for Volume 2 in this series whenever it comes out.

Forgotten Books: Best Offer – Robert Calder

 Fiction, Forgotten Books, Robert Calder  Comments Off
Apr 262013
 
When I was in the used book business in the Eighties, copies of this novel from 1981 were everywhere. Now I'd hate to have to try to find one, although they can be had on-line. It was probably so popular because of that sexy cover, and the salacious subject matter probably didn't hurt sales, either. BEST OFFER is basically a sex comedy about a group of suburban couples who decide to auction off the wives for a night to raise money and save the private school all their kids attend.

I haven't read this novel since then, so I don't know how it holds up, but I remember it being surprisingly good, with some darker, more serious aspects underneath all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sleaziness of it. If you ever run across a copy, you might give it a try, although I make no guarantees. As far as I know, Robert Calder published only one other book, a horror novel called THE DOGS that I never read.

Forgotten Books: Markham – Lawrence Block

 Forgotten Books, Lawrence Block, mystery fiction, TV tie-ins  Comments Off
Apr 192013
 
This post originally appeared in slightly different form on April 20, 2007. My apologies for all the reruns. I just haven't had much time to read lately.


This is a book I’ve had on my shelves for many years, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. It’s a tie-in novel, based on a short-lived series that ran on NBC in 1959 and 1960, starring Ray Milland as New York-based private eye Roy Markham. Now, if Ray Milland isn’t exactly your idea of a hardboiled private eye, well, I feel pretty much the same way. Maybe a lot of other people did, too, and that’s why the series didn’t last long. This novel didn’t come out until 1961, after the TV series was over. I guess Belmont had it in inventory already and decided to go ahead and throw it out there. Lawrence Block wasn’t a big name at the time, so that wasn’t the reason (as it probably was a few years ago when this novel was reissued under the title YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER, with no mention of the TV series or its original Belmont edition).

As for the book itself, it’s pretty standard PI stuff. As a favor to a friend, Markham takes on a wandering daughter job. The girl has disappeared from the fancy private university she attends in New Hampshire. Markham starts investigating and then gets roped into what seems to be a completely different case – but you know the jobs will wind up being connected, and sure enough they are. There’s a lot of small-town college scenes, some late Fifties/early Sixties hipster stuff, a suicide that might be murder, some other deaths that are definitely murder, blackmail, gangsters, and lots of drinking and smoking. Everybody in this book spends a lot of time taking out cigarettes, lighting up cigarettes, putting out cigarettes, etc. Markham gets hit on the head and knocked out. Eventually he untangles everything and exposes the killer, of course.

Not surprisingly, despite the generic plot Block’s use of language is excellent, as always. Even though this book came early in his career, he could already put sentences together in a consistently interesting and entertaining fashion. I didn’t really see anything in this book that was a precursor for, say, the Matt Scudder books. (There is a minor character named Keller, however.) It’s worth reading, although it’s not on the same level as his other early books that have been reissued by Hard Case Crime.
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