The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume Four - Will Murray

The fourth volume in Will Murray’s continuing series THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES returns, for the most part, to more traditional yarns featuring the esteemed detective and his friend and colleague Dr. Watson. The previous volume presented stories with a supernatural and/or science fictional angle, but there are only two such in this collection.

Murray, of course, has nailed the style of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales, or at least it seems so to me although I’m no real expert on the subject. I really enjoyed every story in this volume, but here are a few favorites:

In “The Improbable Misadventure of the Blackish Bottle”, Holmes discovers an unexpected murder weapon hidden in his own quarters at 221B Baker Street. This ties in with Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Holmes story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.”

“The Conundrum of the Absent Cranium” has Holmes seeking to solve the mystery of a murder victim found without, you guessed it, his head.

“The Second Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” is a sequel to “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips”, of course, and is a worthy successor to that classic tale.

Also in the original Five Orange Pips story, Doyle makes mention of an unrecorded Holmes case involving something called the Paradol Chamber. In “The Difficult Ordeal of the Paradol Chamber”, Will Murray records that adventure, and a truly creepy and harrowing one it is. Holmes himself narrates most of it since the action took place without Dr. Watson’s presence. This is a great story, my favorite in this volume, and the basis for the fine cover art by Gary Carbon.

The supernatural does figure in the final two stories, “The Impossiblity of the Premature Postmortem Message” and “The Disquieting Adventure of the Murmuring Dell”. Algernon Blackwood’s occult detective character Dr. John Silence is mentioned in the first of these and appears in the second one. “The Impossibility of the Premature Postmortem Message” involves spiritualism, a subject of much interest to Doyle that formed the basis for his third Professor Challenger novel THE LAND OF MIST. I remember reading that book many years ago, and after the hard-headed scientific adventures of Challenger in the first two books, the mysticism of THE LAND OF MIST really took me by surprise. I recall enjoying it a great deal, though, as I did all of Professor Challenger’s appearances. Murray having Sherlock Holmes tackle the subject is intriguing and very effective. “The Disquieting Adventure of the Murmuring Dell” is another very creepy tale. Disquieting, indeed.

If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, this is a fine addition to a very good series. I give this fourth volume of THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES a strong recommendation. It's available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Taggart (1964)

I last saw this movie at the Eagle Drive-In in 1964 when my dad and I watched it along with some other movie. I’m afraid I don’t remember the second feature. It was probably a beach movie, an Elvis movie, or a John Wayne movie. I can’t consider TAGGART a Movie I’d Missed Until Now, but sixty years is a long time ago. Even so, there were scenes in it that I still remembered, so I suppose that means they were pretty effective. I recall that at the time I really enjoyed it.

This was also my introduction to the work of Louis L’Amour, although that name didn’t mean anything to me then and it would be three or four years before I read my first L’Amour novel (THE SACKETT BRAND). In 1964, L’Amour was already a successful Western writer with good sales and a number of movies based on his novels, but he wasn’t the bestselling icon he became a decade or so later.

TAGGART, like all of L’Amour’s work, makes use of a traditional Western plot, or in this case, several of them. As the movie opens, an evil cattle baron and his equally evil son stampede a herd of cattle through the camp of a smaller rancher who’s encroaching on range the cattle baron considers his own. The small rancher, his wife, and their cook all wind up dead, and the couple’s son, Kent Taggart, is wounded. So is the evil cattle baron. Taggart catches up to them in town and kills the cattle baron’s son. Before dying, the cattle baron sends for three hired killers and sends them after Taggart.

From that point, TAGGART becomes a revenge Western—until it becomes a fight the Apaches Western. Taggart winds up at an abandoned Spanish mission where an old prospector has found a gold mine. The prospector has a beautiful daughter and a beautiful second wife. Emotional turmoil ensues. Two of the hired killers show up. (Taggart has already killed one of them during the pursuit.) Double-crosses, Indian attacks, and more Indian attacks eventually lead to a showdown at an army fort.

The movie makes considerable use of stock footage from earlier Westerns, something I didn’t notice at all in 1964, but it all works and the pace is excellent.

So is the cast, which includes Emile Meyer as the evil cattle baron (the same sort of role he played in SHANE), Dan Duryea as a charming but evil hired killer, Tom Reese and David Carradine (his film debut) as the other hired guns, Western veteran Dick Foran as the old prospector, and even good old Bob Steele in an uncredited role as the camp cook who gets gunned down early on. In the lead as Kent Taggart is Tony Young, who a year earlier had starred in a short-lived TV Western called GUNSLINGER, which I watched regularly and have fond memories of. Young should have been a bigger star than he turned out to be. He wasn’t really a polished actor, but he looked great and handled the action scenes well. He starred in one other Western feature, a movie I haven’t seen called HE RIDES TALL, but after that he played supporting roles and did guest star shots on numerous TV shows. He should have gone to Italy and made Spaghetti Westerns. He had the right look for them.

As I mentioned above, I loved this movie when I saw it in 1964. Then, eventually, I began to wonder if I’d imagined it because it never showed on TV and I never read anything about it. A few years ago I looked it up and found that it does, indeed, exist, and when I saw that it was playing on Grit TV, I had to watch it again after all that time. I’m happy to report that it holds up okay. It’s not the great film I thought it was back then, but it’s a solid, low-budget Sixties Western with a good cast and script. If you’re a fan of the genre, it’s well worth watching.

And for what it’s worth, at some point I did read the L’Amour novel in which it’s based. It’s okay, too. Being one of L’Amour’s earlier novels, it’s shorter, faster paced, and better written than most of his books from the late Sixties on.

Gunsmoke Reckoning - Joseph Chadwick

Texas rancher Cole Mowbrey arrives in Montana on the trail of Matt Kerrigan, who ran off with Cole's sister and then abandoned her to die in a mining camp. He finds that his quarry has a stake in a big ranch, and Kerrigan and his partner are trying to run off all the smaller ranchers and homesteaders in the basin. So Joseph Chadwick’s novel GUNSMOKE RECKONING, published in 1951 by Gold Medal, is both a vengeance quest story and a range war story.

Those are, of course, very traditional plot elements for a Western, and we’ve probably all read books like this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The appeal of a book like this is in the execution, and Chadwick does a fine job of that in this book, manipulating his plot with great skill and achieving a headlong pace that kept me turning the pages past my usual bedtime, which, let me tell you, at my age is quite a feat of storytelling. He also handles the characterization with a sure hand, so that not everyone in this novel turns out exactly like you might think they would. There’s a romantic rectangle, as well, that’s done about as well as you can do that sort of thing.

Not long ago, I had some pretty harsh things to say about Chadwick’s contributions to the Jim Hatfield series in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS, but as unsuited as I think he was to that series, he’s a great Western writer in his stand-alone novels. GUNSMOKE RECKONING is the best of those I’ve read so far and one of the best traditional Westerns I’ve read in a long time. If you’re a Western fan, I give it a very strong recommendation. As far as I know, it was never reprinted after this 1951 edition with its great A. Leslie Ross cover. That’s my copy in the scan, by the way.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, June 1947

This is a pulp that I own and recently read most of. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by Peter Stevens, who did quite a few covers for ADVENTURE during this era.

This issue starts off with the initial installment of an espionage serial set in post-war China entitled “He Who Rides the Tiger” by James Norman. As I usually do with serials if I don’t have all the installments on hand, I skipped this one. It may be an excellent yarn, but I don’t see any point in starting a story I can’t finish. Some of the other installments can be found in issues posted online. Maybe I’ll get around to reading it someday. To be honest, though, that’s not very likely.

Next up is a Western short story by the always dependable Frank Bonham. “Last Drive” is about the final run of a stagecoach. The former driver who is almost completely blind goes along as a passenger, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s forced into taking over the reins when Apaches attack the stagecoach. This is a well-written story with a nice final twist.

It's unusual to find a Dan Cushman story in a pulp that’s not published by Fiction House. He was a regular contributor to LARIAT STORY, ACTION STORIES, and JUNGLE STORIES. His long novella in this issue of ADVENTURE, “The Cask of Khabar”, which is set in the Congo, would have been right at home in JUNGLE STORIES, and again to be honest, it’s the main reason I picked this issue to read. Because of his resemblance to a dead man, American trader and self-professed “jungle tramp” Craig Thebes finds himself mixed up with a gang of ruthless criminals. A couple of beautiful women are involved in the scheme, too, of course. At times in this story, it seems like Cushman is trying to do a jungle version of THE MALTESE FALCON. Thebes is certainly hardboiled, and his banter with the evil Sir Roger Humphries reads like Sam Spade and Casper Gutman trading veiled quips. I think the ending is a bit less dramatic than it could have been, but that’s the only drawback in an otherwise superb pulp yarn that just makes me eager to read more by Cushman.

Samuel W. Taylor wrote a lot of Western, detective, and adventure stories for a wide variety of pulps. His story in this issue is called “Do Not Molest the Miracles” and is billed as an “Off the Trail” story. That fits it pretty well. It’s a whimsical tale of elves building houses for needy veterans during the post-war housing crisis, only to run afoul of government red tape. As a general rule, whimsy isn’t something I really enjoy, but this story is well-written and mildly amusing. It would have made a good, lighter-than-usual episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Steve Hail wrote Westerns and nautical adventures. His story story “Doghole Circuit” in this issue definitely fits into the latter category. It uses the old “disgraced skipper is forced by a catastrophe to redeem himself and pull of a daring stunt” plot. In this case, the catastrophe is an erupting volcano and a passenger liner that’s run aground just off the Big Island of Hawaii. To a confirmed landlubber like me, this plot probably doesn’t resonate as much as it would with somebody who likes and knows something about ships. But I still thought it was a pretty good story anyway.

Being an Oklahoman, Clifton Adams knew the oilfields pretty well and could spin a good yarn using that setting. “The Crazy Kind” is about a prizefight between two oilfield workers with a rich new lease as the stakes. This is a lighter-weight, more humorous story than most of Adams’ work, but it’s still well-written and very entertaining. I never worked in the patch, but I had relatives who did and have been around that world some, so I’ve always had a fondness for novels and stories set there.

I’ll sometimes make an exception to my policy of not reading serial installments. If it’s the final installment, or by an author I particularly like, and the story wasn’t published later as a novel that I might read someday, I’ll give one a try. The final installment (of three) of “Salmon Sweepstakes” by Robert E. Pinkerton wraps up this issue. Pinkerton wrote a lot of stories and serials for the adventure fiction pulps, but I don’t recall ever reading anything by him before. This story is about the rivalry between salmon fishermen in the Pacific Northwest following World War I. I started it but couldn’t get interested in it, so I wound up setting it aside. If I’d been able to read the whole thing, I might have liked it better.

The stories by Cushman, Bonham, and Adams are good enough that I have to consider this a pretty solid issue of ADVENTURE. None of the other stories are bad, and I can't count off for serials because they're just the nature of the beast, so to speak. So I'd say that if you have a copy of this one, it's worth pulling off the shelf and giving it a shot.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Complete Western Book Magazine, February 1952

I don't own this pulp, but it looks like a fine issue of COMPLETE WESTERN BOOK MAGAZINE, starting with the usual excellent cover by Norman Saunders. Inside are stories by a really strong group of authors: D.B. Newton (twice, once as himself and once under the house-name Ken Jason), Philip Ketchum, Dean Owen, H.A. DeRosso, Frank Castle, and Kenneth Fowler. An issue that's almost certainly worth reading if you're fortunate enough to have a copy.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Sin is a Redhead - Steve Harragan (William Maconachie)

Observant readers of this blog with a good memory [like since last Friday] may recognize this cover art. That's because it was used, with some minor modifications, on the cover of Orrie Hitt's novel PUSHOVER, which I wrote about a while back. That comes as no surprise, since the publisher of SIN IS A REDHEAD, Universal Publishing and Distributing, later published sleaze novels under the Beacon Books and Softcover Library imprints, and smaller publishers like that often reused cover art. (UPD also published a wider variety of paperbacks in the Sixties and Seventies under the Award Books imprint, including scores of the Nick Carter, Killmaster novels before that series moved over to Ace/Charter and eventually Berkley.)

I've finally gotten around to reading SIN IS A REDHEAD. Great cover, great title, okay book. "Steve Harragan", the author, is also the main character. Harragan the character is a former crime reporter who hit it big playing the ponies and retired to become a man about town/hardboiled amateur detective. Some websites refer to him as a private eye, but he's not, at least not in this book. In SIN IS A REDHEAD, Harragan is driving down the street in New York City when he spots the beautiful Flame Tilson. He makes her acquaintance, finds out that she's the girlfriend of jazz trumpeter Siggy Houston, and regretfully decides that there won't be any romance with the gorgeous Flame.

But then she calls on him for help, Siggy winds up dead, Flame disappears, and Steve (who, to be honest, is not the brightest guy in the world) winds up on the spot for the murder. So off he goes, galloping around the New York underworld trying to find the real killer and rescue Flame from the bad guys. Along the way he winds up in a couple of pretty diabolical death traps, which he barely escapes.

There's not much detective work in this book. It's more of a straight-ahead thriller, and while it's not particularly good overall, there are some nice scenes here and there and some surprisingly funny lines. It's written in that breezy Carter Brown style, and again, it's no big surprise to find that like Alan G. Yates, the author of the Carter Brown books, "Steve Harragan" the author is also an Englishman, William Maconachie. In fact, SIN IS A REDHEAD is actually a reprint of a British novel, REDHEAD RHAPSODY!, originally published by Hamilton & Company in London, probably in 1950, and reprinted in the States by Uni-Books in 1952. In the original version, both character and author were named "Bart Carson". The name was changed for the American edition, and the character was also given an eye-patch. All this information is courtesy of the top-notch British researcher and bibliographer Steve Holland, author of the indispensable history of post-war British paperbacks THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE. More details about Maconachie and the Bart Carson/Steve Harragan series can be found on Holland's excellent blog Bear Alley.

SIN IS A REDHEAD and the other Harragan paperbacks (which are actually digest size) seem to be pretty easy to come by, although some of them are a little pricey. [There are eight of them on Amazon as I write this, and the cheapest is $30, with prices going up to $195.] I'm not going to run right out and order the others [not at those prices!], but I found enough to like in this one that if I ever come across other books in the series I won't hesitate to pick them up if the price is reasonable.

[This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 11, 2011.]

Bait - William Vance writing as George Cassidy

I’ve seen William Vance’s by-line on a number of Western novels over the years, but as far as I recall I’ve never read any of them. I had no idea that he also wrote soft-core books under the pseudonym George Cassiday until Black Gat Books reprinted one of them entitled BAIT, originally published by Beacon Books in 1962 with a fine cover by Jack Faragasso, who is still with us, by the way, and active on Facebook.

The title refers to beautiful, seventeen-year-old Melody Frane, who lives a hardscrabble existence as a migrant farm worker. The only family she has is a drunken mother, and Melody has to take care of her, as well. She’s working at a cantaloupe farm in Arizona when she meets Kenney Ward, a pilot who works for Harry Ransome, the ruthless tycoon who owns not only the farm but also radio stations, hotels, electronics plants, and other enterprises. Melody and Kenney are attracted to each other, but before a real romance can develop between them, she falls under the sway of Ransome, who beds her, takes her under his wing, and sends her to Los Angeles so she can be educated at a school for aspiring starlets and models run by a beautiful former silent movie star. Ransome claims he wants to hire Melody as his secretary, but in reality he plans to pimp her out to various important businessmen he wants to blackmail.

Although there are crimes in this book, it’s not a crime novel. BAIT is more of a domestic drama as every man Melody encounters, as well as some of the women, try to seduce her. The thread of her developing relationship with Kenney runs all the way through, and anybody who’s read very many of these soft-core books can make a pretty good guess how things are going to turn out.

That predictability in plotting and resolution doesn’t really detract from the appeal of BAIT. It’s a well-written book with some excellent scenes and a pace that never lets up for very long. The sex scenes are frequent but not very graphic, as if Vance wasn’t all that comfortable writing them and got more enjoyment out of developing the characters, the most well-rounded of which is Melody. (No pun intended, honest.) Harry Ransome is also a thoroughly despicable villain. I raced through BAIT and really enjoyed it. I’m not going to drop everything and search for the other “George Cassidy” books Vance wrote, but I am going to check my shelves and see if I have any of his Westerns. The paperback edition of BAIT can be pre-ordered on Amazon, and I’m sure there’ll be an e-book edition as well once it’s published.

25 Years of WesternPulps

On April 23, 1999, I posted the first message on the WesternPulps email group, which I created that day on a platform called OneList. A couple of years before that, while attending a mystery convention in Dallas called Cluefest, I heard Bill Crider and Steve Brewer talking about something called Rara-Avis. That was my introduction to the concept of email groups, and shortly after that, I subscribed to Rara-Avis.

Eventually, I got the idea that there ought to be a group devoted to the Western pulps, and so I started one. That first message seems to have been lost in the group's migration from platform to platform over the years, but here's a quote from the second one:

Now that the list is growing a little, we need to get some posts on it. I recently read two Western pulp novels, both of them Jim Hatfield stories from TEXAS RANGERS: "Renegade Roundup" from the July 1937 issue, and "Terror Stalks the Border" from the September 1937 issue. Both are supposedly by A. Leslie Scott, writing under the Jackson Cole house-name. "TSTB" is definitely by Scott, who has such a distinctive style. Most of the time, "RR" reads like Scott, too, but there are a few passages that sound like someone else's work, perhaps an editor's. Or perhaps Scott rewrote another author's story that failed to pass muster. At any rate, they're both good stories and very enjoyable.

Now, a question, or actually a request. In reading Western pulp stories, please be on the lookout for an author who uses the word "Coltmen" instead of "gunmen". Whoever this author is, he wrote at least a couple of Hatfield stories ("Gun Harvest" and "Brand of the Lawless"), but I've never been able to identify him. His use of "Coltmen" is probably his most distinctive stylistic feature; I've never encountered it anywhere else except in the two stories mentioned above.

This list is wide open for discussion of anything related to Western pulps, including current Western novels that have pulp elements or influences. I'm a Western writer myself, and I know that many of my books have been influenced by my pulp reading.

In case you're wondering, the "Coltmen" author mentioned above was soon identified by my friend Jim Griffin as J. Edward Leithead, and I've read many of his stories since then and adopted several of his catchphrases as my own, an example of that pulp influence in my writing that I mentioned. Over the years, many, many such questions about authors have been answered on the list.

In its early years, the group was pretty busy, hitting its high in messages with 705 in February 2002. But this was just as interest in blogs was rising, and the activity tailed off. Then a few more years went by and Facebook and other social media took up even more of people's time and interest. WesternPulps became a fairly low-traffic group averaging less than a hundred messages per month, although there are still flurries where a topic engages the members' interest and the messages flow faster again for a while.

Early in the group's history, a reader named Kent Johnson joined and really added a lot of energy to the proceedings with many questions and comments, and he also uploaded a wealth of lists and other information to the group's files section. Sadly, Kent passed away after a few short years. Other early contributors who brought a great deal to the list were Todd Mason and Juri Nummelin, both of whom were also members of Rara-Avis, and the above-mentioned Jim Griffin, Western author and friend of long-standing. And they still contribute to the list, making them the longest active members other than myself.

OneList, the group's original platform, was taken over by E-Groups, which was in turn acquired by YahooGroups, which was WesternPulps' home for many years. Back in 2018, seeing that YahooGroups was soon going to be discontinued, I migrated the group to a new platform called Groups.io, where it continues to this day. (Rara-Avis, which has been around even longer, is currently on Groups.io as well.) By this point in social media history, email groups are practically pre-historic, of course, but I don't care. When I started WesternPulps 25 years ago, I never gave any thought to how long it would be around. I wouldn't have guessed that it would still exist two and a half decades and almost 30,000 posts later. But I decided several years ago that it will continue as long as I'm able to maintain it and there's a platform for it, even if it gets back to the point where I'm just sending messages to myself, as I was in the beginning. It's been a labor of love for a long time now, and I still love it. If any of you are interested in joining, it won't take up much of your time or clutter your inbox (it's low-traffic, like I said), and you'll have access to the group website with a huge amount of information about Western pulps and Westerns in general in the message archive, the files section, and the photo section. And you might have the answer to the next question somebody posts about a particular author or pulp.

The STAR WESTERN cover at the top of this post isn't a great scan, but it was one of the first, if not the first, image uploaded to the group. Thank you for reminiscing with me today.

Delilah Was Deadly - Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates)

It’s been too long since I read a Carter Brown novel, so I decided to pick up where I left off in Stark House’s reprinting of the original versions of the Al Wheeler novels published in Australia. DELILAH WAS DEADLY is the third book in the series and was never reprinted in the United States until this collection from several years ago.

In this one, Al is still developing into the character known so well to those of us who grew up reading the Signet paperback versions of the novels in the Sixties and Seventies. He still works for the police department of the unnamed city where the story takes place, and he reports to Commissioner (not Sheriff) Lavers. We have Sergeant Podeski giving him a hand instead of Sergeant Polnick. And Al is actually in charge of the Homicide Bureau in this one, having been promoted since the previous book.

Those differences are fairly minor. The case is the same sort that Al has tackled before and will again, many times. The body of a man who works as the social editor for a fashion magazine is found stuffed in a safe in the magazine’s office. He’s been strangled with a girdle. (If you’re wondering why a fashion magazine has a safe on the premises, it’s so that top-secret dress designs can be locked up.) Al decides to investigate the killing himself when one of the detectives assigned to the case is also murdered when he goes to search the victim’s apartment. More killings follow, as Al navigates a complicated plot involving a nightclub owner, a department store tycoon, an eccentric artist, and, of course, numerous beautiful young women, some of whom succumb to Al’s attempts at seduction.

Then, fairly late in the book, author Carter Brown, who was really Alan G. Yates, springs a pretty effective plot twist. The Carter Brown books were nearly always well-plotted, especially considering their length (around 40,000 words, I’m guessing). This one isn’t quite as complex as some but works well. Everything rockets along with lots of snappy banter, plenty of sexy hijinks, and enough action to keep things interesting. The title isn’t really justified until very late in the book and comes off as a bit of an afterthought by the author, but that’s it’s biggest weakness and it’s nothing to quibble about.

I had a fine time reading DELILAH WAS DEADLY and getting reacquainted with Al Wheeler. Luckily, I have plenty more of those Stark House triple volumes on hand, so I plan to get back to the series without much delay this time. These days, short, entertaining books are just what I’m looking for most of the time. If you want to give these a try, they’re available in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Science Fiction Quarterly, February 1955

I don't think I've ever run across an issue of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY. This looks like a pretty good one. I like the dramatic cover by Kelly Freas, and there are some good writers inside: C.M. Kornbluth, Frank Belknap Long, L. Sprague de Camp, and a couple whose names are only vaguely familiar to me, Charles V. De Vet and Winston Marks. I don't own this issue, but if you want to check it out, it's available on the Internet Archive here. There are a lot of other issues of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY posted there as well. I might have time to read some of them if anybody ever comes up with a thirty-hour day.