Mansion of Evil - Joseph Millard and George Evans

Having read and enjoyed IT RHYMES WITH LUST, I decided to try this other early graphic novel with a crime plot, MANSION OF EVIL, published by Gold Medal in 1950. It was written by veteran pulp and paperback author Joseph. Millard, who years later as Joe Millard wrote the Man With No Name paperbacks for Award Books, novelizations and original novels based on the Clint Eastwood movies. Those were my introduction to his work. I don’t think the art on MANSION OF EVIL has ever been credited officially to anyone, but the consensus of opinion seems to be that it’s by George Evans.

A newspaperman plays a major part in MANSION OF EVIL, just like in IT RHYMES WITH LUST. In this case, it’s reporter Larry Brennan, who’s engaged to beautiful young Beth Halliday. Beth works at an art gallery that’s about to put on an exhibition of paintings by reclusive artist Maxwell Haimes. When Beth meets Haimes, he kind of goes nuts, thinks her name is Laura, kidnaps her, and takes her to his isolated mansion (which comes complete with sinister housekeeper). It becomes obvious pretty quickly that Haimes isn’t completely insane and has some devious plan in mind that includes murder.

Meanwhile, Larry is convinced that something has happened to Beth and is searching desperately for her despite the fact that nobody else seems to take him seriously. The whole situation, which includes a race against time scenario, reminds me of stories by Cornell Woolrich that I’ve read. It also seems to me that there’s some Bruno Fischer influence at work here, too. Whether or not Millard was familiar with those writers, I don’t know, but in MANSION OF EVIL, he’s crafted a story that has similarities to their work.

The artwork isn’t as good as Matt Baker’s in IT RHYMES WITH LUST, but it gets the job done. So does Millard’s lurid, breathless script, although it sometimes reads like it was adapted from a radio serial. It’s over the top and often driven by coincidences, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Scans of the book are available in various places on the Internet, or you can pick up an actual e-book version on Amazon.

Noose for a Lady - Gerald Verner

The murder has already taken place when this British mystery originally published in 1952 opens. Wealthy John Hallam has been poisoned, and his wife Margaret has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang for the crime. Her childhood friend, portrait painter/amateur sleuth Simon Gale, returns to England and discovers Margaret's plight when there's only a week left before the execution. Believing his old friend incapable of murder by poisoning, Gale sets out to uncover the actual murderer with the help of his younger brother and Margaret's stepdaughter. A local police detective who's not an idiot, for a change, also lends a hand.

NOOSE FOR A LADY is a top-notch British village mystery yarn with plenty of suspects (the victim was a cad and a bounder and half the people in the village had good reason to want him dead), a dogged detective, sinister lurkers, a second murder, and finally a gathering of the suspects where Simon Gale explains everything and reveals the killer's identity. It's suspenseful, well-plotted, and written in a fast, breezy style that's very entertaining to read. Simon Gale is a good protagonist with a hearty attitude and a fondness for beer and his pipe. There are two more novels about him, and I think there's a good chance I'll read them.

Gerald Verner, who was born John Robert Stuart Pringle, was a prolific author of mysteries and thrillers who wrote quite a few Sexton Blake yarns under the name Donald Stuart. I read one of them not long ago and enjoyed it a great deal, so I sought out something else by him. NOOSE FOR A LADY is considered one of his best novels, so I started there. It was based on a 1950 radio serial Verner wrote for the BBC. The novel is available from Amazon in e-book and paperback editions, and if you're a fan of British mysteries and Golden Age detection, I think it's well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Pirate Stories, March 1935

I don't believe I've ever run across a mention of PIRATE STORIES before. It was a short-lived adventure pulp edited and published by Hugo Gernsback of AMAZING STORIES fame. This is the third of six issues. I like the cover by Joseph Sokoli. The idea of airborne pirates preying on ships at sea is an interesting one. The feature story in this issue is by Captain Dingle, an author I've been meaning to read for a long time now but still haven't. Backing it up are yarns by the always dependable J. Allan Dunn, George Allan Moffatt, and an author I'm unfamiliar with, J. Winchcombe-Taylor, who certainly has a distinguished-sounding name. I may have to steal that for a character one of these days.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, January 1946

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. My guess as to the cover artist is Robert Stanley, but I’m not certain about that. There are a couple of things about this one I don’t like—the guy’s hands and arms don’t look quite right to me, and neither does his holster—but overall it’s an effective cover.

I’ve said this many times before and probably will again, but Walt Coburn was really inconsistent in his work, especially in the second half of the Forties onwards. But he’s still one of my favorite Western authors because when he’s on his game, he’s really, really good. “Mail-Order Outlaw” in this issue is one of his really, really good stories. The cover calls it a novel, but at 16 pages, even with fairly small print left over from the war years and paper rationing, it’s more of a novelette. Even so, Coburn manages to give this tale of a young cowpuncher who falls in with a gang of bank robbers a bit of an epic feeling. The action is great, the protagonist is very likable, and the villains are despicable. It’s also more tightly plotted than many of Coburn’s stories, which tend to sprawl around and get melodramatic. The sense of authenticity is there as always. No matter how over-the-top Coburn’s plots could get, the characters and settings always ring true. This is a superb story, one of the best by Coburn that I’ve read.

I don’t know much about Michael Oblinger, just that he wrote several dozen stories for various Western pulps. His short story “Hell-on-the-Hoof” starts out with a horse identifying a killer, but that’s just the opening act in a very convoluted tale about an accused murderer hunting down the real culprits. I didn’t think this story was well-written and didn’t care for it.

Since the cover date on pulps was the off-sale date, that means this January 1946 issue of DIME WESTERN was actually on the stands in December 1945. Accordingly, there’s a Christmas story included in the line-up, the novelette “Colt Christmas at Bitter Creek” by Rod Patterson. Last year I read a pulp yarn by Patterson that I enjoyed quite a bit, as well as his novel WHIP HAND, which I found pretty flat and uninspired. Now that I’ve read this story, I’m starting to suspect that Patterson was better at less than novel length. “Colt Christmas at Bitter Creek” is about the showdown between two feuding ranches during a blizzard. It’s well-written, moves right along, and has a nice hardboiled tone. I still want to try more of Patterson’s novels, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for his pulp stories.

Charles Handley is another forgotten pulpster. His story “The Devil’s Sky-Pilot” is a short-short about an outlaw-turned-preacher—or is he? The twist ending in this one is pretty predictable, but it still works and the story is fairly entertaining.

Tom W. Blackburn often wrote stories that weren’t about the usual cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, etc. The protagonist of the novelette “Battle Call For Big-Wheelers” is a partner in a freight company located in a Sierra Nevada mining boomtown. Double-crossed by a man he considered a friend, framed by a rival for murder, Cole Banning finds himself in a mighty deep hole and Blackburn just keeps piling more trouble on his head until I honestly wondered how in the world Banning was going to get out of this mess. But he does, and although the resolution might have been just a tad too quick and convenient, this is still a really good story with interesting characters, strong writing, and plenty of action. Blackburn’s work is nearly always good and this one is no exception.

John Richard Young wrote a couple of dozen Western and adventure stories for various pulps in the Forties and Fifties. His story in this issue, “Law of the Blizzard-Born” is an animal yarn about an old hunter stalking a wolf. This type of story with little or no dialogue and some, if not most, of the story written from the point of view of the animal is one that I just have trouble reading. I wound up skimming this one and didn’t like it.

The novelette that wraps up this issue, “The Phantom Hangman of Yellow Jacket”, is another mining camp story. Somewhat unusual for a Western pulp, it’s also a murder mystery as a ruthless vigilante known as The Citizen is killing people in the camp for no apparent reason. The son of a mine owner who is one of the victims returns from San Francisco, where he’s been something of a wastrel, to grow up and get to the bottom of things. As it turns out, this story isn’t a particularly strong mystery, but it does have a good protagonist and some nice action as it moves along at a fast pace. The author, Harry F. Olmsted, is one of my favorites. Olmsted was known to farm out some of his work, much like Ed Earl Repp, so there’s no way of knowing if some other author had a hand in this one. The story reads like the other Olmsted stories I’ve read, but that may be because even on the ghosted stuff, he did a lot of editing and revising. Regardless of the details, which we’ll likely never know, this is a solid, entertaining yarn.

Overall, this issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE is quite a mixed bag. There are a couple of stories I didn’t like, but the others range from good to excellent and include one of the best Walt Coburn stories I’ve read. So I’d say that if you have a copy on your shelves, it’s well worth reading.

A Rough Edges Rerun: The Phantom Spy - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

Instead of one of the Westerns for which Max Brand (Frederick Faust) is most famous, I’m writing about one of Faust’s espionage novels. THE PHANTOM SPY is set in Europe in the mid-Thirties, the era during which it was written. This isn’t a Ruritanian, Graustarkian, comic opera Europe, either. It’s the real thing, with the grim threat of Hitler’s growing power in Germany looming over everything. In Faust’s novel, however, Hitler isn’t even the real menace. The true villains are an international cabal of warmongers who think that Hitler isn’t moving fast enough and want him to go ahead and invade France right away. To further that end, they’ve managed to steal the plans for the Maginot Line and intend to present them to Hitler so that Germany can attack France’s defensive fortifications at their weakest points. (In reality, the Maginot Line didn’t pose much of an obstacle to the Germans a few years later, but Faust had no way of knowing that.) The British Secret Service sets out to steal the plans back before Hitler gets his hands on them, and the agent entrusted with the job is Lady Cecil de Waters, a British noblewoman who has offered her services as a “talented amateur” in the espionage game. (Yes, Emma Peel without John Steed is exactly what I mean.)

Giving Lady Cecil a hand is a would-be suitor of hers, wisecracking millionaire American playboy Willie Gloster, as well as a mysterious phantom spy known only as Monsieur Jacquelin who turns up when he’s most needed. Faust keeps the action moving along briskly as the characters take turns stealing the plans back and forth from each other, and in the process Willie and Lady Cecil uncover the plotters pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sometimes in his Westerns, Faust can get a little flowery and long-winded in his prose, but not here. This one cooks along in a breezy, hardboiled fashion with double- and triple-crosses, characters pretending to be other characters, fistfights and shootouts, and only occasional pauses for reflection. There aren’t many real twists to the plot – really, if you don’t figure out the true identity of the Phantom Spy early on, like when the character first appears, I’ll be surprised – but that doesn’t matter much because Faust is having so much fun, and so is the reader.

THE PHANTOM SPY first appeared as a serial in the pulp ARGOSY in 1937, under the title “War For Sale”. It was reprinted in hardback by Dodd, Mead in 1973 and then in paperback by Pocket Books in 1975, when Pocket reprinted a number of Faust’s non-Western novels. Both of those editions are available pretty inexpensively on-line. As much as I enjoy Faust’s Westerns, I’d really like to see more of his non-Westerns reprinted, especially some of the pulp serials that have never been published in book form. I believe he wrote a Revolutionary War novel that’s never been reprinted, and I’d love to read that one. There are several pirate novels, too, as well as numerous mysteries and contemporary adventures. If you’ve only read Faust’s Westerns, or if you’ve never read his work at all, give THE PHANTOM SPY a try. I really enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2009. Since then, a number of Faust's non-Western novels have been reprinted, and I really need to get around to reading them.)

It Rhymes With Lust - Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller, and Matt Baker

Last week after I reviewed Arnold Drake’s novel THE STEEL NOOSE, a friend reminded me that Drake also co-authored what is considered by some the first graphic novel, IT RHYMES WITH LUST, published in 1950 as a digest-sized paperback by the comic book publisher Archer St. John. Drake co-wrote the script with Leslie Waller under the pseudonym Drake Waller. The black-and-white art is by Matt Baker (pencils) and Ray Osrin (inks). This book has been reprinted in both paperback and e-book editions, so I picked up a copy of the e-book to check it out.

IT RHYMES WITH LUST is set in Copper City, somewhere in a Western state. If you want to figure it’s loosely based on Butte, Montana, that works for me. Buck Masson is the kingpin who runs everything in Copper City from the criminal underworld to the mines. But when Buck dies, control of his empire falls to his beautiful, cunning, and ruthless wife Rust (whose name rhymes with lust, get it?) who brings in an old flame of hers, newspaperman Hal Weber, to edit the local paper that supposedly is opposed to the Masson criminal empire. Weber is supposed to be a crusading journalist who’s out to reform things, but he’s really just a tool for Rust to use to undermine Marcus Jeffers, her late husband’s second-in-command who now figures he’s going to take over. Weber wants to play things straight, especially after he meets and falls for Audrey Masson, old Buck’s beautiful blond daughter by his first wife. But can Weber escape from Rust’s clutches?

This lurid, hardboiled crime/melodrama is very reminiscent of the type of yarn Gold Medal published all through the Fifties, only IT RHYMES WITH LUST was published just as the Gold Medal line was getting started. The main influence on Drake and Waller’s script was probably the noir movies of the late Forties. It works very well in graphic novel format. The script has the rat-a-tat-tat pace you’d expect. The art is easy to follow and very effective.

I talked about Drake in the last post about him. Leslie Waller wasn’t nearly as prolific, but he wrote some well-regarded thrillers under his own name as well as some popular movie novelizations. Matt Baker was a well-known comic book artist in the Forties and Fifties. Ray Osrin worked as an artist and inker in comic books and later became an editorial cartoonist. All of them do excellent work in IT RHYMES WITH LUST.

Archer St. John followed this publication with another mystery graphic novel, THE CASE OF THE WINKING BUDDHA, written by Manning Lee Stokes with art by Charles Raab. This one seems to be a lot harder to find than IT RHYMES WITH LUST. Neither sold well, and that was the end of the experiment as far as St. John was concerned. Since IT RHYMES WITH LUST is readily available, I don’t hesitate to recommend it to fans of hardboiled crime fiction. I really enjoyed it.

The Ghost Riders - Philip Ketchum

Young rancher Johnny Lang returns to his hometown in New Mexico after serving five years in prison. He was guilty of the robbery he committed, but there were extenuating circumstances. Johnny was railroaded behind bars anyway by his enemy, local cattle baron Ben Mohegan. In most traditional Western novels, Johnny would want to settle the score with Mohegan, but not in Philip Ketchum’s THE GHOST RIDERS, published as half of an Ace Double with William Heuman’s HARDCASE HALLORAN in 1963. Johnny doesn’t plan to stay long; he just wants to pay a visit to the old home place and then light out for Oregon. No more trouble, he vows.

Yeah, you know that’s not going to last long.

Johnny winds up in a shooting scrape and has to head for the hills to hide out from a posse. While he’s doing that, an old friend shows up looking for him, and that leads to Johnny getting involved in a beautiful stranger’s vengeance quest, as she has a grudge against Mohegan, too. Not only that, the smaller ranchers in the area are tired of Mohegan riding roughshod over them and have decided to fight back against him, and of course they figure Johnny will jump at the chance to lead them. Nope, after being in prison, Johnny just wants peace. If only people would stop shooting at him . . .

Veteran pulpster and paperbacker Philip Ketchum knew how to spin a fast-moving, hardboiled Western yarn, that’s for sure. THE GHOST RIDERS races along with plenty of action and interesting, well-developed characters. For somebody who doesn’t want trouble, Johnny Lang sure finds plenty of it, and everything comes to a climax that’s particularly satisfying to me, although I can’t say why without venturing too far into spoiler territory. Like nearly all the Ace Double Westerns I’ve read, this is a solid, enjoyable novel, and if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, THE GHOST RIDERS is well worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, May 1940

Rudolph Belarski provides the eye-catching cover for this issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, and spinning the yarns inside are Robert Bloch, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Carl Jacobi, Stewart Sterling, Arthur K. Barnes, house-name Will Garth, and lesser-known pulpsters Russell Stanton and David Bernard. With covers and titles like that, it's no wonder the Weird Menace pulps sold so well for a while.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine, April 15, 1939

This issue of the iconic Western pulp WESTERN STORY sports a particularly striking cover by Norman Saunders. And it's an all-star issue as far as the authors represented in its pages, too: T.T. Flynn, Harry F. Olmsted, Ray Nafziger, Cliff Farrell, Tom Roan, Tom Curry, and Frank Richardson Pierce. Man, that's a strong line-up! The Flynn story is "Death Marks Time in Trampas", which was the title story in a collection published by Five Star in 1998 that was my introduction to his work. I've read a bunch of his novels and stories since then and enjoyed them all.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Strictly For Cash - James Hadley Chase (Rene Raymond)

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 20, 2009.)

If James Hadley Chase (who was actually an Englishman named Rene Raymond) is remembered for anything these days, it’s probably either his notorious, highly successful first novel, NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, or the charges of plagiarism leveled at one of his early novels, BLONDE’S REQUIEM, which some people thought borrowed a little too generously from Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. One of the people who thought so was Chandler himself, which led to an apology from Chase. (I didn't know at the time of the original post that Chase also ran into plagiarism accusations regarding NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH and William Faulkner's SANCTUARY. Much has been written about this online if you'd care to look it up.) Despite that embarrassment, Chase went on to a long, prolific career as an author of mysteries, thrillers, and noirish crime yarns.

I read a few books by Chase nearly thirty years ago and don’t remember much about them. A recent conversation with one of the readers of this blog prompted me to try another one, and since I’d recently picked up a copy of STRICTLY FOR CASH at Half Price Books, that’s the one I read. Originally published in England by Robert Hale in 1951, it’s one of numerous Chase titles reprinted in the U.S. by Pocket Books during the Seventies. It’s the story of down-on-his-luck boxer Johnny Farrar (is there any other kind of boxer in books like this?), who’s hitchhiking through Florida when he gets mixed up with a crooked fight promoter (is there any other kind?) and a beautiful but quite possibly dangerous dame (is there any other . . . never mind, you get the idea). So far there’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times before, even though it’s reasonably well-written and enjoyable.

But then Chase pulls a switch and starts playing with time in a way you don’t often see in yarns like this. Ultimately, you may know where he’s going with his story, but you can’t be sure how he’s going to get there, and some of the actual twists are fairly unexpected, too. Like every noir protagonist, Johnny thinks he’s doing the right thing, or at least the only thing he can, but the mess he’s in keeps getting worse and worse until everything comes together in an operatic, almost surreal climax. Along the way, the action scenes are very well-done, and there are some nice lines that made me laugh out loud, like “She had a figure that would make a mountain goat lose its foothold.”

Another charge leveled against Chase is that his books, although set in America, don’t sound American. Well, that’s true in this case, sometimes distractingly so. I’m as much of a supporter of pure texts as the next person, but really, in a book set in America, and published by an American publisher (as these Pocket Books reprints were), a character shouldn’t be pumping petrol and putting something in the boot of the car. It wouldn’t have been too hard for an editor to change those references, and it would have improved the book because sometimes they were so jarring that they knocked me right out of the story.

That said, I enjoyed STRICTLY FOR CASH quite a bit. Chase’s style really keeps the reader turning the pages most of the time. I have several more of his books on hand, and I have no doubt that I’ll read them. And it won’t take me another thirty years, either. (I've actually read several more Chase novels since the time of the original post, and I think there's a very good chance I'll read more in the future.)