And the Winner is...

A winner was randomly chosen from the list of entrants to receive the ACE Double (G-638) The Action at Redstone Creek by Merle Constiner / A Time to Shoot It Out by Edwin Booth. Thanks to everyone who entered; there were enough that I may do another contest. Maybe. The winner is...Craig Clarke. Congratulations Craig. Also, you should check out Craig's terrific blog Somebody Dies where he reviews crime, western, and more.

Also related to the contest, I received several terrific recommendations for pulp western writers. Including:

Donald Hamilton, Marvin H. Albert (aka Al Conroy), Harry Whittington, H.A. DeRosso--I just started a story collection and so far I am blown away by the bleak power of his writing--T.T. Flynn, Peter Dawson, Luke Short, Clifton Adams, and Jack Slade.

Thanks to everyone!

"The View" by Brian Garfield

I found an older issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine over the holiday weekend—July 1983—that contained a Brian Garfield story. It cost a princely two dollars; it didn’t take long to both purchase it and devour the Garfield story. Not long enough at all since the short stories of Brian Garfield are more difficult to find than one would think.

The story is titled “The View” and it is a California story—land developers, Hollywood actors, and deep muscle massage professionals. There is also a murder, a touch of adultery, a terrific view, and a condominium builder who wants to take it—the view—away.

Christopher works as a massage therapist, but his true ambition is as a screenwriter. He has several clients on a mountaintop overlooking the Los Angeles basin, and as the story opens he is at the front door of former film star Tom X. Todhunter—an 84 year-old veteran of both silent films and talkies. The old man doesn’t answer and when Christopher tries the knob it opens and he finds Todhunter looking forlornly out the large picture window at the back of his house.

It seems that his neighbor, also a client of Christopher’s, has purchased the surrounding properties with the intention to build a large condominium complex that will completely block Tom’s view. And he is less than excited about the prospect. He tells Tom that they need to stop it from happening, but damn if he knows how….

“The View” is pure fun. It is less mystery and more suspense. It is expertly plotted and written, just as one would expect from Mr Garfield, but there is also a touch of humor and poetic justice. The prose is understated and the story moves with a quick and light pace—it is made for reading, and it reads with a pleasant and expert smoothness. The characters are surprisingly well defined in short space, and the story is perfect for a lazy bedtime read.

“The View” is a professional and competent story and it begs the question; Why isn’t there a Brian Garfield collection available on the market. He is one of the defining writers of both suspense and western fiction from his generation and both his short work, and for the most part, his novels are largely forgotten. If anyone is listening, I will be the first in line to buy a Brian Garfield collection when it is published.

New Authors: 2009

Last year I participated in a meme that asked for a list of all the writers I read for the first time. I really enjoyed it. This year there has been no such meme, but J. Kingston Pierce over at The Rap Sheet made a list and I thought I would follow his lead.

The list is in order of reading. I excluded all non-fiction. I have also included any additional titles I read by the author in 2009. I added ten new fiction writers to my personal “read” library—the exact number as I added in 2008. Five of the 10 are pulp writers and the other five are contemporary, although the novels were original published anywhere from the mid-1990’s to 2009.

Stephen J. Cannell
—On the Grind, February

Paul Harris
—The Secret Keeper, April

Jack Kilborn (aka J.A. Konrath)
—Afraid, May

W.L. Heath
—Violent Saturday, May

Stuart Kaminsky
—The Rockford Files: The Green Bottle, June
—The Rockford Files: Devils on My Doorstep, September

J.M. Flynn
—Deep Six, June

Robert Colby
—The Quaking Widow, July

Sid Jacobson
—Vlad the Impaler, October

Edmond Hamilton
—Fugitive of the Stars, October

Merle Constiner
—The Action at Redstone Creek, November
—Guns of Q Cross, November

Odds & Ends: Thanksgiving Style

1. My wife and I are going to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in style—in Las Vegas, Mojave, and maybe, just maybe Baker, California. It is where all the truly beautiful people go for holidays. So needless to say it’s going to be a little quiet around here for a few days.

2. If you are of the mind there is an interesting essay on the Dorchester website written by Ed Gorman about his recent Leisure release Death Ground. He gives an idea of its origin and even discusses a review that compared it to a Spaghetti Western. Click Here

3. I’ve been reading pulp writer Merle Constiner recently and he really had a knack for writing witty and downright funny dialogue. I finished his novel Guns at Q Cross yesterday and the following line has rattled through my head more than once:

"He'd be more at home with a green buffalo hide, behind a pile of manure."

And don’t forget that I am giving away a copy of Constiner’s The Action at Redstone Creek. The deadline is November 30, 2009. Click Here

4. This is probably old news to most of you, but I discovered a fantastic website that has .pdf files of hundreds of old pulp stories. The stories include the full text—very clean and easy to read—as well as any illustrations that ran with the story. The site is PulpGen.com. If you haven’t been there, you should take a look around. Click Here

5. Happy Thanksgiving!

SLAMMER by Allan Guthrie

Nick Glass is a rookie prison guard in a Scottish prison. He has been on the job six weeks with mixed results—the other guards mock and make trouble for him and the inmates don’t respect him. At home he has a five-year old daughter and a wife. His wife tends to drink too much, and is just on the backside of an affair. To say Nick has a little stress is an understatement.

To make things worse Nick is approached by one of the inmates and asked to mule drugs inside. The inmate gives him two choices: 1) make an easy buck; or 2) his little family gets hurt in a big way. Nick is in big trouble as he desperately tries to protect his family at home and his own life at work.

Slammer is the sort of novel that creeps up on you in about three pages. It starts hard and strong and never lets up. Glass is a regular guy caught in a nasty and impossible situation. He doesn’t belong in the prison. He is a nice guy, both weak and sincere. He, much like his name, is prone to fracture. And Guthrie makes sure Glass does just that.

The novel opens with Glass in the office of the prison psychiatrist. It is a mandatory visit and Nick is less than pleased to be there. The psychiatrist is an instrument Mr Guthrie uses to foreshadow and then define the undoing of Nick Glass. He is a skewed sentiment of sanity in a dark and insane world. A world that envelopes Nick and threatens to destroy him. And Nick is the perfect object—he is prone to fantasy, and as the novel progresses, he begins to mistake his fantasy for reality. It is a trip into hell. A trip the reader knows is coming with each progressive sentence, paragraph and page, but is helpless to stop.

Slammer is a wonderfully executed novel. It is reminiscent of Guthrie’s first novel Two-Way Split, but it is better and executed with a higher skill set. It is short, 263 pages, but it does not lack meaning or story. The prose is hardboiled, lean and smart. The dialogue is crisp, and the atmosphere is weighty and oppressive. It is a fine example of the new noir: a hopeless, distraught and shameless (in a good way) vision of human condition.

Book Giveaway

This is a little different. I have been searching out novels by the pulp writer Merle Constiner, and in my enthusiasm I picked up two copies of his ACE Double The Action at Redstone Creek. And I want to give it away. It is numbered G-638, and it includes A Time to Shoot it Out (originally titled Renegade Guns) by Edwin Booth. The publication date is 1967.

If you are interested in adding this classic ACE Double to your collection send an email to zulu1611@yahoo.com with “Book Giveaway” in the subject line along with your name and the address you would like it shipped in the body of the email by Monday November 30 at 11:59pm MST. I will then select an entry at random, notify the winner and ship the book in early December.

I wrote a review for The Action at Redstone Creek a week or so ago; click Here to read it.

Also, I would love to hear about any old westerns you remember enjoying—titles or authors. Feel free to email me, or post a comment.

Note. The above scans are not of the actual book you will receive.

Jack Higgins

Jack Higgins has been entertaining me since I was twelve or thirteen. I started with his bestsellers and then fell—literally—into his earlier work when I found several old paperbacks at a library sale. The titles included In the Hour Before Midnight, The Keys of Hell, and East of Desolation. I can still remember finding that cache—each of the books were Fawcett Gold Medal’s from the 1970s. They had those terrifically tight and sexy covers from the era, and the stories. What can I say about the stories except they were/are the best adventure thrillers I have ever read.

I’m reading one of Higgins’ early titles now—The Iron Tiger—and as often happens I did a search for Mr Higgins and found an article that appeared in Reuters this past January. I learned a few things—the first, is that 2009 marks his fiftieth year as a professional writer, and that he was diagnosed several years ago with an illness that made writing impossible. There is also a short interview where he discusses The Eagle Has Landed; how it was received, how it changed his life, and how his original publisher didn’t want it.

A snippet:

“CANBERRA (Reuters) - Novelist Harry Patterson, better known as thriller writer Jack Higgins, celebrates 50 years of writing this year, counting his blessing.

“Patterson, 79, was diagnosed about eight years ago with essential tremor syndrome, a progressive neurological disease, that made him shake so much that about two years ago he found he could not pick up a pen and was about to give up writing.

“But while suffering a seizure friend's house, he fell and knocked his head, ending up in hospital -- and overnight his tremors disappeared, allowing him to write again.”

To read the rest go Here.

To read a little appreciation I wrote last year go Here.