This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates

 This Red-Handed Wretch:

Bill Hickman and The Murder of Richard Yates

by Ben Boulden

 

 

In the dying minutes of October 18, 1857, the notorious lawman, lawyer, and admitted murderer, William Adams Hickman – labeled, “this red-handed wretch,” by the New York World and popularly known as Wild Bill – “used up” the mountaineer Richard E. Yates. The Mormon militia, called the Nauvoo Legion, had arrested Yates on a charge of spying for the approaching U.S. Army during the Utah War. Hickman claimed Yates’s killing had been ordered by Mormon prophet Brigham Young. A claim contradicted by the men Hickman implicated in Yates’s murder, and by Mormon historians ever since, but the conditions in Utah at the time, gives a ring of possibility to Hickman’s claim anyway. ...

[Read the rest of “This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates” at Dark City Underground]

Misogyny & Murder: Betty Webb’s Polygamy Mysteries

 Misogyny & Murder: Betty Webb’s Polygamy Mysteries

by Ben Boulden 

Mystery writer and journalist Betty Webb made a literary splash when her second Lena Jones detective novel, Desert Wives, was published by Poisoned Pen Press in 2002. The likable Lena – an orphan and socially-conscious private eye working the upscale Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Scottsdale – finds more than murder while undercover in the fictional polygamist town of Purity on the Utah-Arizona border. This swath of arid desert is called the Arizona Strip and home to more sheep than people, and more religious sects practicing polygyny – a form of polygamy where one man marries multiple women – than anywhere else in the United States. Including the infamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), headquartered in Colorado City, Arizona, and its outlaw “prophet” Warren Jeffs. Publishers Weekly called Desert Wives, “a searing exposé of the abuses of contemporary polygamy,” and then added, “[it] could do for polygamy what [Stowe’s] Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slavery.”
      Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times’ well-respected mystery critic, wrote:

“If Betty Webb had gone undercover and written Desert Wives as a piece of investigative journalism, she’d probably be up for a Pulitzer.”

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Jim Kjelgaard's Adventure Magazine Stories

Jim Kjelgaard’s Adventure Magazine Stories

by Ben Boulden

Jim Kjelgaard (pronounced kel-guard) is best remembered for his young adult adventures featuring dogs, young boys, and always set in the outdoors. A few of his best-known books are Big Red (1945), Irish Red (1951), Outlaw Red (1953), and Stormy (1959). But Kjelgaard was also a regular contributor to pulp and slick magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, including Black Mask, Argosy, Western Story, Weird Tales – it’s reported he and Robert Bloch cowrote “The Man Who Told the Truth,” but the byline in the magazine identifies only Kjelgaard – Short Stories, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post and many others. He had a particularly good relationship with Adventure where (by my count) 36 of his stories appeared between 1942 and 1963.
      Of those, 16 chronicled the exploits of a Native American poacher, Charley Hoe Handle, outwitting a game warden named Horse Jenkins....

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

A Little About Jack Higgins: A Life in Writing

 A Little About Jack Higgins: A Life in Writing

by Ben Boulden

Jack Higgins is a familiar name to most readers. His thrillers have routinely appeared on international bestseller lists since his breakout novel, The Eagle Has Landed, was published in 1975. A book that has been printed more than 50 million times. But Jack Higgins, whose real name is Harry Patterson, wrote 35 novels before The Eagle Has Landed made him a household name, and many of those early novels, especially those published between East of Desolation (the first book with the name Jack Higgins attached) in 1968 and The Run to Morning in 1974, are quite good. At their best, a Jack Higgins novel is linear, well-plotted, exciting, and with a style that is lyrical, and characters that are wonderfully romantic. At their worst, they are bland and lifeless. Higgins’ weakest novels, on average, are those published after 1990, which is about the same time his character Sean Dillon appeared on the scene. Many, but certainly not all, of the Sean Dillon books are weighted by interchangeable plots, characters that are more caricature than realistic, and a stark style that, at its worst, sinks into dullness.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Review: "Domino Island" by Desmond Bagley

Domino Island – published in 2019 by HarperCollins – is Desmond Bagley’s “lost” novel. The manuscript (ms) was discovered by the researcher Philip Eastwood at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center where Bagley’s papers are housed. Along with the ms – titled Because Salton Died by Bagley – were letters between Bagley and his editor at Collins, Bob Knittel, and handwritten notes on the ms, identifying planned changes for publication, but Bagley pulled Because Salton Died back from Collins and the changes were never made. There are a couple hypotheses about why Bagley stopped work on the book. The first and most obvious is perhaps Bagley decided it was a hopeless project and there is some evidence supporting this. In the letter to his editor accompanying the ms, Bagley wrote, “I had a bad case of ‘writer’s block’[.]” He had started and abandoned four “standard Bagleys” – adventure thrillers – and he decided to try something entirely new to get his creative energy going....

[For the rest of the article/review click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Review: "The Spotted Cats" by William G. Tapply

       William G. Tapply’s tenth Brady Coyne novel, The Spotted Cats, is a measured affair defined by its rich characters and Coyne’s sense of loyalty and justice. Coyne is a Boston lawyer with an aversion to work and a proclivity for fly fishing. He grudgingly accepts an invitation to spend a weekend in the Cape Cod home of his client and friend, Jeff Newton. Newton was a professional big game hunter until being mauled by a Zambian leopard, called Nyalubwe by the natives. The encounter left him permanently disabled, bitter, and angry.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Review: "The Revenger" by Jon Messmann

The 1970’s men’s fiction market was rotten with revenge tales populated by veterans of America’s unpopular war in Vietnam. These isolated, disaffected, and angry men brought a new war of vigilante justice to the crime ridden streets of America’s cities. The literary movement began with Don Pendleton’s multi-million copy selling War Against the Mafia [Pinnacle, 1969] featuring Mack Bolan, an Army sniper, home from the war to bury his family: father, mother, and sister. Their deaths were ruled as murder-suicide, which was true since Mack’s dad had pulled the trigger, but Bolan knew the context of his father’s violence. After losing his job, he had borrowed money from the mafia and their pressure for repayment drove him to murder. Bolan is a righteous hero, never doubting his mission, losing focus (even to look at a beautiful woman), or showing regret for his actions.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

by Ben Boulden

Harrison Arnston – Harry to his friends and pretty much everyone else – wrote nine published novels between 1987 and 1994. The critic Jon L. Breen, in his Armchair Detective column “Novel Verdicts” called Arnston’s 1991 legal thriller, Act of Passion, “unusually well plotted” with a trial that “is expertly covered…with some terrific Q-and-A along the way.” Arnston followed Act of Passion with another excellent legal thriller, Trade-Off, in 1992, but his work wandered across the genre in unexpected ways. He turned the 1991 techno-thriller The Big One – where a super-secret government agency is covering up a new discovery for predicting earthquakes – into an enjoyable and outlandish detective story, and The Venus Diaries, Arnston’s final published novel, is a swift tale about an extraordinarily beautiful and brutal assassin for hire, raised in post-World War 2 France by an embittered veteran of the communist partisans.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Professional Tennis, Amateur Spying: Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith Thrillers

 Professional Tennis, Amateur Spying: Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith Thrillers

by Ben Boulden

The six Brad Smith espionage thrillers, published by Tor between 1989 and 1994, are Jack Bickham’s most mature work. The critics were enthusiastic. The New York Times’ thriller review columnist, Newgate Callendar, was a consistent champion. He compared the Smith books to Dick Francis’s mysteries: “Bickham is doing for tennis what Dick Francis has done for horse racing.” He called the books, “skillful,” “smooth,” “highly enjoyable,” and “exciting.” Wes Lukowsky, in Booklist, called the series “deftly plotted.” Publishers Weekly, in its review of The Davis Cup Conspiracy, said, “Bickham deftly flips from tennis lore to the spying game in his customary style, nailing another ace.”

[for the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground…]

Hot Off the Presses: "The Tenth Virgin" by Gary Stewart from Brash Books

 

      A new edition of a great mystery novel is officially on the street: The Tenth Virgin, by Gary Stewart. Set in Salt Lake City and Southern Utah in the mid-1980s, The Tenth Virgin introduces New York private eye Gabe Utley, as he searches for the missing teenage daughter of his high school sweetheart. The trail takes him from Salt Lake City to the poverty-stricken polygamist clans in Southern Utah. The Tenth Virgin is richly detailed with a vivid setting, believable characterization, and sizzling mystery.
      The new Brash Books edition, bringing The Tenth Virgin back into print after more than 30 years, includes an Introduction by an unsung writer – I think his name is Ben Boulden – and is available as a trade paperback and on Kindle.
      Check out my critical article about Gary Stewart at Dark City Underground, which is suspiciously similar to The Tenth Virgin’s Introduction, and (more importantly) read the book! 

Go to Amazon's page for The Tenth Virgin

Dark City Underground

      Any readers kind enough to frequent Gravetapping have noticed an eerie quiet has settled in over the past several months. I was bored with blogging and things slipped and slipped until it was easy for me to ignore the blog. But things are changing. I’ve started blogging again, but the address where I’m appearing has changed. The new place is Dark City Underground. So far, I have 21 posts at the new label and from my perspective the work is bigger and better. I have a couple detailed critical author profiles I’m particularly proud of (and more coming soon):

Polygamists, Outlaws & Mormons: The Crime and Western Tales of Gary Stewart

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

I’ve posted an essay – The Cat & The Cowboy – about my late-cat Pete, along with a hybrid fiction/non-fiction story about the outlaw Bill Hickman: Honor Among Horse Thieves: Wild Bill Hickman’s Christmas Day Shootout. The first of several stories I have planned featuring the horse thief, murderer, and self-proclaimed Mormon Destroying Angel that roamed the western frontier from the 1850s to the 1870s.
      I’ve also been doing my regular routine of reviewing books, both old and new.
      If you’ve enjoyed stopping in at Gravetapping, I think you’ll like Dark City Underground even more. And if you’ve been kind enough to link your blog or website to Gravetapping, would you mind linking Dark City Underground, too? And if I haven’t linked to your blog or website from Dark City Underground, send me a reminder and I will.
      Thanks, and we’ll be talking soon…