Review: "Split Image" by Ron Faust

 

Split Image by Ron Faust Forge, 1997   Split Image, which is Ron Faust’s tenth published novel, is best read cold and this review is loaded with spoilers. Read ahead at your own peril but rest assured it is fantastic. But if you insist… “It occurred to me—and this was my first conscious thought upon ‘awakening’—that the crows did not object to the carnage. Of course not. They were scavengers and were impatiently waiting their opportunity. Even so, I could not entirely dispel the notion that they were judging me—small black magistrates, feathery clerics.” This idea is Andrew Neville’s—a failed playwright with three early critical successes and nothing since, now making his living as an editor of a corporate newsletter. On a whim he travels to a primitive hunting cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. It is autumn, and deer are in season. Andrew takes an old bow from the cabin without any expectations of killing a deer, but when a buck cuts his trail, he is overtaken by a lusty greed. The deer is wounded and while tracking it Andrew comes to a man cleaning a buck. Andrew believes the deer is his, but the man calmly and reasonably claims it as his own. The two have a cold exchange of words; at the end Andrew kills the other man. He doesn’t remember the actual killing, but Andrew knows he did. He cleans up the cabin, disposes of the clothing and other evidence and returns to Chicago. A few days later he learns the man’s identity and realizes, for the first time, he had once known the man. They were in the same theater company, and while Andrew failed as a writer his victim found success in Hollywood. Andrew, after meeting his victim’s widow at the funeral, calculatingly insinuates himself into the dead man’s life. He moves into the boat house on his victim’s wooded estate, wears his clothing, befriends his only child, and smoothly woos his wife. The only barrier between Andrew taking over the man’s life is the despicable Roland Scheiss— “ ‘Scheiss means ‘shit’ in German, doesn’t it?’ ” Scheiss was hired by the murdered man’s parents to prove his widow, and by extension, Andrew Neville killed their son. Scheiss is truly loathsome. He is filthy, crude, and corrupt. His game is blackmail and he begins calling Andrew at odd moments of the night threatening, cajoling, taunting. Andrew remains calm, but his sanity begins to unravel. He converses with his victim in the dark hours, small meaningless events begin to weigh heavily on him, and finally his narrative turns suspect—is the tale truly happening as it is being told, or is the reader being deceived? Split Image is a fine novel—dark, riveting, and curious. It is as much literature as commercial. It weaves an enticing mixture of Edgar Allan Poe—think “The Tell-Tale Heart”—Alfred Hitchcock, and a 1950’s Gold Medal paperback. Andrew Neville is a cold, almost empty narrator, who is as interesting, and enigmatic as any character in popular literature. The prose is sparse, poetic and meaningful. It is also satisfying, thought-provoking, and damn good. And I mean, damn good. You should read it, really.

Ron Faust—before setting off on an adventuresome and transient adult life—was raised in Chicago and nearby Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Which means Split Image’s setting is Faust’s home ground and Wisconsin’s dark woods are deftly woven into the tale with a frightening realism. So much so that Ron’s widow, Gayl, told me she couldn’t read Split Image because it felt too familiar to her, too real. You see, Gayl had been raised in the Lake Geneva area, too, and the pair married at a young age. She had followed Ron first to Colorado Springs and then to San Diego and Taos, New Mexico. Key West, Florida fit in there somewhere, too, before the couple returned to Lake Geneva in the early-1990s. Ron died of bladder cancer, the same disease that had killed is father, on August 31, 2011. His ashes were scattered in Lake Geneva. He was 75 years old.

Purchase a Kindle edition here and a paperback here at Amazon

Stephen Marlowe

 

A little piece about Stephen Marlowe for… Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories by Stephen Marlowe A 3 PLAY Book   Introduction     Stephen Marlowe—born as Milton Lesser on August 7, 1928, to Norman and Syliva Lesser in Brooklyn, New York—purportedly said: “At the age of eight, I wanted to be a writer and I never changed my mind.” And was he ever a writer. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from William & Mary in 1949, with a referral from science fiction writer Damon Knight, Marlowe took a job with the famous Scott Meredith Literary Agency. The same place writers like Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lester del Rey, and Lawrence Block, started their careers. He sold his first story, a science fiction novelette titled “All Heroes Are Hated!,” to Amazing Stories in 1950. Marlowe, after that first sale, concentrated almost exclusively on science fiction throughout the first half of the decade; publishing dozens of stories in pulps and digests like Imagination, Marvel Science Stories, Galaxy, and Fantastic. His first novel, Earthbound, as by Milton Lesser, was a speculative young adult job for the John C. Winston Company. Earthbound was released the same day Marlowe, 23-years-old at the time, reported for his Korean War service in 1952. According to a 2007 interview with Ed Gorman, Marlowe had forgotten about contracting for a second book with Winston: “I was at a winter training exercise at Camp Drum [Western New York], where I was temporarily attached to the 82nd Airborne. I got a frantic call from my agent: How [are] you coming on the second Winston novel? I’d forgotten all about it and it was due in a week. I spent a weekend telling myself it was impossible. Then on Monday the colonel I worked for, on hearing of my plight, said, ‘Son, how much are they paying you to write that book?’ I told him the advance was a thousand bucks. ‘Son,’ he told me, ‘even the U.S. Army can’t stand between you and that kind of money. Go home and write that book.’ ” Marlowe wrote the book, The Star Seekers, in less than a week, delivered it, but “never had the courage to read it.” The Star Seekers hit bookshelves in 1953 and has been seldom seen ever since. In the mid-1950s, Marlowe shifted his focus from science fiction—although he continued to write speculative tales into the early-1960s—to suspense. He contributed to mystery pulps like Manhunt, Hunted, and Accused, and wrote novels for the paperback original market. His first suspense novel was Catch the Brass Ring, which was one-half of an Ace Double published in 1954. A year later, Marlowe introduced the character that made him famous: Chester Drum. Drum was a Washington, D.C. private eye specializing in international cases. An original idea in the mid-20th Century since the hardboiled dicks of the era were set in large American cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The international settings of Drum’s cases are vivid with an exotic realism that came from Marlowe’s real-life geography hopping. In an interview, Marlowe said, “[I’ve] lost count of how many places I’ve lived—surely more than a hundred in twenty-odd countries.” The series was a hit and Gold Medal, the premium paperback publisher of the day, sold millions of the books.  There were 20 Chester Drum novels between 1955, when The Second Longest Night appeared, and 1968 when Drum Beat—Marianne was published. The novels were accompanied by eight short stories published in Manhunt, Accused, Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The New York Times mystery critic, Anthony Boucher, wrote: “few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and sex.” After Gold Medal dropped Marlowe’s Chester Drum series, he turned to more ambitious hardcover suspense novels. These big books—longer and more complex than his earlier novels—had similar exotic settings as the Drum stories. This, along with Marlowe’s ability to tighten suspense, scene-by-scene, and what Boucher had earlier called his understated sex and violence gave these books punch. The first of these, Come Over, Red Rover—if one discounts Marlowe’s 1966 hardcover, The Search for Bruno Heidler—appeared in 1968. Others of note are Summit (1970), The Cawthorn Journals (1975), and The Valkyrie Encounter, which Marlowe called, in that same Ed Gorman interview, his favorite of his own hardcover suspense novels.    The 1980s saw Marlowe pivot again into biographical novels, which the mystery author and critic Bill Pronzini called “brilliantly conceived [and] meticulously researched.” The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus appeared in 1987; The Lighthouse at the End of the World, about Edgar Allan Poe, in 1995; and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes—which, according to Pronzini, Marlowe considered his best novel and Ed Gorman called “his masterpiece”—was published in 1996. Over his long career, Stephen Marlowe received the Prix Gutenberg du Livre, a French literary award, in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1997. As we said earlier, Marlowe was born as Milton Lesser, but sometime in the late-1950s (after his Chester Drum novels had made a big splash) he legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe. Shortly after graduating from William & Mary, Marlowe—then still known as Milton Lesser—married Leona Lang on June 2, 1950. Leona, who went by Leigh, was a trained psychologist. The couple had two daughters but divorced in the early-1960s. Marlowe then, in 1964, married Ann Humbert in Manhattan. The pair were married until Marlowe’s death from “myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder” on February 22, 2008, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories features three of Marlowe’s best speculative tales—one novelette and two shorts. “Divvy Up,” Amazing Stories, 1960, is a dystopian treasure about one man’s survival in a world where death is a relief from a tortured and soulless world. Its dark themes would have made for a marvelous episode of the original The Twilight Zone. “Finders Keepers,” Fantastic Universe, 1953, is a light-hearted tale about time traveling historians and a search going all the way back to Adam and Eve. “The Passionate Pitchman,” Fantastic, 1956, is a slam-bang—read that as exciting—adventure novelette about gangsters, heists, and teleportation. Now on with the stories…   Cover by Karadraws.com

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Review: "Robak's Witch" by Joe L. Hensley

 

Robak’s Witch by Joe L. Hensley St. Martin’s Press, 1997   In the Spring of 1992, while perusing the stacks at Waldenbooks, I found a mass market paperback tagged at 10-cents. It was a PaperJacks Bogie’s Mystery—remember that long gone Canada-based publisher?—titled Robak’s Fire, by Joe L. Hensley. I snapped it up like all I had was a dime, which was probably about right, and took it home. I started reading that same afternoon and turned its final page the next morning. The rural Indiana setting, the colorful and believable characters, and the main player, a lawyer named Don Robak, all rang true and the plot, which has mostly been lost from my head over the decades, was exciting enough that I’ve carried Robak’s Fire around with me ever expecting that I’ll read it again. I haven’t read it again, which isn’t so strange, but Robak’s Fire is the only Joe L. Hensley novel I had ever read, which is downright weird. Until now, anyway, because Hensley’s eleventh (of twelve) Robak mystery, Robak’s Witch, is (finally) my second excursion into Robak’s world. In Robak’s Witch, Don Robak has just been elected as a judge—he will take the bench at the first of the year—and recovering from an abdominal gunshot wound he received in the courtroom while representing a woman in a divorce proceeding. The details of the shooting, which are relevant to the story being told, are spread throughout the narrative like so many tasty tidbits. Robak, who has quit his practice and plans to take it easy and heal during Indiana’s fickle autumn, is facing his own divorce. His wife Jo took their son to live with her sister in Chicago. So when Robak’s college buddy, Kevin Smalley, calls and asks for his help on a death penalty case, Robak pretends to hesitate but agrees with some enthusiasm. Bertha Jones, an herbalist labeled as a witch by a local millennialist pastor, Reverend Allwell, is accused of poisoning her nephew and niece, Jim and Mary, by dosing a stew she made with nicotine. Bertha had cooked the stew outside in the yard and most of her neighbors in the trailer park where she lived saw the teenagers die in excruciating pain. The good Reverend Allwell was so upset, he tried setting Bertha on fire. There is little doubt in the community of Bertha’s guilt and Robak’s job is to ensure the defense has performed its due diligence for Bertha. But what Robak finds is a community, including government officials, fearful of Allwell and his followers. Robak’s Witch is a sparkling example of a low-key regional legal thriller. Robak, nursing his gut wound and often in pain, perfectly narrates the story with colorful character descriptions, easy legal explanations, and tense—well written—suspense. There is a smooth climactic twist that is more surprising than it should have been and, in the end, the good guys win. The background themes about fundamentalist religion, White Christian Nationalism, and hate mongering are as relevant—perhaps even more so—today as they were in the late-1990s. Robak’s Witch is simply terrific! Now if only I will read another Joe L. Hensley book before three decades ticks by again.

Robak’s Witch, and all of Joe L. Hensley’s Robak novels are out-of-print, which is a shame—but it does give me an excuse to haunt a few used bookshops.

From Ed Gorman's Desk: "Ross Macdonald"

from ED GORMAN’S Desk

Ross Macdonald from Aug. 1, 2007   The first Ross Macdonald novel I ever read was The Way Some People Die. He was John Ross Macdonald then, still going back and forth I suppose with John D. MacDonald about the use of names so similar.      I was fifteen, steeped in Gold Medals and Lions and Ace Doubles. By then I’d read a good deal of Hammett and Chandler as well. None of it prepared me for Ross Macdonald.      I was too ignorant to pick up on stylistic differences. What I noticed were the characters. Few of them were new to me as types, most of them in fact were in most of the hardboiled novels I’d read, but Macdonald brought a depth and humanity to them that made me think not of other crime writers but of authors such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway and James T. Farrell and Graham Greene, my idols at the time. This was real no bullshit psychological writing.      Just as superheroes never outgrow their need for milk, I’ve never outgrown my need for the novels and stories of Ross Macdonald. I share his view of humanity, that amalgam of fascination, disappointment, anger, and sorrow that fill his work.      If you want to remind yourself of how good he was even early on, I’d recommend The Archer Files edited by Tom Nolan and published by Crippen & Landru. In addition to being a fine looking collection, it contains all the published Lew Archer short stories plus an intriguing section called “Notes.” Macdonald started stories that he planned to someday finish, a way of keeping thoughts alive. Most of these sure would have made superb tales.      Then there’s the long introduction by Tom Nolan in which he takes the reader into the work and life of Kenneth Millar; a/k/a Ross Macdonald. Nolan wrote the Edgar-nominated biography of Macdonald and this introduction is almost a synthesis of it in its information, insight and elegantly arranged presentation.      Oh, yes—the stories. There are an even dozen and while some are better than others all of them demonstrate why he became so important so quickly, even though his real fame took many years to achieve. My favorite is an imperfect piece called “Wild Goose Chase.” There’s a sort of gothic frenzy to it that kept me flipping those pages.      This is an essential acquisition for all libraries, home or public.  Click here to check out The Archer Files at Amazon.

This article originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, New Improved Gorman, on Aug. 1, 2007. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a variety of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work) was in the crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the fictional Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America. The New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town could take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an intriguing mix of knight errant and realist…”      But Ed was also a tireless reader and promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror, and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.   Click here to check out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon.

 

Review: "Bertie's Mom" by Jeremiah Healy

“Bertie’s Mom” by Jeremiah Healy Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sep. 1989   “Bertie’s Mom”—which by my count is Jeremiah Healy’s third John Francis Cuddy short story, published between series entries Swan Dive (1988) and Yesterday’s News (1989)—is a clever tale with a sense of humor and a beautiful nudge of irony. When Cuddy is approached by a moderately wealthy elderly widow to find her parakeet, Bertie, he tells her: “Mrs. Addison, I can’t find a parakeet.” But Mrs. Addison convinces John Cuddy he should at least try. Bertie disappeared when Mrs. Addison’s townhouse was burgled—nothing other than the bird was taken. Cuddy starts his search at the pet store where Bertie was purchased and one clue leads him to next until…well, he solves the mystery. “Bertie’s Mom” is a top-notch, almost whimsical without ever being irrelevant, mystery story with a brilliantly twisty ending and an admirably ironic solution. In other words, it kept me turning the pages wondering what was going to happen and, in the end, made me smile. It leans more traditional, but should appeal to readers of hardboiled mysteries, too.

The cover of the Sep. 1989 issue may be the worst, most unrelated, cover of any EQMM I’ve seen. I mean, Hulk Hogan alongside the blurb, 10 WITH MUSCLE, is sorta lame. It does, however, have a solid line-up of stories by writers like Julian Symons, Edward D. Hoch, and James Powell.

 

Booked (and Printed): June 2024

My reading numbers were better in June than in May; although my eyes whined all month like a 13-year-old after being asked to set the dinner table. I read six books—two story anthologies and four novels—and two individual short stories. My reading was squarely within the mystery genre and what I read ranged from good to WOW—which is (WOW, I mean) the highest rating on my atomic book meter. First up—and this one hit the WOW scale with an unheard of WOW+1—was Stark House’s impressive but simply titled 25th Anniversary anthology, The Stark House Anthology, edited by Rick Ollerman & Gregory Shepard (2024). Its 30 stories, all written by authors previously published by Stark House, popped and sizzled. A previously unpublished short novel, So Curse the Day, by Jada M. Davis, is worth the price of admission all by itself. The anthology is big, entertaining, and fun as f— Well, you know… I reviewed it here. The other anthology, Three Strikes—You’re Dead!, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley (2024), is a sports-themed extravaganza of good clean mystery reading. I liked it a lot and you can read my full review here. As for the two shorts—“Bertie’s Mom,” by Jeremiah Healy, and “Phone Call,” by Berton Roueche—both were good. I especially enjoyed the Healy tale, which featured his Boston private eye, John Frances Cuddy. It was clever with a shimmering sense of humor. I read both stories in the September 1989 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine—which has a cringe-inducing photograph of Hulk Hogan on the cover (not shown because…well, just because.)

Okay, now for the novels I booked in June. I liked ’em all! My favorite, and it was a photo finish because Steve Hamilton’s The Second Life of Nick Mason (2016) gave it a run, was David Housewright’s seventh Rushmore McKenzie mystery, Highway 61 (2011). When McKenzie’s girlfriend’s daughter, Erica, asks him to help her father out of a jam he reluctantly agrees. Reluctantly because McKenzie doesn’t like Erica’s dad and as it turns out his instincts are spot-on because he finds himself embroiled in a blackmailing scheme with its roots in prostitution and murder. The slam-bang climax is stunning and leaves the reader wondering which side of the line—good guy or bad—McKenzie is standing. I should write a detailed review of Highway 61, but it’s unlikely since I’ve written too many reviews of the McKenzie novels in recent months and I would hate for my readers (all three of you) to get bored. So... What is more likely is that a review of The Second Life of Nick Mason will appear in the next few weeks because it is a smoking good read. A crime thriller more than a mystery, it chronicles Nick Mason’s unexpected release from a 25-year federal beef for murder. But Nick’s newfound freedom comes with strings, the type that anyone with a conscience would balk at, and more than a few hard choices. The Chicago setting is marvelous and Hamilton’s rich writing gives Nick’s inner-world a vibrant poignancy. The only new book I read was David Bell’s craftsman-like psychological thriller, Storm Warning (2024). Set during a hurricane in an almost abandoned and falling-apart high-rise apartment building on a barrier island not far from Miami, there is more to fear than the weather because a killer is lose. The handful of remaining residents hole up together, but one-by-one they disappear. Bell does an excellent job of concealing the killer, as well as their motive, and building an uneasy tension. Storm Warning isn’t as good as some Bell’s previous outings—Cemetery Girl (2013) and Layover (2019) come to mind—but it is still an excellent summer read. As for that fourth novel, Nightmare at Dawn, by Judson Philips (1971), which is the seventh Peter Sayles outing, was surprising for a couple reasons. First, its cover made it look like a straight action book, but it turned out to be a well-plotted suspense novel with a light mystery. Second, Judson Philips is the real-life name of Hugh Pentecost, the guy who wrote dozens of smart traditional mysteries in second half of the 20th Century. But maybe the biggest surprise? I liked it enough to officially begin hunting for more Judson Philips stories generally and Peter Sayles books in particular.     Fin— Now on to next month…

A William Campbell Gault Intro

A little something I wrote for the William Campbell Gault collection…  Mixology: Science Fiction Stories 3 Play, 2024     Introduction   William Campbell Gault—born on March 9, 1910, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to John and Ella Hovde Gault—is one of the most critically acclaimed post-WW2 writers of genre fiction. He is best known as a mystery and juvenile sports writer for boys, but he successfully published in a variety of genres and in his early career wrote more than 300 stories for the pulps. The novelist Ed Gorman wrote, “[Gault] was a compelling short story writer who looked at the world honestly if sardonically and found a good deal of it to be depressingly hilarious.” Gault had the knack, as the Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia says, of combining “various motifs from the different pulp magazine genres—sports, mystery, science fiction—and blend them into a distinctive style of his own.” Another trait separating Gault’s fiction from that of his peers—it is about something. It is filled with ethical dilemmas, racial tensions, bigotry, and political tolerance. Gault’s writing career began in 1936 when he won a $50 prize in a short story competition sponsored by the Milwaukee Journal. His first professional sales were to the sex magazines of the 1930s, including Paris Nights and Scarlet Adventuress “where”—according to a 1979 interview with Bill Crider—“the dirtiest word we used was ‘curvaceous’.” Gault published those stories with the pseudonym Roney Scott, which he dusted off for his early crime novel, Shakedown (1953), published with Howard Fast’s The Darkness Within as an Ace Double. Shakedown introduced Gault’s popular series character, Joe Puma, but the Joe Puma of Shakedown is a different man from what he is in the later novels and most knowledgeable readers exclude Shakedown from the official Puma literary canon. In the late-1930s Gault began writing for the sports pulps and quickly moved into the mystery pulps “because the sports magazines came out so erratically, ten one month, four the next” that he needed a larger market to earn a living. Gault’s stories appeared in many of the better pulps, including Argosy, Black Mask, Adventure, Dime Detective, and Short Stories. As the popularity of the pulps waned in the late-1940s—which forced Gault to take outside work with McDonnell Douglas and then the U.S. Post Office—he cracked the hardcover and paperback original markets. With Don’t Cry for Me (Dutton, 1952), Gault won an Edgar Award for best first novel. Like most of Gault’s mysteries, Don’t Cry for Me is set in Southern California—Kirkus called it “California complicated”—and its mid-century timeframe is still vibrant with readers more than 70 years after its first publication. Gault wrote a string of standalone crime novels before introducing his first series character, Beverly Hills private eye Brock “The Rock” Callahan, in the 1956 novel, Ring Around Rosa (Dutton). Callahan is a former WW2 OSS operator and he played guard for the Los Angeles Rams. He is an ethical cuss and there is no doubt he will do the right thing every time out. In 1958, Gault’s other private eye, Joe Puma, hit the page in End of a Call Girl (Fawcett Crest). While Callahan is upright, Puma is a little shifty and, as the critic Jon L. Breen wrote, “Joe threatens to spin out of control.” While both the Callahan and Puma books have become cult favorites, Gault claimed he never made much money with any of them. His biggest commercial successes were his juvenile sports novels for boys. The first of these, Thunder Road (Dutton, 1952), remained in print for close to 30 years and was reprinted by two different paperback houses, which, according to his 1979 interview, “helped keep me in used golf balls through my dotage.” So in 1966, Gault quit writing mystery—and everything else—to focus on the more lucrative juvenile market. He wouldn’t return to mysteries again until the late-1970s. But our interest is with William Campbell Gault’s science fiction. A genre that represents only a tiny fraction of his total output, but he served the genre well with several high-quality and thoughtful stories that are as much about morality—and not the easy kind you find in the Bible—as they are about entertainment. Gault’s speculative stories are fine examples of his genre-mixing style. He combines the tension and precise plotting of the mystery with, at times, sports and sporting events, and the audacity of idea-driven science fiction. They are damn entertaining, too. Mixology: Science Fiction Stories, brings together three of Gault’s best speculative tales—two novelettes and one short—published in the 1950s. “Title Fight” (Fantastic Universe, 1956), which showcases Gault’s bona fides as sports story writer with its vivid setting in the boxing ring, is a marvelous story about freedom and equality. As a bonus, the main player is a robot. “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (Imagination, 1951) is a sardonic tale about marriage, longing, and disappointment. It is played out using the machinations of an unknown alien civilization, a squirrel, and Venus. The final story, “Made to Measure” (Galaxy, 1957), would have made a brilliant episode for the original The Twilight Zone television series. At its center is a theme of appreciating what you have without looking too closely at its faults. William Campbell Gault died on December 27, 1995, in Santa Barbara, California. He had been married twice and had two children—a son and a daughter. During WW2, Gault served with the 166th Infantry in Hawaii from 1943 until the end of the war. He was awarded The Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He received a Shamus for his 1980 novel, The Cana Diversion—after returning to writing mysteries—and another Lifetime Achievement Award, this one from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, in 1991.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon. The cover was designed by Karadraws.com *            *            *

 

Review: "Morgan's Revenge" by Matt Weston

 

Morgan’s Revenge by Matt Weston Paperback Library, 1971   reviewed by Mike Baker   Morgan the Drifter is an eye patch wearing, former Harvard graduate and Virginia lawyer, veteran of the American Civil War, having fought for them that weren’t traitors, and who’s income comes from revenue from a ranch his Daddy left him and his brother. Mostly, Morgan drifts. He’s been traveling lately, with his Arabian steed named Samut, along the Big Horn Mountains where he starts finding burned out homesteads, ranches and trading posts whose residents are left murdered and mutilated presumably at the hands of the local Northern Shoshone bands. He buries all the dead he finds and then heads to the local fort where his former Civil War commander Captain Bradley is stationed. Bradley is off on patrol so Morgan heads out to find him which he does, Bradley being nearly dead with an arrow in his back, his last words being, “They weren’t Shoshone. They were white men”. Morgan swears revenge. And this is where booked loses its f’ing mind. Morgan finds an actual Shoshone band to confirm the arrow that killed his friend weren’t bona-fide Shoshone. He befriends the Shoshone chief with the very old Sacajawea, who speaks white man real good, translating the rest of the Indians speak cigar store Indian. You know what I mean. That heapem big trouble for brown man. How! Also, this is where we meet the buxom and willing Mountain Lamb, who they propose will guide Morgan to the fake Shoshone because a capable Shoshone warrior wouldn’t have tits. I believe I mentioned she was buxom. But wait, there’s more… Remember how in You Only Live Twice they turn tall, anglo hawk faced and hairy Bond into an Asian man by giving him a haircut and dying his skin yellow? Yup. They full on dye Morgan’s skin, give him a mohawk haircut and an Indian name which translates to “Big Guy”. Also, because the book was written for a 1970’s American male, he has to shave constantly. Anyhow… He and Mountain Hussy head off to find the fake Shoshone, get vengeance for the fake Indian depredations and mash. Discretely. And get them some bloody vengeance. I enjoyed the hell out of this book. The writing is good enough. It’s a ridiculous premise but not distractingly ridiculous. There’s an actual relationship between Big Guy and Mountain Slut. The violence is mostly the hand-to-hand variety because Big Guy is an Indian and wouldn’t have a gun, I guess. The book doesn’t really say. It even has a decent, if predictable, twist. It’s 70’s action with a Little Big Man meets James Bond thang. I give Morgan’s Revenge 3 out of 10 boobs and half an arterial spray.

Matt Weston has the sound of a nom de plume, but it is a mystery to us at the blog who was behind the name. At least one other western appeared as by Matt Weston; 1970’s Morgan, which was the first book of the two-book series featuring the eye-patch wearing Morgan the Drifter.