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 A previously unpublished short novel, So Curse the Day, by Jada M. Davis, is worth the price of admission all by itself.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.