Thrift Shop Book Covers: "End of the Gun"

End of the Gun was a paperback original published by Pocket Books’ imprint Perma Books in 1955, which is the very edition that caught my eye. The artwork is stark in a monochromatic sort of way. A large hand holding a revolver, the wrong end pointed at the audience, one chamber empty, and a brown background. The artist: Tom Ryan.

The opening paragraph:

“In the pines, Britton waited patiently, peering steadily at the band of mustangs drinking at the spring below. The stallion was a coyote-dun with a black mane and tail and he kept moving about restlessly and warily, head flung up as he sniffed the air. Britton, however, was down-wind and he knew the stallion would never catch his scent.”

H. A. (Henry Andrew) DeRosso was born in Wisconsin in 1917. He was primarily a short story writer who specialized in Westerns; although he also wrote some very good mystery stories. He published six novels (all Westerns); End of the Gun was the fourth. He died of a gunshot wound in October 1960, which was ruled accidental by the Coroner, but there has been speculation it was suicide—his health was failing, and, interestingly, Marquette General Hospital owns the copyright to many—if not all—of his stories.

Mr. DeRosso’s writing, at its best, is existential, violent, and melancholy. His Westerns are almost entirely set in the desert Southwest, and his portrayal of the hard, dry, stark landscape is a central element. I have previously reviewed two posthumous story collections titled Under the Burning Sun, and Riders of the Shadowlands; both edited by Bill Pronzini. I have also reviewed his mystery story “Revenge is Bitter-Sweet”.     

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts featuring the cover art and miscellany of books I find at thrift stores and used bookshops. It is reserved for books I purchase as much for the cover art as the story or author.

"Revenge is Bitter-Sweet" by H. A. DeRosso

H. A. DeRosso is best known for his dark Westerns. His better work is unusual—it tends toward dark, but it has vibrant and visceral settings and descriptions. His protagonists tend to be indecisive and lost. His work is frequently, and correctly, compared with Cornell Woolrich’s bleak and violent noir.

His Westerns are amazing. They were original in an era when the genre was cluttered with stereotypes and cheese, but he was also an accomplished writer of pulp crime. His crime stories vary from readable to damn good; an example of the later is his 1960 story “The Hired Man”. I recently found a crime story he wrote in the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Death Bag. It is titled “Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” and, while it isn’t as good as “The Hired Man,” it is an entertaining and well developed story.

Will Owen is bitter and angry. Another man caused his father’s death and the woman he loves is lost to him. The story opens with a late night appointment in the woods. Will is anxious, and nervous. He is waiting in the dark night to get a long awaited revenge for his father’s death.

“Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” is a twisty story with a surprise ending—it opens rushing down one avenue and quickly turns down another. The climax, and the twist, is planted early in the story.  The author didn’t cheat. I guessed the surprise before it was revealed, but it didn’t bother me. The writing was good enough to make it work.

The protagonist is a believable character that displays emotions relevant to us all—sorrow, anger and guilt in shifting shades. The setting is brilliantly conceived and executed to support the thematic emotions of the story. It is a dark and gloomy rural wilderness that matches the internal sufferings of the protagonist. A place that is likely very much like Mr DeRosso’s native Wisconsin.

The prose isn’t exactly hardboiled, but it is far from delicate. There are passages that feel like a dark and masculine poetry—

“The car stopped. The lights winked out. The night shadows dwelt in unruffled peace again.”

RIDERS OF THE SHADOWLANDS by H. A. DeRosso

I recently read another H. A. DeRosso collection—after Under the Burning Sun—edited by Bill Pronzini . Its title: Riders of the Shadowlands. It was published by Five Star in 1999, and it is similar to Under the Burning Sun in that it collects ten of DeRosso’s western-type stories—two were published by mystery magazines, although one is a strange kind of mystery. The tales are less eclectic than the first collection, but no less entertaining, existential, or downright terrific.

The stories in this collection are also lightly edited—James Reasoner in a comment to my post about Under the Burning Sun said, “I compared a couple of the stories in the collection to their original magazine appearances and found only a very few changes.” Mr. Pronzini also states that he only edited superfluous, and redundant words. I only mention the editing because of the recent Internet flare-up about the new Harlequin pulp editions that were edited for content—a situation that is far different than the editing in this volume.

My favorite stories included in the collection are both tales of the “shadowlands.” One is a short story and the other a novella. The novella is the title story, “Riders of the Shadowlands,” a fairly conventionally plotted rustler tale. Its ordinariness ends at the plot however. It is a violent story in a hellish setting with a hardboiled / noir attitude. It has more in common with the hardboiled crime written in the 1950s, but the western setting and attitudes are accurate and beautifully described in a hard-bitten, stark prose.

There is a terrific mystery titled “Dark Purpose,” which was originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (April 1958) under the title “Kill the Killer.” It is a manhunt story set in the wilds of Northern Wisconsin. The wilderness, and landscape, are as central to the story as they are in DeRosso’s “shadowlands” tales. In fact it is as much a western as any of the stories included in the collection.

Riders of the Shadowlands does not include a dud; each is vibrant, entertaining, and dark. The stories were published between 1950 and 1962, and each is an example of how talented and original DeRosso was as a writer.

Top Five Reads of 2009

I’m not sure why I do a top of the year list; probably the same reason I do anything on this blog: to hear myself type. But damn if I don’t enjoy it. So here is the fourth annual Gravetapping Top Five Reads of the Year…enjoy…. And, a little refresher on the rules. The book must be new to me, but its publication date is unimportant.

This year’s list was more difficult to create than its predecessors because, simply, I read so many wonderfully entertaining novels. The year was a year of discovery. I discovered a dozen or so new authors, the bulk of them wrote during the paperback revolution in the 1950s and 60s and I also rediscovered a bevy of authors whom I had ignored for years. The most important from the latter group is Brian Garfield and Donald Hamilton, and from the former H. A. DeRosso, Merle Constiner and Robert Colby.

Here it is, in ascending order.

5. Line of Fire by Donald Hamilton. I read this title in March and I was awed by the power of both its linear storyline and tight, literate, prose. A perfect suspense novel.

4. Cage of Night by Ed Gorman. This is another early 2009 read; I read it in April. It is a story that doesn’t fit a category, exactly, but it lives somewhere between dark suspense, supernatural horror and crime. It is one of the finest horror novels I have ever read.

3. Under the Burning Sun by H. A. DeRosso. I read this one in December. This is a collection of stories written, for the most part, in the 1950s and 60s. The stories, particularly the “shadowlands” westerns are unforgettable. DeRosso was thirty or more years ahead of his time.

2. Fear in a Handful of Dust by Brian Garfield (originally published as by John Ives). I read this title in July. This modern western / suspense novel knocked me off my feet. It is literally perfect. A masterpiece of suspense.

1. Violent Saturday by W. L. Heath. I read it in May. There are only a few crime novels I would ever refer to as beautiful—defined as haunting, sharp, and meaningful—and this is one of them. It is a novel that everyone should read. Really, I mean everyone.

This list easily could have gone to ten of fifteen titles, but I sweated, worked, chaffed, and even cried a few times in my attempts to reduce it to the mandatory five. A few more titles that could have made the list but didn't are: Northfield by Johnny D. Boggs, North Star by Richard S. Wheeler, The Midnight Room and Ticket to Ride by Ed Gorman, Necessity by Brian Garfield, Binary by John Lange, and Slammer by Allan Guthrie.

All in all 2009 was a fine year for reading. I bet 2010 will be just as good.

UNDER THE BURNING SUN by H. A. DeRosso

I read an astonishingly good collection of stories by pulp writer H. A. DeRosso titled Under the Burning Sun. The collection includes twelve stories; two are novelettes. Ten are straight westerns, although generally far from traditional, and the other two are suspense with a western voice. It was compiled and edited by Bill Pronzini; in his Foreword he writes the stories, save one, were lightly edited “to eliminate superfluous and repetitive passages contained in the original magazine versions.”

This collection is my first experience with DeRosso’s work and I was stunned by the power of his writing. It tended toward the unusual and bleak, the mythical and surreal, but it also vitalized the characters with a hard-bitten sadness and self-awareness that is rarely found in genre fiction. A major theme in the stories is one of hope, but it is hope that is never fulfilled.  The characters—the protagonists—can see a better place and future, but can never quite get there.

The best story in the collection is a novelette titled “The Bounty Hunter”. It is what Bill Pronzini labels a “shadowlands” story—a surreal western that is related more to the bleak other worlds of The Twilight Zone than a traditional western. It reminded me of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger.  It is a relatively simple story, and follows the track of a bounty hunter called Spurr. Spurr kills an outlaw who, he is told later, may be his own son. It is a mythical story—from the beautifully surreal landscape to the internal demons that drive Spurr to search for the truth.

The other stories range from the more traditional “Hold-up”—the story of the father of a failing rancher who is forced to choose between his self-identified morality and both his, and his son’s, future—to the rich rendering of the final months of the Chiricahuas’ fight to stay off the reservation in “The Last Sleep”.

Under the Burning Sun is more than a collection of western stories. It is a sample of how good the genre story can be. The violence—and there is some—is realistic and vivid. It is examined with a neutrality that allows the reader to see its effects on the characters and story. The “shadowlands” tales—“The Bounty Hunter” and “Those Bloody Bells of Hell!”—are brilliant.  The prose is written in a surreal form that depicts the landscape as a hellish nightmare where only monsters exist. It is best related to a high quality comic book; something like Jonah Hex.

Under the Burning Sun is a wonderful collection. It reads like a train steaming through the vast deserts of the Southwest; desolate, beautiful, and deadly. Bill Pronzini relates DeRosso’s style to the Black Mask school of hardboiled in general, and Cornell Woolrich’s work particularly.