Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, March 1948

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan, with another fantastic cover by Sam Cherry. He was really at his peak during this era. Earlier this year when I reviewed the April 1950 issue of TEXAS RANGERS, one of the members of the WesternPulps email group commented that the Jim Hatfield novel in it, “The Rimrock Raiders”, sounded similar to the Hatfield novel in the March 1948 issue, “The Black Gold Secret”. So I had to find my copy and read that one, too. Now I have.

“The Black Gold Secret” and “The Rimrock Raiders” are both by A. Leslie Scott writing under the Jackson Cole house-name, so it’s not surprising that they’re similar. The basic concept—clashes between cattlemen and oil drillers who have moved into what was previously a ranching area—are the same, and Scott used that plot foundation in other novels, as well. But the details in “The Black Gold Secret” are different and it’s an equally entertaining yarn. Early on in this one, Hatfield extinguishes a burning oil well, something that he also does in “The Rimrock Raiders”, but does so in a totally different manner—and it makes for a slam-bang, very exciting scene, too. Scott layers in some geology and behind-the-scenes stuff about the oil industry and also provides plenty of shootouts and fistfights along the way. The vivid descriptions that are a Scott trademark are there but rather limited, as he keeps this one really racing along. Of course, there’s more going on than is apparent at first, but you know Hatfield will untangle all the villainy by the end, and it’s a pretty spectacular climax, too, as the main bad guy meets his end in an unexpected way. I had a great time reading this novel, and I’m sure I’ll be reading another by Scott before too much longer.

Tom Parsons was a Thrilling Group house-name, so there’s no telling who wrote “Gun Trail”, a short-short about a Texas Ranger doggedly tracking down a horse thief and murderer, only to find that things aren’t exactly what he thought they were. There’s not a lot to this story, but it’s short and punchy and enjoyable.

I started out not liking Joseph Chadwick’s work very much, but he’s won me over and become one of my favorite Western writers. I think he’s one of the best of the more hardboiled Western authors who rose to prominence in the postwar years. His novelette in this issue, “The Blizzard and the Banker”, is excellent. It’s about a small town in Dakota Territory trying to survive a hard winter. The local banker is the hero of a Western story, for a nice change, but there are several other good characters including an outlaw who’s maybe not quite as bad as his reputation would have you believe, a beautiful female faro dealer, and assorted villains. Chadwick does a fine job with the interactions of these characters as well as his depictions of the harsh weather. Just a really, really good story all the way around.

Allan K. Echols was one of those workmanlike writers who filled up the pages of Western, detective, and aviation pulps with hundreds of stories during a 30-year career (mid-Twenties to mid-Fifties; he passed away in 1953 but still had new stories coming out a couple of years later). He also wrote more than a dozen Western novels. And yet I’ve never run across anybody who proclaims themselves a big Allan K. Echols fan. His story in this issue, “Brother’s Keeper”, is an unacknowledged reprint from the January 1938 issue of ROMANTIC WESTERN. It’s not romantic at all, though. Instead, it’s about an apparently dull-witted sheriff who’s trying to figure out which of two rancher brothers is responsible for the murder of one of their enemies. It’s a well-written, solidly plotted story, and I enjoyed it, but I doubt that it’ll stick with me. Which probably helps to explain why Echols is pretty much forgotten even among devoted Western readers.

There’s also a Doc Swap story by Ben Frank in this issue. I’m sorry, but I didn’t even try to read it. I used to say that the Swap and Whopper stories by Syl McDowell in THRILLING WESTERN were my least favorite Western pulp series, but I’ve surprised myself by kind of warming up to them recently. Not so Doc Swap, which by this time had taken over from Lee Bond’s Long Sam Littlejohn as the regular backup series in TEXAS RANGERS. I just don’t find these appealing at all.

However, I’d still say this is a good issue of TEXAS RANGERS. The Hatfield novel and Joseph Chadwick’s novelette are both excellent, and the stories by Echols and Parsons are entertaining. If you have a copy, it’s well worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, you may actually like Doc Swap, you never know.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Mum's the Word for Murder - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire as a writer when this book was published under the pseudonym Asa Baker in 1938. He was making a living writing romances and Westerns for lending library publishers, but it was a precarious one. Better things were on the horizon for him, though. The next year, 1939, Henry Holt would publish Dresser’s novel DIVIDEND ON DEATH under the pseudonym Brett Halliday, which introduced redheaded Miami private detective Michael Shayne, a character who would make Dresser a rich man (and put a few shekels in the pockets of numerous other authors, as well, present company included).

But what about MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER? It’s an important book because it’s a dry run for the introduction of Michael Shayne a year later. The detective, Jerry Burke, is a big, tough, smart Irishman like Shayne, and although he’s a cop in this book, he has a background as a private detective and shares the same sort of checkered history that Dresser was to give Shayne. The novel is narrated by Asa Baker (which was also the original byline), a struggling author of Western novels obviously patterned after Dresser himself. A number of years later, Dresser wrote himself (as Halliday) into one of the Shayne novels, SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, in much the same way. The book is set in El Paso, Dresser’s hometown and the scene of one of the best Shayne novels, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS. Burke even has a nemesis, the local chief of detectives Jelcoe, who serves the same function as Miami Beach Chief of Detective Peter Painter in the Shayne novels.

As MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER opens, Asa Baker is struggling to find inspiration for a new novel, and he finds it in the person of his old friend Jerry Burke, who has been hired by the city as a special detective to clean up crime and corruption in El Paso. Burke tells Baker about a strange advertisement that appeared in that afternoon’s paper, warning that a murder will take place at exactly 11:41 that night and challenging Burke to do something about it. The ad is signed “Mum”.

Sure enough, a wealthy businessman is murdered at exactly 11:41, and Burke invites Baker along to observe the investigation and gather material for a novel based on the case. This is just the beginning of a clever cat-and-mouse game between Burke and the mysterious serial killer who calls himself Mum. There are several more murders, and each time it appears that the case is just about solved, Dresser throws in yet another twist. Burke has the same talent that Shayne possesses: he’s always one step ahead of everybody else in the book – and two steps ahead of the reader, finally coming up with an ingenious solution that predates another author’s more famous usage of the same gimmick.

The early Shayne novels are entertaining blends of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection, many of them with plots that rival Erle Stanley Gardner for complexity. Dresser doesn’t quite have the mix down yet in this book – there’s not much comedy, for instance, and Dresser doesn’t strictly play fair, withholding a fairly important clue from the reader until late in the book – but MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is still one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a while. Dresser’s style is very smooth and keeps the pages turning easily. I had a hard time putting this one down.

By the Fifties, the Shayne novels were doing so well in paperback for Dell that Dresser pulled out this old novel, along with one he wrote under the pseudonym Hal Debrett, BEFORE I WAKE, and Dell reissued them under the Brett Halliday byline. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER proved popular enough that it was reissued again in the Sixties, this time with a McGinnis cover that’s not a particularly good one, in my opinion. Unless that’s not actually McGinnis’s work. I don’t have that edition, so maybe somebody who does can check and correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s one more Jerry Burke novel under the Asa Baker name, THE KISSED CORPSE, which came out in 1939, the same year as DIVIDEND ON DEATH. After that, Dresser was either too busy to return to that Shayne-prototype (he was writing Westerns as Peter Field and Don Davis, in addition to carrying on the Shayne series), or maybe he just thought that Jerry Burke had served his purpose. Based on my reading of this book, I plan on trying to get hold of a copy of THE KISSED CORPSE. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is long out of print, of course, like most of Dresser’s work, but copies are fairly easy to come by on-line. I liked this one a lot and give it a high recommendation.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 2, 2010. In the comments on the original post, someone asked about the "ingenious solution" in this novel and the other author who used it later. I have absolutely no idea about any of that anymore. But another commenter confirmed that the second cover is indeed by Robert McGinnis. I have a copy of the other Jerry Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE. A friend sent it to me not long after this post first appeared. I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't read it. But I know where it is. Maybe time to get it out and finally read it. Also since 2010, MUM'S THE WORD FOR MURDER has been reprinted as a very inexpensive e-book, which you can get here if you want to check it out.)

Review: Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail - Fred Blosser

I’m not sure how I missed this one when it came out last fall. Fred Blosser is an old friend, a fan and scholar of Robert E. Howard, and a fine writer. And that title! Well, that’s just pure pulp goodness and I am always the target audience for that.

Howard’s novella “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is one of my top three favorite stories by him. (The other two are “Beyond the Black River” and “Wild Water”, in case anyone is interested.) The protagonist of “The Vultures of Wahpeton” is gunfighting Texan Steve Corcoran. The protagonist of “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” is gunfighting Texan Steve Cochran. At least one of the characters in this story believes them to be one and the same, that Cochran is simply the notorious Steve Corcoran going by another name. Blosser doesn’t resolve that one way or the other, but I’d say the evidence is pretty strong that Cochran is really Corcoran.

But it doesn’t really matter. Cochran and a companion, a Papago Indian, set out into the harsh landscape of Arizona in search of a fortune in silver that’s supposed to be hidden in a lost and abandoned mission where a massacre took place a couple of hundred years earlier. They run into trouble almost right away, an ambush that proves deadly. Then things are complicated by the arrival of two beautiful young women who hate each other but are attracted to Cochran—or maybe they just want to get their hands on that silver, too.

Pursued by Apaches and bandits, Cochran finally arrives at the so-called Black Mission, only to discover another surprise waiting for him there, and this is the most dangerous and strangest of all. It’s fitting that a story written mostly in homage to Robert E. Howard would have a little H.P. Lovecraft influence, too.

Blosser really nails the pulpish tone of this story with its fast pace, frequent gritty action, and a few spicy scenes with the so-called sixgun vixens. It’s just great fun from start to finish. Then, as a bonus for REH fans, Blosser wraps things up with an entertaining essay about Howard’s Western fiction. If you’re a Howard fan or just enjoy a fine Western adventure yarn, I give “Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail” a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Come As You Are - Mindi Abair

Mindi Abair is one of my favorite musicians, and I really like the easy-going vibe of this song. Sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, you want to wallow in melancholy, but sometimes you want something to lift your spirits. This song does that for me.

Review: A Gambling Man - David Baldacci

Let me start with the obligatory complaint about the length of this book: David Baldacci’s A GAMBLING MAN, like most mysteries and thrillers from the tradional publishers these days, is just too blasted long. I’ll have more to say about that later on.

For now, let’s establish that this is the second novel featuring Aloysius Archer, World War II vet, ex-con (he was sent to prison for a crime he only kinda, sorta committed, and then only for good reasons), currently on his way to Bay Town, California, to become an apprentice private detective. I read the first book, ONE GOOD DEED, last year, and although it was, yes, too long, I found enough in it to like that I wanted to give this second novel in the series a try.

As I said, Archer is on his way to California, but he stops first in Reno, Nevada, where, through some perilous circumstances, he acquires a fancy foreign car and a friend in beautiful singer/dancer/would-be movie starlet Liberty Callahan. Except for these two bits of set-up, the first fourth of the book is filler. Entertaining, well-written filler, mind you, but still . . .

Liberty accompanies Archer to California, where he goes to work for a private detective named Willie Dash, an old friend of the cop Archer helped out in the previous book. They’re hired to find out who’s blackmailing a candidate for mayor of Bay Town. The politician is rich and has a beautiful wife, whose father is the local tycoon and far richer than anybody else in the area. The guy has fingers in all sorts of pies, too, including some that may or may not be quite on the up and up.

Well, of course, somebody involved in the investigation gets murdered, although it takes Baldacci almost to the halfway point of the book to get there. Archer gets beaten up by thugs. Somebody else gets murdered. Archer meets a few beautiful dames. Turns out there were more murders nobody even knew about until Archer and Willie Dash start uncovering connections. The plot gets pretty complicated but makes sense in the end, which is relatively satisfying. There’s enough story here for a nice, tight, 160-page paperback.

A GAMBLING MAN, in its original edition, is a 438-page hardback.

But don’t take that to mean I’m giving it a bad review. There’s actually quite a bit I liked about it. The book is set in 1949, and by and large, it reads like it. There’s only one bothersome anachronism I spotted: a woman is referred to by the title Ms. Technically, the word came into existence in the early 20^th Century, but I don’t believe it was in common usage until the Seventies. Seeing somebody use it in a book set in 1949 was jarring, at least to me. But the rest of the dialogue and the attitudes of the characters ring true to me. So I guess one misstep in 438 pages isn’t too bad. (Yeah, I’m harping on the number of pages.)

The main plot is solid, too. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but well put together. I don’t know how well-read Baldacci is when it comes to classic private eye fiction, but I got the feeling that CHINATOWN must be one of his favorite movies. Nothing wrong with that. It’s one of my favorite movies, too. And I think I picked up some Raymond Chandler influence, even though the book is written in third person. Archer’s banter is reminiscent of Philip Marlowe’s, and I have to wonder if Bay Town is a nod to Chandler’s Bay City.

As for the characters, Archer is a tough, smart, likable protagonist, while still being fallible and human. I think I liked him even more in this book than I did in the previous one. Willie Dash and Liberty Callahan are both excellent supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable.

Now, to get back to the length of this book (you knew I would), the way Baldacci turns what could have been a reasonably short paperback into a fat hardback, other than the filler in the first part of the book, is by describing everything. Archer can’t enter a room without Baldacci giving us a rundown on everything that’s in it. Everybody he meets gets a thorough description. You might think this would bother me, but even I was surprised by the fact that it didn’t, much. I think that’s because even though he describes lots of things, he doesn’t dwell on any one of them for too long. He gives the reader a few details and moves on. In a way, this book reminds me of the work of Leslie Scott: it’s vividly descriptive, but yet it moves at a fairly brisk pace. (Baldacci isn’t as brisk as Scott, but then, who is?)

Also, reading this book made me realize something: I’d rather read stuff like this than a lot of modern thrillers whose authors like to talk about how they never describe anything, never use an adverb, and never, ever use a speech tag other than “said”. That’s fine if that’s how you like to write, and a lot of successful writers do, but all too often, to me that approach produces prose that’s flat and bland and boring. I was never bored reading A GAMBLING MAN, even though it took me longer than most books do.

So overall, I liked this book, and I enjoyed it enough I plan to read the third and apparently final book in the series. Not right away, but I expect I’ll get to it fairly soon. I might even move on from there and try some of Baldacci’s other books. The guy can tell a story, even if it is in sort of a long-winded way sometimes. In the meantime, this one is available in the usual e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, July 1937

I said a while back that I ought to read some issues of the air war pulp SKY FIGHTERS. Well, I don’t actually own any. But I do own the Adventure House reprint of the July 1937 issue, so I read it. The cover is by Eugene Frandzen, who painted a bunch of them for SKY FIGHTERS.

This issue leads off with the novella “North Sea Nightmare” by George Bruce. I read another novella by Bruce last year and really enjoyed it. This one is set during World War I and centers around two young Navy pilots known as Goldilocks (because he’s small and blond) and the Bear (because he’s big and burly). Goldilocks is the pilot and the Bear is the observer/gunner in a flying boat that does reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea, looking for German ships and submarines. They come up with a daring plan for a raid on the bay where most of the German navy is based. That raid provokes an even more epic battle that may change the course of the war. I like the way Bruce writes, and there’s plenty of good action in this one. Goldilocks and the Bear are good characters, too. But I never found the plot as compelling as in the other story by Bruce that I read, and I didn’t like the ending. So while I still consider this a good story, I found it somewhat disappointing. I definitely want to read more by George Bruce, though.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few of the pulp novels featuring the Lone Eagle, an American pilot/intelligence agent named John Masters whose adventures appeared in the pulp THE LONE EAGLE (later renamed THE AMERICAN EAGLE and AMERICAN EAGLES). The stories appeared under the house-name Lt. Scott Morgan but were written by several different authors, most notably F.E. Rechnitzer, who created the series. I always enjoyed the Lone Eagle stories because Masters was just as much of a spy as he was a pilot, and most of the novels had him operating extensively behind enemy lines as well as engaging in aerial dogfights. He often crossed paths with the mysterious and dangerous R-47, a seductive female German agent who became a recurring villainess. The first two novels in the series are reprinted in a very nice double volume from Black Dog Books called WINGS OF WAR, which is still available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

I said all that to say this: this issue of SKY FIGHTERS features a Lone Eagle novelette, also called “Wings of War”, and it’s the only time a story about the character appeared anywhere other than in his own pulp. I don’t know what brought that about. It’s possible one of the Lone Eagle authors turned in a manuscript that was too short and the editors at the Thrilling Group just decided to run it in SKY FIGHTERS rather than asking the author to expand it. Or maybe the story was written to order at novelette length in order to publicize the Lone Eagle’s own pulp—although that seems an odd thing to do several years into a magazine’s run. (THE LONE EAGLE debuted in 1933.) Regardless of its origins, “Wings of War” is a good story, with Masters going undercover as a German soldier returned in a prisoner exchange so that he try to find out why the Germans seemingly have abandoned a vital area along the front. Masters suspects the wily Huns are just setting a trap for the Allies. He’s right, of course, but he discovers what’s really going on only after another encounter with R-47, and as usual, their meeting almost proves fatal for Masters. There’s plenty of action, a plausible if far-fetched scheme by the Germans, and a smashing climax. I enjoyed this story, and it reminded me that it’s been too long since I read one of the full-length Lone Eagle novels.

“Luck of the Damned” is John Scott Douglas, a versatile and prolific pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, adventure, Western, and sports stories in a career that lasted from the mid-Twenties to the early Fifties. It’s about a young pilot who’s convinced he’s jinxed, especially on his birthday. So when his commanding officer orders him to fly a dangerous mission on that particular day, he has to battle not only the enemy but also his own superstition. This is an entertaining story that I thought wasn’t quite as strong as it might have been with a different twist, but it’s still worth reading.

Robert Sidney Bowen is one of the big names in aviation and air war pulp. He wrote a lot of other things, too, including boy’s adventure novels and mystery and detective yarns. I’ve been reading his work for close to 60 years now and always enjoy it. Just a very solid, dependably entertaining writer. His story in this issue, “Fledgling’s Finish”, is no exception. A young pilot volunteers for a suicidal bombing run on a castle that’s the center of the German communications network. When his commander refuses to let him, he takes it on himself to make the effort anyway. Most of the story is written from the point of view of the commanding officer, which proves to be an effective and suspenseful tactic. I really enjoyed this story.

Joe Archibald’s specialty was humorous stories. He didn’t just write them for the air war pulps (although he did a bunch of them), he turned out humorous yarns for the Western, detective, and sports pulps, too. I’m not a big fan of his work, but sometimes I find his stories mildly amusing. That’s a pretty good description of “A Flyer in Cauliflowers”. This is part of a series featuring two American pilots named Ambrose Hooley and Muley Spink (the narrator). The plot concerns a prizefight between an American flier and a British pilot to determine who deserves credit for shooting down a couple of German planes. There’s also a captured German ace who escapes and has to be hunted down. As I said above, it’s mildly amusing and moves along fairly well, so it’s a readable story. Not much more than that, mind you, but I did finish it, which is more than I can say for some of Archibald’s yarns.

Hal White wrote dozens of Western, detective, and aviation stories for the pulps between the mid-Twenties and the early Fifties, but that’s all I know about him. His story “Fly High and Die” wraps up this issue. It’s about a squadron of fighter pilots who believe they’ve been cursed by a dead German ace. Anytime they fly higher than 8000 feet, something terrible happens to them. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The actual solution to the mystery struck me as a little bland, but overall the story is okay.

And okay is a good description of this issue as a whole. The Lone Eagle story is excellent, the Robert Sidney Bowen story is very good, and even though I found the George Bruce story a little disappointing, it’s still a good story and makes me want to read more by him. The other stories are mildly entertaining but forgettable. I probably won’t go hunting for more issues of SKY FIGHTERS, but if I come across any, I won’t hesitate to grab them, either.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, Summer 1945

I don't own this issue of FRONTIER STORIES, so I haven't read it. But it has a dramatic cover by Richard Case and a fine group of writers inside. The lead story by Les Savage Jr., "The Lone Star Camel Corps", may have been cannibalized for Savage for his novel ONCE A FIGHTER. It was reprinted in one of the Les Savage Jr. collections packaged by Jon Tuska and I have a copy of that book on order. I'm looking forward to reading the story. Also on hand in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES are William Heuman, Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, R.S. Lerch, Fairfax Downey, and the lesser-known Ben T. Young and Raymond L. Hill. Lots of good reading there, I have no doubt about that.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

Review: Backfire - Charles L. Burgess

A while back, I read and enjoyed Charles Burgess’s novel THE OTHER WOMAN, which was published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and reprinted last year by Stark House as part of their great Black Gat Books line. Burgess, a Florida author who specialized in writing articles for the true crime magazines, wrote only two novels, and his other one, BACKFIRE, was very rare, having been published only in Australia. Now the good folks at Stark House have tracked it down and reprinted it as well, along with Burgess’s only short story and a selection of his true crime yarns. I’ve just read BACKFIRE.

The novel’s protagonist is Martin Powers, about as normal and run-of-the-mill a guy as you could find. He’s a salesman for a cosmetics company and is recently married to a beautiful brunette named Angela. He has a pretty good life, he thinks—until somebody starts trying to kill him.

After several failed attempts on his life, Martin’s wife brings in the cops, in the person of a hulking detective named Sam Bannerman. Unfortunately, Bannerman doesn’t seem to be able to make any progress in finding out who wants Martin dead. So Martin figures if he wants to stay alive, he’d better do some investigating himself. He was adopted as a young child and knows very little about his background, so he decides that would be a good place to start. He proves to be a clever, dogged detective, too, and starts uncovering things. But will he arrive at the ultimate answer before his mysterious enemy knocks him off?

BACKFIRE is a well-constructed mystery/suspense novel that generates considerably urgency and kept me flipping the pages. I think Burgess revealed some key elements of the plot maybe a tad too early, but that didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the book. He keeps the central questions unanswered until late in the book and keeps tightening the screws on Martin until a satisfying climax.

Maybe due to Burgess’s background as a true crime author, there’s a strong sense of realism to this book, as well, a sense that the investigation really could have gone this way. There’s nothing flashy about the style, just straight-ahead storytelling, but in a story like this, that’s a very effective approach. I'm sorry Burgess didn't write more novels. I had a fine time reading BACKFIRE and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions. I haven’t yet read the true crime articles that round out the book, but I intend to.

Review: 'Nada - Daniel Boyd (Dan Stumpf)

I’m not sure how I missed this novel when it came out in 2010. I’m sure I read the reviews of it on Bill Crider’s blog and Mystery Scene, and I should have picked it up then because it sounds exactly like my kind of book. Plus, the author and I are acquainted on-line. He’s commented here under his real name, Dan Stumpf, and I’ve commented on his book and movie reviews over on Mystery Scene. But even though it took me a while to get around to it, I’m very glad I did because ‘NADA is a terrific book.

It's set in Mexico in 1936. The title does double duty, since “nada” is the Spanish word for nothing, and in this book it’s also the nickname of the small town of Quenada, which is on the other side of the desert from the abandoned Old Pesos Mine. The mine isn’t completely abandoned, however. There’s a caretaker of sorts, Vernon Culley, a World War I veteran turned bootlegger and gangster turned mining engineer. He’s the narrator, and he provides a colorful, distinctive narrative voice that’s a pleasure to read.

One day a truck shows up at the mine. The two men in it are fleeing from a gang of bandits led by the Serrano Brothers, with whom Culley is acquainted. There’s a shootout, one of the men winds up dead, and Culley discovers that the truck is full of gold bars that were entrusted to the Dutchman who was killed in the battle. He was supposed to sell the gold and return the proceeds to some Dutch Jews who fled to America from the Nazis. One of the group is the dead man’s father-in-law. The Dutchman had hired a Mexican/Indian named Ray to drive him and the gold to its destination. Ray and Culley team up to try to carry out the Dutchman’s mission, since they promised the dying man they would.

Of course, it won’t be easy since they’ll have to battle the desert, vicious bandits, and corrupt lawmen along the way. Not to mention their own mercenary impulses and the guilt that haunts Ray . . .

This is the sort of historical adventure yarn that Jack Higgins used to write, although I think ‘NADA is better written than any of the Higgins novels I’ve read. The author gives us a bunch of superb action scenes but also really develops the characters of Culley and Ray as they work together and get to know each other. They discuss books, philosophy, religion, and plenty of other subjects, but even so, Stumpf never lets the action lag for long and the pace is suspenseful and relentless.

This is the first novel that Stumpf wrote as Daniel Boyd, but he’s done several more since then. It's also the first fiction by him that I’ve read, but I’m going to have to remedy that. Meanwhile, I give ‘NADA a very high recommendation. It's available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I think it’s a lock for my top ten list at the end of the year.