Sunday, December 22, 2024

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, May 1945


I've mentioned before that I never liked going to the barber shop when I was a kid. Is this a barber chair the guy is sitting in? I think it is, and that's a bottle of hair tonic he's holding. Several other bottles are visible in the background. Maybe the redheaded babe was giving him a manicure before she had to pull that gat. Anyway, I don't like barber shops, and if any of you are barbers, I'm sorry. I mean no offense. I promise you, if you'd had to cut my hair when I was a little kid, you wouldn't have liked me, either. I was a terrible customer. But to get back to the point of this post . . . I feel like I should know who painted this cover, but I don't. Sam Cherry, maybe? Inside this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE are some good authors, most notably Fredric Brown but also Sam Merwin Jr., David X. Manners, Benton Braden (twice, once as himself and under his pseudonym Walter Wilson), and house-name J.S. Endicott (probably Merwin, if I had to guess).

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly, January 8, 1938


This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my somewhat battered copy in the scan. The cover art is by H.W. Scott, and it’s an excellent depiction of T.W. Ford’s series character Solo Strant, also known as the Silver Kid because of the silver conchos on his shirt and hatband, the silver-inlaid butts of his guns, and the silver death’s-head clasp on his hat's chin strap. Ford was tremendously prolific in several genres—Western, sports, detective, and aviation—as well as working in the pulps as an editor, but the Silver Kid series is probably his magnum opus. He wrote approximately 60 Silver Kid stories, all of them novella length, which is a pretty significant body of work. They appeared in WILD WEST WEEKLY from 1935 to 1941, then in various Columbia Western pulps from 1942 to 1952. Solo Strant is a small but deadly gunfighter/adventurer who’s not above selling his gun skills if he believes it's for a worthy cause.

In this issue’s lead novella, “Traitors Ride the Sundown”, Strant is hired to find out who’s trying to murder a rancher who has a spread in the Sundown Hills. On the way to take the job, he runs into trouble at an outlaw roadhouse in Bad Man’s Pass but is helped out by a friendly old-timer who is headed in the same direction. When Strant reaches his destination, he has to deal with several bushwhackings and murders before he untangles what’s going on. There are a couple of occasions where someone is about to give him some vital information, only to wind up dead. The plot is pretty simple and straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, but I really enjoy the way Ford writes. His punchy, action-packed style really races along and Solo Strant is a very likable protagonist. I’ve read several Silver Kid novellas before and always enjoyed them. “Traitors Ride the Sundown” is also quite entertaining. If somebody were to reprint this series, I’d certainly be a customer for it. Until then, I’ll read ’em where I find ’em.

Ben Conlon is best remembered for writing the Pete Rice stories, which appeared in the character’s own magazine and also in WILD WEST WEEKLY, under the pseudonym Austin Gridley, but he wrote a couple of hundred Western, sports, and adventure yarns for various pulps and under various pen-names over the years. He has a stand-alone story, “Texas Blood”, in this issue under his own name. It’s about a young former Texas Ranger starting a ranch in New Mexico and running into rustling trouble. The stereotypical pulp Western dialect is really thick in this one. Everybody talks that way. My Mangy Polecat Threshold is higher than most people’s, but Conlon overdoes it to the point that I almost gave up. I’m glad I didn’t because, other than the dialogue, his writing is pretty clean and swift and vivid, and the plot has some clever twists leading to a smashing climax. I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.

J. Allan Dunn wrote approximately 160 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY about a young Texas Ranger named Bud Jones. This issue’s yarn is called “Buckshot and Bullets” and finds Bud trying to head off a war between Texas cattlemen and Mexican sheepherders. I nearly always enjoy Dunn’s work, but a couple of things about this one bothered me, the most troublesome that he seems to think Houston is the capital of Texas, not Austin. Also, he has all the Texans referring to the Mexicans as “Mexies”, a term I don’t think I’ve ever heard. That said, this is a pretty well-written, exciting tale with some nice action. Bud Jones is a very likable protagonist, too.

The most prolific series of all in WILD WEST WEEKLY starred Billy West, the young owner of the Circle J ranch in Montana, and his two friends who work for him, feisty, redheaded Joe Scott and cantankerous old codger Buck Foster, along with Sing Lo, the ranch’s Chinese cook. Upwards of 450 novelettes starring this bunch were published between 1927 and 1941, written by half a dozen different authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. I’d read a few of them before and enjoyed them. The story in this issue, “Gun-Fight Valley”, is by Norman L. Hay, who probably wrote more Circle  J novelettes than anyone else. Our heroes are in Arizona on a cattle-buying trip when they get drawn into the mystery of a missing wagon train. What they find turns out to be somewhat unexpected. This is a nicely plotted yarn with plenty of excellent action. Billy, Joe, and Buck are standard characters but are handled well and I enjoy reading about their exploits. I’d love to see some of this series reprinted someday.

Evidently, “Burro Bait” by Phil Squires is part of a humorous series about a young man from Missouri called Hinges Hollister who goes west to become a cowboy. The story is told in the form of letters between Hinges and his mother and girlfriend back home. The dialect is so thick as to be almost indecipherable, and the humor falls flat. Not to my taste at all, and I didn’t finish it.

The issue wraps up with “Tommy Rockford Bucks the Nevada Wolves” by one of my favorite Western writers, Walker A. Tompkins. By WILD WEST WEEKLY standards, the Tommy Rockford series wasn’t that prolific: approximately 50 stories in a dozen years, 1931-43. But it’s a good one, and Tommy Rockford is one of my favorite characters from this pulp known for its series characters. He’s a young railroad detective, and if they had ever made any Tommy Rockford movies, Roy Rogers would have been perfect to play him. In this yarn, which takes place in Arizona and Mexico, despite the title, Tommy takes on an outlaw gang that has traveled from Nevada to Arizona to visit another gang and see their hideout. This leads to a stagecoach holdup, an attempted bank robbery, and Tommy being captured by the outlaws. I found this one to be something of a disappointment because, despite all those plot elements, it never comes together as a very compelling story. It’s more a case of just throwing things in the pot until there are enough pages. Even worse, Tommy does something that’s so out of character, it just about ruined the story for me, and it wasn’t even necessary to make the plot work. I think it would have been more effective handling things a different way. The story is readable enough because Tompkins’ prose is always smooth and just races right along, but this is easily the worst of the Tommy Rockford series I’ve read so far.

So what you have in this issue is definitely a mixed bag. The cover is excellent, the Silver Kid and Circle J stories are both very good, the Bud Jones story is flawed but entertaining, the Tommy Rockford story definitely sub-par, the Ben Conlon story okay but with overdone dialect, and the Hinges Hollister story not for me at all. I still like WILD WEST WEEKLY, but this is far from my favorite issue. It does make me want to read more Silver Kid and Circle J stories, though.

Friday, December 20, 2024

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: River Queen - Charles N. Heckelmann


If Charles N. Heckelmann is remembered at all today by paperback fans, it’s probably as the founder and editor of Monarch Books or the editor at Popular Library during the Sixties. However, before that he worked as a writer and editor in the Western pulps, most notably those in the so-called Thrilling Group, and he continued writing Western novels from the late Forties throughout the Fifties. He was never very prolific as an author, but his books were well-regarded in their time.

I just read my first Heckelmann novel, RIVER QUEEN, and it’s a good one. That’s the title of the Graphic Books paperback reprint. The novel first appeared in hardback from Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER. RIVER QUEEN is actually the better and more appropriate title. This is a riverboat book, set largely along the Missouri River in Montana Territory, although the first section of the story centers around the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Bill Horn is the captain and pilot of the riverboat Western Star. His main rival on the river is Kay Graham, the beautiful female captain of the Queen. Both of their boats wind up being hired by the army to carry troops and supplies up the Missouri River to help deal with the rising threat of the Sioux, who have started raiding the settlements there because the army is stretched so thin due to the war. There’s also a romantic triangle going on, as well as an old enemy of Horn’s who is now a Jayhawker, ostensibly helping the Confederate side while really being out for all the loot he can get his hands on.

Why this novel was never adapted into a movie starring John Wayne, I’ll never know. Bill Horn seems to be a perfect character for the Duke to play, and considering the way Heckelmann describes him, I wonder if he thought the same thing. Barbara Stanwyck would have been great as Kay Graham, and the villain cries out to be played by Forrest Tucker. It’s not really a John Ford or Howard Hawks type of story, but in the hands of a director like Michael Curtiz or Henry Hathaway . . . Well, never mind. There’s no such movie. But it would have been a good one, because Heckelmann has packed a lot into this book: epic battles, romantic intrigue, mano a mano showdowns, and a little reasonably accurate history. The action scenes are really good, and my only real complaint is Heckelmann’s occasional tendency to slow down the story in order to explain the backgrounds of some of the characters. This is especially annoying early on, but once you get past the first chapter or so, the action never flags for very long. I enjoyed this one enough that I definitely plan to read more by Heckelmann.

(It will come as no surprise to any of you that I haven't read anything else by Charles N. Heckelmann since this post first appeared in somewhat different form on November 21, 2008. However, I did start one of his Westerns not long ago, but it also had a slow start, as mentioned above, and I didn't overcome that one. But I definitely intend to try again. I have probably half a dozen or more of his books on my shelves. Also, I found a listing on-line that identifies the artist on the cover of the paperback edition as Harry Barton. I can't guarantee that's correct, but it's the only artist ID I found. Below is the cover of the original hardcover edition published by Henry Holt under the title THE RAWHIDER, with cover art by Ignatz Sahula-Dycke. I still say that RIVER QUEEN is a much better title, and I much prefer the Graphic Giant cover, too.)



Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Review: Killer's Caress - Cary Moran (Edwin Truett Long)


In 1936, Culture Publications, the publisher of the Spicy line of pulps, decided to branch out into hardbacks, using the same authors who filled the pages of their pulps. The result was a company called Valhalla Press, which managed to put out only two books before somebody decided it was a bad idea: PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER by Arthur Wallace (a name that may or may not have been a pseudonym, nobody seems to know) and KILLER’S CARESS by Cary Moran, who was actually a young writer living in Texas named Edwin Truett Long. PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER is a real rarity. I’ve never seen a copy in the wild and it can be found for sale on-line only now and then.

But KILLER’S CARESS is a different story. It’s been reprinted a couple of times, most recently by Black Dog Books. That edition is still available in trade paperback and e-book editions on Amazon. I’ve had a copy for quite a while, and after seeing something about it on Facebook recently, I was prompted to read it.


The protagonist of this novel is gossip columnist Johnny Harding, who writes a popular newspaper column called Johnny-On-the-Spot. As such, he knows everybody from bartenders to bigshot politicians, from hat check girls to ruthless gangsters and gamblers. He has a beautiful redheaded assistant and a big lug of a driver. One evening when he’s headed out to make his rounds of the nightspots and hunt material for his column, he’s nearly rubbed out by a couple of hired killers. Later in the evening, he runs into the rich, sleazy playboy who has inherited the newspaper where he works. Said playboy has enemies all over the place including his estranged actress wife who’s trying to divorce him, a gambler and nightclub owner, the above-mentioned hat check girl, a news photographer he’s fired, and Johnny himself. The way the guy keeps getting threatened, you know he’s going to wind up dead and Johnny is probably going to be blamed for it.

But that’s not exactly what happens. Somebody winds up being murdered, all right, but it’s a friend of Johnny’s, and that sets him off on a whirlwind of action, detection, and seduction. Johnny’s furious quest to avenge his pal reminded me very much of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, although Johnny, while a tough little mug (I kept seeing a young Jimmy Cagney in my head), is no Mike Hammer. The fact that he has a pal on the homicide squad and a competent knockout of an assistant also reminded me of the Hammer novels, and I can’t help but wonder if Mickey ever read KILLER’S CARESS.

Eventually there are more murders. The pace seldom lets up, and Long crams a lot into a story that takes place in about 48 hours. Everything leads up to a great scene on a gambling ship that includes not only a gathering of the suspects and an explanation of who committed the crimes, but also features a big shootout as the cops raid the boat.


The plot is really complex, but it’s one of those that seems to make sense, especially if you squint your eyes a little and hold your mouth just right. The big appeal to me is Long’s breathless, breezy style, which he was already perfecting in dozens of stories for the Spicy pulps under various pseudonyms and house-names. I had a great time reading KILLER’S CARESS. It reminded me of the hardboiled yarns I grew up reading, and I give it a high recommendation.

I’m also very much interested in the career of Edwin Truett Long, especially since I found out that he’s buried in Fort Worth, about 20 miles as the crow flies from where I’m typing this. But more about him in another post sometime, when I’ve read more of his work.

Monday, December 16, 2024

Review: Rough Riders of the Ragged Rimrock - James J. Griffin


I think James J. Griffin has written more novels about the Texas Rangers than anyone since A. Leslie Scott, who must hold the record for the most novels featuring a Texas Ranger as the hero. But for more than twenty years, Griffin has also been spinning action-packed yarns about the Rangers starring several different protagonists.

One of his recent books, ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK (I love that title) stars veteran Ranger Will Kirkpatrick and his young sidekick Jonas Peterson. This isn’t the first novel featuring these characters, although it’s the first one I’ve read, but Griffin does a good job filling in their backgrounds: Jonas is actually a probationary Ranger in Kirkpatrick’s custody, who arrested him for taking part in a robbery, even though it was Jonas’s outlaw cousins who forced him into it. Will believes in second chances, so now he and Jonas ride on the same side of the law and cover a broad swath of West Texas and the Panhandle as they try to bring law and order to the Lone Star State.

ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK actually comes across as something of a frontier law enforcement procedural as Will and Jonas deal with several cases involving bank robberies, stagecoach holdups, crooked local lawmen, and a cattle baron and his sons who believe they’re above the law. For a while, Jonas operates on his own while Will is recovering from a bullet wound, and he acquits himself admirably before the Rangers team up again to track down a gang of stagecoach robbers who murder all the passengers when they pull a job, so as not to leave any witnesses behind.

Griffin’s passion for writing action-packed traditional Western novels really comes through in this tale, and his knowledge of horses, the landscape, and frontier life lends it a definite air of authenticity without sacrificing a bit of a mythic quality, too. I enjoyed ROUGH RIDERS OF THE RAGGED RIMROCK, but fair warning, it does end on sort of a cliffhanger. But I already have the next book in the series on my Kindle, so no problem there. If you’re already a fan you’ll want to read this one, and if you haven’t sampled Griffin’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. It's available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

Sunday, December 15, 2024

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, January 1944


I really like the cover by Robert Fuqua on this issue of AMAZING STORIES. It's certainly dramatic. William P. McGivern is the dominant author in this one with three stories: the lead novella under his own name, a novelette as P.F. Costello, and a short story as Gerald Vance. Also on hand are the always-dependable Ross Rocklynne, the always-interesting Ed Earl Repp, and Berkeley Livingston, an author whose work I haven't read enough of to form an opinion. If you want to check out this issue for yourself, PDFS of it and a lot of other issues of AMAZING STORIES can be found here.

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: West, November 1940


This is a pulp that I own. That’s my copy in the scan, complete with store stamp. I’m not sure who did the cover art. The most likely suspect is Richard Lyon, but I’m not confident enough to say it’s his work.

The lead novel in this issue (and it’s actually long enough to be considered a novel this time) is “Black Diamonds” by A. Leslie, who was really A. Leslie Scott. This novel was published in hardcover in 1942 under the title THE COWPUNCHER, as by Bradford Scott, another of Leslie Scott’s pseudonyms. In this century, it was published in paperback and as an e-book by Leisure, a large print hardcover by Center Point, and remains available as an e-book and trade paperback from Amazon Encore. I read the e-book edition a couple of weeks ago, and you can find my review of it here. It’s an excellent Western novel. I think I like the title “Black Diamonds” a little better than THE COWPUNCHER, though. I suspect Scott changed it for the story’s book publication because he thought it didn’t sound enough like a Western.

I decided to go ahead and read the three short stories from the pulp. The first, “Fugitive”, is by Frank Carl Young, a forgotten pulpster who wrote more than a hundred Western stories for various pulps between 1931 and 1952. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. “Fugitive” is about a young cowboy on the run from the law who makes a home for himself working on a ranch owned by a friendly young couple. Naturally, his past catches up to him and causes trouble. The slight plot twist in the end of this one won’t catch many readers by surprise, but the writing is very good and it’s an entertaining story.

Scott Carleton was a house-name used primarily on the long-running Buffalo Billy Bates series in POPULAR WESTERN, but it appears on a few stand-alone stories, too, like this issue’s “Necktie Party”, about a young cowboy falsely accused of rustling and facing a lynching. This is a pretty well-written story for the most part, but the bit of business on which the plot ultimately turns is just too far-fetched for me to buy it. Willing suspension of disbelief got stretched to the breaking point in this one.

I don’t know anything about William Mahoney except that, according to the Fictionmags Index, he published 19 stories between 1931 and 1942, most of them in the gang pulps but with a few Westerns scattered among them. His story “Trouble Rider” in this issue reads a little like a hardboiled crime yarn with a pretty complicated plot and a harrowing torture scene that’s pretty strong stuff for a Western pulp. The protagonist is a cowboy framed for the murder of a mining tycoon in Arizona. He has to venture south of the border and get mixed up in a scheme involving blackmail, an old crime, and Mexican politics in order to clear his name. It’s a little offbeat, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and would be interested in reading Mahoney’s other Western yarns, or some of his gang pulp stories, for that matter.

Overall, I’d say this is a very good issue of WEST, but that’s due mainly to the fact that 80% of its pages are occupied by a top-notch Leslie Scott novel. But two of the three back-up stories are entertaining, too, and the third one has some nice lines in it even though in the end I thought it was a little ridiculous. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it’s well worth reading.

Friday, December 13, 2024

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Roadside Night - Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick


In forty-plus years of reading and collecting books like this, I’d never heard of this novel or its authors, Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick. As far as I’ve been able to discover, this is the only book they ever published.

When you see the phrase “strange love” on a paperback from this era (1951), it’s usually code for a lesbian novel. Not in this case. The relationships here are strictly heterosexual. The narrator, Buck Randall, is an ex-G.I., a World War II vet who fought on Guadalcanal. He owns a tavern and a small motel on the Pacific coast in California. He’s having a minor romance with the beautiful teenage daughter of the man who owns a restaurant down the coast highway from the motel. He’s not particularly ambitious.

Then a gorgeous blonde in an expensive car stops at the tavern for a drink as she’s passing through the area, and Buck falls hard for her. He pines away until she comes back by. They start getting to know each other. She’s interested in him, too, and after they begin sleeping together, he finds out that she’s not as well-to-do as he thought at first. In fact, she’s in sort of a desperate situation, but she knows a way out, if only she can find somebody to help her . . .

Yep, you’ve read it before, starting with James M. Cain and going right on through the Fifties in the work of dozens of paperbackers like Charles Williams, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and Orrie Hitt. The femme fatale, the likable but not-too-bright hero, the scheme that will make them both rich if only nothing goes wrong . . . but it always does. The first half of ROADSIDE NIGHT doesn’t blaze any new ground, but at least it’s a fairly early example of that standard plot. What makes it worth reading is the prose, which is bleak and fast-paced, and the sweaty air of doom and desperation that hangs over the book like fog rolling in from the sea.

Then the second half of the novel throws in just enough plot twists so that everything doesn’t work out quite the way you might expect it, and ROADSIDE NIGHT turns into a really nice little noir novel. I think the ending could have been stronger – Nistler and Broderick pull back just a little when maybe they shouldn’t have – but it’s still very effective. This isn’t some lost masterpiece of crime fiction, but it’s well worth reading and would make a good candidate for reprinting. It’s too short for Hard Case Crime, probably not much more than 35,000 words, but it would work just fine in, say, a Stark House collection with a couple of other short novels. I’m really glad I ran across it, and if you happen to do likewise, I think you should grab it and read it.

(As far as I know, this book still hasn't been reprinted since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on December 4, 2009, but used copies are available on Amazon that are reasonably inexpensive. More than likely, you can find some at other on-line booksellers, too.)

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Review: The Lost Continent - Edgar Rice Burroughs


Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels fall into three categories for me: Books I Know I’ve Read, Books I Know I Haven’t Read, and Books I May Have Read 50 or 60 Years Ago But Don’t Remember For Sure. THE LOST CONTINENT falls into that third category. I was in the mood for some ERB, and I had a hunch I hadn’t read it before, so I decided to give it a try. Besides, who can resist one of those short Ace editions with a Frank Frazetta cover?

This novel takes place in the 22nd Century. All communication between Western and Eastern Hemispheres has been cut off for more than two hundred years, following a catastrophic war that seemed on the verge of consuming Europe and threatened the Western Hemisphere as well. No one from the West is allowed to venture past “Thirty” or “One Seventy-Five”, the dividing lines between the hemispheres. (Hence the story’s original title, “Beyond Thirty”.) Our narrator and protagonist is young naval officer Jefferson Turck, commander of the Pan-American aero-submarine Coldwater. That’s right, it’s an aero-submarine, meaning it can fly and travel underwater. How cool is that? But not surprisingly, while the Coldwater is patrolling the Atlantic, it develops engine trouble and has to ditch in the ocean. Turck can’t submerge the craft because it wouldn’t be able to resurface. Turck also has to deal with treachery among his own crew, and eventually that puts him at sea in a small boat with three companions, being washed toward what once was Europe. After two centuries, what will these stalwart Pan-Americans find?

Not surprisingly, one of the first people Turck runs into is a beautiful young woman who needs rescuing. He and his companions go on to find that England has regressed to a primitive level with rival tribes of barbarians fighting each other and zoo animals having proliferated after the fall of civilization (as you can see in that great cover). Along with the girl, they move on across the English Channel to what used to be France. Once there, they discover that civilizations do still exist in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the form of warring empires from China and Africa that are battling to take over what used to be Europe.

This is a flawed but enjoyable novel. The first half, set mostly in what used to be England, is full of intriguing concepts but bogs down a little in travelogue mode, where the characters go here and look at this thing and go there and look at this other thing. Once the scene shifts to the continent and the characters find themselves embroiled in an epic war, Burroughs once again packs the story with interesting ideas, but the whole thing feels rushed considering how broad the scope of the tale is. There’s enough meat in THE LOST CONTINENT that today’s authors probably would get a trilogy of doorstop novels out of the same plot. If I had to choose, I much prefer Burroughs’ leaner, faster-paced treatment of the story, but I still wish he’d done a little more with it. The ending is a rather abrupt deus ex machina.

Don’t get me wrong. All quibbling aside, I liked THE LOST CONTINENT. Now that I’ve read it, I’m certain it wasn’t one of the Burroughs books I read back in junior high and high school, so I’m very glad I picked it up now. Burroughs could always spin a yarn, and sometimes that’s exactly what I’m looking for. THE LOST CONTINENT is an early novel by Burroughs, published as “Beyond Thirty” in the February 1916 issue of the pulp ALL AROUND MAGAZINE, reprinted numerous times starting in the Fifties, and currently available on Amazon in various e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. If you're a Burroughs fan and haven't read it, it's well worth your time.



Monday, December 09, 2024

Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #11: Invasion: UFO - Robert Deis and Bob Cunningham, eds.


When I was a kid, I happened to read Donald E. Keyhoe’s book THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL, and that sparked a huge interest in UFOs. I quickly went on to read other books about the subject by authors such as Frank Edwards and George Adamski, and my fifth grade buddies probably got tired of me yammering about flying saucers. But I was always yammering about something or other, so it might not have made any difference.

Keyhoe, Edwards, and Adamski are all to be found in the latest issue of the always excellent MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, the INVASION: UFO issue. As you might expect, this volume is right up my alley. Keyhoe, who I’ve really come to admire and enjoy as an author of aviation pulp fiction in the past few years, is on hand with the lengthy article “The Flying Saucers Are Real”, from the January 1950 issue of TRUE, which he expanded into the book I read almost 60 years ago and have never forgotten. Edwards, whose book FLYING SAUCERS—SERIOUS BUSINESS was another favorite of mine, is mentioned. There’s an enjoyable article about Adamski, who I took as a serious researcher and author at the time when I read his book INSIDE THE FLYING SAUCERS. Turns out he was a bit of a charlatan and/or nutjob, but hey, I had a good time reading his book back then and a good time reading about him now, so it's a win as far as I’m concerned.

Gary Lovisi contributes a fine article about vintage paperbacks that exploited the flying saucer craze, and when you have photo galleries that spotlight Anne Francis and Mara Corday, you’ve got to love that, or at least I do. The final article in this issue, “Are UFOs Attacking Our Oil Fields?”, from the May 1975 issue of STAG, combines two of my interests, flying saucers and oil fields, and was written by the great Robert F. Dorr, so I’d say it’s tied for my favorite with Keyhoe’s iconic article. Bob Dorr was just such a fine writer it’s always a pleasure to read anything he wrote, and the same is true of Keyhoe.

Now, I have to make a confession: I’ve seen something strange in the sky myself, a number of years ago, and someone else was with me who saw the same thing. We’ve never been able to figure out exactly what it was, but it was sure puzzling. I’m not going to go into any more details, or you’d think that I’m a nutjob. (Well, some of you no doubt think that anyway, but why confirm it?) You can take my word for it, though, that the latest issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is another beautiful piece of work from editors Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, and I give it my highest recommendation. You can order it on Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here.