Review: Taming the Nueces Strip: The Story of McNelly's Rangers - George Durham as told to Clyde Wantland

I mentioned the other day that I sometimes read Western history books, and here’s a good example. As research for the second Johnny Colt novel (currently being written), I just read TAMING THE NUECES STRIP: THE STORY OF McNELLY’S RANGERS by George Durham as told to Clyde Wantland.

Durham was a member of Captain Leander McNelly’s Special Force of Texas Rangers that was sent to the Nueces Strip are of Texas, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, to clean out the rustlers and outlaws plaguing the area in the 1870s. Years later, Durham told the story to journalist Wantland, who turned the old Ranger’s reminiscences into this book first published in 1962.

And it’s a great yarn, not the least bit dry and academic. Most of it, in fact, reads like a novel, and I had a fine time reading it. I’m pretty sure I read it when I was in college for the Life and Literature of the Southwest course I took, and I knew quite a bit about McNelly and his Rangers from other research over the years, but that didn’t prepare me for the vividness and sense of authenticity found in this account. It’s a fine example of Texana and Western history, and if you’re interested in those subjects, I give it a very high recommendation. TAMING THE NUECES STRIP is still in print in e-book and paperback editions.

And if you’ll allow me an infrequent bit of blatant self-promotion, JOHNNY COLT #2: BLOOD ON THE BORDER will be along presently from Dusty Saddle Productions.

Review: Knight of Darkness: The Legend of The Shadow - Will Murray

Will Murray has written more non-fiction about The Shadow than anyone else, and whatever he wants to write about the character and his adventures, I’ll gladly read because it’s always entertaining and informative. Such is the case with KNIGHT OF DARKNESS: THE LEGEND OF THE SHADOW, the latest volume of Shadow scholarship from Murray.

This book collects a wide assortment of articles about The Shadow written by Murray at various times in his career. There are several behind-the-scenes looks at the creation of the pulp character, including an examination of exactly how the series was plotted by author Walter B. Gibson, editor John Nanovic, and Street & Smith executive Henry Ralston. I’ve read a bunch about The Shadow over the years, much of it by Murray, but I learned some things I didn’t know from these articles.

Murray also writes about Gibson’s very prolific career in comic book scripting and his work with various famous magicians. Other articles take a look at the different movie incarnations of The Shadow, from the Victor Jory serial all the way up to the Alec Baldwin movie in the Nineties. The radio show comes in for extensive discussions, as well, and I’m always interested in reading about that version since it was actually my introduction to the character. Murray covers all the comic book versions, most of which I remember reading. Well, not the ones in the Forties, although I have read some reprints of them. But I sure remember those from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.

As always, all these articles are well-written and great fun to read. In addition to that, there are dozens of superb illustrations by Michael Wm Kaluta, the artist most associated with the Shadow comic books, and the great Frank Hamilton, whose fine work graced the pages of pulp fanzines for many years. This is an excellent volume all around and I had a great time reading it. It’s available on Amazon in a handsome trade paperback edition. I think there’s at least one more volume of Shadow non-fiction to come from Murray, and I’m looking forward to it.

Review: Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author - Willard M. Oliver

I never get tired of reading about Robert E. Howard and his work. I’ve read several biographies and books about his writings and countless articles on those subjects. So I am definitely the target audience for ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR, the massive new REH biography by Willard M. Oliver published by the University of North Texas Press in hardcover and e-book editions. (It doesn’t hurt that I’m a graduate of UNT, or as it was known when I went there, North Texas State University.)

I really enjoyed the other biographies I read, even the deeply flawed DARK VALLEY DESTINY by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin. It was the first real REH bio, and a friend of mine helped the de Camps with the research. Plus we didn’t really know at the time about much of the stuff they got wrong or misinterpreted. Anyway, before I wander off in the weeds . . .

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR will likely be considered the definitive REH biography from now on, since it’s exhaustively researched, extensively footnoted, and brings together in one place all the information that’s available about Howard’s life, plus adding some things that I’ve never come across before in nearly 60 years of being a Howard fan. Academically, I just don’t see how anybody could ever top this volume.

However, I’m not an academic. I’m a guy who likes Howard’s yarns and have ever since I spotted the Lancer edition of CONAN THE USURPER in Barber’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth lo, those many years ago. And I feel a strong kinship toward Howard dating back to the moment I opened that paperback with its purple-edged pages and read in L. Sprague de Camp’s introduction that Howard was from Cross Plains, Texas—a town I’d heard of all my life because both sides of my family come from the same general area in west central Texas. I mean, here was a guy from a little town in Texas who forged a career as a writer when everything seemed stacked against him, and that was exactly what I wanted to do!

So what I look for in a biography of Robert E. Howard is a sense of who he was, what he did, how and why he did it (as much as it’s possible to figure out the why), and the same feeling I get when I stand in the Howard House in Cross Plains and look into that tiny room where Bob lived and worked . . . and this new book delivers on that. It delivers on that magnificently, in prose that’s clear, straightforward, sometimes poignant, and very compelling.

I haven’t been to Cross Plains for Howard Days in a number of years and I’ve never met or been in contact with Will Oliver, so I say this not as a friend of his but as a long-time reader and fan of Howard’s work.

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR is the best book I’ve read this year. For Howard fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

Review: Storyteller: Helpful Hints and Tall Tales From the Writing Life - Carlton Stowers

I first met Carlton Stowers many years ago at one of the mass autograph parties TCU Press used to sponsor every December. The idea was that they would gather twenty or thirty local authors in one place, and people could come and buy signed books to give as Christmas presents. The events were usually held at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens in those days. It seemed like they sold quite a few books, but for me, the real appeal was the chance to see old friends I didn’t run into in person that often—Elmer Kelton, Jory Sherman, Kerry Newcomb, G. Clifton Wisler—and to make new friends such as, well, Carlton Stowers.

I knew who Carlton Stowers was before that. I’d seen the name many times and knew he was an Edgar Award-winning author of true crime books. I believe he was acquainted with Bill Crider, too, and I’d heard Bill speak of him. But I didn’t read true crime books so I’d never sampled his work. However, when we were introduced and I spent some time talking to the guy, we were friends right away. His interests ranged ‘way beyond true crime, and I remember telling him one time, after he’d spun a great yarn about a distant relative of his who’d ridden with Pancho Villa, “You really need to be writing fiction. You’d be great at it.”

Eventually he did, but we’ll get to that.

For several years, Stowers attended the annual Howard Days get-together in Cross Plains with his friend and literary agent Jim Donovan (a fine writer his own self), and we had lengthy, hugely enjoyable conversations about everything under the sun, as they say. I haven’t been able to make it to Cross Plains for several years now, and those conversations with Carlton are among the things I really miss. Maybe one of these days.

So, to the point of this review, last year TCU Press published STORYTELLER: HELPFUL HINTS AND TALL TALES FROM THE WRITING LIFE. It’s part memoir, part how-to book, and it’s full of entertaining stories about Stowers’ life and his varied careers as a sports reporter, columnist, feature writer, ghostwriter for sports and entertainment figures, and of course, his award-winning years as an author of true crime books. I said above that I didn’t read true crime, and I still don’t, but I swear, I really need to read Carlton’s books because I know they must be well-written and compelling. Mixed in with these reminiscences are plenty of useful, practical tips about writing non-fiction of all sorts.

There’s also a section about Stowers’ career as a Western novelist. He’s written six novels so far, and they’re all excellent. I hope he does more. In the meantime, and until I get around to reading some of those true crime books, I’m very glad to have read STORYTELLER. It’s a superb book about the writing life, and if that interests you, I give it my highest recommendation. You can find it in trade paperback on Amazon.

Review: The Art of Ron Lesser, Volume 2: Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls - Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, Daniel Zimmer, eds.

I’ve become a big fan of Ron Lesser’s artwork in the past few years. Well, actually, I’ve been a big fan of Ron Lesser’s artwork for about 60 years, because that’s how long ago it was when I first started noticing it on paperback covers as I avidly looked through the new books on the spinner racks, searching for the next one I was going to read. I loved his covers—but I had no idea they were painted by Ron Lesser. In fact, one of my early favorite covers, the one on the second Dell edition of L.L. Foreman’s novel ARROW IN THE DUST, was painted by Lesser, although I didn’t discover that until decades later. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many books I picked up because I was intrigued by the covers he painted.

A couple of years ago, THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS, spotlighting those paperback covers, was one of my favorite books of the year. Now I’ve read THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 2: DANGEROUS DAMES AND COVER DOLLS—maybe I should say, feasted my eyes on—the second volume devoted to Lesser’s art from editor Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, joined this time around by Daniel Zimmer, with an assist from Tim Hewitt. Zimmer provides a fine biographical essay about Lesser and Joe Jusko, a top-notch artist himself, contributes an excellent foreword, but of course, the real appeal of this beautiful book is the art, scores of excellent reproductions of paintings done by Lesser after his days of doing paperback covers were mostly over. Most of them, as you’d expect, feature beautiful women, but there are top-notch Civil War and Western paintings as well. Lesser was always one of those guys who could illustrate anything and do a fantastic job of it. But let’s face it, his paintings of Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and others will just take your breath away.

Then there’s my favorite section of the book: as Lesser puts it in his commentary, cover paintings for books that don’t actually exist. These might as well have come off some of those paperbacks from the spinner racks, the kind I’ve loved for most of my life. And I’d love to read those books now, even if they don’t exist. Heck, I’d write them!

If you’re a paperback lover or just enjoy some absolutely wonderful art, I give my highest recommendation to THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 2: DANGEROUS DAMES AND COVER DOLLS. It’s available on Amazon in hardback and paperback editions. I loved it.

The Shadowed Circle #7 - Steve Donoso, ed.

THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, the excellent fan journal devoted to the iconic character The Shadow, is back with Issue Number 7, and as always, it’s a top-notch collection of articles and artwork featuring one of my favorite characters. Highlights this time around include Nicholas Montelongo’s article about the Big Little Books featuring The Shadow (I’m not a scholar or collector of the Big Little Books, but I read a bunch of them when I was a kid, but not the ones starring The Shadow, so all this was new to me); Martin Grams Jr.’s look at The Shadow’s agents and how they translated from the pulps to the radio version; and Arthur Penteado’s lengthy and compelling essay about how the theme of redemption figures heavily in several of the pulp novels starring The Shadow. All the contents are informative and entertaining, though, and if you’re a Shadow fan you’ll read them with as much pleasure as I did. Editor/publisher Steve Donoso and his cohorts have done another fine job of assembling this issue, which gets a very high recommendation from me. You can pick it up on Amazon or on the magazine’s website.

Looking For Lost Streets/High Fliers, Middleweights, and Lowlifes - Cullen Gallagher

I haven’t read a great deal by David Goodis, but everything I’ve read has been very good. He’s one of those authors I need to read more. I’ve never read any of the scores of stories Goodis wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, mostly under his own name but a good number of them under house-names, as well. However, Cullen Gallagher has read those aviation yarns, as well as the sports, mystery, and Western stories Goodis sold to the pulps. In fact, there’s a good chance Gallagher has read more of Goodis’s short fiction than anyone else, since there are less than a handful of stories he hasn’t read.

Gallagher puts the knowledge gained from all this reading to superb use in two recent non-fiction books about Goodis’s pulp fiction. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF DAVID GOODIS’S PULP FICTION lays the groundwork, and then HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS delivers in spectacular fashion as Gallagher provides summaries and critical commentary on nearly 200 stories, as well as developing a well-researched case that the themes and characterizations that made Goodis’s later hardboiled crime and noir novels modern-day classics actually grew out of his work for the aviation pulps, not his early efforts in the detective pulps.

Along the way, Gallagher adds considerable insight to the use of house-names in the pulps, and LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS contains an invaluable section that identifies not just the stories Goodis wrote for Popular Publications that were published under house-names but also identifies the actual authors of dozens of other house-name stories. I’ve never seen this information before, and it’s great to know which well-known Western pulpsters actually wrote stories under the names Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and others. Gallagher dug most of this out of Popular Publications pay records that are part of a collection at the New York Public Library. This is research and scholarship well beyond the call of duty and is a real boon to fans of pulps and popular fiction.

If you’re a David Goodis fan, you really need to read these books. If you’re interested in pulp fiction in general, I give them my highest recommendation. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS is available in e-book and paperback editions. HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. They’re two of the best books I’ve read this year.

Now, we need to get more of Goodis’s aviation yarns back in print . . .

The Shadowed Circle Compendium - Steve Donoso, ed.

I’ve been a big fan of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, a beautifully produced journal devoted to The Shadow, ever since it began publishing a few years ago. Now we have THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM, an even prettier volume reprinting some of the best articles from the first seven issues of the regular journal, plus half a dozen new articles that make this book well worthwhile even if you’ve read the others in their original appearances.

The highlight of the new articles, for me, is “The Shadowed Seven”, in which editor/publisher Steve Donoso asked more than twenty fans and/or scholars of The Shadow to select their seven favorite Shadow stories, the ones they would take with them to the proverbial desert island. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to this article myself.) All the different incarnations of the character were fair game for this exercise: pulps, comics, movies, and the radio show. There’s a good representation of all of those, although the pulp novels dominate the lists. I didn’t make a count or anything like that, but it seemed to me that the very first novel, “The Living Shadow”, was mentioned more than any of the others, which makes sense. After all, it established the character and set the tone for everything that was to come after. Several of the other early pulp novels were very popular, too. Even now, more than 50 years after I read them the first time, I vividly recall the great action scenes, the incredible shoot-outs between The Shadow and the hordes of gangdom, and how enthralled I was by them.

Other new articles include a look at The Shadow’s appearances in various fanzines over the past 40-some-odd years, checklists of the novels and reprints, and “The Essential Shadow Reference Collection”, devoted to the various books that have been written about the character.

If you haven’t been reading THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, the compendium is definitely a best-of-the-best volume and is likely to send you scurrying to pick up back issues of the regular journal. If you’ve been reading it from the start like me, you’ll have a great time revisiting old favorites and taking in the new material. THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM is available in hardback and paperback editions, and if you’re a Shadow fan, or a fan of the pulps in general, it gets my highest recommendation.

Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860-1960 - Christine Bold

From time to time, I get in the mood to read some non-fiction, but it’s usually non-fiction about fiction. Case in point, SELLING THE WILD WEST: POPULAR WESTERN FICTION 1860-1960 by Christine Bold, published in 1980 by Indiana University Press. A friend of mine recommended this book to me, and the author’s name was familiar. I remembered that she contributed some of the essays about various authors in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS. So it seemed like something I might enjoy.

The book has an intriguing concept: it’s an examination of the way Westerns became a mass-produced genre with a lot of constraints and rules that developed because of the way it was published, as well as how some authors of Westerns were able to achieve distinct authorial voices despite those constraints and rules. Bold starts with the dime novels and progresses through the early Twentieth Century and the pulp and original paperback eras, doing quick surveys of each of those publishing methods and then analyzing in more detail the careers of several different authors from each time period.

I’m not a big fan of dime novels, but I enjoyed reading about their origins and learned a few things. The authors Bold concentrates on in this section are Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, Edward S. Ellis, and Edward L. Wheeler. I knew quite a bit about Buntline and Ingraham (I once edited a novel in which Buntline is the main character, THE DIME NOVELIST by Clay More), but Ellis and Wheeler were pretty much new to me. Bold also discusses the different approaches of the two main publishers of dime novels, Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith.

In the section on the early Twentieth Century, Bold focuses on the big sellers—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand (Frederick Faust), and Emerson Hough—as well as Frederic Remington, who (I didn’t know this) wrote several novels as well as being a legendary artist of the American West. Brand, of course, is something of a transitional figure, bridging the early days of Wister and Grey with the pulp era that he dominated. I’ve read a lot about Wister (who originated much of what we think of as Western fiction), Grey (the first bestseller in the genre), and Brand (the first King of the Pulps), but I knew much less about Remington and Hough. Neither of whom I’ve ever read, by the way.

Moving on, Bold covers the careers of several writers who “escaped” from the pulps: Alan Le May, Ernest Haycox, Jack Schaefer, and Louis L’Amour. Le May I know mostly from the movies based on his books, although I have read the novel THE SEARCHERS (and didn’t like it as much as the movie). I’ve read and loved both of Schaefer’s novels, SHANE and MONTE WALSH. I’ve come to appreciate Haycox’s work, although I have a preference for his pulp era novellas before he “escaped” those untrimmed pages. And while I haven’t read all of L’Amour’s novels and stories, by any means, I’ve read a bunch of them. L'Amour comes in for the greatest amount of criticism from Bold. She praises his marketing abilities but doesn’t seem to think much of his writing.

The book wraps up with some brief coverage of “Anti-Western Westerns” from the Seventies such as E.L. Doctorow’s WELCOME TO HARD TIMES and Ishmael Reed’s YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE DOWN. There’s also a mention of what Bold erroneously refers to as “Playboy Westerns”, clearly a reference to the various Adult Western series published under house names. Comparing them to dime novels is fair game, I think. There are certainly similarities in the way they’re produced. But I’ve never heard anybody else refer to them as Playboy Westerns, a misnomer Bold picked up probably from the fact that Playboy Paperbacks published two of the early Adult Western series, Slocum by Jake Logan and Raider and Doc by J.D. Hardin, before those series were sold to Berkley.

SELLING THE WILD WEST is an enjoyable book with plenty of interesting insights. There are stretches where the academic density of the writing made my eyes start to glaze over a little, but for the most part it moves right along and is quite entertaining if you’re interested in the subject. Which I am, considering that a huge part of my own career has been spent writing books within a specific system and following the rules (mostly unwritten) of that system, while at the same time trying to establish my own voice and get across the things that I want to get across. That’s been a lot of fun and I think I’ve been somewhat successful at it.

Hell-Bent for Hollywood - Fred Olen Ray

I haven’t seen all that many of Fred Olen Ray’s movies, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen that he wrote and/or directed. I first became aware of his work in the mid-Eighties when I worked at Fort Worth Books & Video and rented out his action film ARMED RESPONSE (starring David Carradine and Lee Van Cleef) many, many times. It was a popular movie for us.

Ray has just published his autobiography, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD. I always enjoy reading about creative people, so I gave it a try. He doesn’t pull many punches in telling about his life, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Florida to his early desire to be a filmmaker to the many detours along the way to achieving his dream. It’s a compelling tale that Ray spins in straightforward, no-nonsense prose.

I especially enjoyed the sections where Ray talks about our mutual friend Terrell Lee Lankford, who wrote the scripts for several of Ray’s movies over the years. Lankford was a regular commenter here in the early days of this blog and is the author of several excellent crime novels including EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, BLONDE LIGHTNING, and ANGRY MOON. If you haven’t read his books, you really should.

But to get back to Ray, HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is a wonderful book. I had a very hard time putting it down. If you want insights into filmmaking and fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories about many legendary Hollywood figures, you’ll find plenty of that in the book, along with the inspiring narrative of Ray’s own life. I have a feeling he might scoff at hearing himself described as inspiring, but that’s the way it seems to me. HELL-BENT FOR HOLLYWOOD is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I give it a high recommendation. It's available in trade paperback and e-book editions.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Travels With Charley - John Steinbeck

Before Captain America and Billy did it in the movie EASY RIDER, before Green Lantern and Green Arrow did it in the comic books, author John Steinbeck and a ten-year-old poodle named Charley set off in the fall of 1960 in search of America. Appropriately enough, that’s the subtitle of the resulting book, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY: IN SEARCH OF AMERICA.

When I was a junior in high school, a friend and I went through a pseudo-intellectual phase, as sixteen-year-old boys will sometimes do. We read and discussed Hemingway and Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and God knows what else. If our parents would have let us get away with it, we probably would have smoked pipes and worn jackets with leather patches on the elbows. It’s a wonder we didn’t choke on our own pretentiousness. But we actually did read some good books and discover some good authors along the way, among them John Steinbeck. Two of Steinbeck’s books stand out in my memory: the novel THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT and the memoir TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY. I liked a lot of his other novels, too, most notably CUP OF GOLD, TORTILLA FLAT, and OF MICE AND MEN. I was less fond of THE GRAPES OF WRATH and EAST OF EDEN, even though those two are probably his most popular novels. It’s been more than forty years since I read TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, so I decided to see how well it holds up.

I’m happy to report that it holds up very well indeed. Steinbeck writes beautifully about nature and the places he visits and the people he meets. His social and political observations are always interesting, although this time around I did notice an occasional touch of smug superiority about his comments that I didn’t recall from my first reading of the book. It’s not enough to really cause a problem, though.

The best part of TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY is the relationship between Steinbeck and Charley, who becomes as vivid a character as any in the book. When Charley develops medical problems and you don’t know what the outcome will be, there’s genuine suspense. As some of you know, I’m a dog person, and Charley’s a great dog.

It’s nice to know that this is as fine a book as I remember it being. Now, will I go back and reread THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT or some of Steinbeck’s other novels and see if they hold up as well? It could happen.

(News flash: It didn't happen. I don't think I've read anything by Steinbeck in the fifteen years since this post first appeared in a somewhat different form on June 5, 2009. And since then, it's become pretty well accepted that TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY is highly fictionalized, almost more of a novel based on the actual trip Steinbeck and Charley took rather than pure non-fiction. I don't care. It's still a good book, and I still have good memories of those long-ago high school days when I first read it.)

The Digest Enthusiast, Book Sixteen - Richard Krauss, ed.

For those of us who are long-time fans of genre fiction, this is kind of a Golden Age. Not only are there more readily available reprints of vintage material than even the most devoted fan could ever get around to reading, there are also a number of magazines and journals devoted to the fiction we love. For example, MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, THE BRONZE GAZETTE, and the subject of today’s post, THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST. Book Sixteen in that series is now available, and it’s one of my favorite issues so far.

It starts off with a very nice keyhole cover featuring pinup model Jeanne Carmen, who’s featured in a long article about her career, lavishly illustrated (as they say) with many photographs and magazine cover reproductions.

Inside, regular contributor Steve Carper starts things off with an in-depth article about Handi-Books and their publisher James Quinn. Handi-Books published one of my favorite Harry Whittington novels, SLAY RIDE FOR A LADY, as well as good books by Robert Leslie Bellem, Cleve F. Adams, Paul Evan Lehman, Leslie Ernenwein, and others.

TDE editor Richard Krauss examines the first year of Howard Browne’s tenure as editor of FANTASTIC and returns later in the issue with a look at Robert A.W. Lowndes’ editorship of various magazines published by Health Knowledge. I’ve long been interested in Lowndes, who was known for editing some entertaining pulp magazines on next-to-nonexistent budgets. Krauss’s article about the Health Knowledge magazines is fascinating. Those magazines were never distributed to any of the stores and newsstands I frequented as a kid, or I would have picked them up for sure. I have a few in my collection now and always find them interesting.

Peter Enfantino continues his survey of MANHUNT, the best crime fiction digest of the Fifties, and Anthony Perconti takes a look at some of the digest-sized comic book reprint collections published by DC in the Eighties. I enjoyed both of these articles as well. Perconti’s stirred up some nice nostalgic memories because I bought and read quite a few of those digest comics collections when they were new. I actually remember seeing some of the very late issues of MANHUNT on the stands when they were new, but I never bought any of them. I’m not sure why, unless my allowance and the money I earned just wouldn’t stretch quite that far. EQMM was my mystery digest of choice in those days.

So there’s something for just about everybody in Book Sixteen of THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST, and it’s all well-written, informative, and entertaining. This is a great series, and the latest volume is available on Amazon in both a full color and a black-and-white edition. Highly recommended.

The Bronze Gazette #93/#94 - Chuck Welch, ed.

I think I was a subscriber to the Doc Savage fanzine THE BRONZE GAZETTE many years ago. It would have been before the Fire of ’08, so I’m not sure. But I realized recently it was still being published, and since I’ve been enjoying THE SHADOWED CIRCLE so much, I figured I ought to check out this fanzine devoted to the other great pulp hero from Street & Smith. So I subscribed and just received issues #93 and #94, the current offerings. I’m really glad I did because I raced through them and had a great time.

While I love that so much wonderful material is available on the Internet, there’s something about the feel of a printed fanzine in your hands. Sure, there’s some nostalgia involved, but THE BRONZE GAZETTE is just a top-notch publication all the way around. #93 leads off with a great cover by Mark Wheatley, who also has an article inside about the painting and how he envisioned it as the way Doc might have looked if the novels about him had appeared originally in one of the slick magazines, like COLLIER’S, instead of in a pulp. I really like this cover. The back cover by Tim Faurote is another alternate vision and finds Doc and the Fabulous Five featured on a RESERVOIR DOGS-like movie poster for THE MAN OF BRONZE.

Inside this issue is an excellent assortment of articles: a look at a very obscure Doc Savage fanzine from the Seventies; a piece about using AI to create art; an exploration of a possible romance between Renny and Pat, and along the same lines, some speculation about Doc’s avoidance of intimacy; an interview with Doug Wildey about an unrealized Doc animated series; tributes to writer Mark Justice and fan/dealer Weatherly Hardy; and an examination of the Doc Talos series, another alternate take on the Doc Savage character. Writers include Will Murray, Craig McDonald, Howard Wright, Malcolm Deeley, Bill Lane, and Alexander LeVasseur. A fine job all around.

#94 has a fine front cover by Bob Larkin with an article inside about it. The back cover by Tim Faurote finds Doc and his pals cast in another movie, this one a Magnificent Seven-like take on THE MAN OF BRONZE. Chuck Welch leads off the interior contents with an editorial that generated considerable discussion on-line. He suggests that the current generation of Doc Savage fans may be the last generation of Doc fans, and I can’t disagree with the theory. We’re an aging group, there’s no getting around that, and younger fans aren’t really replacing the older ones who head off to that newsstand full of pulps in the sky. But I also agree when he says that as Doc Savage fans, we should rage against the dying of the light and maintain our passion for the character and the stories in any way we can. Reading THE BRONZE GAZETTE seems like a good start on that. I also intend to read the Doc novels by Will Murray that I’ve never gotten around to (there are still a few) and reread some of the original pulp stories that occupy a fond place in my memories. I don’t have time to reread the entire series, but I definitely intend to revisit some highlights.

Elsewhere in this issue is some great art by Rick Forgus; a review of THE DEVIL GENGHIS by Daryl Morrissy; a look at the final Doc novel by Lester Dent, UP FROM EARTH’S CENTER, by Steve Donoso of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE fame (I enjoyed this novel much more than I expected to); speculation by Glen Held on whether Monk was based on famous New York gangster Edward “Monk” Eastman (Held makes a good case); an essay on the possible connection between Doc Savage and Charles Atlas by Mark Lambert; and a final note by Howard Wright on the fanzine THE MAN OF BRONZE discussed in the previous issue. All in all, another fine issue.

I really enjoyed reading both of these volumes. They took me back to an earlier and in many ways better time, an era that I find myself revisiting more and more as I get older. A number of back issues of THE BRONZE GAZETTE are still available. I have a hunch I know what I’m going to be doing for a while. If you’re a long-time Doc fan like me, don’t overlook THE BRONZE GAZETTE like I did. I give it my highest recommendation.

The Art of Ron Lesser, Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens - Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and J. Kingston Pierce, eds.

THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS is the latest fantastic art book from the editing combo of Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, joined this time by crime fiction expert J. Kingston Pierce. This book really got its start from a series of interviews with Lesser conducted by Pierce. Expanded versions of those interviews are included in this volume, along with features on Lesser’s favorite models (including his wife; that's her on the cover above) and reproductions not only of dozens of paperbacks for which he did the covers but also the original paintings which were used on those covers.

In a word, beautiful.

But of course, I’m going to say more than a word. Any book with Bill Cunningham handling the production is going to be very well done, and DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS is no exception. This is a substantial hardback volume, and the cover reproductions are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Those covers looked great on spinner racks, but they look even better at the large size made possible by a book like this.

The text put together by Bob Deis is informative and entertaining. I knew who Ron Lesser is but knew very little about him. Pierce’s interviews and Deis’s features provide plenty of background about Lesser’s life and career.

What really strikes me about this book is realizing how many of those paperbacks with Ron Lesser covers I bought over the years! I could flip through the pages and say, “Yeah, I had that one and that one and that one . . .” Clearly, Lesser’s covers helped sell those books to me. I’m certainly guilty of misidentifying some of his covers as being by Robert McGinnis, as Deis mentions is common. In recent years I think I’ve gotten a little better eye for such things. I’m happy to have those earlier misconceptions of mine cleared up, because Ron Lesser deserves all the credit he can get for being a substantial part of my reading life.

This is just the first of several planned volumes on Lesser’s career. It concentrates on the covers that feature beautiful women. Later volumes will zero in on Lesser’s work for Western, war, and adventure paperbacks. I can’t wait to see them. If you’re a long-time paperback fan and want to relive some glorious days, I give DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS my highest recommendation. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The Shadowed Circle #5 - Steve Donoso, ed.

The fifth issue of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE is here, and as usual, this journal devoted to the iconic character The Shadow continues to be outstanding. First of all, I love the front cover by Joe Booth. It’s as good a Shadow painting as I’ve seen in a long time and perfectly captures the feeling of the pulp, right down to the wear and tear along the edges. Booth also provides a couple of pieces of interior art that are excellent, as well.

Editor/publisher Steve Donoso has put together a fine group of articles about The Shadow. Some highlights for me:

“Shadow—and Substance, Part 2” by Dick Myers continues his examination of The Shadow’s organization, how it’s put together, functions, and is paid for. This is fascinating stuff to a long-time fan. Myers’ article was written a number of years ago but is being published for the first time in THE SHADOWED CIRCLE.

“Walter Gibson’s Mysterious Shadow Sabbatical” by Will Murray takes a look at an unexplained gap in Walter B. Gibson’s prodigious output of Shadow novels. Murray knows as much or more about The Shadow and Walter Gibson as anyone alive today and always produces great articles.

Speaking of Murray, Steve Donoso’s review of his latest book, DARK AVENGER: THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE SHADOW, is top-notch and highlights the differences between this volume and the fondly remembered THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE that inspired it.

“Street & Smith’s World’s Finest” by M.J. Moran takes a look at the early novels featuring The Shadow and Doc Savage, focusing on their similarities and also their very distinct differences. Moran makes some interesting points that may run counter to the general impressions of long-time fans such as myself who have read extensively from all eras of the two series. But when you stop and think about it, he’s right.

In “The Shadow—Strange Creature in Black—The Comic Book Years: Part 2”, Todd D. Severin takes a look at some of The Shadow’s appearances in comic books that I actually remember this time around: the 1953 parody in MAD Magazine (I actually read this in a MAD paperback sometime in the early Sixties), the Archie Comics version (I bought some of these new and remember being unimpressed by them, even though I knew little or nothing of the character at that time), and the fantastic DC comics run in the Seventies by Denny O’Neil, Michael William Kaluta, and various other hands (I bought these new off the spinner rack as well and loved them, although like the change in artists from Kaluta to Frank Robbins was a real shock, an impression seemingly shared by most of the readers).

All the articles are good, but those are the ones that stood out most for me. As always, I sat down and read this new issue from cover to cover. I can’t imagine any fan of The Shadow not loving THE SHADOWED CIRCLE. I give it my highest recommendation. You can subscribe to it or buy back issues on the publisher’s website or pick up individual issues from Amazon. Next time around will be the first themed issue, devoted to The Shadow’s part-time agent Myra Reldon. I don’t know much about this character, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

There's Just One Problem . . .: True Tales From the Former, One-time, 7th Most Powerful Person in WWE - Brian Gewirtz

My time as a wrestling fan breaks down into two distinct eras. When I was a kid, one of the local TV stations showed wrestling matches from the North Side Coliseum in Fort Worth every Monday night. I was a devoted follower for a while and absolutely believed everything I was watching was completely real. I understand now why my dad, who watched with me sometimes, seemed rather amused by my enthusiasm. Out of curiosity, I looked around on the internet and found a site covering the Texas wrestling circuit in those days, and the only wrestler whose name I remembered was Pepper Gomez (not much sublety or political correctness in the early Sixties).

Almost forty years later, in the late Nineties/early 2000s, I became a regular viewer of what was then the WWF’s weekly show on UPN, FRIDAY NIGHT SMACKDOWN. This was what is now known as the Attitude Era, and some of the prominent wrestlers were The Rock, The Undertaker, Kane, the Big Show, Triple H, and my favorite, Mankind (the great Mick Foley). The whole thing was so goofy and over the top that I really enjoyed it for a few years before moving on to other things.

So when one of my friends on Facebook posted about this book, I knew I’d have to get a copy and read it for old-time’s sake. THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . .: TRUE TALES FROM THE FORMER, ONE-TIME, 7^TH MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN WWE is by Brian Gewirtz, a former sitcom scripter who became WWE’s head writer during the time I was watching and remained in that position for fifteen years. Prior to that era, the managers and the wrestlers themselves came up with most of the storylines and dialogue they used. It was unusual to have an actual writing staff shaping the way things were going to go in the matches. Gewirtz and his fellow writers (some of whom were former wrestlers) took things to a different level.

Given his comedy writing background, it’s no surprise that THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . . is a very funny book, full of just the sort of bizarre tales you’d expect when you’re dealing with such colorful, larger than life personalities. There are some poignant and dramatic moments, too, but mostly I chuckled and laughed out loud reading this book. It’s nice to get to know these characters better and get an understanding of why some of the storylines developed as they did.

I think you’d have to be a wrestling fan, at least to a certain extent, to enjoy this book. As mentioned above, I’m a casual, part-time fan at best, but I still found enough to like that I had a great time reading THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM . . . Now I have to go to YouTube and see if I can find some of those old North Side Coliseum matches from the early Sixties.

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction - Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor

The first Mickey Spillane novel I ever read was THE DEEP, a hardback I checked out from the library when I was 12 years old and in the sixth grade. By that time I was already volunteering at the local library and could check books out to myself without anybody saying, “Hey, kid, are you sure you’re old enough to read that?”

My second Spillane novel, and my introduction to Mike Hammer, was KISS ME, DEADLY, another library hardcover I took with me and read while my family was visiting my aunt in Blanket, Texas. I still remember reading it in the big brown armchair that was my favorite reading spot in her house.

Just like I remember reading the Signet paperback of THE SNAKE in the repurposed World War II barracks building that served as the high school study hall, or, best of all, reading ONE LONELY NIGHT in a chair on the porch of my sister’s house one summer day, blown away by the great opening, the even better ending, and all the stuff in between.

Which is my long-winded, nostalgia-wallowing way of saying that I love Mickey Spillane’s books. I read them all, I reread one now and then over the years, and I read and enjoyed many of the Spillane novels that Max Allan Collins completed from various fragments and outlines and notes. Mike Hammer is one of my all-time favorite fictional private eyes and Mickey Spillane one of my favorite writers. One of the things I’m most proud of from my tenure as the editor of Rough Edges Press is that I got to work on the great Spillane collection STAND UP AND DIE!

So for a while now, I’ve been looking forward to SPILLANE: KING OF PULP FICTION, the first in-depth biography of Spillane by that same Max Allan Collins and his excellent collaborator James L. Traylor. Spillane is long overdue for such a volume, and Collins and Traylor have done a magnificent job of delivering it.

I learned a lot about Spillane’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood than I ever knew before, and the book is illustrated with photos I’d never seen. Spillane really comes alive in the biographical sections, a driven but affable guy, true to his blue collar roots, never pretentious, but treating his work a lot more seriously than the impression his self-deprecating attitude might convey. Spillane, clearly, was able to take the job of putting words on paper with great seriousness while recognizing the absurdities of much of the publishing business and all the trappings that go with it. My kind of guy, in other words.

Woven through the biography is a critical discussion and appreciation of each of Spillane’s novels. As Collins and Traylor point out, you can’t really talk about Spillane’s novels without talking about the endings, so spoilers abound and anyone who hasn’t read the books should consider themselves warned. The thing of it is, even when you know the endings, the books still hold fabulously on rereading. Some of them I enjoyed even more, because knowing what was coming, I could appreciate how cleverly Spillane set everything up. One of the great joys of writing is planting a seed that doesn’t come to fruition until much later on.

Collins and Traylor also cover the various moves, TV shows, radio shows, comic strips, and comic books based on Spillane’s work, as well as his early comic book scripting and his possible sales to the pulps and the slicks. (For the record, I’m absolutely convinced that Spillane sold hardboiled detective yarns to various pulps under the name “Frank Morris” . . . and I hope to see a collection of those stories someday.)

There are helpful listings of Spillane’s novels and collections in publication order, and also a chronological listing of all the Mike Hammer novels including the ones Collins completed for Spillane. This is very helpful because for a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of reading/rereading the Hammer series in order, including the Collins titles. Whether anything will come of this, I don’t know—I have lots of great ideas I never get around to—but in case I do, this list will be very valuable.

I really enjoyed SPILLANE: KING OF PULP FICTION. It’s entertaining, informative, and very nostalgic, but above all, just plain fun to read. It’s the best book I’ve read so far this year and is a lock for my top ten list at the end of the year. It's available in print, e-book, and audio editions. If you’re a Spillane fan, you’ve probably already bought it. If you’re thinking about it but haven’t pulled the trigger yet, go ahead.

Mike Hammer would. And then tell you it was easy.

Dark Avenger: The Strange Saga of The Shadow - Will Murray

One of the first books I ever bought about pulps was THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE by Will Murray, an author/editor/pulp fan who I probably met through our mutual friend Tom Johnson. This was more than 40 years ago, so some of the details have slipped my memory. But I was a big fan of The Shadow, having listened to the radio shows, read all the original novels published by Belmont (having no idea at the time that they were written by Dennis Lynds, another guy who would become a friend years later) and all the reprinted pulp novels from Bantam, Pyramid, Jove, Tempo, Dover, etc. So I dived into THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE with great enthusiasm and was well-rewarded. I loved it. It’s one of the all-time best books about pulps, in my opinion. Plus it’s a beautiful oversized paperback with a great cover by Frank Hamilton.

Of course, my copy was lost in the Fire of ’08 and I never got around to replacing it.

But now we come to today, and Will Murray’s latest book DARK AVENGER: THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE SHADOW. This is a greatly revised and expanded version of THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE and includes all the information Murray gleaned from the past forty-some-odd years of research. I opened it with the same enthusiasm I felt four decades ago and wasn’t the least bit disappointed. This is the best, most exhaustive volume about a single pulp magazine ever written.

Anything you want to know about THE SHADOW MAGAZINE is in here. The authors are covered extensively (mostly Walter B. Gibson, of course, but there’s plenty about Theodore Tinsley, Bruce Elliott, and Lester Dent, as well), as well as the editors and illustrators and the Street & Smith executives who were involved in the magazine’s production. The entire run of 325 novels is broken down into distinct categories, and Murray explores how they were written, how the series evolved, and the various influences that caused that evolution. He touches on the various versions of The Shadow after the pulp ended, but this is mostly about the 18-year run between 1931 and 1949. Rightly so, as far as I’m concerned since the pulp Shadow is my favorite.

The cover of this new edition is by Joe DeVito, who has done great covers for many of Murray’s books in recent years. I really like this one because it captures The Shadow’s personality quite well and also includes Myra Reldon, one of The Shadow’s agents from the novels who usually isn’t featured in artwork about the character and the pulp. An excellent job all around by DeVito. The book also includes a lot of the interior illustrations by Frank Hamilton from the earlier edition. I always loved Hamilton’s work and am very pleased to see these illustrations again. They really bring back a bygone era of pulp fandom filled with printed fanzines and books like THE DUENDE HISTORY OF THE SHADOW MAGAZINE.

Even if you’re a fan of The Shadow and read the original version, you’re going to want to read the new edition, too. I raced through it, unable to put it down, having the time of my life reliving memories of the Shadow novels I’ve read and being reminded of all the great ones still waiting for me to read. Between the great journal THE SHADOWED CIRCLE and the books devoted to the character by Will Murray, this is the new Golden Age of Shadow Fandom. DARK AVENGER gets my highest recommendation. It’s available in both e-book and trade paperback editions.

The Wrap Up

There’s no point in denying that 2022 was a rotten year in many ways, but there’s also no point in dwelling on that. So let’s turn our attention to more pleasant endeavors, such as writing, reading, editing, and publishing.

To take those things in reverse order, for most of this year I was the editor of Rough Edges Press, the mystery/thriller/men’s adventure imprint of Wolfpack Publishing. It was a wonderful job, as I got to work with Mike Bray, Jake Bray, Patience Bramlett, and all the other great people at Wolfpack, in addition to all the authors involved. While there, I was privileged to edit some really excellent books, and I’m proud of what the line accomplished. However, I stepped down at the end of October because I discovered that I couldn’t both edit and write at the level I wanted to, and although I didn’t mind slowing down some on my page production (more about that in the next paragraph) I just wasn’t ready to stop writing full-time. There are still too many books in my head clamoring to get out.

As I mentioned a few posts back, 2022 was the first year since 2004 that I didn’t write at least a million words of fiction. So the streak ends at 17 years, and while I might have preferred an even number (yes, I am a little OCD), I’m absolutely fine with that. I wrote approximately 900,000 words this year. That’s plenty. I think 750,000 would be a good total for 2023. I wrote at that level for many years before I started hitting a million, and I think I can continue producing at that level for a while yet. My plan for next year is to keep up with my regular ghost-writing job (I’m committed to approximately half a million words there) and devote the rest of the wordage to a few books of my own. We’ll see.

On the reading front, it was a good year, not at all rotten. I read 138 books. Here are my top ten favorites, in the order in which I read them:

A GUIDE TO THE GOOD LIFE: THE ANCIENT ART OF STOIC JOY, William B. Irvine

GUNS OF THE DAMNED, Stone Cody (Thomas E. Mount)

IN THE PULP FICTION TRENCHES, Len Levinson

STAND UP AND DIE!: THE LOST THRILLERS OF MICKEY SPILLANE, Mickey Spillane

THE SPIDER: SCOURGE OF THE SCORPION, Will Murray

GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS, Leslie McFarlane

FROM THE FILES OF . . . MIKE HAMMER, Mickey Spillane

THE RANCH CAT (apa STRAIGHT FROM BOOT HILL), Willliam Hopson

JANE FURY, James Robert Daniels

CALICO, Lee Goldberg

I’m aware that’s a pretty odd mix. Two of them I edited (the Levinson memoir and the Spillane prose collection; the other Spillane book is a collection of the Mike Hammer comic strip I had nothing to do with). Two of them aren’t out yet because I read them in manuscript, JANE FURY and CALICO, but they’ll be out next year and you should remember those titles because they’re great. The pulp influence is there in GUNS OF THE DAMNED, the first novel in the Silver Trent series originally published in THE WESTERN RAIDER and STAR WESTERN, and in the Hopson novel because he got his start in the Western pulps, and in the new Spider novel by Will Murray since the Spider is one of the iconic pulp hero characters. My study of Stoic philosophy kind of petered out as the year went on, but the lessons I learned from it came in handy more than once and I still plan to get back to it.

There were at least two dozen other books right on the verge of making this list, including quite a few I edited, starting with Jamie Mason’s Father Barrett series and Ryan Fowler’s Father Tag Nolan series. Both of those feature priests/detectives and both are absolutely excellent, but beyond that, they couldn’t be more different. You should check them out if you haven’t already. Chuck Dixon’s Levon Cade series continued this year with several great entries. Brent Towns added another top-notch action/adventure series to his tireless output with TALON and also gave us some fine hardboiled private eye novels set in Australia. Nik Morton’s Leon Cazador books are fast-paced international thrillers with a great protagonist. Stephen Mertz’s latest Cody’s War novel demonstrates that he hasn’t lost a step and is still a legend in the action/adventure field. And these are just Rough Edges Press books. I also read some great pulp reprints from Altus Press/Steeger Books and several superb hardboiled/noir novels from Stark House/Black Gat Books/Staccato Crime. I swear, if you can’t find plenty of great books to read these days, you’re just not looking hard enough!

Finally, this blog suffered a bit in 2022 because I just didn’t have enough time to devote to it. As a result, there were fewer posts than any year since I started it in 2004—and since I started it in July, that was only half a year. I hope to post more in 2023, including more book reviews, the return of movie reviews, and maybe an occasional post about what else is going on in my life, although generally, that stuff is pretty boring. My thanks to all of you reading this, whether you’ve been a regular reader since 2004 or just found the blog. Like the WesternPulps email group (which will celebrate its 24^th anniversary this spring), I intend to keep this going for a good long while yet.

The Dan Cushman Reader - Brent D. McCann

Yesterday’s post mentioned that Dan Cushman’s first story, “Girl of the Golden Lode”, was published in the Winter 1943 issue of the pulp NORTH-WEST ROMANCES. Today’s post is about Cushman as well. With a title like THE DAN CUSHMAN READER, you’d think this was a collection of his stories, right? Well, it’s not. Instead, THE DAN CUSHMAN READER is a book-length master’s thesis about Cushman and his work, written in 2001 by Brent D. McCann, a graduate student at the University of Montana who was able to interview Cushman numerous times before the author passed away. It's posted online here. I downloaded it several years ago and finally got around to reading it.

Despite being written as an academic paper, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, THE DAN CUSHMAN READER is very readable and entertaining. McCann does an excellent job with the biographical information, providing a clear, interesting overview of Cushman’s life. He covers Cushman’s career as a writer in-depth, too, and provides a detailed analysis of several of Cushman’s novels, most notably STAY AWAY, JOE, a controversial novel about life on an Indian reservation that was adapted into a Broadway play and then later into a movie starring Elvis Presley.

McCann seems to think, understandably so, that any lasting reputation Cushman has will be because of STAY AWAY, JOE. But despite its early popularity and success, over the ensuing years the novel has been criticized and memory-holed because of the controversy around it, and it doesn’t appear to be in print today, although used copies of it are readily available. On the other hand, at least eight volumes of Cushman’s pulp and paperback work are in print, and used copies of his other books are just as easily found as STAY AWAY, JOE. My personal favorites of his work are his Armless O’Neil stories from JUNGLE STORIES and ACTION STORIES, but his pulp Westerns and Northerns are consistently very good, too. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I haven’t read STAY AWAY, JOE, and I wrote the introduction to one of the volumes of collected Armless O’Neil stories published by Altus Press.)

I’ve mentioned before that it took me a while to warm up to Cushman’s style, but once I did, he became one of my favorite pulp writers. Because of that, I really enjoyed THE DAN CUSHMAN READER. I don’t have any idea what became of its author, Brent McCann, but I appreciate the work he did on this. If you’re a Cushman fan or a fan of pulp and paperback fiction in general, it’s well worth reading.