Catching up on recent stuff...

OK, I haven't been a very good correspondent. I'm trying to get caught up now and here's a few things I've read lately....

The second volume of her Henry and Emmy Tibbett series, Down Among the Dead Men is a solid if unremarkable mystery novel. Henry and Emmy are on holiday again, visiting some friends for a sailing vacation in the seaside hamlet of Berrybridge Haven. They get involved with the local weekend sailing community, get to know the locals, and hear a tale of a somewhat mysterious death that happened some time ago. But then there's some tensions, some strangeness, and another murder. Who did it, and why? It all wraps up nicely, if a bit sadly; it's a tale of a somewhat minor crime that snowballed into some bigger ones. It's a pleasant read, with well-drawn characters, a good plot, and a setting that reminded me of some of the waterside towns on the Chesapeake that I've visited. You can always count on Patricia Moyes.

Now THIS is a classic. Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black is simply amazing. A beautiful woman works her way into the lives of a series of men, and kills them all in various ways. It's sheer noir delerium, one of the great examples of dark pulp noir fiction out there. It inspired a Francois Truffaut film, starring Jeanne Moreau...but if you like the movie, prepare yourself, because the movie makes a substantial change to the story, changing the nature of the crime that started her spree, and a devastating final twist is cut that changed everything. I had read the novel first and found the movie disappointing....but I have friends who saw the movie first and found the book a disappointment, so your actual mileage may vary. I find the book superior and I'm glad I've managed to hang on to it all these years....I first read it as a high-school student back in the 80s, and I was pleasantly surprised to see I still had it when I moved.

Michael Rowe's Wild Fell was simply infuriating for me. Parts of it are excellent, as it describes the narrator's boyhood and experiences that led to him buying an old house on an island on a lake in Canada. It goes fairly leisurely for a while, but I didn't mind, as there were hints of menace in the story and in a prelude about the house...but then in the last chapter everything seems cranked up to 11 and revelations come so rapidly that it's hard to keep track, and it's unclear if we're supposed to take them as literal truth or just lies. It reads as if the author had come to his page limit and had to wrap everything up in a hurry. If it had simply been bad, I could have wiped my hands and walked away, but in this case, Rowe has genuine grace as a stylist...but I felt his plotting needed work. A lot of work.

So, that brings me a few steps closer to being up to date...more to come....

THE SECRETS OF DREARCLIFF GRANGE SCHOOL by Kim Newman

I'm really starting to kick myself for not having plunged into Kim Newman's works earlier. I read Anno-Dracula back in the 90s and enjoyed it, but never picked up the sequels or anything else by him. Now, after sampling some of his work, I'm making up for lost time.

The Secrets of Drearcliff School (2015) is set vaguely in the 20s, and centers on Amy Thomsett, a young girl with a strange gift; it seems she can levitate herself, but has little control over it. Her uptight widowed mother sends her off to the title institute, which seems to specialize in difficult cases such as Amy. It's not that Amy is a bad person or poor student, but her mother holds Amy's paranormal ability against her.

The school is indeed a dreary spot on the coast, and of course strange things happen. It's not as plainly a magical school like Hogwarts, but it's definitely an odd place. There are the usual problems of bullying and rank and class issues that would rise up in school stories of the type, but here Newman throws in a neat angle in that most of the students are the daughters of mad scientists, pulp heroes, supervillains, and the like. (I chuckled at the mention of a "Sally Nikola" and there's probably a ton of references that sailed over my head.

Amy ends up forming "the Moth Club" with her friends Frecks, Kali, and Light Fingers. Frecks is a stolid British sort who has hidden talents; Kali is the daughter of an Indian bandit lord, and who reads too much gangster fiction and speaks like a pulp gangster. Light Fingers is another Unusual; her hands can move at amazing speed. Amy is a moth fancier and she assigns appropriate code names to her friends. But why? Because hooded figures are stalking the campus, and an attempt is made to abduct Kali.

But once that is resolved, there's a new menace in the form of Antoinette Rowley Rayne, a haughty new girl who openly declares her intention to change the school....and actually succeeds in drawing many of her fellow students into a sort of cult. And the hooded creeps are back, seemingly in league with Rayne.

It's a lot of fun, and my only complaint is that there's a lot of setup with references to strange Other Ones and the like, and when the story concludes there's still a lot of unanswered questions....including the fate of the REAL mastermind behind it all.

Still, it's a good read, and moves well. I enjoyed it immensely, not only for the story and characters but for the many nods to pulp fiction, which is Newman's signature. Worth finding.

WALK OUT ON DEATH by Charlotte Armstrong

I've been wanting to read some Charlotte Armstrong for a while, after reading some good things about her work. This was the first I picked up....and I wasn't too thrilled by it.

Walk Out on Death (originally titled Catch-As-Catch-Can) isn't much of a mystery, but a thriller in which a series of circumstances lead to a perilous situation. It opens with a fairly silly situation: world traveler Jonas Breen has brought home Laila, his beautiful daughter (or so he claims) from a quickie marriage in the South Seas (or so he claims). Seriously, everyone seems to take this at face value. But anyway, he dies, and innocent and very naive 18-year-old Laila inherits a half million dollars. (For 1952, that was a fortune.) She is surrounded by various cousins: Clive Breen, Dee Allison, and Andrew Talbot. Laila has a crush on Andy, who's been having a turbulent relationship with Dee, and Clive, who always needs money. There's also Pearl Dean, a friend of Jonas, a spiritualist who may or may not have designs on the Breen cash.

After realizing she's made a fool of herself over Andy, Laila leaves the house for a long walk, and while she's gone the people in the house are in a panic as the housekeeper collapsed and died. It turned out she had eaten some improperly-canned beans and got botulism as a result...and Laila had just eaten some of the same beans. Soon Dee and Andy are searching for her to get her to a hospital for treatment. (This was a reality in the day; people could and did die from botulism, and their only hope was to be rushed to a hospital for an injection of an antivenin before 24 hours were through.)

Clive finds out...and decides to keep Laila on ice until she dies from the poison, so he can inherit. But then she takes off on her own, hooking up with her friend Pearl and hiding in Pearl's trailer while she drives off to the beach.

Dee and Andy have a series of misadventures while looking for Laila, and there's a prolonged chase, a dramatic traffic accident, a creepy laundry truck driver, and a conclusion in a house about to be flooded with a powerful insecticide fog before it all ends happily.

It's a bit of a mess, but at least it's an energetic mess. It moves quickly although sometimes the plot contrivances are just too damn contrived and convenient, including Laila nursing a broken heart in the morning and finding true love in the afternoon. I did like how a witness to the aforementioned accident, an elderly mute woman, is regularly dismissed and ignored by everyone around her until finally someone stops and thinks to ask if she happened to see anything. Maybe a bit overly obvious that she's standing in for how so many women and their contributions are overlooked and ignored, and also for society's dismissive attitude toward the elderly, but it was still nicely done.

But all in all, the story is too muddled and too contrived to hit bullseye, but it is energetic and fast-moving enough to make an acceptable time-killer for a lazy afternoon. It's a fairly brief read, about 184 pages, and out of print, but you may come across an old copy in your local friendly used book emporium.

Catching Up & Short Takes

OK, I've been busy and distracted lately, but in a good way: I start a new job tomorrow! It came just in time; my unemployment ran out (you get six months here in Maryland) and what money I had was on the verge of running out, so if I didn't land a job when I did I'd be moving in with my mother and updating this blog from the local library. (She doesn't have internet.)

I won't go into detail about the new job but it's with a local stable company, involves research, is a temp-to-hire position through a famous temp company, but if they like me after about six months I'll be brought on permanently. The pay is less than I had been making but is right at the low end of what I'd prefer. (Considering everything else I'd been interviewing for was below that mark, sometimes significantly below, I think I'm lucky.)

So...what have I been reading lately?

Some of H. C. Bailey's works about Reggie Fortune are available as ebooks and I read the first one, after sampling some excellent tales. These are fun traditional mysteries from 1920, and while sometimes Reggie seems a bit too much like Lord Peter Wimsey (whom some simply can't stand), the stories tend to the darker than Wimsey's and could deal with intense obsessions, corruption, miscarriages of justice, and child abuse. The stories in this particular collection are a bit lighter in tone than some of later ones, but Bailey's elegant and sophisticated style are a joy to read and the mysteries can be genuinely nasty...although one is a bit comical. They do give an "origin story" as the first tale, "The Archduke's Tea," features Fortune accidentally embroiled in a mystery, with the police (and he himself) being surprised as his acumen in solving the case, leading him to be called in on others as the volume progresses. I can't wait to dip into more Fortune; this is damn good stuff.

Well, this is lurid, isn't it? This is the first in a series of collections of pulp tales by Paul Chadwick, about the adventures of reporter Wade Hammond, who becomes embroiled in some startling mysteries. The first story, "Murder in the Mist," is shockingly mundane, but the third story, "The Murder Monster," which the cover illustrates, is sheer pulp madness. There's a mad criminal called the Tarantula, a mesmeric mastermind, and a bizarre plot involving making people see skeletons. My favorite story, "Doctor Zero," had a mastermind using weird purple lights as murder weapons. This is good pulpy fun, as published in the magazines "Detective Dragnet" and "Ten Detective Aces" between 1931 and 1935.

Elizabeth Daly had been a big deal in the 40s, with Agatha Christie naming her as her favorite mystery author. This is her first book....and I wasn't thrilled. It actually took me three tries to read it, and when I finally did, I had the plot figured out easily. Henry Gamage (Daly's detective, a rare book expert) is vacationing at a seaside resort in Maine when an alarming death occurs, as a frail, ill man seemingly falls from a cliff. However, there's evidence that it might not have been an accident, and the death occurs literally hours after he inherited a fortune. There's a lot of meandering around a local theater company and a golf game, but I found it confusing and hard to follow, and the final revelation not much of a shock. I was very disappointed in this book but I have heard some very good things about her other novels, so I'll probably give her another try at some point.

The first in a new series and while it was well-structured and well-written, I was rather annoyed with it as it's yet another one of those books set in Victorian times but with the characters not acting all that Victorian. Really, it seems to be endemic among those who write historical fiction these days to make their physical milieu well-researched and period-accurate but their character's attitudes and behaviors to be perfectly modern. But I digress...March Middleton, newly orphaned, goes to London to live with her new guardian, detective Sidney Grice, who is a flamboyant and well-known figure in the papers. Middleton finally convinces him to allow her to assist on a case, a seemingly sordid one involving a murder in a sleazy junk shop, but it ends up leading into rather strange Victorian noir territory. Not bad, but there were aspects of it I wasn't crazy about. Unsure if I'll continue down this road...

Well, there's some more, but that's enough for now. I need to get to bed and be ready for my first day of work tomorrow....

More from the Pulps: THE SPIDER STRIKES!

Thank goodness for the Kindle store on Amazon; it's making a lot of classic pulp titles available. In addition to Doc Savage and the Shadow, I'm also diving into The Spider.

The Spider, aka Richard Wentworth, first appeared in September of 1933, and was the seventh character to get his own magazine. (Aside from Doc Savage and the Shadow, there were folks like The Phantom Detective, G-8 and his Battle Aces, Secret Agent X, The Avenger, Captain Future, The Black Bat, and probably a few others I've missed; the old hero pulps are seen as the forerunners of modern comic books, with the influences on them very, very obvious.) He's from the same publisher that did The Shadow and there's quite a few similarities between the two characters on the surface, although there are significant differences.

In The Spider Strikes, the first novel in the series, Richard Wentworth is a wealthy playboy already known as an amateur detective and crime-fighter. He's returning from Europe after attempting to track down a mysterious criminal known as Mr. X, a genius of disguise who seems able to infiltrate anywhere he pleases and gets away with bizarre crimes. He's a vicious criminal who has some sort of nebulous plan and Wentworth is trying to track him down.

"The Spider" is Wentworth's alter ego; actually, The Spider is wanted for murder, and he's basically a George Kaplan-esque character (watch North by Northwest if you don't get that reference)  who gets blamed for any deaths that Wentworth causes. He's got few scruples about killing, but makes sure the people he kills are guilty.

The story also introduces the reader to Wentworth's faithful servant Ram Singh (who's shamefully stereotyped but also a tough, strong character) and Wentworth's girlfriend, Nita Van Sloan (who is one tough cookie). These characters would regularly appear in the series and sometimes would even take over "The Spider" identity.

The plot meanders here and there in New York, and eventually leads, interestingly, to a ship loaded with chemicals, and it turns out there's a double plot. Mr. X wants to use poison gas at sea to loot a ship on its way to the US with a foreign debt payment (similar to one of Leslie Charteris' "Saint" stories, "The National Debt"), and also gas Wall Street and loot it.

And that's one of the interesting things about the series; it's seldom just gangster and thieves and racketeers. Spider villains think big; they're after huge coups and will do grandiose things to get them. (I've read a few Spider novels in the past.) Although The Spider doesn't really have a costumed identity in this novel, that does develop later, and the series will also become notorious for the lurid titles that sound like something from the weird menace pulp tradition, stuff like Emperor of Pain and Death Reign of the Vampire King and The Devil's Death Dwarves.

Is this worth reading? Definitely, for fans of the pulps. The Spider is definitely one of those pulp characters who almost defines the genre in its over-the-top battiness and sheer energy. Truly fun.

Short Bits: What I've Read Lately

So I've been reading a number of things lately that aren't worthy of entire blog posts themselves, but are worthy of mention...so here goes...

As a gay kid, the Doc Savage books fascinated me, largely because of their covers. The muscular man in a tattered shirt recalled my childhood crush on Race Bannon (I'm not joking), and even as an adult I can't help but snicker a bit looking back; the images of Doc had him tailor-made to be a gay lust object, even though everyone seemed blissfully clueless about it. And even in the stories...he avoids emotional entanglements, hangs out with five other guys...hmmm, seems suspicious, eh?

Levity aside, I reread the first Doc Savage book, The Man of Bronze. It's a pulp classic, full-throttle pulp energy, throwing everything at the reader while still serving as a decent introduction to its characters and milieu. Doc's father, Clark Savage, Se., just died from a mysterious illness, and his son "Doc," aka Clark Savage, Jr., sets out with his five best friends to avenge his death. But he's attacked in his lab by mysterious assassins who seem to be Mayan, and the trail leads to a lost valley in Central America, a pocket of ancient Mayans, and to a confrontation with a vicious criminal who uses germ warfare to control a valuable resource.

It's nonsense, but it's energetic nonsense that's a ton of fun. It's got Haggardian lost civilizations coupled with Doc's slightly sci-fi gadgetry (what might now be termed "dieselpunk"). It's a worthy introduction to the series.

I mean, c'mon, how gay is this?

And then I dipped into more pulp...

Eyes of the Shadow is the second Shadow pulp novel, and suffers in comparison to the energetic first book. The second one's a bit turgid, with a slightly muddled plot about stolen Russian jewels and a group of criminals trying to kill off a series of men who were in on the secret, along with an elderly criminal who's pulling the strings and seems to get away at the end. It's OK, and has a few harrowing scenes, but was overall unmemorable.

As an aside, I recently listened to an audio version of Daniel Pinkwater's sprightly kids' book Attila the Pun, which besides being most amusing, has a character named Lamont Penumbra, who has a huge nose and skulks around by night wearing a slouch hat. Hm.

I just finished Cleek of Scotland Yard, one of Thomas Hanshew's countless Hamilton Cleek novels. Like the first, it's full of melodrama, but isn't as over-the-top enjoyable. It's basically a short-story collection given some connecting tissue, but the stories themselves are often letdowns. One mystery is a naked reworking of Doyle's "Silver Blaze." Two stories involve mysteries that turn out to be accidental, a theft that wasn't and a seeming attempted murder that turns out to be a bizarre twist of fate. One mystery is solved because by coincidence, Cleek had happened to spot the criminal doing something suspicious a year before. Another case is solved because Cleek just happens to know that a certain costume was all the rage in the Paris cabarets for a while. There are one or two noteworthy mysteries, including one of a boy who seems to vanish from a greenhouse-type room, but overall the book was a letdown.

Cleek himself becomes insufferable. He's almost moved to tears about the possible murder of a young boy, but it's so overdone and dramatic that it seems insincere. He's impossibly noble and forbearing, as well as profoundly judgmental and frequently correct in his snap judgments of people. And naturally, it ends with him being offered the crown of the country he's prince of (he's an exiled prince of a central European county, y'know), but he rejects it out of love for a common woman.

Some have wondered if Cleek was a Mary Sue for Hanshew; he's impossibly noble and blessed with every virtue, as well as being an actual prince and the object of adoration for nearly every person he meets. Not knowing much about Hanshew, I can't say.

Last up is The Benson Murder Case, the first of the Philo Vance series by S. S. Van Dine, aka Willard Huntington Wright. In this, Philo Vance, wealthy dilettante, is allowed by his pal District Attorney John S.F.X. Markham to poke around a real murder scene. Vance figures out who must be the murderer right away, and leads everyone else on a merry chase as lets on that he knows but won't share his methods or knowledge until the end.

It's a little annoying, to say the least. The crime itself isn't all that interesting (a broker is found shot in his home), and the jumping from one interview to the next gets a bit tedious. Vance himself is quite annoying at times, superior and supercilious, very affected in manner and speech, often seeming like a total prissy queen. However, it's kind of interesting on a meta level, as it was based on a real murder (the unsolved shooting of bridge expert Joseph Browne Elwell in 1920), and a method used in the book of determining a shooter's height is utter nonsense.

On the plus side, it's overflowing with real 20s atmosphere, something I always enjoy.

So, that's a sampling of some less-than-thrillworthy stuff I've read lately...entertaining enough, to be sure, but not always up to the standards one would like to employ.

More fun stuff on the way....

Short Bits

A little this'n'that...

Over the holidays I saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Pretty much more a steampunk James Bond film rather than anything from Conan Doyle, but considering how Holmes was the subject of so many pastiches and ripoffs, and how the character was borrowed by Maurice Leblanc for some of the Arsene Lupin novels, it hardly seems the sacrilege some of the pearl-clutching purists out there would have you think. Go see it, if you haven't already. I saw it with my sister and her family; we saw the last one together, too, so this has become Our Thing.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Hugo, which I knew little about but went to see based on recommendations of friends. It's really not that much of a kiddie film as you might think; it involves an automaton and some real history, including George Melies and his work. It's also some of the best-integrated 3D I've seen in a flick. I'm to the point that I now refuse to see a movie if I know it was retroactively made 3D; I was disappointed in Alice in Wonderland and the second half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had some truly crappy 3D work.

I bought a Kindle Fire with part of a check my parents gave me (never worry, the rest went in the bank), and am truly delighted with how you can load PDFs on it. There's a lot you can get on PDF that's not available in other ebook format, like just about anything from Horrormasters. Also, long ago I bought CD-ROMs of all the Doc Savage pulp novels and all the Shadow pulp novels in PDF, so there's lots of downloading going on.

So far read a couple of things from Horrormasters: "The Abby of Clunedale," by Dr. Nathan Drake, a short early Gothic bit of looniness, possibly first published as a chapbook or blue book, and included in Drake's collection Literary Hours. It's one of those all-atmosphere, no-characterization Gothicks meant to be consumed in one sitting, probably by candlelight while the wind rattles the eaves. It's OK stuff, has a Scooby-Doo-ish ending, but palatable. (Dr. Nathan Drake [1766-1836] was a physician, essayist, and Shakespeare scholar.) Also up was "The Abduction," an excerpt from a novel by a Thomas Frost, that's full of atmosphere as an innocent maiden is kidnapped and held in a crumbling castle, but it ends abruptly and I guess one is to seek out the rest of the book to learn what happens. (I think it's the same Thomas Frost [1821-1908] who was a dedicated Chartist and radical, who admitted to writing a series of potboiler novels.)

And then there's the first-ever Shadow novel (of which there were literally hundreds...I'm gonna busy for a few years with this project!). The Living Shadow really has the Shadow taking a back-seat. It's really the story of Harry Vincent, who is recruited by The Shadow as he's about to commit suicide. T.S. gives him a reason to live and something to work for, and Vincent throws himself into it. The plot involved is rather mundane (a man is murdered, the search is on for his jewel collection, and eventually a fence is unmasked), but it serves as a primer for The Shadow's organization. The man himself shows up from time to time, usually to serve as a deus ex machina when Vincent gets in trouble, but he seems to be a forgiving boss and realizes the occasional slip-up is an occupational hazard.

This isn't the Shadow of radio; he's not Lamont Cranston (although that is brought up later in the series) and doesn't have psychic powers. He has a wide network of agents and doesn't rely on just one person. (And the radio character of Margot Lane wasn't added to the novels until much later, and met with fan resentment and protest.) The Shadow could probably be described as a sort of western ninja, always hiding in the shadows and using dark outfits (but without those tiresome samurai swords and throwing stars and all that impractical nonsense that doesn't exist outside martial arts movies), but he's also a master of disguise. There is mention of how he may be a master spy from WWI who was disfigured in action and later reported dead; I've heard that later in the series someone actually glimpses his real face and reacts with shock, saying that the man of a million faces has no face of his own.

It's good pulpy fun and actually rather good. Worth checking out, if you can get hold of it.

So that's it for now. I'm relaxing at home, on a cold Sunday afternoon, with a pot of Pouchong tea and a BBC miniseries on the tube ("The Chelsea Murders" from Armchair Thriller), and enjoying a lazy holiday weekend after all the craziness of last month....

Tales of the Shadowmen: The Modern Babylon

This is another case of "Great cover!"

The first in a series of anthologies from the good folks of Black Coat Press, these are different because they feature primarily characters from French pulp fiction, mingling with some other creations.  For instance, the cover depicts a confrontation between Feuillade's Judex and Mary Shelley's Creature.

The stories are not merely "new adventures" of popular characters, but crossovers.  Unfortunately, there's a few stories in here that function only as opportunities for characters to meet; however, at their best, the stories have a narrative that brings them together organically.

The cover illustrates "The Mask of the Monster" by Matthew Baugh, a decent story about the Creature surviving into early 20th-century France (and it's not bad for being his first work of fiction).  Bill Cunningham's "Cadavre Exquis" suffers not only from trying to cram too much into a short story, but also from a bleak outlook as the heroic Fascinax's efforts turn out to be futile.  And veteran TV writer, producer, and novelist Terrance Dicks of Dr. Who fame, gives one of the most unsatisfactory stories in the bunch, "When Lemmy Met Jules", which basically is only a meeting between Lemmy Caution and Jules Maigret, with minimal plot.  Yawn.

Up next was Winn Scott Eckert's "The Vanishing Devil," which featured Doc Ardan, Jules Maigret, and Sherlock Holmes, and was pleasant enough but not overly memorable.  Viviane Etrivert's "The Three Jewish Horsemen" is a delightful romp with Arsene Lupin and the Phantom of the Opera.  And I really liked G. L. Gick's "The Werewolf of Rutherford Grange," largely because it's being serialized and can afford to take its time.  It had good atmosphere and was more focused on story rather than throwing together as many characters as possible...which is a problem with Rick Lai's story "The Last Vendetta," which I felt was simply overpopulated with various characters and the dialogue existed mainly so people could drop pop-culture references.

Belgian author Alain le Bussy contributed the brief but very fun "The Sainte-Genevieve Caper" that has a meeting between Arsene Lupin and Sherlock Holmes (who crossed swords several times in Maurice Leblanc's original Lupin novels).  Jean-Marc and Randy L'Officier (who edited this collection, by the way) contribute the amusingly Lovecraftian "Journey to the Centre of Chaos."  "Lacunal Visions" by Samuel T. Payne is an adventure of Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, against a villain who seems to be a distant relative of Dr. Who.  And Dupin shows up again in John Peel's "The Kind-Hearted Torturer," only this time having him connect with the Count of Monte Cristo.

"Penumbra," by Chris Roberson, was a lot of fun for me to read, as it not only crosses Louis Feuillade's two creations, Judex and Les Vampires, but also throws in Kent Allard, aka "The Shadow" of pulp classics, for good measure.  "The Paris-Ganymede Clock" was an interesting bit of steampunk from veteran sci-fi scribe Robert Sheckley.  And the collection is rounded up by Brian Stableford's mini-epic "The Titan Unwrecked; or Futility Revisited," which mixes fictional characters with real-life writers and millionaires on a luxury ship cruising across the Atlantic.

Is it worth reading?  Oh hell yeah.  Despite a few missteps, it's still a fun way of introducing yourself to some lesser-known characters, and there's fun and adventure to spare.  The best pieces are actual STORIES, not merely literary contrivances, and for savvy readers, there's often a smile or a chuckle to be had.

This is the first in a series from Black Coat, and while there's room for improvement, the level of quality is still very high.  Not quite required reading, but damn close.