As you may or may not be aware, Electric Pentacle Press, publisher of my novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD, closed its doors recently. This leaves my novel homeless and out of print, along with EPP's other publications, except Occult Detective Quarterly Magazine, which has already moved to another publisher.

I'd like to thank EPP's publisher, Travis Neisler, for taking a chance on the book and all he and EPP did in putting it together and getting it out into the world.

As of this posting, THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD has already been pulled from all sales outlets, including Amazon, so if you were thinking about picking up a copy, the very small number of them I have, are the only ones left unspoken for in the world. These are now collector's items for fans of weird fiction and noir, so hit me up, if you're interested.

If you bought TROW in its first edition, you have my heartfelt thanks. It was truly a labor of love and for a first novel, I'd like to think it's pretty damned good.

I'm not about to let it go just yet, either. Tom Ahearn's first recorded case is only the beginning and I'm not ready to let it go out of print and into that warm, Los Angeles night. Currently, I'm investigating options for a new home for TROW and hope to have good news to share with all of you soon. 

Stay tuned for more news.

I've read this series three times and all the years after I first discovered it, it's still probably my favorite manhwa series (tied with AARON'S ABSURD ARMADA).

I've mentioned it here before, in fact, but that was a few years ago. Since I love it, and it's little known here in the which is a shame because it really is a fantastic coming of age story, it deserves another look.

A lot of stuff has been going on lately, most of which I can't, or don't care to, share, so instead let's show off some new acquisitions.

Over the long weekend, I did some used-book hunting and came home with these finds.

I was delighted to find an Alan Dean Foster novelization of a film, PALE RIDER, I haven't seen since I was a kid. As I've mentioned before, I was a big fan of film novelization as a kid and Alan Dean Foster (whose ALIEN adaptation I wrote about here) is one of the all-time greats of novelizations. I look forward to reading this one quite a bit. 

I was also glad to find I AM LEGEND as I've read all of Matheson's crime and western novels, but somehow none of the sci-fi or horror he's best known for. As many regular visitors probably know, I read mostly crime, mystery and western novels after spending a great deal of my life reading almost-exclusively fantasy and sci-fi. Somehow, though, I never got around to reading the stuff Matheson is known for, such as I AM LEGEND and HELLHOUSE. His crime and western novels are pretty sub-par, but I expect great things of I AM LEGEND. I mean, it is a legendary piece of literature, pun intended, so it has to be good.

I've also mentioned before what a big fan I am of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of attorney-detective Perry Mason. Aside from his PM novels (he wrote over eighty, by the way, from the early 30s until the early 70s and his passing), I've read many of his Cool & Lam detective series and some of his standalone novels, and I have to say: I've never read an ESG novel I didn't enjoy. Some of his books are better than others, but I've yet to find one that wasn't thoroughly enjoyable. They do certainly fit a pattern, a template ESG created and was comfortable with, but the details of each are unique and never fail to delight me. That said, I cleaned the place out of Erle Stanley Gardner books. Literally. Never hurts to stock up on a good thing.

Lastly for commentary: the Mickey Spillane novel, his first, I, THE JURY. I've read half a dozen Mickey Spillane novels, and many more completed by Max Allan Collins (my favorite living writer) and if I'm completely honest, I'm not a huge Spillane fan. I totally understand his appeal, but the books just don't do much for me. That being said, I'm still willing to give them a try when I come across ones I haven't read because a man who sold so many books and made so many people happy doing so, had to be doing something right. At any rate, this copy of I, THE JURY was seemingly in nearly-pristine condition. When I opened it up at home, though, I noticed someone had underlined and circled dozens of lines and individual words in the text and written notes in the margins. Mostly the notes run along the lines of, "Could be said by Dirty Harry???" and "Find definition???" I'm a little annoyed I didn't realize the book was so marked up, but I'm also curious about the person who left them. I'm guessing the note-writer was young, at the time, based on the enthusiastic use of question marks and the nature of the notes themselves, but I'll never know. That's part of the fun of used books: wondering at their origins.

That's it for now. Hope all of you had a good holiday weekend!

Two things attracted me to this movie: one, it's based on a Dorothy Hughes novel and two, it's an early example of rural noir. Instead of the normal city environment, it's set in a rural town in New Mexico.

​Those are good ingredients to work with, but is the final product any good?

Well. Lucky Gagin, played by Robert Montgomery (father of Samantha from Bewitched), who also directed this movie, is a vet who comes to rural San Pablo to find the mobster he blames for his best friend's death, quasi-hiding out in the backwater. Because of a festival going on, Lucky can't find a hotel room and ends up on the residential side of town where he meets the beautiful Pila. She, of course, senses he's both trouble and in trouble himself and gives him a "magical" charm of protection.

After that, Gagin goes and makes some trouble, looking for Hugo. I'm gonna skip a lot of recap here because the film starts out very slowly and winds its way through a weird middle section where Lucky pals around with an archetype we've been taught by a few hundred movies not to trust: a greasy fat guy who is overly friendly and solicitous, trying to hide the fact that he's just biding his time to shank you and take everything you have. The only difference here is that he's Mexican and runs a merry-go-round (with, you guessed it, a pink horse). The merry-go-round is kind of a clumsy symbolic device meant to signify the very pointless of life. There's also a message about how society as a whole treats former soldiers: with a level of fear and awe that sets them apart from the rest of us when all most of them want to do is go back to regular, everyday life once it's all said and done. The end of the film pretty much drives that home.

I'll be honest: I had a hard time watching this movie. It's not a bad movie, but every scene goes just a little longer than you expect, a little longer than it should. There's more said than there should be and less shown to us than I'd like. You can tell an actor directed it because he loved acting and wanted to give himself--and his costars--every opportunity to do so. The film is really a character study more than anything else, but some of the long-windedness kind of blunted the impact of some scenes that I'm sure were more effective in the original novel.

At any rate, it's an OK, if problematic, entry into this series.

An appropriately-named film for this feature, it supposedly features newspaper men--at night!--and its most surprising aspect is there is no editing or newspaper business of any sort!

Well, now that's out of the way, let me say, I stumbled on this without any idea of what to expect. Frankly, I didn't expect much and I sure got it. Apparently, it's loosely adapted from a radio show of the same name, featuring a different crime-related story each episode, as supposedly related by the night editor of a newspaper - these being stories he couldn't report on because they're too dark or depraved or something, I suppose.

I had to figure all this out after the fact, by the way - the movie clearly expected the audience would be familiar with the radio show and format.

At any rate, the movie starts with a bunch of guys sitting around a newspaper office at night, playing cards, until one starts telling the story. And it isn't much of a story.

A police detective, while in the midst of meeting his mistress, witnesses a crime. He can't report it because he's cheating on his wife and can't explain why he was in the area to witness it without outing himself, but his mistress--also married, and very wealthy and some sort of society dame, to boot--also can't report it for similar reasons. So the cop goes through the motions of investigating the crime, without being able to simply go to the crook who committed it and arrest him. This leads to further troubles when the investigation points towards a man the detective knows is innocent, so of course, he's conflicted and faces moral dillemas, let's say.

All in all, it was a sorry effort of a film. Its best quality is it's barely an hour. I suppose it was intended to start of a series of these, making the transition from radio to film, but that never happened. And if this is the foot they chose to start off on, it's probably for the best.

​Not recommended.

I wrote about Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, P.I. series here several months ago and how my interest was spurred by a reviewer's favorably comparing my novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD to them. Without rehashing what I wrote then, suffice it to say that I am a fan of Ross MacDonald and when I saw two of his non-Archer crime novels (both stand-alones) on my most-recent trip to the used bookstore, I snatched them up. MacDonald only write a very small number of non-Archer novels, so I was excited to check these out.

​Now, let's talk a little about MEET ME AT THE MORGUE.

Originally published in 1953 (the year between the publications of the third and fourth Lew Archer novels) under a semi-pseudonym (using his full name, John Ross MacDonald), MEET ME AT THE MORGUE has a very different feel from the MacDonald works I'm familiar with.

For one, it doesn't feature a P.I. or even a cop as the protagonist. Howard Cross is a parole officer who is convinced that his model parolee (on parole for a drunken vehicular manslaughter and seemingly punishing himself more than the courts did) is innocent when he's accused of a kidnapping, even though Cross himself saw the man with the boy only hours before the ransom note was delivered to his parents. From there, an extremely-tangled, but in the end, entirely logical mystery begins to unfold.

The interesting thing about this novel, at first, is that Cross has neither any experience as an investigator nor any business investigating this crime. Almost everyone believes Fred Miner committed the crime, or at least was an accomplice to it. Cross has nothing but his certainty that Miner is a good man who made a mistake and not a hardened criminal capable of stealing a child. And as he performs his initial investigation, he's certain of nothing else - not his methods or even his own motives. It lends a sort of charm to the story as we feel out Cross's character as he feels out his own situation.

Within forty pages, though, that all evaporates and Cross is solving the mystery like Lance Lawson on adderall. Each decision he makes turns out to be the exactly correct one and each step leads him unerringly to a bigger, more important piece of the puzzle and he seems to expertly weave them together in solving the crime. 

I really don't know what happened there, but it affected my enjoyment of the novel. Don't get me wrong, the mystery is, as I said, complicated and tangled and fantastically spun, but Cross starts out as an interesting character and is quickly relegated to another generic, tough and smart guy solving a seemingly-impenetrable crime as easily as he'd tie his shoes. It was a disappointing development.

That said, the novel is very solid in terms of plot and if you care more about the mystery than character development, it should be right up your alley. 

I think I've written about Harry Whittington here before. I've certainly read enough of his crime novels. Some are excellent (like his swamp-noir A MOMENT TO PREY) and some are atrocious (like DON'T SPEAK TO STRANGE GIRLS), but most are fairly average. However, Whittington also wrote a number of westerns. Until recently, I'd never read one, but a friend gave me three for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. The first I read was SADDLE THE STORM and I have to say, it's so good, it almost seems hard to believe Whittington wrote it. 

As I said, I've read a number of Whittington's crime novels - ten or twelve, probably. While the subject matter varies widely, they almost all have one thing in common: they are very simple, very straightforward. That's not a bad thing, per se. His most complex book I'd previously read was A HAVEN FOR THE DAMNED, which reads less like a novel and more like a single-set-piece stage-play with a large number of characters moving on and off stage. That felt like Whittington being more ambitious than was typical, but it's nothing compared to SADDLE THE STORM.

SADDLE THE STORM is a western, but it's really not like any western I've read before. It's immensely, incredibly densely-packed with both named characters and plot. When I first started it and I realized how quickly characters were being introduced, I feared it would be a case of a huge cast being used to obfuscate a thin plot, but it's exactly the opposite. None of the characters Whittington introduces are filler nor are their words or actions wasted.

The entire novel takes place during a three-day Independence Day celebration in the small town of Malpais and features three main, interwoven plots about: a young couple whose marriage is falling apart; a Bible-thumping bully who terrorizes his wife and children as an outlet for his own anger at being pushed around by larger ranching outfits; and a young gunfighter who wants to get away from a life of violence and bloodshed. Each of the three plots could have supported a typical Whittington novel on its own, but here, Whittington weaves them together so skillfully, each character and plot playing off of and adding to, moving along, the others, that it's truly incredible. The endings don't wrap up as realistically as I'd hoped, but each has an ending that works and even if they're a little anti-climactic, they don't take away from the overall experience.

The thing about this book is that it was so good that it makes me wonder why Whittington didn't devote this kind of skill to his other works. SADDLE THE STORM was published in 1954, early on in Whittington's career. Almost all of his work in the 50s and early 60s was published by Gold Medal, who paid fairly small amounts for initial print runs (though they paid fair royalties on additional print runs and many of their books went through multiple runs and/or editions). Many GM authors produced large bodies of work simply to make a living. Whittington himself was incredibly prolific--at one point, he produced a 50k novel a month for more than three years--and I suppose at some point, he made the decision between a steady income from potboilers and a more uneven income from more-artfully-produced novels. Clearly, he chose the steady work.

It's too bad, really, because Whittington, while not forgotten, is not as widely remembered as he deserves to be and I truly believe that if his crime novels were as skillfully produced as SADDLE THE STORM, he would have been able to break into the more mainstream, larger publishers and gain more lasting recognition.

That being said, if you've never read Whittington, there's no time like the present to start and you can certainly do worse than start with this one.

Just a quick note: I've sold another western, a second story featuring Ernie Farrar, the town marshal of Aldensville. The first story, "A Hanging Matter" was published this past spring in Crimson Streets Magazine, and this new story, entitled "Noose-Hungry", will appear late this year in CSM's pages, as well. It's another cow-town mystery, so if you liked "A Hanging Matter", I think you'll like this one, too.

And if you haven't read Marshal Farrar's first case, fear not - it's available online.

Click here or the image below and enjoy! 

I don't normally post reviews; if you follow this site at all, you know that the stuff I write about here is usually more my thought process on a work. I almost made this a Literary Legacy post, but it isn't - that wouldn't be fair to Ovid DeMaris as A. I haven't read enough of his work to write such a post and B. his literary legacy is the important journalism and non-fiction works he wrote for decades, covering the Mafia quite extensively. But I do want to write about this novel, so let's just call this what it is: a review.

In his early years as a writer, and sporadically later on, as well, he wrote crime fiction. And while I had known of DeMaris as both a fellow New Englander and an important journalist, I was delighted to find he'd published a number of these crime novels through Gold Medal, probably my favorite publishing company of all time.

Well, let's say that enthusiasm faded quickly. In fact, I was disappointed in THE EXTORTIONERS.

As I mentioned earlier this year, I sold a story to Eric S. Fomley's newest anthology, DRABBLEDARK, a collection of 101 horror and dark fiction drabbles and now it's been released!

Amazon reader Maura Y says:

A well-written drabble can deliver great emotional impact and demands great reader engagement, because every word matters. Luckily for us readers, Drabbledark contains many well-written drabbles... I greatly enjoyed reading Drabbledark. Owing to the breadth of topics, which were presented within an elegant, reader-friendly layout, I would highly recommend Drabbledark as a quick introduction to the genre of dark fiction. However, beware: a likely side effect of reading this ambitious anthology of blood-curdling gems is a frighteningly deep, almost otherworldly attachment to microfiction.

Get your own copy in print or on Kindle right here!