Mike Blair story by Hank Searls?

 

Can anyone identify this story? This is most probably a Mike Blair story by Hank Searls, but I can't be 100% certain, because the story was published in Finnish without the author's name. Mike Blair is in it, though, and it sure feels like a hardboiled PI story from the late fourties or early fifties.

In the story, Blair runs into an old flame, who sings in a nightclub performing under a false name. The woman tells Blair that she's anxious to see another man, who snatched her from Blair five years ago and is getting out of prison. Blair promises to look for the man. He also gets entangled with a gangster boss who may have set the man up as the murderer of a man who won some money from him in a casino. In one scene, Blair and a bartender who's helping him get almost drowned in a car. It's a good story of its kind, full of action, beautiful women and dangerous fist fights. It almost never sloops down. 

Any help would be appreciated. The Blair stories were collected and published by Steeger Books in 2020, but I don't have that book. This is probably from Dime Detective, since the Finnish pulp I'm researching used lots of material from Popular Publications.

EDIT: I found this, it was originally "For Auld Lang Crime", and it's from Dime Detective, Dec. 1950. 

The preface for my book Dark Places and Little Tramps

Here's the preface I wrote for my book Dark Places and Little Tramps, which is a collection of writings about crime and other genres, taken from this very same blog. The sales have been lacking - I don't know what I expected, but I couldn't foresee that they would stop sending parcels across the Atlantic. There was also a bit of a delay getting the book in Amazon, and I think some of the possible momentum was lost while waiting for the book to appear there. It's now available, but as I already implied, I'm not sure whether it moves across the pond at the moment. (Damn you, Trump, and your tariffs!). But alas, seems like there's no Kindle version, even though I had an electronic version of the book made. Luckily my income isn't dependent on this! I'm not sure if it works, but the e-book version can also be bought here. Here, on another blog, is the table of contents for the book - it's too long to post here!

This book is a collection of book reviews from my blog called Pulpetti (Finnish for pulpit). I set the blog up in 2005 and updated it irregularly into 2022, when I finally stopped. Pulpetti, as the title probably tells you, was mainly about pulp or pulpish fiction, stuff that was published in pulp magazines, paperback novels and other low-end literary venues. I also wrote a lot about obscure films and some classics, and there was also a lot about my family issues and other odds and ends (I even published some poems there!), but sometime around 2010 I decided to concentrate on the reviews of pulp fiction and films and stop talking about my personal life, other than some work-related stuff, i.e. translating crime fiction, writing about it and what have you. I also started other blogs where I could direct my seemingly endless energy. 

Blogs around the world were mainly in English when I started Pulpetti, so it was natural to me that Pulpetti was also in English. I'm not a native speaker, as I live in Finland, but I've always thought my English is pretty fluent. At times I also published in Finnish, and I remember writer J. D. Rhoades saying that those parts in Pulpetti sounded like Elvish to him. 

Pulpetti brought many connections. From 2004 to 2011 I published a crime fiction fanzine called Isku in Finnish, and I got lots of new hardboiled and noir writing in them, stories by Patti Abbott, Bill Crider, Christa Faust, Ed Gorman, Jason Starr and Kevin Wignall, to name just a few. I couldn't have had the same supply of good stories without the blogging. Thanks go also to the Rara-Avis e-mail list which was still going strong during those years. 

Great cover by Ossi Hiekkala.

Largely thanks to Pulpetti, I had also connections to sample new crime novels for a paperback line I was editing for a Finnish publisher, namely Arktinen Banaani. I hand-picked books for the line in 2008–2010. The line went bust after only six books, but what classics they were: Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman, Kevin Wignall's Who Is Conrad Hirst?, Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye, Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest, Christa Faust's Money Shot and James Sallis's Drive. How could you not love those books? But it seems the Finnish audience was able to resist their call, and the publisher really didn't know what to do with the books, so the paperback line ceased. After the paperbacks, there came a few books in hardcover (Kevin Wignall's The Dark Flag, which unfortunately still hasn't been published in English and probably never will, Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde, and Ken Bruen's London Boulevard, plus two crime novels by Finnish authors), but they vanished without a trace. A writer friend of mine, Antti Tuomainen, said to me that one day someone's gonna pick up one of these books, decides to become a writer and writes a book that changes the course of history. Here's hoping...

Why then did I stop blogging? I simply couldn't find the time anymore: I was already writing or doing some other writing-related work six, seven or even eight hours every day, so I thought it would be too tiresome to try to come up with something worthwhile to be published in a blog. And then there was social media, namely Facebook, where I could also publish stuff about my writing and pulpish fiction. Sometime around 2020 Facebook stopped showing links to Google-owned Blogger in its newsfeed, so it became quite frustrating to publish something on Blogspot and then find out no one has read it. There are other problems with Facebook that I wholeheartedly recognize, and as I'm writing this introduction, I've been on a Facebook break. I also wanted to have these reviews at hand and in print, just in case of Google deciding to cease all defunct or dormant blogs. 

As I said, Pulpetti was mainly about pulpish fiction, mostly hardboiled and noir writing, but also some westerns, some horror, some fantasy, some sleaze and other erotica and other genres. Many of the reviews in Pulpetti were born out of making a sequel to my original Pulpografia (2000, in Finnish only), a reference book on American crime and mystery writers published mainly in the pulp and paperback format. I also did a book on American western writers, so it was natural to post about that genre as well. 

In the early 2020's I started finishing up the sequel to Pulpografia, and I had to read some men's adventure books, a genre I'm not very much interested in, but which seems quite popular nowadays. When I was writing my first book over 20 years ago, I concentrated on genres that I really cared about, the noir and hardboiled stuff, but the wind has changed, at least according to the sites like Paperback Warrior and Facebook groups like Men's Adventure Paperbacks of the 20th Century, where men's adventure books, like the Mack Bolans by Don Pendleton, are very much a fad.  (As I'm writing this introduction, the sequel is not finished yet, but I'm hoping it will see the light of day in 2025! EDIT: Here's hoping...) 

In this book, there's also a large section on neo-noir, since I was reading (and still am!) new American, British and Irish crime fiction, mainly in the noir or neo-noir subgenre. I think there hasn't been any kind of history of neo-noir fiction, so this could be a start, or at least someone can use this as a source or a reference work. A word of warning: neo-noir is a famously slippery genre, so someone might think that not all the books mentioned here are neo-noir or even noir.

We have also a section on sleaze or sex paperbacks of the 1960's and 1970's (and later ones as well). Many people know that lots of sleaze paperbacks are also crime fiction. Just to name a few: Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Robert Silverberg, Orrie Hitt, Barry Malzberg... I did a book on sleaze paperbacks in 2020, called Pulpografia Erotica. It concentrates on American books that were published also in Finnish, so the scope is pretty limited and haphazard. There were lots of crime-related books that have never before been called to attention of crime fiction aficionados, though, so I think this section should prove interesting to many paperback fans. 

There are also sections on westerns and some other genres as well, with a short segment of non-fiction books and magazines. One of the most important segments in this book focuses on older British crime fiction. There are reviews and articles on British spy books, but also stuff about British private eye books, some of which are very light pastiches of the genuine American stuff. James Hadley Chase has many of his books reviewed, though I really don't find him that appealing. In the end, we have some reviews on crime/noir graphic novels and also some stuff on Finnish literature, mainly Aino Kallas and Mika Waltari, but also a survey of Finnish private eye fiction. "Reviews in brief" is just what it is: very short reviews on hardboiled, noir and other novels. 

The book doesn't contain the blog posts as they were, since I've edited them and taken out stuff that's not relevant anymore, i.e. things about where I was reading the book or some such. I've also combined some of the shorter reviews into longer ones, for example in the case of James Hadley Chase. 

The texts are arranged alphabetically according to the writer's surname. I've also added the publishing info, and you can find the publisher and the year of the first edition in the headers. (In this time of e-books, it's becoming more and more difficult to find the publishing year and the name of the original publisher!) 

I hope you find this mixed-up collection of reviews and essays interesting and entertaining. 

(And I indeed hope you can order the book and get it into your hands, tariffs or not!)

My book Dark Places and Little Tramps out

I decided to break the silence here, because I have a new book out and it's in English! One day, over a year ago, I got an idea: I'd take all the blog posts here in Pulpetti that are about literature, crime or otherwise, and edit them into a collection of reviews and articles. It took me over a year, but the book finally came out last month. I edited the texts, took out some blogginess (is that a word? I mean stuff like where I was reading the book etc.), organized them in different genres and wrote a foreword. My friend and colleague JT Lindroos, the mastermind behind the now defunct PointBlank, also did the cover and helped with the back cover copy. The book came out under the moniker Pulpetti Books. 

I thought at first I'd publish the book via Amazon, but then I thought I should do it via Books on Demand (BoD), which is situated in Germany. I use it regularly with my own publishing house, Helmivyö, and I thought it would be the best way to make the book available to public, since through them I could also have  the international distribution. Here the book is on Amazon, though not as an eBook. The book is available on many other sites as well, for example in The Australian Booktopia. The book should be out also as an eBook, but I'll have to find out about that. Do check out also this, this and this. (EDIT: I thought at first that Dark Places isn't available in Amazon, but Tony Baer over at Rara-Avis list found it. There must've been a delay, and I didn't check the availability when writing this blog post.) 

Mind you, the title of the book isn't supposed to refer to Charles Chaplin (this didn't occur to me at all, and neither to JT!), it's a reference to Gil Brewer's novel which I mention in the book's list of essential noir. (Dark Places is the title of Gillian Flynn's novel, which I also write about.) (EDIT: In an earlier version of this post, I mentioned I write about Brewer's Little Tramp in the book, but that is not the case after all. But there are two reviews of other novels by Brewer.) 

Here's the back cover copy: 

Dark Places and Little Tramps collects Juri Nummelin's writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other literary genres of yesteryear. The author has written extensively about genre fiction and popular culture for more than four decades, but this new volume is the first publication of his writings in English. Among many other subjects, it features a lengthy section on neo-noir and writers like Gillian Flynn, Allan Guthrie, Jason Starr and Duane Swierczynski. He also investigates British spy and crime fiction, and includes chapters on western and horror. Nummelin shines new light to many of these areas, such as the largely forgotten topic of sleaze paperbacks.

And also little something about me as well: 

Juri Nummelin is a Finnish writer and publisher, who has had a life-long crush on hardboiled and noir. His blog, Pulpetti, was for many years a steady source of news and opinions about pulp and paperback fiction and edgy new crime writing. The texts in this volume are culled from the blog, but they have been newly edited and organized by genre. In the book, Nummelin also reminisces about his experiences in attempting get new neo-noir writers published in the Finnish language.

You can find the whole table of contents here. 

Jordan Harper: She Rides Shotgun

I'm late joining the crowd praising Jordan Harper's first novel, She Rides Shotgun. It came out already in 2017 (okay, less than two years ago, which to my mind means it's a new book), but I managed to get it only last Christmas (it was a present from me to me). True, I read it very fast once I started it. She Rides Shotgun is an excellent crime novel, which really deserved the Edgar for the best debut it got.

She Rides Shotgun has been compared to Charles Portis's True Grit, a marvellous anti-Western Western from the late 1960's. True, Portis's novel is narrated by the 14-year female lead herself, and She Rides Shotgun is divided between chapters in which the main focalizer (and not the narrator) is either 11-year old Polly McClusky or his ex-con father  Park, who is out to save her ass from the neo-nazis that already killed her mother.

The premise is already intriguing. Add to that Harper's narrative skills and his lines of occasional poetry, and you have a winner. Add to that a copious amount of shuddering violence, and you have a double-winner. And mind you, there's never a hint of sexual abuse toward Polly, though lesser writers might have veered into that direction. I didn't know if the prelude with the bad sheriff of a Hicksville was necessary, but it got the fear of him into my heart.

You've all probably read about Dan Mallory already. I have his Woman in the Window as by A. J. Finn sitting on a shelf, but I can forget it and read She Rides Shotgun again instead. (But really, the New Yorker piece on Mallory is amazing.)

Sam Hawken: Missing

I really liked Hawken's earlier novel, Juaréz Dance, in all its minimalism. During the last Christmas holiday, I read his later novel, Missing, which is also set in Texan-Mexican milieu. I have heard that his critical view of Mexico is not necessarily true or honest, but it makes for a gripping read. Missing is about a former Marine, who leads a pretty quiet life in Laredo, Texas. Things get sour, when his half-Mexican daughter and her Mexican friend disappear after a concert. The book starts slowly, develops slowly and builds into a violent, shattering climax that leaves you gasping for air. What's more important is that the book is also believable, with relatable characters.

A lengthier post to follow, on Jason Starr and Jordan Harper - or two posts.

Laura Lippman: Sunburn

I read Laura Lippman's new thriller, Sunburn, already a month ago, when we were coming back from Crete. I started it in a plane and was almost sad when the flight was so short I couldn't finish it straight away.

Sunburn is a very good crime novel, something Anne Tyler and James M. Cain would've written, if they had collaborated (Lippman cites both as influence in her epilogue): a woman, whom life hasn't treated fairly, suddenly (or so it seems) leaves her husband and three-year old child on the beach and moves to a Hicksville in Maryland and meets a tall dark stranger. I don't believe anyone can predict the twists and turns of the novel, especially the first half is very exciting and full of red herrings. The other half is totally different and moves along at a different pace, which some might think is a letdown, but I'm sure it's done on purpose.

There's lots of good and excellent in the book, but I'll mention only two things or themes. Food and making it gets lots of display, but for once this is elementary to the plot and thematics, and not just some sentimental paraphernalia of most new crime novels with food in them. What's especially great is that Lippman almost never describes what her characters look like, but still you get a very full image of them. This happens, because she writes about what kind of an effect her characters have on other people. Lippman is very skillful in this.

Highly recommended, also to Finnish (and Swedish and Greek and Italian etc.) publishers. Sunburn would make a fine addition to the other domestic suspense writers you've been translating and publishing for some years now. This is something entirely different from those dull Nordic noir serial killer doorstoppers: lean and mean and thoughtful, all this at the same time. Hardboiled with a feminist twist. You can't get more exciting than that.

Stark House Western Classics

There's been some talk about the idea of reprinting classic hardboiled and noirish westerns of the fifties and sixties. I compiled such a list earlier on my blog here (I called the list, jokingly, Hard Case Western) and the Spinetingler Mag maven Brian Lindenmuth has been talking about the same kind of westerns on his Facebook site.

Only now I noticed that Stark House Press has started doing this. Earlier they reprinted three of Harry Whittington's noir westerns, and they reprinted one by Arnold Hano, the Lion Books editor, and now they've done a two-fer by Clifton Adams. This is incredible! I only hope I'd have more time on my hands.

If anyone wants to work along these lines, the list I compiled can be used. I only wish my name would be mentioned somewhere.

Andy Straka: A Witness Above

I'd never heard about Andy Straka before, but I snatched his PI novel A Witness Above from the Brash Books newsletter, when it was free for a limited time. I read the book on my cell phone, which worked just fine.

A Witness Above stars Straka's private eye protagonist Frank Pavlicek, who's a former cop, fired from duty after shooting down a black kid, thinking the kid was armed. Pavlicek has retired from New York to his old haunts in Virginia. As he's training his hawk (something Straka seems himself to do), he stumbles upon a dead man, who seems to have a connection with Pavlicek's daughter. Soon Pavlicek gets a call of help from his daughter.

A Witness Above is a fluent, if not spectacularly original read. If you like hardboiled private eye novels, this should work for you. Straka's style is straight-forward and not overtly wordy, which at times suits me just fine. A Witness Above worked very well on the small screen of my phone. This is something one could read on a plane or in a train.

I just founded a publishing company

Well, not exactly. I just didn't do it, just like that, it was a long and at times frustrating process. But now it's up, after planning it and thinking about it for many, many years.

The publishing company is called Helmivyö in Finnish. I'm not really sure what it should be called in English - literally it's a bit like "a string of pearls", but the word "helmivyö" is an old word originally meant to be the Finnish translation of "anthology". It's probably translated from the Italian "collana", which means both "collection" and "jewel". And so my publishing company does a lot of anthologies.

The first of which is Ajokortti helvettiin ("License to Hell", according to the short story the title was taken from), a collection of flash fiction stories I published in my short-lived Ässä magazine (plus three new stories from Rob Hart, Stephen D. Rogers and Anthony Neil Smith).

There is also a collection of my reviews, articles and what not about American hardboiled crime novel, called Epämiellyttäviä päähenkilöitä ("Unpleasant Protagonists"). It turned out to be almost 300 pages! There's stuff ranging from John K. Butler and old true crime mags to James Ellroy and Gillian Flynn. (Okay, I'm cheating a bit, since Flynn isn't hardboiled, but she's noir, and that's close enough.)

The third book is Kalmankylväjä ("Deathbringer" or something like that) by Petri Hirvonen, a very short and tense action novel taking place somewhere in South America.

Two of the books, my collection and Petri's novel, were designed by J.T. Lindroos, the mastermind originally hailing from Finland. The cover for the flash fiction anthology was done by Jenni Jokiniemi.

The books are available only in print-on-demand. They are not available as e-books, since there are no markets for them in Finland. (It's a long and boring story.) I have plans for future books (actually I have four almost ready), and this might be something, well, not big, but biggish. We'll see. I'm not one to boast about my possible successes. You can see more here (it's obviously in Finnish).

PS. There might be some translations in the future, as I've accumulated lots of connections through years. I'll contact you.

Joe Gores: Interface

After reading for years praises for Joe Gores' 1974 novel Interface I decided finally to read it during the holidays. The book is a private eye classic, but not anything Chandler or Macdonald might've written. It's a tense novel in which the private eye is no hero. He works with the crooks, for the crooks, against the crooks. He's no tarnished knight.

The "he" of the novel is Neil Fargo, but he's not the main protagonist of the book. There's also one Docker, half-crazy and violent Vietnam veteran, who in the beginning kills two guys and steals an attache case full of drug money. This takes place already in the midst of events, as Gores doesn't give anything away for the reader. He also writes in a terse, behaviorist style that stays away from depicting what the characters are thinking at any given moment or what they are driving at with their actions. This made - at least for me - pretty difficult to get into the book. The rhythm started to feel easier in the middle of the book. There's a mesmerizing twist in the end, but even that's not very easily narrated.

I'd really like to read this in a good translation - it's never been translated in Finnish, I don't know why (some other books by Gores have been) -, but somehow I don't think that's gonna happen. Still, a very good book that comes highly recommended.

Steve Brewer: Bank Job

I just finished this hardboiled thriller reminiscent of Elmore Leonard's work the other day. It was the first book I read by Steve Brewer, but I liked it well enough to read more of his books later on.

Bank Job (2005) is one of those books that start rapidly, race along with a good speed and develop into a satisfying climax. Three low-life criminals are on a crime spree doing stupid things. One of them gets hit by a whiskey bottle during an attempt to rob a liquor store. The guys end up in a lonely house with an old couple living in it. The old guy of the house has a secret up his sleeve, and much action and mayhem ensue. There's plenty of violence that really hurts, and there are also some sudden twists and turns.

Brewer creates memorable characters with just few touches, a bit of dialogue, descriptions of how people move, act, keep a book in their hands. It's quite nice that the lead character is someone over 60. The young hoodlums are also depicted very nicely, they are fully human though they are quite worthless and almost evil. The plot moves on with a nice pace and slows down only in the last 20 or 30 pages. Comes highly recommended, even with the very stale front cover.

Edit: Oops! I meant to publish this on Saturday, but I accidentally pushed the Publish button and can't take it out anymore. So it's two book posts on the same day, but I don't really think anyone minds. 

Peter Rozovsky on hardboiled

In his blog I too rarely read Peter Rozovsky has started a new series of posts: he looks into the classic American hardboiled crime fiction. Here are his posts on Lionel White, Edward Anderson (Thieves Like Us), James M. Cain, Dan J. Marlowe and Robert Silverberg (admittedly a small one) and finally Dan J. Marlowe (again!), Paul Cain and Jim Thompson. He has also some other fascinating posts on different subjects, go read them all!

Robert Crais: The First Rule

I hadn't read any of Robert Crais's private eye novels with Elvis Cole, but I had heard good things about them, so I was curious when The First Rule from 2010 was translated in Finnish just this month. It stars Joe Pike, who was first Elvis Cole's dangerous sidekick buddy, but has now his own series of books. He's a former mercenary and he's also as tough as they come.

The First Rule is about Pike investigating the killings of his former colleague and friend and his family. It seems soon that there are bigger things at stake and the clues lead to the Eastern European mafia. Crais moves the story along smoothly, which is always an asset, when you're talking about a book like this. This kind of stuff is almost comfort reading for me. Pike is violent, but only when it's necessary. He's a vigilante, but he doesn't go about babbling about it, which makes the ideology easier to stomach and the character more believable. There are some moments, where I would've cut down the wordage, but all in all this a compact book, gripping and fast to read.

This is by no means an entry for the Friday's Forgotten Books meme, but take a look at the other entries here.

Dave White: When One Man Dies & The Evil That Men Do

I've said earlier that I really don't care about the recent private eye characters whose problems are worse than their clients. The major exception here is Reed Farrel Coleman, but on the whole I'd rather the private eyes would disappear if they turned sideways.

This didn't stop me enjoying Dave White's two novels, When One Man Dies (2007) and The Evil That Men Do (2009). In them, the private eye hero Jackson Donne suffers from many problems: he's only 28 and yet he's an alcoholic, his former colleagues at the police hate him, he's done nothing much to educate himself, he's alienated from his family and his girlfriend left him and died later from something Jackson Donne did.

In When One Man Dies Jackson Donne is having a drink and consoling himself for his ex's death, when an old, a bit weird but harmless man is run over by a car outsider the bar. Donne feels he has to look into the old man's death - he used to share drinks with the guy, after all -, but he runs into trouble when his old nemesis at the police force starts to investigate the same accident, only to do harm to Donne. Dave White spins an interesting story with many interlocking incidents, and even though the twists in the story sometimes feel a bit forced, it remains intriguing to the end. Jackson Donne's past mistakes in the police force are drawn into the center of the story, and it seems like he can never escape them.

The Evil That Men Do is the more powerful novel of the two and Jackson Donne is really deep in the story of his sister who asks Donne to check into what their old and ill mother has been talking about their granddad. Donne's PI license was taken out in the aforementioned book, but he decides nevertheless he can do this last favour to his family and to his dying mother. He finds out soon that there's a maniac on the loose to avenge something ancient to his family - but just what it is is clear only in the end, if even then. White tramples the ground between the plausible and the implausible, but manages to stay on the clean side with this.

There's one thing I didn't get accustomed easily: When One Man Dies is narrated both in Donne's first person narration and the third person narration in the other sections. In The Evil That Men Do Donne is being narrated through a third person narrative, which makes more sense. There are also scenes set in the late thirties, when White tells just what tragic happened in the past.

In the end feels like there can be no future for Jackson Donne. I asked Dave White if there are plans for other Jackson Donne novels, but he said he doesn't have a publication date for his next novel. I'm hoping there will be a new Donne book, if only to see what White does to make Donne rise from the ashes. (He writes in his blog, though, about a new manuscript. [Link above.])

Dave White is, by the way, a good example of how one can rise from the on-line ghetto of crime literature. The bunch of Jackson Donne short stories were first published in different venues in the web before White published his first book. And here's hoping he'll publish many more!

Hard Case Western

I've said it as a comment to a blog post here and there, but let's make it official: besides their great Hard Case Crime line, Charles Ardai should've set up also a line called Hard Case Western. Many of the Western novels of the late fourties, fifties and early sixties could also be catered to the audience of the hardboiled and noir literature, and many of the books from bygone decades would very well be worth reprinting.

This idea came to me many years ago, but I was reminded of it, when Cullen Callagher started posting reviews of hardboiled westerns on his delightful blog, Pulp Serenade. You can see some of the reviews here (Harry Whittington: Desert Stake-Out), here (A.S. Fleischmann's Yellowleg, basis for an early Peckinpah film), here (Frank Castle's Dakota Boomtown) and here (Gil Brewer's rare entry into the genre, Some Must Die), but do read all of his blog, I guarantee it's worth your while.

All of those novels could well be published under the Hard Case Western by-line. I have some other recommendations:

Marvin Albert: Posse at High Pass, Fawcett 1964 (Albert wrote also excellent crime novels as Al Conroy and different other nyms; this is a great Western thriller)
Jack April: Feud at Five Rivers, Dodd Mead 1955 (Broadway script writer's only Western novel, great noirish atmosphere in a story of revenge)
Frank Castle: Brand of Hate, Tower 1966 (Cullen said nice things about Dakota Boomtown, this is a very good tale about guy who sells guns to Indians, but winds up being double- and triple-crossed)
Merle Constiner: Short-Trigger Man, Ace 1964 (if there's a blueprint of a hardboiled Western, this is it)
William R. Cox: Comanche Moon, McGraw Hill 1959 (unbearably suspenseful thriller of the people trapped by Indians, noir in its tones of despair and disappointment)
H.A. DeRosso: .44 (need I say anything more about this?)
Steve Frazee: Desert Guns, Dell 1957 (became a bad film with Roger Moore, but the book is gripping, full of action)
Philip Ketchum: Harsh Reckoning, Ballantine 1962 (is there a more noir title than that?)
James B. Chaffin (Giles Lutz): The Wolfer, Belmont 1962 (weird story about wolf-hunters, living in caves, full of action)
Richard Meade (also known as Ben Haas): Big Bend, Doubleday 1962 (man has to go to Mexico to avenge wrongs)
D.B. Newton: The Wolf Pack, Bantam 1953 (great thriller about a gang terrorizing a whole city, compares to The Violent Saturday and preceded it by two years)
Dudley Dean (also wrote as Dean Owen): Six-Gun Vengeance, Fawcett 1953 (great claustrophobic and hysterical noir)
Gordon Shirreffs: Too Tough to Die, Avon 1964 (just gotta love that title! Boetticher-like minimalism and hardboiledness)
Luke Short: Blood on the Moon, 1948 (I haven't read this one, but the film that was based on this, with Mitchum, would be just too great to pass)

Any early Western by Brian Garfield would also fit the bill, and so would anything by Donald Hamilton, whom Hard Case Crime has already reprinted. A later addition could be Jack Ehrlich's The Fastest Gun in the Pulpit from 1973: funny and violent. I'm also sure many new writers would like to try their hands at a Western, and I'm sure someone like James Reasoner has a noir Western in him, and so do Joe Lansdale, Tom Piccirilli and others.

Having said all of the above, I do know that the market for Western paperbacks is limited and that the market for paperbacks is diminishing, but who says one can't have a dream?

Saturday Forgotten Book: Jonathan Valin's Day of Wrath

I'm one day behind in Patti Abbott's blog post series (which would make for a nice book, don't you think, with Patti picking up her favourites along the way), but Jonathan Valin's series about P.I. Harry Stoner was called "lost" already years ago, so it's only fitting to keep you waiting for one more day.

Day of Wrath came out in 1982 and Harry Stoner was already well established, since this was the fourth book in the eleven-book series. Jonathan Valin is one of those writers who followed in the footsteps of Ross Macdonald: the hero feels wounded, but is sympathetic towards losers of the life. The plots are also somewhat similar and there's not much - if any - pulp feel to these books, as there are in Raymond Chandler or the many fifties' paperback private eye books. Valin touches quite a lot of themes: the power of money, the trauma that bad childhood leaves you with, suffering in the end chain of the society, the burden of one's own history and bad choices one has made throughout the life. Valin's plots are complex and the storylines touch lots of different people in the many areas of the American society.

So, what have these Scandinavian crime writers done that Valin and other serious American hardboiled writers of his ilk (Arthur Lyons, Marcia Muller, Stephen Greenleaf, Michael Collins etc.) didn't already do in the eighties and early nineties? The Americans just did it with fewer pages.

There's just something that bugs me about Valin. He writes with great passion, he can move the story along with a great speed and grabs you and makes you keep flipping the pages, but I don't like the way he treats sexuality. In all of his books I have read (which makes three) the bad guys are sexually frustrated or perverted, and in Valin the so-called perversion always means "evil". In Day of Wrath (which has a great shocking scene early on that stays with you for a long time) the baddie is sexually active to the point of being promiscuous and bisexual, and Harry Stoner is always describing the baddie as being cold-eyed, cunning, scary. In one of the other books, Extenuating Circumstances from 1999, Stoner's customer is a man who's into homosexual sadomasochism, but only because he's suffered very bad traumas, and there seems to be no way that he could actually, based on his free will, enjoy what he's doing or what's being done to him. All in all, it feels like it's Valin who has these problems with his sexuality.

But I can understand this is a concern that many are not interested in, and it certainly doesn't get in the way of enjoyment I get out of reading Valin.

And what's Valin doing now? Here's The Rap Sheet.

Forgotten Short Story Friday: Tom Blackburn and George Michener

As Patti Abbott suggested, this Friday's Forgotten prose entries should be about short stories. I thought immediately about two western short stories that stuck to my mind when I was researching the Finnish pulp and other fictionmags some years back writing my books Six Guns and Five Guns (the latter is exclusively about short stories in magazines). The other story is by Tom Blackburn, the other one is by George Michener.

Tom Blackburn is better known of the two. He lived from 1926 to 1997 and wrote pulp stories from the thirties on. Later he did lots of novels, both in paperback and hardback. He was never a bestseller, but he's a firm part of the fifties' western renaissance that was heavily featured in paperback originals.

The one short story I've read from Blackburn is called "Then There Were None". It appeared in Dime Western, July 1950 (and the Finnish translation came in Seikkailujen Maailma 7/1956). It's a gripping noir story, with full of violence and unexpected twists, all in a very short form, handled convincingly. The story starts with the boss of the criminal gang waking up and killing one of his mates and trying to convince the others that the dead man attempted to shoot him. Involved is a stupid young boy who idolizes these gangsters. As noir as a western can be.

Now, George Michener we know nothing about. He wrote primarily westerns for the short story market, starting from the mid-thirties and magazines like West and Ace-High Magazine, and giving up in the early fifties. His one story was called in the Finnish translation "The Scarface's Revenge" (Seikkailujen Maailma 10/1951), which doesn't match those found in the Fictionmags Index. It's a great story nevertheless: Scarface, mentally and fysically disturbed criminal, returns to his old haunts and gathers up his old gang, but they have a new boss. He decides to kidnap the sheriff's kid - and it turns out the sheriff is Scarface's half-brother. Very violent and disturbing - a noir western in the mold of Blackburn's story above.

PS. Just thought to Google and found this. I didn't know that Blackburn wrote lyrics for Disney films!

Anthony Neil Smith: Psychosomatic

Finally got around to reading Anthony Neil Smith's Psychosomatic that came out from PointBlank some years ago. It's recommended if you think you can take it: it's about an amputated lady, with no arms and legs, who thinks she can control men. And actually that's what she does. Several guys fall under her spell and a killing spree starts. This is like Elmore Leonard on speed.

Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes

My holiday reading included the latest from Dave Zeltserman (of the Fast Lane fame), Small Crimes. It was just perfect for the Christmas spirit: a story about a delusional narcist who's trying to right some wrongs in a non-violent way, getting lots of innocent folks killed in the process. Highly recommended.

Here's the Boston Globe's review with which I share views.

Cover by Paul Rader

Does anyone recognize in what book this cover by Paul Rader was originally published? In Finland it illustrated a rather forgotten hardboiled mystery by Aylwin Lee Martin. Mustat helmet started the famous Ilves (= Tomcat) series in 1960. Martin's novel was originally called The Crimson Frame (Fawcett Gold Medal 1952) and I seem to remember it was okay, mildly reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon. The hero is P.I. Matt Hughes. (And he's not mentioned in the Thrilling Detective listings!)