Don Smith: Secret Mission: Morocco

In my on-going research on later American paperback crime and adventure writers, I read one of the Secret Mission books by the Canadian Don Smith. I'd read earlier two of his books featuring the international private eye Tim Parnell and liked them quite a bit, so I thought this might also be to my liking. 

The hero of the Secret Mission books is Phil Sherman, an international traveler and entrepreneur, just like Don Smith seems to have been, who also helps CIA and other officials out. In Secret Mission: Morocco, he's asked to dig up something about an European millionaire who looks like he's smuggling counterfeit gold bars from Morocco. Stuff ensues. 

Don Smith is not a very colourful writer, and Phil Sherman is not a very colourful character. In fact, both are quite bland. I liked this trait in the Tim Parnell books, but this one left me colder. Maybe it was the Finnish translation. Nevertheless, the book is quite realistic in tone and milieu (Don Smith lived in Morocco, so that explains the believable description of the locales), and the bad guys are not your pulp-style crazy bastards. Still, there's a weird sadistic scene in the book in which Sherman is captured and whipped while a sexy woman fondles and kisses her.  

Here's Spy Guys and Gals on Don Smith. The guy has an interesting history, that must be said. 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres.

Lee Raintree: Dallas

And now for something completely different - or is it after all that much different from any other books I've been writing here in my blog? 

As you can see from the cover and the title, Dallas by Lee Raintree (published by Dell in 1978) is a novelization of the Dallas TV series. It's written on the basis of the original miniseries which has later been dubbed as the first season, because the series was continued after the five-part miniseries proved to be popular. Mind you, I never watched Dallas and I don't really know how faithful the book is, but luckily there's a Goodreads writer telling what the differences are (i.e. Bobby Ewing is a Vietnam veteran in the book and suffers from violent anxiety attacks). It also seems that the book has a beginning missing from the series that tells about the start of the feud between the Ewings and the Barneses. The epilogue is set in the 1920's or the 1930's, and it's quite strong and dramatic. 

Lee Raintree was really Con Sellers, a paperback writer whose books I've written earlier about in my blog (see here). He started out in very cheap sleaze paperbacks, but managed to make it big with Dallas and scored big deals with his next books. This is his only book as by Lee Raintree. 

Dallas is the fourth book I've read by him, and seems like he was a good writer with a sense for words and drama. His characters and sentences are edgy and angular, and I like that kind of style very much. This is no smooth soap opera for faint-heart middle-class ladies. There are scenes of violence and rape, and the scene near the end when two white trash men crash into the Ewing house and threaten the women of the family is very powerful. (In the book, Ellie Ewing saves the women and kills the other man, in the series Bobby and Jock Ewing come to the rescue.) Of course it also titillates readers, and after having been assaulted, Sue Ellen, the wife of J.R. Ewing, finds her hidden sexuality, which might be embarrassing to some readers. It is indeed awkward and old-fashioned. One other thing must be said: J.R. Ewing is only a mean bastard in the book (fantasizing about tying Pamela Barnes in bed and raping her), and were he to appear like that in the series, he wouldn't have proven so popular. (I noticed there's a book The Quotations of J.R. Ewing. C'mon!) It must be said, though, that at times the book can be quite long-winded, with lots of dialogue going nowhere, especially in the middle. Sellers was probably paid by the word. 

The Finnish translation which I read is quite different from the other translations or the original. It was published in hardcover (which, as far as I can see, is the only hardcover publication of the book), and it was given a nice, Polish-style cover by Finnish artist Pekka Loiri. 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

A novel by L. Patrick Greene needs identification

I'm trying for research purposes to identify a novel by the pulp writer L. Patrick Greene that was translated in Finnish in 1944. It had earlier, in 1943, come out as a serial in a Finnish newspaper, but none of the editions state what the title of the book is originally. Its Finnish title is "Diamond Shaft", meaning "Timanttikuilu", but there's no title by Greene under that title. The book starts with the diamong smuggler Aubrey St. John Major rescuing a woman who's getting a beating in an alley, but soon he finds out it's a scam and they were only after his money. Later on a man called Soapy Sam Richards makes him a proposal about a mysterious diamond shaft which the local people are afraid of. It's said that the shift doesn't have a bottom. There are several other people after the diamonds as well, including the woman in the beginning getting beaten up and the man who does the beating. There's also a scene in which St. John Major talks about using a monocle with a policeman.

Does anyone reading this blog recognize the book or the serial from this? Any tip would be appreciated. The writer's name is misspelled in the Finnish book. 

EDIT: This turned out to be Devil's Kloof from 1931. Thanks to everyone who answered! 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

Michael Brett: An Ear for Murder (1967)

I read this old private eye mystery by Michael Brett in a day, which I quite enjoyed, having struggled through a much longer crime novel which took almost a week. The book's protagonist is Pete McGrath, a tough private eye working in New York, but going to Las Vegas in the book. In the beginning, he's hired by a mysterious woman saying her husband has disappeared. She doesn't want to get to touch with the police, which of course makes McGrath suspicious, but a man has to make a living. Soon he stumbles upon a dead man, which is a given in any old school PI novel. McGrath has to find a sadistic killer who works with an axe or a machete, portrayed in the cover. 

I liked the book, though it's nowhere near great. It's a fast read, and everything flows quite smoothly. Brett makes McGrath a likable hero who can work his way out in the mean streets, but there are also bursts of sudden violence. Especially the scene in which McGrath cuts off an ear from a killer is gruesome. There's also lots of old school male chauvinism in the book, but what can you expect? It must be said, though, that McGrath also dates a young woman who works at the UN. 

Here's more about Brett in Mystery*File. 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

Western novels by female authors

 

My earlier post about western novels was so popular, I decided to pick up this entry I had earlier posted only to the WesternPulps e-mail group (remember those?). It's about western novels (and some short stories) that are written by female authors. I was reading these for an essay I later used in a collection of my western-themed book of articles. This is a bit skimpy at times, but I don't have the time to edit it. Here's hoping it suffices. 

Helen Hunt Jackson: Ramona: very popular in its time, but seems forgotten now. Must admit that I didn't finish the book, as the style and narration felt so dated, but interesting nevertheless in its portrayal of the oppression of Indians.

B. M. Bower: The Chip of the Flying U: I didn't get into Bower's "yuh mangy polecat" style, so I wrote more about her influence and place in the history of western fiction. I found an Elmer Kelton quote that Bower's sales diminished when the audience found out she's a woman.

Dorothy M. Johnson: The Hanging Tree: Johnson is a great short story writer, but for some reason I couldn't get into this, maybe there were too many characters for such a short length (90 pages in a Ballantine pb) or then it was because Johnson couldn't concentrate more fully on the woman in the lead (it seems she stopped writing westerns for a long time after having this frustrating experience with the editors (of Saturday Evening Post, I believe) - or then she just wasn't a novelist. Not bad, though, in any meaning of the word. Haven't seen the film, unfortunately.

Jane Barry: A Time in the Sun: I couldn't find much info on Barry, but seems like she wrote some other historical novels as well, but is largely forgotten today. Her western from 1962 is a Haycox-influenced novel about two women abducted by Indians and attempts to rescue them which have large political consequences. Barry turns the focus at times on the women themselves, not just the heroes trying to save them, and one of them doesn't want to leave his Indian husband. A bit slow, but interesting, and based on what Barry says in her foreword, she really did her homework. You can find this on Kindle, if you're interested. I read this based on her entry in The Twentieth Century Western Writers, which is still a valuable reference work.

Marguerite Noble: Filaree: this was a nice surprise, a very touching portrait of life in early 20th century Arizona, written from a perspective of a woman trying to come up with her indifferent and at times violent husband who tries to make the woman abandon his family, and her large bunch of kids. This really felt real and lived throughout, and I believe Noble based the story on her mother's life. I believe this was also mentioned in TCWW, but I don't think Noble has an entry there of her own.

JoAnn Levy: For California's Gold: a tale of the California Gold Rush told from the viewpoint of a woman whose husband forces them to go searching for gold, with tragic consequences. Suffers from being a bit too nice, though several people die in the course of the book. It's also too literary with some narrative techniques that I found implausible, especially from a diary-like narration. I wouldn't have read this, and possibly not many know about JoAnn Levy, but I received this book from a Finnish professor who had lived in the US and read lots of westerns during his time there and donated the books to the Finnish Western Society. (The books are in my cellar and I don't really know what to do with them. I'll never be able to read so many westerns in my lifetime.)

Kathleen Kent: The Outcasts: a pretty tough novel for a female writer, contains some harsh violence, but for some reason I didn't feel much interest in the characters. This was the newest novel I read for the article.

I also read short stories by Jane Candia Coleman and Peggy Simson Curry. The former's "Moving On" was superb with original characters, highly recommended. This was in the book The Morrow Anthology of Great Western Short Stories, edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. The anthology looks very well done by and large, with lots of forgotten pulp and female writers. Peggy Simson Curry's "Geranium House" was in the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories, edited by John Jakes (at least in name, maybe he had some assistant working on this also). I didn't really care for the humorous story, but I liked reading about Curry in the short introduction. The story came out originally in SEP or Collier's. (I didn't mention Curry in my article.)

I also tried to read Mari Sandoz, but her style wore me down. I understood maybe half of what was going down in The Tom-Walker. I tried Cheyenne Autumn, but as it isn't a novel per se, I didn't try to force my way through it. I understood from an on-line essay that her publishers tried to diminish her use of the old slang, and you can rest assured they should've tried harder.

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!)

Three westerns from the sixties

Here's a summary of three western novels from the sixties I recently read in quick succession. One of the books was a hardback originally, two others were paperbacks. I read the books in Finnish translation, hence the books in the picture are in Finnish. 

D. B. Newton: On the Dodge (Berkley 1962): Bannister, wanted by law for killing a man in a fight, finds himself in a town getting tangled up in the fight against the railroad contractor and the landgrabbers. One of the books in Newton's Bannister series. Bannister is a flawed man, but he can take care of himself.

Wayne D. Overholser: The Bitter Night (Macmillan 1961): a fine thriller set almost entirely in a stagecoach station.

Reese Sullivan (Giles A. Lutz): The Demanding Land (Ace Double 1966): a man returns to his hometown after having been suspected of a murder and ends up fighting the father and brother of the dead man. At the same time he sets up his own ranch. Not very tight plotwise, but I liked Lutz's angular style and his eye for peculiar details, such as poisoning wolves with strychnine and selling wild horses to the English for the Boer War.

I thought that Newton's book was the best of the bunch, but I noticed I have a hard time remembering what actually happened in the book. All were quite hardboiled, and with the exception of Overholser, there were no real heroes, and with Overholser the main character is just an ordinary man.

There's one thing about westerns, though: they don't really seem personal to me. In noir and hardboiled, you find more books in which the writers reveal themselves, their fears, desires and dreams, but in westerns this is quite rare. H. A. DeRosso is one exception. I haven't yet read Arnold Hano's Flint, which reportedly has the same plot as one of Jim Thompson's novels (and Hano was his editor in Lion Books). There are more literary westerns, such as the books by Max Evans, which have this personal quality.