My book Pulpografia 2 out

I was finally able to finish and publish the sequel to my first book, Pulpografia, called simply Pulpografia 2. The earlier book came out in 2000, and I wrote the first articles for the new book already two or three years later, so the book has been over twenty years in the making! 

The old book was more about private eye books, and hardboiled and noir writing, with some older spy novels thrown in. There were also Don Pendleton and some other writers of the men's adventure genre. 

This new book concentrates on the newer paperbacks, mainly from the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's, but there are also a scattering of older writers, like Seymour Shubin, whose delightful Anyone's My Name I read only some few years back. (It's not actually a paperback in a strict sense, but I couldn't but add the book, and I also found a true adventure story by Shubin in a Finnish men's magazine, which makes him more pulpish.) 

There are lots of keywords for the men's adventure writers, and I must say I'm really not fond of the genre. Many books are written poorly and there's simply not enough action. Many of the series focus on a group of men, and they all talk before the action commences. What's the thing with that? There are also many Nick Carter writers, and man, do they vary! Some are very good, and some are very bad. I also had a chance to talk with some authors (for example the poets Henry Rasof and Stephen Williamson, whose The Dubrovnik Massacre must be the worst in the Nick Carter saga - but they shared some funny anecdotes). I got to thinking that someone could make some money reprinting some of the better Nick Carters. For example, Martin Cruz Smith did some fantastic work with the books. But I guess the owner of the rights is an obstacle, and maybe contracts prohibit reprints. One author stood out in my opinion: Ralph Hayes, whose Taggart books seem very good in their genre. I found Con Sellers' career also very interesting, and he was an intriguing writer. 

The new book isn't the only or the first sequel to the earlier Pulpografia, since I've also published a book on Western paperbacks (called Kuudestilaukeavat, "Six-Guns") and books on British crime paperbacks and American sleaze paperbacks. They were called, respectively, Pulpografia Britannica and Pulpografia Erotica. (There's also a small volume on Western short stories published in Finnish in different fictionmags, called "Five-Guns".) I call the new book a direct sequel to Pulpografia, and the others are thematic sequels. 

Alas, the book is only in Finnish. My attempts to publish in English (look here) haven't been very successful, but of course I do know that the glory days of my blog have been long gone. If I had published the book, say, fifteen years ago, someone would've probably recognized me as the author of Pulpetti. Then again, for some reason or another, I didn't get the e-book in Amazon, and Dark Places and Little Tramps is only available in print, which makes the book pricey. 

Here are some links to the reviews of the books I write about in my book: Don Smith, Lee Raintree aka Con Sellers, Michael Brett, George Snyder. 

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. 

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.

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. 

George Snyder: Nick Carter: Jewel of Doom

 

I've been going through my forth-coming book (well, forth-coming maybe next year or in 2024) about American paperback crime and suspense writers published in Finnish, but I haven't found time to actually read any of the books. I managed to squeeze in a Nick Carter by George Snyder, who died in 2018 after self-publishing his new crime books during the recent years. 

The Jewel of Doom came originally out in 1970, when Lyle Kenyon Engel was producing the series for Award. The publishing house forced Engel and his writers to use first person narration, which may not be suitable for Nick Carter (though later efforts by Dennis Lynds and Robert Randisi proved it could be done*), and there's no reason for it in here. Nick Carter is not more alive in The Jewel of Doom than he is in those novels that are narrated in third person. 

The plot of the book deals with the Fabergé eggs. Now, this piqued my interest, since Peter Carl Fabergé lived in the Czarist Russia when Finland was still a part of the empire. He didn't have Finnish roots, but his mentor Peter Pendin was Finnish, and many Finnish smiths worked for the Fabergé family, producing lots of beautiful golden eggs. In Snyder's book, one of the eggs is being used in smuggling the plans for a new US military device out of the country. Nick Carter of course prevents it from happening. He also gets to spend some quality time with different babes throughout the novel.

Sad to say, the book wasn't very good. It's not badly written, from what I can gather from the Finnish translation, but the scenes go on and on. Especially the erotic scenes seem endless, and yet nothing much happens. The action scenes are handled deftly, but even they are too long. I didn't actually finish the book and started another. 

Here's Paul Bishop on Snyder, and here's also a German interview with Snyder.  

The Finnish cover from 1974 above. It has nothing to do with the book, since the lady in the photo seems to hold a copy of Mao's Little Red Book in her hand. 

* At least Lynds did Nick Carters in the first person narration, and I seem to remember Randisi did too. Correct if I'm wrong. 

Robert Crane: Born of Battle

Robert Crane was really Con Sellers, a steady writer of low-grade paperbacks working through the sixties and seventies for the small publishers, and finally finding some mainstream success in the eighties and early nineties. It seems his breakthrough novel was the novelization of the Dallas TV series he did in 1980. He died in 1992. Here's a link to the Finnish translation of the Dallas book - it came out here in hardcover, with a very non-pulp cover! 

I read now one of Sellers's war paperbacks as by Robert Crane. Most of the Robert Crane books are about one Sgt. Ben Corbin fighting in Korea, but this one, called Born of Battle, tells about an Army old hand Ernie Kovacs and a war reporter called Saxon, who must be Sellers's self-portrait, since he started writing for the war papers (I don't know the actual term here) in Korea. The book came out in Finland under the title Sankarit ovat kuolleet ("The Heroes Are Dead"), which doesn't make any sense. The cover is also misleading.  

Born of Battle doesn't contain many action or battle scenes, it's more like a love novel, since Saxon's romance with a South Korean woman takes so much place in the narration, and the book is pretty episodic. But I didn't mind, since Crane/Sellers writes convincingly and effortlessly about his characters and their endeavors. The book came out from Pyramid in 1962, but there's not much pulpiness that was so prevalent in the books Pyramid usually published. 

Axel Kilgore (Jerry Ahern): Death Lust

Jerry Ahern was known mainly for his post-apocalyptic series like The Survivalist and The Takers. I haven't read any of those, but I read one of the books in his other series, about the one-eyed mercenary Hank Frost, written as by Axel Kilgore. I'd read one before, called The Terror Contract (1982). It wasn't bad, straight-up action that has no pretenses of literary merit. Even the gun porn that you hear Ahern having been guilty of is minimal. 

The other Hank Frost I recently read, called Death Lust (also 1982; Cosa Nostra! in Finnish), wasn't as good, though it had its moments. There's even a hint of great adventure in the air, when Hank Frost is posing as a gun dealer somewhere in the Mediterranean, and when the ship he's travelling in gets attacked, he saves a young woman and when it's revealed she's the daughter of a Mafia don, he wins the father's ever-lasting gratitude. The Mafia helps Hank Frost attacking the gun dealers led by Frost's long-time enemy, Eva Chapmann, whose father he's killed in the past. There are lots of attacks and battles in the book, and I got actually kind of lost amongst them, but all in all this was a pretty entertaining men's adventure paperback. The end in which Eva Chapmann is dressed as a nun, was a bit weird, though. 

Elliott Lewis: Two Heads Are Better

This is no men's adventure paperback, instead it's a private eye novel that came out in paperback in 1980. The publisher was Pinnacle that was famous for its men's adventure books in the seventies and early eighties, but seems like they were ready to publish books from different genres. 

Elliott Lewis was a radio actor who sometimes appeared on TV and film. When he retired from acting, he wrote seven private eye books for Pinnacle from 1980 to 1983. The first one is weirdly named Two Heads Are Better. The antihero of the book is one Fred Bennett, an ex-cop leading a lousy life and working as a private eye. The book starts off with a headless corpse being found on the trunk of his car, and Bennett has to flee and solve the case at the same time. 

I really didn't like this book. It seems hasty and the plot is too convoluted. Bennett is not very likable character, though I usually like unsympathetic private eyes. This is not the case here. Bill Crider said it better here. 

David Hagberg: Nick Carter: The Istanbul Decision

I've never read any books by David Hagberg, though he seems to have been prolific and at least somewhat appreciated writer of spy thrillers, mainly in the 21st century. He started out in the mid-seventies, penning Nick Carters and Flash Gordon paperbacks without a byline and several one-off horror/SF paperbacks, such as the cult favourite Croc. He died in 2019. 

I've now read one of his Nick Carters, called The Istanbul Decision. It came out originally in 1983, and Hagberg's titles for his AXE novels are all pretty similar: you have your The Ouster Conspiracy, The Vengeance Game, The Strontium Code... This one is about Nick Carter trying to lure a Soviet spy into a trap by using a double for the spy's daughter who the Americans have kidnapped. It's very complicated, but not very intriguing. The book races on, but I didn't feel much for the characters. The climax takes place in the Orient Express. I don't remember much about the book anymore. 

Someone said that Hagberg was one of the writers who made the Nick Carter series too realistic and humorless in the early eighties. There's lots of action, but none of it is zany or far out. 

I'm still intrigued by his other Nick Carter, Death Island (1984), that was published in Finland as "Blood-Hungry Man-Eaters" (Verta janoavat ihmissyöjät, that is). 

James Fritzhand: Nick Carter: Sign of the Cobra

As I said, I was going to post short reviews of some paperbacks I'll be reading in the coming months as I'm 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. Many of the books I'll be reading are men's adventure, a genre I'm not very much interested in, but which seems quite popular nowadays. When I was writing my first book 20 years ago, it was mainly about 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. 

Okay, off to the book I was going to write about. It's a Nick Carter/Killmaster book, written by James Fritzhand. The title is Sign of the Cobra, and it's one of the three Nick Carters Fritzhand wrote in the mid-seventies. All the books take place in Asia, and in them Nick Carter is fluent in taekwondo, which, if I'm not mistaken, he's not in the earlier books. I read on the Glorious Trash blog that the continuity of the Nick Carter series was gone when the series was taken out of Lyle Kenyon Engel's hands, and the writers came up with their own versions of Nick Carter. 

That said, Sign of the Cobra isn't a bad book. It's fluent and readable, and there's just enough old time pulp bravado to keep things interesting, though this isn't as crazy as some of the sixties' installments in the series, for example the books by Manning Lee Stokes. The villain has an artificial arm that looks like a cobra, and it's equipped with poisonous needles! The action scenes are quite good, except when Fritzhand makes someone say something aloud in the middle of a taekwondo strike which makes for a very weird reading. Just how slow is Nick Carter moving? 

Robert Ackworth: Young Doctor in Town

I've been lately writing a sequel to my first non-fiction book that was called Pulpografia. The working title has been "The Shadow of Pulpografia", but it won't probably be the final name. Well, you could call many of my books sequels to Pulpografia, but this one is made with the same premise: it's a reference book on American crime and suspense writers whose books and short stories were published in Finland in a paperback format or in a pulp magazine or similar periodical publication. 

I've been doing this work on an almost daily basis, with digging up some biographical and bibliographic information on the authors, but now I've been browsing the books and writing something about them. The first one happened to be Young Doctor in Town by Robert Ackworth. Who he? I don't know much about Ackworth, but he was born in 1923 and is most possibly dead by now. He wrote some short stories for the digests in the late fifties, and at the same time he published some erotic-cum-romantic paperbacks (i.e. The Moments Between, 1959). He published as late as 1978, when the novel The Takers came out. It seems to be about Hollywood. Ackworth wrote also some Dr. Kildare novelizations for Lancer. There's also a war novel by him in Finnish (called "One Moment from Hell"), but seems like it was never published in the US or UK. 

He penned also this one-off medical romance. As it was not a crime novel, I didn't feel the need to read the book and thought browsing should suffice. It's about a young doctor called Garner coming into a small town and getting mixed up with the possibly mentally ill wife of the town's big man. There's also romance, but also some critique of the state of medical care in the small town. 

The book was published in 1963 by something called Medical Fiction Books. Does anyone know anything about this outfit? 

I have other work to do and other books to read, but I think I'll try to squeeze some vintage paperbacks in and try to write about them here at Pulpetti. Next up a Nick Carter by James Fritzhand, and another one by David Hagberg! 

Sleaze novels that are also crime

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... And as many people reading my blog know, I just published a book on sleaze paperbacks. 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. At least not to my knowledge. (The book, called Pulpografia Erotica, is available here. But mind you, it's in Finnish and there's no international sales possibility.) 

So, I think the following books should be included in the next edition (or at least the appendix) of Allen Hubin's crime fiction bibliography (if they already are, I didn't notice and apologize): 

Norman Bligh: The Sisters. Softcover Library 1966. (Includes a killing of a mob boss, though not exactly a crime novel.)

Beth Brown: Man and Wife. Claude Kendall 1933. (Includes a private eye who shakes down clients of a famous prostitute. Not exactly a crime novel.) 

Richard E. Geis: Girlsville. France Books 1963. (Private eye called Vic Kunzer is hired to find a film producer's daughter.) 

Alexander Keith: The Love Gun. Bee-Line Books, the late sixties. (Murder takes place in a hunting cabin where there are some half dozen people. Set in Canada, there's also a French-speaking lieutenant! Can't find the exact year for this.) 

Kimberly Kemp (Paul Russo): Operation Sex. Midwood 1962. (International intrigue and sex.)

Peter Keyes (most possibly Andrew J. Collins): The Love Odds. Brandon House 1967. (Hardboiled crime novel about a private eye like character Steve Wayne who tackles the mobsters running a casino.) 

Lester Lake: So Wild, So Wanton. All Star Books 1962. (Cab driver fights the shakedown ring working in an elite high school.) 

Lester Morris: Savage Lust. Private Editions 1962. (Narcissistic womanizer kills accidentally his ex-mistress and tries to keep it hidden. Great noir novel with a very downbeat ending.) 

Max Nortic: Code Name: The Gypsy Virgin. Midwood 1971. (International intrigue and sadism as two female spies fight each other.) 

Max Nortic: The Real Thing. Midwood 1970. (A classic heist novel taking place in a casino.) 

Eric Sand: The Seduction. Beacon 1965. (Noirish novel about a young woman who comes back to her home town to revenge her father's death.) 

Floyd Smith: Action Girls. Midwood 1977 (there must be an earlier edition, since this was published in Finland in 1974). (An archaeologist tries to find his wife's ring in the desert so he can't be punished for killing her.) 

Gary Tubbs: The Case of the Missing Rubber. Published in 1969, can't find the publisher. (Private eye Charlie Romp gets mixed up in the smuggling of a sex drug.) 

David Warren: Tunnel of Love. Criterion Classics, no date. (Man is in prison for killing his wife's lover, then he finds out the man didn't die after all, and hunts him down. Lots of description of prison life. Maybe Warren was an inmate himself? This is the only book he wrote, at least under this moniker.) 

Then there are also these two books that are heavily crime-related, but I can't find any info on them: 
Jason Brown: Little Girl Lost and Bob Grand: Between All of Us. If anyone has anything on them, I'll be glad to hear it. I've written about these books (and the two published as by "Ralph Hayes") earlier here in Pulpetti. 

Peter Keyes's sleaze / hardboiled novel The Love Odds

Okay, here's still another crime-cum-sleaze paperback from the sixties. I already finished my book on the subject, and I'll write about it more in the near future, but wanted to share this one. 

As I wrote earlier, I think sleaze writer Peter Keyes was really Andrew J. Collins, who'd started out in the crime pulps in the fourties. I read the three books as by Keyes that have been translated in Finnish. They are: By Sex Possessed (Brandon House 1966), The Love Odds (Brandon 1967) and Hardrock Romeo (Brandon 1967). By Sex Possessed was the weakest of the three, but Hardrock Romeo had some interest in it because of its sociopathic country & western singer lead. 

The Love Odds was the most interesting one of the trio, mainly because it seems like it was a write-up of an earlier pulp novellette or a novel. The hero is one Steve Wayne, who is almost like a private eye, clearing up the financial problems of firms and such. He's asked to find out who's taking a casino's money in Las Vegas. He meets two tough mobsters, Al Terry and Manny Zugg, who run the casino, and suspects them from the beginning. The mobsters buy Wayne a girl to make love with, but also to spy on him. Wayne also meets the owner of the casino, who's of course a good-looking dame, and has sex with her as well. The shattering climax takes place in the desert outside Vegas, where Wayne and his partner are told to dig their own graves, while the criminals have their way with the women of the story. The scene is actually quite gruesome and even disturbing.

There's some implausibility to the plot and of course it's all too short and not very memorable, but I thought I was entertained while reading this. If anyone's read Collins's pulp crime stories, I'd be interested to hear if he has one with Steve Wayne and the casino's money. 

Lester Morris: Savage Lust (1962)

Here's another noir novel masquerading as a sleaze paperback! No one has ever heard of Lester Morris, let alone his sole novel Savage Lust that came out from a small paperback house called Private Editions. I thought this was pretty good and solid and could've been written by some better known paperbacker. The ending is devilishly cruel and ironic. 

Savage Lust's anti-hero is Si, a heel and a gigolo who uses and cheats women all the time. He's living in Florida and skimming money from every broad he can get his hands on. One of his lady friends, the wife of a hotel owner, wants to get Si all to herself and kills her husband and tells Si they can get the husband's money. Si doesn't want to get involved in a murder, but manages, almost accidentally, to kill the lady friend. Si buries the bodies and tries to act as the caretaker of the hotel while the owners are on a vacation. You can see this is not going to end well, right? And it sure doesn't! The ending is a punishment you just don't see coming. 

Not altogether plausible, but entertaining nevertheless, and the more noir aspects of the story are worth your while. I seem to enjoy the American sleaze paperbacks where the main guy is a no-good heel, who's getting beaten. No idea who really wrote this, but there were other Lesters writing sleaze at the same time, for example Lester Lake and Lester Arthur. They might be the same guy or,
then again, might not.