EDMOND HAMILTON “What’s It Like Out There?” Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952. First anthologized in The Best from Startling Stories, edited by Samuel Mines (Henry Holt, hardcover, 1953). Reprinted elsewhere many times. The first Hamilton collection in which it appeared was What’s It Like Out There and Other Stories (Ace, paperback, 1974).

   I’m working my way through the latter collection, if reading only the first story so far qualifies as “working my through” it. Although he had an extraordinarily long writing career, “What’s It Like Out There?” is probably Hamilton’s most well remembered story, and it came along toward the beginning of what I consider the last third of it.

   In his early days — the 20s and 30s — Edmond Hamilton was an out and out “space opera” kind of guy, writing stories with titles such as Crashing Suns, The Star-Stealers and The Comet-Drivers, all appearing first in Weird Tales. In the 1940s his career took a nosedive (my opinion) when he spent most of writing time dreaming up new adventures for Captain Future, again for the pulp magazines.

   Whether “What’s It Like Out There?” was his first story written for readers at an adult level, I’m not sure, but from what I’ve read, it turned heads around in SF fandom almost immediately. It’s the story of a survivor of the second expedition to Mars, who before making his way home in Ohio from the hospital where he spent a number of weeks recovering, has to stop along the way to visit the families and loved ones of his friends who didn’t make it.

   He would like to tell them the truth — that their loved ones died in vain, perishing on a cruel and uncaring planet, with their only purpose for being there being the uranium people on Earth need to continue going about their merry and equally uncaring ways — but he finds that he can’t. People on Earth still need their heroes, he discovers, no matter how little they actually care, except when of course it’s personal, and even then, as he discovers, most are happier not knowing the truth.

   There are lots of nuances in this story that the preceding paragraph does not begin to go into. Last night was the first time I’d read this story in years, and it surprised me as to how much I read into it this time that I suspect I didn’t before. More than I remembered, at any rate.

JACK BOYLE – Boston Blackie. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1979. Reprint of the first edition published by H. K. Fly, hardcover, 1919.

   This is an unusual book in that it consists of previously published short stories put together and revised slightly to resemble chapters in a novel. It is the only Boston Blackie “novel” or collection to be published.

   The Boston Blackie stories began running in The American Magazine in 1914; later ones appeared in Red Book and Cosmopolitan. Although by today’s standards they contain overly dramatic language and sentimental plots, they still provide an entertaining insight into popular American fiction of the early 1900s.

   Included in this reprint edition is a scholarly introduction by Edward D. Hoch, the original illustrations, and still photographs from some of the various Boston Blackie films.

   For those unfamiliar with Boyle’s Boston Blackie, he was a criminal — primarily a safecracker — and was wanted by many police departments. But he was also a devoted husband, a “university graduate, a scholar, and gentleman.” The first half of his nickname derived from his Boston birthplace, the second half from his piercing black eyes.

   As interesting as Blackie himself may be, his creator is even more so. Jack Boyle was a San Francisco newspaper editor who became addicted to opium in the legendary dens of Chinatown. This cost him his job, and, unable to get another, he turned to a fife of crime — an unsuccessful one, for he was twice arrested and sent to prison, once for forgery and the second time for armed robbery.

   It was while he was in San Quentin on the robbery conviction that he wrote (and sold) his first Boston Blackie story to American, under the pseudonym “6606” — his prison number. Many of the subsequent Blackie stories were to employ drug and prison backgrounds. After his release, Boyle continued his writing career and helped adapt some of his stories for silent films.

   Several Blackie silents were made in the 1920s; the first of these, for which Boyle wrote the screenplay, was The Face in the Fog (1922) and featured Lionel Barrymore as Blackie. The character underwent a considerable transformation in the series of B-talkies that began in 1941 and starred Chester Morris: He became a wise-talking reformed-crook-turned-sleuth with a penchant for dames, danger, and sudden death. The Hollywood incarnation also appeared on the radio and briefly on television in its early years.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

BEN PASTOR – The Road to Ithaca. Martin Bora #5. Bitter Lemon Press; trade paperback, March 2017.

   It is May 1941 as Wehrmacht Captain Martin Bora, age twenty-seven, of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, is sent to Crete to solve a murder that could embarrass the Reich and lead to a major diplomatic disaster. A representative of the Red Cross close to SS chief Heinrich Himmler has been killed during an inspection, and Bora is under intense pressure to solve the crime quickly, and to provide a scapegoat, a politically satisfactory one.

   That is only the surface though. Far more dangerous undercurrents wait for him at every turn.

   This is the fifth novel in the series by Ben Pastor, a woman incidentally, who immigrated from Italy and who became an American when she moved to Texas. She was a professor in Illinois, Ohio, and Vermont, and now spends half her time in her native Italy according to her bio.

   The Bora novels are intensely researched and carefully plotted mysteries with a hero who carries a forbidden copy of James Joyce Ulysses in his pocket, and frequently is at odds with the wishes and orders of his superiors and his own prickly conscience.

   In The Road to Ithaca he is sent to the mountains of Crete, where at first it looks as if the crime was friendly fire from a unit of trigger happy German paratroopers accused of a war crime, but as Bora looks deeper he is drawn into increasingly dangerous territory among local bandits and resistance fighters and his own morality in a world of double crosses, multiple identities, revenge, and double agents.

   Pastor brings in big issues such as where does a man’s duty to his country and to himself take him, and how much moral ambiguity can a man allow before he himself is tainted? She writes vividly, mastering suspense while asking deeper questions, her characters drawn in subtle shades of gray for the most part, but with a pervasive sense of the evil at the core of the Nazi power structure, and how it corrupted even the best of men.

   There are also well-drawn characters from history such as Himmler, and in this work Erskine Caldwell and his wife Margaret Bourke-White, correspondents in Moscow where Bora is with the German Embassy as the novel opens.

   Like the private eye of mystery fiction Bora often finds himself a lone wary knight alone in a quest for relative truth, a Philip Marlowe with echoes of Maigret trying to maintain sanity in a world gone mad.

   Here he is facing death in a Cretan brothel:

   That’s just a small sample of how well written this book is. Pastor does indulge in a bit of foreshadowing, letting us know a tragic event looms in Bora’s future, that I could personally have done without, but it is a small caveat and not overdone or overly detrimental.

   I’ll certainly be looking for the first four books in the series from an author who echoes writers like Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Alan Furst, Hans Helmut Kirst, and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels while creating a milieu and a hero both original and classic.

      The Martin Bora series —

1. Lumen (1999)

2. Liar Moon (2001)
3. A Dark Song of Blood (2014)

4. Tin Sky (2015)
5. Road to Ithaca (2017)

This song is from their CD The Mountain, released in 1999. Joining in on this track are Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Marty Stuart and Cowboy Jack Clement, among others.

CHARLES N. HECKLEMAN – Return to Arapahoe. Fawcett Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1980.

   When Pace Barnes returns home from chasing Indians with the army, he finds his brother dead and their home in the hands of one Grady Chambers, a ruthless rancher responsible for a good deal of other trouble there in the foothills of the Rincons.

   Heckelman’s prose is reminiscent of the type found in the type found in the adventures of the Hardy Boys, the 1930s version, to pick an example that comes most easily to mind, but overcoming all — or most — hurdles, it’s a kind of prose that nevertheless seems to suffice.

   Here’s a tale that could easily be fashioned into an old-fashioned B-western movie, in other words, but (mercifully) without the usual comical sidekick.

PostScript:   My brief hesitation there in the second paragraph goes along very well with my observation in the third. It concerns the absolute worst Western cliché in western-adventure books and movies ever. When I was ten years old, I thought it was a stinker, and I still do. It happens when two bad guys have the good guy trapped in a room, both of them with guns on him, and one ornery owlhoot says to the other, “All right, Lumpy, shoot him and let’s get it over with.” And the other says, “Hey, boss, not yet. I’ve got a better idea.”

Bibliographic Notes:   Charles N. Heckelman (1913-2005) is not a big name as far as well-known western writers are concerned. I found a total of nine western novels offered for sale under his name online, one (Lawless Range) published as early as 1946, and there may be others. This led me to check out whether he may have written for the pulp magazines, and yes, it turns out he did: over eighty stories in the Western Fiction index, ranging in years from 1937 to 1955.

FRONTIER CIRCUS. “Depths of Fear.” CBS-TV; 5 October 1961. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Chill Wills, John Derek, Richard Jaeckel. Guest Cast: Aldo Ray, James Gregory, Bethel Leslie. Creator: Samuel A. Peeples. Director: William Witney.

   The concept of this series is both twofold and obvious from the title. It’s a western series with the setting and trappings of circus-related stories. Either that, or it’s a circus series taking place in the Old West. On the basis of watching only this one episode, I’m inclined to go with the latter. Just as in Wagon Train, to use the example that comes to mind almost immediately, it’s the people and their stories that make for the conflicts and the drama, not so much the setting.

   Chill Wills (as Colonel Casey Thompson) is a partner in the T and T Circus with John Derek (Ben Travis), with Richard Jaeckel as their traveling scout and assistant. And every week for 26 weeks, a whole flock of middle- to high-level guest stars came on to have their fictional stories told. Among them: Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Montgomery, Gilbert Roland, Irene Dunne, Don “Red” Barry, Dan Duryea, Vera Miles, Stella Stevens, Rip Torn, Claude Akins and many more.

   The conflict in this first episode is a three-way one, between James Gregory, a martinet of a lion tamer as well as a wife-abuser; his wife, Bethel Leslie, who would leave him if she dared; and Aldo Ray, a drunken bum picked up the circus who was once also a lion tamer, but one who has lost his nerve because of a past incident in his life.

   The story is fairly predictable one, but between the script and Wiliam Witney’s direction, the 50 minutes or so of running time go by very quickly, and the continuing members of the cast are sharp on their toes to jump right in whenever needed in support.

   It’s an unusual combination of genres, and but with a good cast and guest stars, it’s no wonder that the series lasted a full year. In a way, though, it’s also no surprise that it wasn’t picked up for a second season. The confines of a circus just wouldn’t seem to allow for such a wide range of stories as was possible on the much longer-running (and aforementioned) Wagon Train series.

WILD WOMEN. Norman Dawn Productions, 1952. Re-released as Bowanga Bowanga and White Sirens of Africa. Lewis Wilson, Dana Wilson, Mort Thompson and Don Orlando. Written and directed by Norman Dawn. (Note: Not to be confused with Wild Women of Wongo, Captive Women or Mesa of Lost Women. Beware of substitutes!)

   A modestly enjoyable bad film if you’re in that kind of mood, but if you’re not, I recommend you stay away from this preposterous collage of mismatched stock footage and cheap-jack filmmaking.

   Mort Thompson and Don Orlando start out the film as Bwanas of a rather threadbare safari, who run across a wandering explorer (Lewis Wilson, the screen’s first Batman) who recounts how he came to be wandering.

   Whereupon we flash back to his childhood, and it seems he must have grown up in the 1920s because this part is taken from an old silent film (possibly one of Director Dawn’s early efforts; he was a pioneer of the silent film, introducing technical innovations like rear projection and matte shots) with something about an abusive jungle dad and a grass hut besieged by lions. There’s also some newer footage of a woman clad in animal skins, sometimes accompanied by a guy in a gorilla suit, but the ersatz ape is apparently just dropping by for a Guest Spot, as he has no further part in the story.

   A couple of flashbacks later, Thompson, Orlando and Wilson are off in search of the lost tribe of wild women, and shortly thereafter they all get caught by the vanished vixens and dragged off to a part of Africa that looks suspiciously like Bronson Canyon, the stomping grounds for generations of cheap movies, from the silent days to Robot Monster.

   I’d like to tell you more of the plot, but there isn’t any. The girls dance a lot, they take turns fighting over the guys, sometimes they fight the guys for a change, and sometimes we just look at mismatched stock shots of jungle animals, including a moose who seems to have wandered into this picture by mistake.

   Well, I never said it was a classic, but everyone keeps a straight face throughout and the actresses even put a bit of energy into the dancin’ and fightin’ parts. I had to admire their commitment, even while shaking my head at the silliness of it all.

STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Blood Type. John Marshall Tanner #8. William Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, October 1993.

   In this, his latest adventure, PI John Marshall Tanner doesn’t have a client for quite a while. A drinking buddy having marital trouble is dead, and Tanner doesn’t accept the common belief that it was suicide. There is a lot of emotional baggage that’s lugged around in this rather lengthy detective tale, and most of it is eventually opened for all to see.

   Unfortunately, somewhere along the line Tanner’s investigation gets sidetracked, and the story transforms itself into a massive, full-fledged medical thriller. And somehow, not so coincidentally, my interest in the proceedings faded, flickered and all but went out.

   I’m going to call this the Reverse Villainy Syndrome. The more gigantic the plot, the less meaningful the solution to the original crime becomes. I also know that Greenleaf realized this, too, since he makes just about the same point somewhere around halfway through.

   The ending is also a huge disappointment. Tanner is good at guessing, no doubt about it. He has most of the solution wrong most of the way through, and then, just as he finally seems to get it right, the story stops, and suddenly it’s over. Left behind are only a few little questions, the kind asked by inquiring little minds (like mine) and never really answered.

   There are a lot of memorable characters brought to life in this book, but the bottom line is that Tanner doesn’t really do any detecting in this book, and it was the ending that I especially didn’t care for.

THE TRAIN. United Artists, 1964. Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau. Director: John Frankenheimer.

JANE HADDAM – Bleeding Hearts. Gregor Demarkian #9. Bantam, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995.

   Nobody’s ever admitted to me they like these, but this is the ninth so I know somebody besides me reads them. This is the Valentine’s Day entry in her “holiday” series.

   Gregor Demarkian is the retired head of the FBI “serial killer” branch, now living back in the Armenian neighborhood of Philadelphia where he grew up. One of the neighborhood ladies, a plain woman in her late fifties, meets and gets giddy over a once-noted psychologist who four years ago was tried for the murder of his wife and found innocent. Things get a bit sticky at a party she throws for him when his ex-mistress shows up, sending Demarkian’s friend to her room in tears.

   The psychologist follows her, and shortly thereafter he is found stabbed to death on the floor, and her standing over him with a dagger in her hand — the same dagger that was found by the body of his wife.

   The Demarkian books are predictably formulaic in their structure. First there’s the introduction of the players who’ll be the murdered, murderer, and suspects, then the crime, then the investigation and eventual solving of the crime by Demarkian, “the Armenian Hercule Poirot.”

   I like them because the cast is usually interesting and I enjoy Haddam’s leisurely, multi-viewpoint way of telling the story. Like the previous books it’s nothing major, but enjoyable; reading one is sort of like putting on a comfortable old shoe that you’re a little ashamed of.

   
Bibliographic Note:   There have been so far twenty more Demarkian books. The most recent one was Fighting Chance, published in 2014.