I received the following email from Mike Chomko yesterday with some startling but not surprising news. Here it is in its entirety:

   Following the 2008 Pulpcon, I came home with a feeling of hope that things were finally going to change and Pulpcon would start reversing its recent losses. Now, nearly two months later, that feeling of hope is gone.

   For a number of years, Jack Cullers, Barry Traylor, and I have been pushing for changes in the way that Pulpcon is run. For years, our pleas have been countered with “that’s the way we’ve always done things.” Following two lengthy committee meetings at the 2008 Pulpcon, Jack, Barry, and I seemed to get enough concessions out of the other committee members to feel that the convention was finally going to be run in new ways.

   At the general business meeting held at this year’s Pulpcon, one idea that was discussed was finding a new site for the convention. Most members in attendance seemed to favor remaining in Ohio, but in a city other than Dayton.

   About two weeks after returning from the convention, I took it upon myself to contact the cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. All three municipalities responded, but Columbus was by and large the location that demonstrated the most interest in hosting our convention.

   Needing some information for Columbus to put together a proposal for hosting Pulpcon, I contacted Bob Gorton, the chairman of the Pulpcon Committee. Bob provided the required information, but also stated he felt that it was time to renew the contract that Pulpcon had with the Dayton Convention Center.

   I forwarded Bob’s email to the rest of the Pulpcon Committee-Richard Clear, Jack Cullers, Don Ramlow, Mary Ramlow, and Barry Traylor. The result of my email was a vote to renew the contract with Dayton (with Jack, Barry, and myself dissenting) and a reprimand from Bob Gorton. He told me that he was unaware that I had made a motion to call for a vote whether or not to stay with the Dayton Convention Center. I was simply trying to get things done quickly and responsibly.

   At this summer’s committee meetings, Bob Gorton told us he is “not very good with email.” He said that he “largely ignored most email.” However, he agreed to “meet” via email at least once a month. The committee decided to hold a meeting via email on the first weekend of every month. We could contact each other via email at other times, but the monthly meetings would be required.

   Our first email meeting was held over Labor Day weekend. To start our discussion, I combed through the Pulpcon business meeting minutes and the minutes from our two committee meetings, and wrote what I thought should be done concerning a wide array of items. I asked the use of volunteers, venues in which to advertise, conventions where we should have flyers, links to other websites, an explanation addressed to the general pulp community explaining why Pulpcon was returning to Dayton, changing the types of material that can be sold at Pulpcon, showing movies at the convention, obtaining mailing lists, newsletter revisions, a survey of Pulpcon attendees, and other things. I also suggested that with all the work to be done, we should be communicating more than once a month.

   The responses to my queries and ideas were practically nil from Gorton, Don Ramlow, and Richard Clear (who was new to the Pulpcon Committee).

   Since that first email meeting, Bob has been silent, not communicating with Jack, Barry, or me. I do not know if he is communicating with anyone else. Don has emailed a few suggestions, as well as Mary. Richard Clear has likewise made a few comments. But for the most part — except for fairly constant communications between Jack Cullers, Barry Traylor, and myself — the Pulpcon Committee has largely been silent.

   In fact, in a recent email to the entire committee, Don Ramlow wrote: “I know everyone has their own responsibilities. However, my schedule is the busiest in the fall. I’m setting up 12 radio productions for my theatre group All Ears theatre, teaching five colleges classes (one which is on-line requiring a lot of email contact), working with other people on other conventions, trying to find time to practice with my rock band “Chaos Theory” and finally finish up my 200,000 word reference book on OTR so I can submit it to the publisher yet this year. That, in addition to finding time to spend with Mary and our children and grandchildren. I realize that my schedule is not of concern to others and that you all have your own commitments. However, for me it means trying to budget time for all of them and the only way I can do that is to schedule accordingly.”

   When asked this week about preparing advertising flyers for Gary Lovisi’s book show, Bouchercon, and Rich Harvey’s Pulp Adventurecon, Gorton and Don Ramlow did not respond.

   Given Bob Gorton’s silence and Don Ramlow’s suggested lack of time to commit to the work required to turn Pulpcon around, I asked them to resign from the committee. Both Jack Cullers and Barry Traylor seconded my motion. Unfortunately, both Gorton and Ramlow have ignored my request.

   Jack Cullers, Barry Traylor, and I have decided that if we want to move the convention forward, it is impossible to continue to work with Bob Gorton and Don Ramlow. They seem to feel that shortening the convention to three days will be enough to turn things around. They seem to think that by creating a few generic flyers that seem to be addressed to people who already know about Pulpcon, the convention’s troubles will be over. They seem to think that they need to devote very little time and energy to turn Pulpcon around. They seem to think that communication is unnecessary.

   Although it’s time for Gorton and Ramlow to step aside so progress can be made, they do not appear to be willing to do so. Jack Cullers, Barry Traylor, and I are willing to devote the time and energy needed to get Pulpcon moving forward. However, we cannot do so with the obstructions set up by Gorton’s inability to communicate and Ramlow’s lack of time and cooperation. We have therefore decided to break away from the Gorton/Ramlow convention and organize our own Pulpcon.

   This past June, Jack Cullers learned that the Pulpcon service mark, originally registered to Rusty Hevelin, had lapsed in 1989. So Jack applied to register the service mark in his own name. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is currently investigating Jack’s claim to the service mark. Jack, who has been a member of the Pulpcon Committee for many years, believes there should be no difficulty in registering the service mark in his own name.

   Jack, Barry, and I are currently investigating sites in Columbus, Ohio for a planned Pulpcon to be held in late July or early August, without the obstructionists Gorton and Ramlow. We are also in discussions with interested parties who are considering holding an East Coast pulp and paper convention, most likely in November 2009.

   Whenever we hold the convention, we plan to publicize it and open it up to a wider array of material than has traditionally been allowed at Pulpcon. However, if we are to organize a successful convention, we will need your help. Please plan to support our convention in whatever month it is held.

   If you are a dealer and would be interested in selling at our show, please let us know as soon as possible. If you are interested in lending a hand, please drop us a line. More particulars will follow as our plans become better defined.

   If you’d like to be added to the new Pulpcon mailing list, please send your name and address to Mike Chomko at michaelchomko@rcn.com or 2217 W. Fairview Street, Allentown, PA 18104-6542 or Jack Cullers at jassways@woh.rr.com or 1272 Cheatham Way, Bellbrook, OH 45305. Please be sure to include your email address if you have one. Thanks.

DIG ME LATER – Miriam-Ann Hagen.

Mercury Mystery 157; digest-sized paperback; no date stated, but generally accepted as being 1951. Hardcover edition: Doubleday/Crime Club; 1949. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, August 1949.

   I mean no offense to anyone named Hortense, or who knows anyone with the name Hortense, but it IS an old-fashioned name, I believe you have to admit, and a series of mysteries with a leading character named Hortense Clinton is going to be considered light-hearted from the outset, whether it is true or not.

   But true it is, or at the least, this second of three mysteries she was involved in certainly is. When a murder occurs across the hall to her in her Manhattan apartment, Hortense accidentally confronts the killer with her night clothes on, blemish cream on her face, chin strap on, and a band across her forehead.

   Of course squatting down on the floor as she was, all she could see before she was knocked unconscious was the killer’s pant legs and shoes. But if the killer was the dead man’s nephew making his getaway as she was putting her milk bottles out, why did he take the time to take her diamond watch?

   As it happens, the answer to that question is clear to any reader who’s been paying attention and has read Chapter One carefully, so anyone who reads detective stories for the detective work in them isn’t going to find much of any substance to mull over in this one.

   But the characters are what might keep you reading, as the did me, somewhat wacky and somewhat confusing, or confused themselves as to why so many of them end up with Hortense in a resort hotel in Nova Scotia where she flees when her notoriety in Manhattan proves to be too much for her.

   The killer is obvious enough in retrospect, but there are plenty of false trails to be followed and examined carefully before the final denouement. Most – but not all – the questions are answered, and Hortense Clinton survives to be involved in another murder another day. (See the bibliography below.)

   But before getting to that, I didn’t do any research on the author before beginning the book – I seldom do, as I prefer to let the book speak for the author, not his/her reputation or background. I almost never even read the blurbs on the jacket flaps or the back cover.

   So it took me a while to place Ms. Hagen’s style of writing, even though I have to admit that I should have known. It’s a style that feels itself necessary to explain the smallest detail, to spell out things so that the reader will fully understand, and yet is smooth enough, and clever enough to stay interesting. I am not denigrating it in any way. It’s a style of writing I most certainly and definitely admire.

   I wish I could explain better what I mean, but here’s a sample, and maybe that will help. Picking a page and a selection at random from the first chapter, take this as an example. Hortense is being asked by the police to identify the nephew’s shoes:

   Which was, to cut the story off short, that she wouldn’t later be able to testify in court that it couldn’t have been the man that the suspected of being the killer.

   I don’t know if that was enough of a sample for you to tell, and maybe you never heard of Aaron Marc Stein, also known as George Bagby and Hampton Stone, but the writing is identical. But if you have, then I’m sure you spotted the similarity, and probably even before I made the connection. And if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, as I should have been, or at least my only claim for ignorance was that I forgot, in one of Mike Nevins’s columns for M*F, he happened to have mentioned in passing that Miriam-Ann Hagen was Aaron Marc Stein’s sister.

   The title comes from a bit of jazzy jargon from the 1940s that I don’t think was used appropriately in the novel, but to expand the context a little, take a look at the three mystery novels that Miriam-Ann Hagen wrote, courtesy of Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

HAGEN, MIRIAM-ANN (1903-1984)
       Plant Me Now (n.) Doubleday 1947 [Hortense Clinton; Train]
       Dig Me Later (n.) Doubleday 1949 [Hortense Clinton; Canada]
       Murder-But Natch (n.) Doubleday 1951 [Hortense Clinton; Ship]



[UPDATE] 09-28-08.  I asked Mike Nevins to read my comments and then to consider the possibility that Aaron Marc Stein might have written the Hortense Clinton books under his sister’s name. Here’s his reply. I’m sure he’s right, but the thought lingers on…

   If you check back, it was a year ago yesterday that I announced here on the blog that I’d uploaded an article by John Pugmire about one of his favorite subgenres of mystery fiction, Locked Room Mysteries. (Mine, too, of course.)

   It’s largely a list of such stories considered to be the best by a couple of noted panels of experts — I’ll leave the details to the article itself — along (and here is where I came in) with cover images of as many of them as John and I could come up with — or nearly 100 or so.

   Some time ago — and longer ago than I’d rather admit — John sent me images of five more covers, one an improvement over one that we’d used to fill a gap, plus four that are brand new. I’ve finally gotten around to doing what I do, and that’s get them online at last.

   The page is on the primary M*F website, and even if you’ve seen it before, I think it’s worth a look. Here’s the URL: https://mysteryfile.com/Locked_Rooms/Library.html, and here are a couple of the newly added covers:

   Back in May it was that I posted an inquiry from John Herrington about some records in North Carolina that should shed some light, he thought, on the true identity of British mystery writer A. Fielding, until recently thought to be a pseudonym of Lady Dorothy Feilding, 1889-1935.

   Catching up with what John’s learned since then, here are a couple of emails from him. From late July:

   More recently, here’s an email from John that reached me a couple of days ago:

   Just another reason for everyone with an interest in Golden Age and (mostly) traditional mysteries to anxiously await the next issue of CADS (short for Crime and Detective Stories).

   Geoff Bradley, the editor, doesn’t maintain an online presence, but information about issue 50 can be found here. The issue most recently mailed is #54. His email address is Geoffcads @ aol.com

   It’s been a long time in getting it finished (the last update was sometime in January) but the Mystery House section of Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day Lending Library website is ready for viewing. Thanks to the assistance of Bill Pronzini, whose collection has been of great use, cover images of almost all of the books published by Mystery House between 1940 and 1948 are now online.

   Mystery House was revived as an imprint in 1952 and continued on until 1959, but rather than doing any of these, what Bill and I will be tackling next are the covers of the lending library mysteries published by Arcadia House between 1939 and 1947. Arcadia House also began publishing mysteries in 1952, but here again we’ll concentrate on the ‘Golden Age’ titles first.

   Here are a couple of the Mystery House covers. For the others, you’ll have to follow the link above:

To continue from my previous post, I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday, and she agreed to let me go back to the amount of Armour Thyroid I had been taking. She also went through a list of possible replacements for the endocrinologist whose assistance I no longer require. (Ha.) As it turns out, though, the name of the one I’ll be seeing next came from the patient standing behind me at the checkout desk.

Turns out that he and I have gone through pretty much the same list of doctors in the past, only he’s been way ahead of me in seeing this and that one and rejecting them all until he came to one he likes and who he says actually takes the time to talk to him.

Problem is, my appointment with this new fellow isn’t until mid-January. That’s how far backed up anyone specializing in diabetes or thyroid cases are, in case your son or daughter happens to be looking for a possible new career path.

But now I know — from the Internet, not from any doctor — that taking Armour Thyroid should be spread throughout the day, not just the morning, and that calcium supplements interfere with its effectiveness. So I’ve changed my pill-taking regimen accordingly, and while it’s too early to say for sure, so far it seems to have helped. But it is scary that you have to learn things like this on your own. You really have to wonder just how much doctors really know. Exploring wellness support from places like D8 Super Store can be a helpful addition when you’re navigating health and looking for balance on your own terms.

In any case, the bottom line is this. Don’t ever let your doctor’s goal be normal numbers. Let the goal be the normal health of the patient, and that folks, is you, someday if not now.

As for me, I’m alternating good days with bad days, which is a big step up from mostly bad ones. It took me a while to bottom out as I seem to have done, and it will probably take about as long to get back up again. Mystery*File as a blog won’t be shutting down, but its focus will change (again, as it has every so often) to — well, I haven’t quite gotten that far, but you’ll see, probably about the same time as I do.

I hope this will be the last time I need to talk about myself like this, but it certainly helps to have a forum like this where I can vent off every once in a while. Thanks again for all of the good wishes, suggestions and advice. I most certainly appreciate it!

   I’ve been ill the past few days. It seems strange that such a small gland such as your thyroid could be so crucial, but it is. It regulates your entire well-being.

   As for the new endocrinologist, he’s history. We’ve come to an impasse. He called me on Monday after my latest set of blood tests and I’d told the nurse I’d like to talk with him, and he began by saying, “We can’t keep having this same conversation over and over again.” (This is the third time we’d talked, once in his office.)

   He wanted me to cut back on my thyroid supplements even more, and I told him I was too ill to think about it. His reply, without once asking me what kind of problems I’d been having, “If you don’t take my advice, I can’t help you.” Go back to the previous dosage? Out of the question. “I won’t write you a prescription for it.”

   As a say, an impasse, and he’s out of my life. I’ll see my primary care physician next week, and she’ll help me get things straightened out. That I’m not concerned about.

   But things will remain quiet here on the blog for a while longer. I don’t know if you wanted to know all this, but you haven’t seen anything here from me lately, and I thought maybe I should tell you why.

   I also needed to let off some steam, as you can imagine.

LEWIS B. PATTEN – Prodigal Gunfighter.

Berkley F1241; paperback original, 1966. Signet, 1976; Signet Double, 1979; Leisure Double, 1994.

   Lewis B. Patten’s first book, Massacre at White River, came out from Ace in 1952, and his writing career continued right up until he died in 1981, when Track of the Hunter came out, also as a paperback original, this time from Signet.

   He was incredibly prolific. In a thirty-year span he produced something like 90 novels, including books as by Lewis Ford, Len Leighton (with Wayne D. Overholser) and Joseph Wayne (also in collaboration with Overholser).

   As one of the next generation of western writers, Patten’s all of novels came out very much in the post-pulp era but (as far as I know) also still all very much in the “code of the west” tradition. It’s certainly difficult to generalize on the basis of one book, and Prodigal Gunfighter is the only book of his that I’ve read in several years, and probably more than that.

   Not that Patten didn’t write for the pulps. Starting in 1950 he had a score or more shorter works that appeared in magazines like Mammoth Western, Thrilling Western, Frontier Stories and so on. His name is certainly more identified with novels, however, and in his heyday, he was cranking them out like almost nobody else.

   And he was published in hardcover as well. He may have begun in softcover only, but beginning with Guns at Gray Butte in 1963, more and more of books came out from Doubleday. Not all of them, but a high percentage of them, the easy explanation for this being that he probably wrote more books than Doubleday could publish.

   Take 1966 for example. He wrote No God in Saguaro and Death Waited at Rialto Creek for Doubleday; The Odds Against Circle L for Ace; and Prodigal Gunfighter for Berkley. Not that year, but in the same time period, he also wrote for Lancer and Signet, the latter eventually becoming his primary publisher in paperback, both for originals and reprints of the Doubleday novels.

   If you want a slim and lean western to read, one that you will pick up and not put down until you’re done, then the 128 page Prodigal Gunfighter is the book for you. Taking place in the space of only a day in the small town of Cottonwood Springs, Patten certainly doesn’t leave the reader much time to breathe.

   The early morning finds the entire town down at the railroad station, waiting for the prodigal to return, in the person of the notorious home-grown gunfighter Slade Teplin. Included among them is a rather nervous deputy sheriff Johnny Yoder, who has been semi-courting Teplin’s wife, Molly, a school teacher who thought she could tame him, couldn’t, but who has not yet divorced him.

   Is he the reason for Slade’s return? Slade has had no contact with Molly since he left town. His father still lives in Cottonwood Springs, but there’s hardly any love lost between the two of them. Does he want revenge of some sort against the entire town? It is pure hatred? No one seems to know, and the sense of fear in the town is everywhere.

   And no one can do anything, including the law. In all but his first of many killings over the years, Slade has never drawn first. On page 91 Slade is briefly confronted by the sheriff:

   Cal Reeder was a kid, the son of a wealthy local rancher, who thought he’d make a name for himself and failed. His father is part of the story, and so are the four drifters that Johnny notices having come quietly into town.

   Even at the short length the plot does not go exactly where it seems expected to do, and on pages 114-115 is one of the best choreographed fist-fights (not shoot-outs) I’ve read in quite a while, and it’s not even with Slade Teplin. He’s still on the loose, however – don’t worry about that – and with plans to cause even more havoc in Cottonwood Springs.

   To show you want I mean, though, here’s at least how the end of the fight reads:

   After a few seconds taken to recover, Johnny knows he needs to make the man talk. From page 116:

   He’s not bluffing. The west was a tough place to live, but Patten’s characters also seem to be tough enough themselves and equal to the challenge when they need to be. What’s more traditional than that?

PostScript: Written later in Patten’s career is a book called The Law in Cottonwood (Doubleday, 1978). In paperback form from Signet and Leisure, it eventually appears packaged up in the same edition as Prodigal Gunfighter, two novels for the price of one. I don’t happen to have a copy readily at hand, so while I’m curious and it may not be very likely, I have no idea whether or not the later book has any of the same characters as this one.

[UPDATE] 09-06-08. First of all, my apologies for being unable to provide a cover image for the original Berkley edition of this book. I can’t get at my copy, and I can’t locate one anywhere else. There is only one copy for sale on abebooks at the moment, for example. Early Berkley paperbacks are often hard to find, more so than you might think, but their distribution through the 1960s was extremely erratic. (Believe it or not, I was looking for them then.)

   I posted this to fulfill a semi-promise I made in the previous post, in which Patten came up as an example of western noir writer. I didn’t write this review with that thought in mind, but at least from the quotes, I think you can gather that it’s a fairly tough-minded book. More than that I cannot tell you myself.

   The latest issue of the online magazine Black Horse Extra is out, devoted primarily as always the western fiction recently put out by UK publisher Robert Hale, but again, as always, branching out in many different ways.

   For example, in this, the September-November 2008 issue, the main topic is an attempt to answer the question, Can western fiction also be noir?

    If I’d been asked before reading this issue, except for a tendency for traditional westerns most often to have happy endings, my answer would have been yes, of course. Happily I’m reinforced in that opinion by James Reasoner’s comments about one of his current favorite western authors, Lewis Patten (1915-1981) in a review of Rope Law (Gold Medal, 1956), about which he says in part:

    “… as the posse waits for nightfall so they can close in, Patten backtracks to fill in the story of what brought the characters to this point, and it’s a years-long saga of drunkenness, prostitution, robbery, and murder worthy of any of the more contemporary Gold Medal’s. Sex serves as the motivation for most of this, and while the scenes aren’t graphic, there are quite a few of them for a traditional western published in 1956.”

   Chap O’Keefe (aka Keith Chapman, who leaves comments here under one or the other of each of the two names every once in a while) follows with story descriptions of several of Patten’s other books, one or two of which I’ve read myself, reviews of which I really ought to post here sometime soon. Chap points out in each of them what in his opinion makes them noir, including the imagery of the writing.

    From Giant on Horseback (Ace,1964) for example; “Rain fell, gently drizzling, shining on the slicker worn by the stationmaster, dripping softly from the eaves of the weather-beaten, yellow-frame station. The train hissed patiently as it waited for the passenger to alight. . . .”

   Concerning “happy endings,” James suggests that authors were constrained into doing so by editors, and Chap follows up by pointing out that editors still have great influence in that direction today.

   In that regard, he goes into specific detail with a behind-the-scenes look at what his editors wanted (and didn’t want) in two of his own most recent books, A Gunfight Too Many and Misfit Lil Cleans Up, both published by Hale under their Black Horse imprint, which makes for very interesting reading.

   If you’re a fan if either western or noir fiction, you’ll want to read the whole issue yourself. And I haven’t even begun to mention any of the other interviews and news items it contains. (How old is Ernest Borgnine? And what western movie is he going to be in next??)

HERE’S FLASH CASEY. Grand National Pictures, 1938. Eric Linden, Boots Mallory, Cully Richards, Holmes Herbert, Joseph Crehan, Howard Lang. Based on the story “Return Engagement,” by George Harmon Coxe (Black Mask, March 1934). Director: Lynn Shores.

   A copy of Black Mask from 1934 with “Return Engagement” in it is going to be hard to find, if you don’t already own one, but you can also find it in a much more recent book about the leading character: Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer: From the Pulps to Radio and Beyond, by J. Randolph Cox and David S. Siegel.

   I wish I had my copy at hand, because any resemblance of the Flash Casey in this movie and the Casey I remember reading other stories about is — to put it bluntly — none at all. Someone else is going to have to read it, the original story, that is, and be willing to tell us about it.

   I’ve also been hard-pressed to come up with posters or stills from the film. I have one of Eric Linden, who plays Casey, and some kind of trading card of Boots Mallory, who plays Casey’s girl friend of sorts, Kay Lanning, the society page editor of the newspaper where Casey, fresh out of college, lands his first paying job. (And at $18 a week, it is not much of a job. It is a wonder what Kay sees in him.)

   What you can do, however, is watch the entire movie online. Go to www.archive.org, click on the right spot, and there it is. Marvelous!

   In a matter of speaking, of course. I’m talking about Internet technology, not the quality of the film. Eric Linden, whose career lasted about ten years through the 1930s, plays Casey as a naive college kid for all it’s worth, which is maybe the dime it would cost you to see it back in 1938. And if I haven’t happened to have mentioned it before, this is a comedy film all the way, so it’s not Linden who’s responsible for his actions.

   What might possibly qualify this as a crime film? Almost nothing, as long as you’ve asked, but Casey does take some candid photos at a society affair that an unscrupulous gang of blackmailers alters and tries to make a bundle on. Bungling that, they kidnap Kay, and Flash comes to the rescue by commandeering an ambulance…

   Besides being an actress for a short while, Patricia “Boots” Mallory was also a good-looking dancer and an actress. Her film career ended in 1938, but she had married film producer William Cagney, brother of actor James Cagney, back in 1932, well before then. She later married actor Herbert Marshall, to whom she was still wed when she died in 1958.

   So, as you can see, here’s my review. Two paragraphs about the movie itself, surrounded by a lot of fluff. Go watch the movie itself and see if it deserves more.