A live version of the first song on jazz singer Karrin Allyson’s CD In Blue (2002).

   
   This one day pulp and paperback convention has been an annual event for over a dozen years and has been held at the Ramada on Route 206 near the NJ Turnpike exit in Bordentown, NJ. Frankly, I don’t think Rich Harvey has received enough credit for his dedication in putting on this convention each year. He has even started to do a one day show in Florida during the winter.

       

   In addition to pulps and paperbacks, the 47 tables also held pulp reprints, slick magazines, dime novels, DVDs of old movies, and original artwork. There were over a hundred attendees and the room always looked crowded and busy during the day. In addition to Rich Harvey, author Audrey Parente also was helping out and things were run very smoothly with many dealers coming from as far away as Boston, Connecticut, Maryland, NY, and even Florida. Restaurants and hotels were within easy reach.

   Though this is a one day convention, for the past several years it has been a four day event for me and some fellow collector friends. For instance Matt Moring, who runs Altus Press and owns much of the old Munsey and Popular Publications, comes down for a visit starting the Wednesday before the convention and spends several days meeting with us doing research.

   Digges La Touche, otherwise known as The Reading Machine and The Major, is a great pulp resource and along with me, we discuss with Matt all sorts of ideas involving the pulps and even the slicks. This time we drove Matt to distraction talking about H. Bedford Jones best series which most collectors do not even known about, the Pinky Jenkins novellas that were published in Ace High in the 1920’s.

   We also talked about some of the great slick magazine series like the Glencannon stories by Guy Gilpatric and the Scipio series by Clarence Buddington Kelland. These literary discussions took place not only at my house and up at Digges’ brother’s place but also at the various local restaurants.

   I’ve also gotten into the habit of hosting a pulp luncheon for collectors who arrive early on Friday and stay overnight at the Ramada for the Saturday show. These luncheons are attended only by serious, and I mean really serious, readers and collectors. This year in addition to myself, the discussions held the rapt attention of Matt Moring, The Reading Machine, Ed Hulse, and dealers Nick Certo, Scott Hartshorn, and Paul Herman.

   Legendary collector and dealer Jack Irwin also attended and the day before had provided several of us some much needed reading matter when we visited his storage facility which non-collectors call a house. I’ve known Jack since the 1960’s and he has been collecting pulps for over 70 years.

   Digges picked me up at 7:30 am on the day of the convention and by 8:15 we were in the dealers room of the Ramada looking through piles of pulps, digests, paperbacks, and slicks. Though the official opening time is 10:00 am, many tables set up quite early and fellow dealers visit each other. We would have been there earlier but the city of Trenton was shut down by what looked like the entire police force as they blockaded many of the streets. Some type of marathon. You know, the usual non-collector waste of time. I never will understand non-readers and non-collectors.

   I had a table and proceeded to dump several boxes of books and pulps. I must have brought a couple hundred hardcover detective and mystery novels that I had read and no longer wanted. Also over 50 banged up pulps. Since I wanted to sell everything, I priced everything at one dollar each. That’s right, everything was a buck! Evidently no one believed me because I sold only 18 hardcovers and made $18.00.

   At the end of the show, since I was threatening to throw the contents of the entire table into the dumpster, I gave away all the hardcovers to fellow readers. Every collector has a non-collector who is in charge of harassing them about their collection of books, and I had told my non-collecting spouse that these books were making a one way trip and would not be returning to our house.

   But don’t feel sorry about my lack of money-making skills. First of all, I found a pulp cover painting for a reasonable price. The photo shows me holding it and it is the cover from a 1934 Western Story. The artist is Frank Spradling, and it is quite unusual, as it shows a nighttime scene that must have happened a million times out west. A cowboy hears a noise at his campfire and reaches for his gun.

   Several books made their debut at this convention. The latest of Ed Hulse’s Murania Press volumes was available. It’s a reprint of a Dime Mystery novel from 1933 by William Corcoran called The Purple Eye. Altus Press had several new collections from their Dime Detective Library, including one of the best and most unusual series, the Jeffery Wren series by G.T. Fleming-Roberts. It stars the best of the magician detectives and includes an introduction by Fleming-Roberts’ son.

   But the most noteworthy debut was the stunning blockbuster collection from Altus Press titled Them That Lives by Their Guns. It’s volume one of the collected hard-boiled stories of Race Williams by Carroll John Daly, creator of the hard-boiled detective story. This large book has 654 pages and is only $29.95. All of the stories, except one, are from Black Mask, 1923-1927. There is a long introduction discussing the pros and cons of Daly’s work. This is a must buy volume of historical significance and though Race Williams is a murdering SOB, every pulp reader and collector should have this collection. I’m sure we will be seeing some interesting reviews from both lovers and haters of Daly’s work.

            

   I’ve saved the best for last. You may wonder about the photos showing horror and fantasy writer Chet Williamson and me holding up four old issues of All Story. Chet bought these 1913-1914 issues 37 years ago and decided to sell them to me, thus completing my 444 issue set of All Story. It’s been a quest that I’ve been involved in for many decades and I now have probably the only complete set in existence.

   Many collectors complain about the trials and tribulations of collecting the weekly pulps. I’m talking about not only All Story, 1905-1920, but also Western Story, 1919-1949, Detective Story,, 1915-1949, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy, etc. I collect and read all these magazines and have managed to compile extensive runs.

   Instead of finding it a terrible and expensive job, I have enjoyed myself tremendously and I don’t regret the money that I’ve spent on these magazines. It’s been a load of fun and I’ve tried to get that enjoyment across in my series of articles called “Collecting Pulps: A Memoir”.

   I stress *read* because there actually is quality fiction in these old magazines. Don’t believe ignorant literary critics that lump all the pulps together as sub-literary. There actually is such a thing as a good pulp magazine, and that’s why I’ve been collecting them for most of my life. There are bad titles also, but that’s another story.

   So ended several days of meeting with old friends, talking about books, pulps, and old movies. There is no better way to spend our time. Collecting books is a lifelong activity and you may retire from a job or a profession but you never retire from collecting. I urge all readers and collectors to support the Windy City Pulp Convention and Pulpfest. They are great fun!

Editorial Note:   Thanks to Sai Shankar for the use of the photos.
   

         

MARGARET MARON – Bootlegger’s Daughter. Deborah Knott #1, Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1992; paperback, June 1993.

   Margaret Maron is the author of seven novels featuring Sigrid Harald, as well as one non-series mystery. I understand that we’ve seen the last of Harald for a while, and that Maron will concentrate on Deborah Knott.

   Fine with me; I liked the Harald stories well enough to read and acquire them, but I think Bootlegger’s Daughter clearly represents a move up in the craft.

   Deborah Knott is a 34 year old attorney who has entered the Democratic Primary for the position of District Judge. Her father is (was?) the best known bootlegger in that part of North Carolina, and they are currently somewhat estranged due to his opposition to her political ambitions.

   Just prior to election day, an old (unrequited) love comes to her for help The story of course deals with her journey into the past in search of answers, but it is much more than just a mystery to be solved. It is the story of a woman trying to enter a man’s world in the old south, and indeed an evocative depiction of the people and culture of a piece of that part of our country.

   I know North Carolina only slightly, but know the rural south well, and found the milieu to be finely and accurately drawn. Deborah herself is an appealing character, a strong and determined woman who I believe will find favor with most readers. I look forward to meeting her again. A very good book, recommended highly.

   A final note: on the back of the dust jacket are no less than seven favorable and well deserved advance comments by fellow mystery writers, and I was struck by the fact that they were all by female authors. Hmmm. One isn’t quite sure what to infer. Do Maron/Mysterious Press consider this primarily a “woman’s” book? Surely not, though that’s the most obvious implication. I would think it almost has to be a marketing decision of some kind. Oh, well.

      The Deborah Knott Series —

Bootlegger’s Daughter, 1992
Southern Discomfort, 1993

Shooting at Loons, 1994
Up Jumps the Devil, 1996

Killer Market, 1997
Home Fires, 1998
Storm Track, 2000
Uncommon Clay, 2001
Slow Dollar, 2002
High Country Fall, 2004
Rituals of the Season, 2005
Winter’s Child, 2006

Hard Row, 2007
Death’s Half-Acre, 2008
Sand Sharks, 2009

Christmas Mourning, 2010
Three-Day Town, 2011 (cross-over with Sigrid Harald)
The Buzzard Table, 2012

Designated Daughters, 2014
Long Upon the Land, 2015

Note: Sigrid Harald made two additional appearances after the Deborak Knott series began: Fugitive Colors (1995) and the crossover novel noted above. Bootlegger’s Daughter won the 1992 Agatha and the Anthony, Edgar and Macavity awards for “Best Novel” the following year.

THE HOWARDS OF VIRGINIA. Columbia Pictures, 1940. Cary Grant, Martha Scott, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Marshal, Richard Carlson, Paul Kelly. Director: Frank Lloyd.

   During his long and storied film career, Cary Grant appeared in films of different genres and portrayed a wide array of characters. It’s very easy to close one’s eyes and picture Grant in a screwball comedy or as a soldier and spy. What about as a backwoods Virginian adorned in Daniel Boone attire? That’s more difficult, wouldn’t you say?

   But somehow, kind of, sort of, Grant manages to pull it off.

   That’s a statement that could be applied in general to The Howards of Virginia, a slightly above average historical melodrama set in Virginia during the colonial era and the American Revolution. Based on Elizabeth Page’s novel, The Tree of Liberty, the movie features Grant in a starring role. He portrays Matt Howard, a man of western Virginia who falls in love with and marries Jane Payton (Martha Stewart), a woman from the Tidewater aristocracy.

   The movie traces the couple’s relationship from its tumultuous beginnings through their settlement in a western Virginia tobacco plantation, Howard’s election to the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the Revolutionary War. Although the film is unevenly paced, it ends up all coming together by the end. The last half hour of the film, in which Grant’s character really comes into his own, makes sitting through a rather sluggish first hour worth it.

   All told, while The Howards of Virginia is no forgotten classic begging to be rediscovered, it’s nevertheless a significant entry in Grant’s early film career and a surprisingly gritty portrayal of soldiering during the campaign for American independence.

DAVID HILTBRAND – Deader Than Disco. Avon, paperback original, April 2005.

   Here’s the first paragraph of my review of Hiltbrand’s first mystery, Killer Solo, which came out in January, 2004:

   Deader Than Disco, Hiltbrand’s second novel, also marks the second appearance of rock ’n roll detective Jim McNamara. I may as well say, up front and for the record, that Killer Solo is the better of the two, but with no other contender in sight, that leaves the first book still in the top position.

   Although other real life people in the world of show business (Gwenyth Paltrow, Sheryl Crow) are mentioned in passing, McNamara’s client is only an excellent clone (and reasonable facsimile) of singer superstar Madonna, a lady named Angel (last name Chiavone), who’s deeply involved with the murder of a superstar pro basketball player in her home, after a party, and she is strictly not talking about it, not to any one, and certainly not to McNamara, who was actually hired by Angel’s publicist, a lady named Lani.

   McNamara’s own demons, the ones that forced him out of active show business himself, drinking and a bad drug problem, are past him, and yet not entirely. He finds AA meetings to attend wherever he goes, which in this book includes a long stint in Hollywood, followed by a shorter one in Manhattan, and all the while keeping in touch with his sponsor back in New England. The latter being, by the way, a very good way of having someone around to bounce ideas off of.

   As a writer, Hiltbrand has a neat way of characterizing his characters quickly and sharply, even the ones who are only passing through. About 80% of McNamara’s investigation goes down well, but once he decides that the decamped diva has disappeared off to Detroit (well, Michigan, but it doesn’t match the alliteration) – and how’d he know, I do not know – all of the well-characterized characters fade into the background. With at that point only three players to play around with (Angel, MacNamara, and the killer) the well-honed tale (up to then) fritters itself away into a badly rehearsed made-for-cable late night thriller.

   Chapter 40 begins with “It took a while to sort things out.” But unlike some complicated detective stories with lots of twists and turns in the plot, three more pages and it’s over.

Bibliographic Note: The third and final Jim McNamara novel was Dying to Be Famous (Harper, 2006).

THE NEANDERTHAL MAN. United Artists, 1953. Robert Shayne, Joyce Terry, Richard Crane, Beverly Garland. Written by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen. Directed by E. A. Dupont.

   It would be easy to pick at this shabby film for the confused story, wooden acting and choppy continuity — I mean how tacky is it when the movie credits misspell the name of the top-billed actor? And as long as we’re carping, there’s the scene where Beverly Garland walks into the background and is replaced by another actress, or the muddled montage where a sabre-tooth tiger attacks a car, intercut with footage of a bobcat and something hitting the windshield that looks like a suction-cup Garfield. And don’t let’s forget the stiff and unconvincing rubber mask that’s supposed to be a primitive beast-face.

   Robert Shayne is remembered these days as Inspector Henderson on The Adventures of Superman but he did his share of Mad Doctoring in things like Face of Marble and The Indestructible Man. Here he gets to pull out a few stops and rave in the approved Lugosi style as a scientist (in what field I’m not exactly sure, and I suspect the writers weren’t either) who believes Neanderthal Man was our intellectual equal — a motif in some recent TV Commercials — and has developed a serum that will regress stuff.

   As the film opens, he has used this on a house cat and a housekeeper, and when he tries it on himself he turns into the frozen-faced boogeyman of the title, lumbering amok about the countryside trying to make things lively.

   The first disturbing element comes when he carries off a local gal and (it’s pretty clearly implied) brutally rapes her. But later on, after he abducts a waitress and they spend the night in a cave, she comes out in the morning and begs the surrounding posse to spare his life. Which makes one wonder just what went on, but I suspect that here again the writers had no idea.

   For me though, the most unsettling part came earlier, in the standard scene where Shayne is being scoffed at by his scientist-peers after showing them a display that “demonstrates” how Neanderthal was more advanced than Cro-Magnon, and when they ask him for proof, he calls them stupid.

   A silly scene, poorly written, but something about the temper of our times made it resonate with me. There are people coming on national TV these days who publicly boast that they can’t understand Evolution and want us to elect them President.

   There are others who call us stupid if we ask for proof of what they say — as I sat watching the Mad Doctor spouting the same clichés about being misunderstood, I almost expected him to blame the Liberal Media.

   And it got me to wondering if some of the public figures of these days maybe watched too many late-late shows. Or has public discourse moved to the level of a cheesy old horror flick? Which may be the scariest thing we’ll see this Halloween.

   Pleasant dreams, children…..

   Craig Rice (1908-1957) is something of an acquired taste. She was immensely popular in her heyday, so much so that Time magazine made her the subject of a cover story back in 1946, and her reputation was still high enough more than forty years after her death that a book-length biography was written about her (Jeffrey Marks’ Who Was That Lady?).

   Thanks to publishers like Rue Morgue Press, at least a few of her novels are still available today, but no one would call her a posthumous bestseller. What made her stand out among her contemporaries was the way she blended traditional whodunit elements with the kind of wacky humor one associates with Hollywood screwball comedies. In an earlier column I discussed her debut whodunit, 8 Faces at 3 (1939). This time I tackle her second.

   The Marks biography doesn’t tell us whether Rice worked directly in radio before turning to novels. But she did serve for brief periods in the late Thirties as radio critic for a small midwest magazine, so it’s no surprise that the background of The Corpse Steps Out (1940) is a Chicago station. Its sensational singing star Nelle Brown, married to an ex-millionaire more than twice her age but (although Rice treats the subject discreetly) rarely without at least one lover in her own age bracket or younger, is being blackmailed by a former paramour on the basis of some, shall we say, erotic letters she wrote him.

   Between the regular broadcast of her musical variety show and the re-broadcast for the west coast, she sneaks off to the man’s apartment and finds him shot to death and the letters gone. She goes back to the station and tells her press agent, Jake Justus, whom we first met in 8 Faces at 3.

   Jake pays his own visit to the apartment and finds the corpse has vanished. Pretty soon Jake’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife Helene Brand and the rumpled liquor-sodden attorney John J. Malone, both also familiar from Rice’s earlier novel, are running around with Jake to find the body, save Nelle Brown’s radio career, expose the murderer, and drain Chicago of its liquor supply.

   No one ranks The Corpse Steps Out among Rice’s greatest hits but it’s often bracketed with her mystery-as-screwball-comedy titles. Not by me. The body of the first of three murderees is moved around Chicago twice and that of the second once, but there’s nothing wildly humorous about these developments. I’d call the book a fairly straightforward whodunit, impossible for any reader to solve ahead of the protagonists and pockmarked by one huge coincidence: Jake and Helene are driving past a certain old warehouse when they notice it’s on fire and Jake for no good reason breaks into the building and finds the corpse he’s been looking for.

   True, the proceedings are punctuated here and there by screwball dialogue. In Chapter 10 Jake settles down in the apartment he’s temporarily sharing with Helene. “I love our little home, dear….Where shall we hang up the goldfish?” In Chapter 28, as the end comes near, Malone assures Jake that “we’re leaving no turn unstoned.” To which Helene replies: “That’s wrong….[W]e’re leaving no worm unturned.”

   Genuine Hollywood screwball comedies tended to dwell on sexual innuendo but Rice keeps it to — dare I say it? — a bare minimum. About to take off on a nuptial trip with Jake, a somewhat casually attired Helene says: “I’d better get dressed, unless you don’t mind my being married in pink pajamas.” To which Jake replies: “It would save time….”

   He’s much more of an acquired taste than Rice, but my favorite among wacky mystery writers based in Chicago (or anywhere else) is Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), whom I’ve loved since my teens. Besides having the Windy City in common, Keeler and Rice shared the experience of having been institutionalized, he early in life, she later. When he was about 20, Harry’s mother for unknown reasons had him involuntarily committed for more than a year.

   That period had a lasting effect on his novels. In The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro (1926) Jerry Middleton, heir to a Chicago patent-medicine fortune, is replaced by an impostor and railroaded into the state mental hospital where he’s befriended by the genuine madpersons, sweet souls one and all, and nearly killed by an assassin who‘s been hired to get admitted to the asylum and slice him up. The scene where Jerry is analyzed by that world-renowned shrink Herr Doktor Meister-Professor von Zero is probably the most hilarious lampoon of Freud ever committed to print.

   About a dozen years later Keeler revisited the nuthouse theme in the novel published in two volumes as The Mysterious Mr. I (1938) and The Chameleon (1939). The nameless narrator is on a mission to collect $100,000 by returning an escaped millionaire to the loonybin before midnight. On his quest he trips blithely through close to a hundred identities, posing in turn as a tycoon, a safecracker, a locomotive engineer, a gambler, several different detectives, several authors, a couple of actors and a philosophy professor — just to name a few! — before this forerunner of The Great Impostor returns to the asylum where, as he assures us, he’ll spend the rest of his days reading British magazines and sipping Ch teau d’Yquem with his keeper.

   At the end of The Corpse Steps Out, which appeared about a year after The Chameleon, Rice offers a similarly benign take on asylums:

   Severe alcoholism and several manic-depressive and suicidal episodes led to Rice herself spending part of her last years in California’s Camarillo State Hospital and other institutions. I doubt that she found them the pleasant places she and Keeler had once conjured up. As critic William Ruehlmann has said, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover. Poor woman.

Born in Greece, Nancy Goudinaki now lives and performs in the greater New York City area. “I’ll Be Seeing You” appears on her debut album, I Wanna Be Your Star (2014).

Nancy Goudinaki: vocals & classical guitar, Orrin Evans: piano & arrangements, Dwayne Burno bass, JD Allen tenor saxophone, Rudy Royston drums.

“Sunken Treasure.” An episode of Miami Undercover, Ziv, syndicated, 24 April 1961 (Season 1, Episode 14). Lee Bowman (Jeff Thompson), Rocky Graziano (Rocky). Guest cast: George N. Neise, Adrienne Bourbeau, Gene Damian, Nora Hayden. Music: Johnny Green. Writer: Gerald Drayson Adams. Director: Howard W. Koch.

   The gimmick here is that posing as a man-about-town playboy, detective Jeff Thompson is actually working undercover for a Miami Beach hotel association. Rocky Graziano is his live-in assistant who also prepares his breakfast.

   There are a couple of other episodes still in existence out of run of 38 — and if you go searching, you may find them online. It’s not likely, but even if someone came up with a complete set on DVD, I wouldn’t pay a lot of money for copies. Based on my sample of size one, I’d say the series was competently done, but where it counts, it was little more than mediocre.

   A couple of Jeff’s friends, a young married couple who run a small boating operation, are taken in by a pair of con-artists who want some stolen diamonds to be brought up from the ocean as salvage from a sunken Spanish galleon. (I may have the details wrong — there’s a lot of plot that’s stuffed into a mere 25 minute episode — but it’s close enough.)

   Lee Bowman’s was 47 when he made this series, his movie career far in the past, and while still spry, he looks older. Rocky Graziano’s only contribution is to be enthusiastic, which he does just fine. Adrienne Bourbeau is not the Adrienne Barbeau, but the statuesque Nora Hayden makes a very fine substitute for Jane Russell, who probably was not available.

   Nothing is made of Jeff’s undercover status. Perhaps the married couple know him only as a playboy (an aging one), but the two con-artists know who he is from the get-go. There is a bomb involved toward the end of this episode, but it’s easily disposed of, and the whole affair is laughed off as a lark, just another day at the beach. Miami Beach, that is.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Girl on the Run. Gold Medal #424, paperback original, August 1954. Reprinted several times, including Gold Medal R2142; paperback, 1969.

   Edward S. Aarons is best known, of course, for his long-running “Assignment” series, featuring the intrepid Cajun CIA operative Sam Durell. The first of these was Assignment to Disaster (Gold Medal, 1955), so Girl on the Run, being published a year earlier, might be considered a dry run for the series, without being a series novel itself, with no other books coming between.

   The hero of Girl on the Run, Harry Bannock, is a structural engineer between jobs and at loose ends in France before heading back to the states, does not happen to work for any espionage organization, however. He’s just a guy, who because of a girl, Lorette O’Bae, whom he earlier loved and lost to a friendly rival, finds himself at her service, and soon thereafter, not surprisingly, involved way over his head in non-stop action and nail-biting adventure.

   What the bad guys are after – and this includes his not-now-so-friendly former rival – is either (a) an enormously valuable medieval treasure, or (b) a secret, hidden lode of uranium, either of which will have a great influence on France’s political role in the postwar world.

   Honed by working in the pulps, one imagines, Aarons’ prose is clear, clipped, crisp and clean. From page 19:

   From pages 33-34:

   Here’s an action scene, from page 53:

   On page 93, he becomes philosophical, the following thoughts going through his mind:

   There is much to this story that would also be considered hard-boiled, and I would recommend at least the first 75% of the book to you, including the parts I quoted from. It is also true that the tale seems to get away from Aarons from that point on, out of control and misfiring at precisely the wrong time and the wrong place. He is beat up and left for dead at one point, for example, but he is not dead. With the use of not a single bullet, Bannock lives somehow, he recovers, and he prevails.

   We knew he would, but all in all, I think (just maybe) it could have been made a teensy bit more of a challenge for him. Not that Bannock — if you were to ask him, given all that he goes through — would agree!