Why reread? I’ve known several readers and collectors who bluntly state that they seldom or never reread stories or books. They argue that there are too many new books waiting to be read, sort of the like the old saying, “So many books, so little time.”

   I love to reread but only my favorite books and stories. And only the ones that I consider to be outstanding or great. There is nothing more exasperating than to reread a book and realize that it was not even worth reading the first time. Not to mention the waste of time. That’s why I’ve always noted on a slip of paper the date read, my grade, and comments about the book. Then, decades later, I can tell at a glance what I thought of the book and whether it is worth a second reading or not.

   So aside from the enjoyment of rereading an outstanding book, why read it again? Some books demand a second (and a third and a fourth) reading because they have several layers and levels of complex meaning that you might want to explore and investigate. Also a book read in your twenties may reveal additional meanings when you reread it many years later. There have been books that I read as a young man that I didn’t have the proper maturity to truly understand but as an older reader, I now find them to be indispensable.

   Every reader has their favorite books that they have reread. Some of mine are:

         War and Peace — 3 times.

         Moby Dick — 3 times.

         The Sun Also Rises — 5 times.

         Under the Volcano — 5 times.

   In the different genres I’ve several books that I’ve reread:

   In science fiction: Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and Stars My Destination. Also the novels of Philip K. Dick and Robert Silverberg; the short stories of J.G. Ballard and Theodore Sturgeon.

   In the detective and crime genre: the novels of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, and Ross Macdonald.

   In the western field: the novels of Luke Short, Elmore Leonard, Elmer Kelton. Lonesome Dove is maybe the best western I’ve ever reread.

   I also have reread stories in the pulp magazines. Many literary critics make the mistake of lumping all the pulps into one sub-literary category. They think all the pulps published mediocre and poor action fiction of very little redeeming literary value. They are wrong. There is such a thing as excellent pulp fiction, and I’ve tried to point out some examples in this series on collecting pulps.

   Of course, I absolutely agree with Sturgeon’s Law which in simple terms may be explained as “90% of everything is crap.” This is a good thing to say to anyone who criticizes your tastes in reading matter. For instance if they sneer at your love for detective, SF, or western fiction, then you can state Sturgeon’s Law, which I’ve found to roughly apply to just about all forms of literary endeavor.

   In other words, I’m always looking for that less than 10% that I hope will be worth reading and rereading. As I reread my notes spread throughout thousands of books and fiction magazines, I see I’m now at a good point in my life where I’m reading mainly the good 10%. Sure, every now and then I make a mistake or blunder and find myself reading the 90% crap, but after so many years of reading, I’m getting pretty good at avoiding the stuff that is not worth reading.

   A couple months before the August Pulpfest convention, one of the committee members, knowing my love for the magazine Unknown, asked me if I would participate on a panel discussing the title. This made me think about Unknown and how I had started collecting and reading it so many years ago.

   When I first started to think about collecting it, I was just a teenager and had very little money. I had enough to buy the SF digests and paperbacks but a set of Unknown back in the 1950’s cost around $50, a sum that I never had until years later. Back then, just about all pulps were a dollar or less, a fact that is hard to believe now.

   Finally in 1963, while attending college, I managed to put aside $50 and I started scouting around for a set of the 39 issues. All I could pay was $50 but everyone I contacted wanted more. I even contacted the Werewolf Bookshop in Verona, Pennsylvania (this bookstore advertised in many of the digest SF magazines) and I still have the letter dated September 3, 1963. I stapled it into my Unknown book where I noted my thoughts and comments on the magazine. The owner stated that he had contacted three fans and only one was willing to sell and he wanted $200 for his set.

   Back in 1963 this was an outrageous sum, and it’s lucky I did not send money to the Werewolf Bookshop. It seems the owner was in the habit of sending you anything he had if he did not have the books that you ordered. Then when you complained about receiving books that you didn’t want, he would ignore your letters and keep your money. If I had sent him $200, there is no telling what he would have shipped me. Except that it would not have been a set of Unknown. I have read about and even met fellow collectors who fell victim to this scam.

   Fortunately, I eventually bought a set from Gerry de la Ree, a SF collector and dealer who lived in New Jersey. For decades in the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, Gerry mailed out monthly sale lists listing SF pulps, digests, books, and artwork. He wanted only $50 and I now had the complete set. I read several stories in scattered issues, but college and then being drafted into the army delayed my project of reading the complete set.

   However, by 1969 I was discharged and I spent six months of doing nothing but reading. I didn’t even look for a job, and I loved living in my mother’s house drinking beer and reading all day. She must of thought she raised a bum, but she was wrong. She raised a book collector and reader.

   I started reading from the first issue, March 1939 and I read each issue, every story, every word, until the end in October 1943. That’s 4 1/2 years and 39 issues. Over 250 stories ranging from novel length to short story. John W. Campbell, the editor of both Unknown and Astounding, estimated that the 7 by 10 inch pulp size issues contained 70,000 words of fiction and the 8 1/2 by 11 inch format contained 110,000 words.

   That means I read over 3 million words of fiction in 1969 when I started my project of reading the entire set. I forget how long it took me but since I was not wasting any time working, I probably read close to an issue every day or two. I then recorded my thoughts in a standard English composition notebook. I think they still make these things, black with white speckles and it says “Composition” on the front cover. With over 100 pages I could devote two pages to each issue, listing each story and author along with a grade and my comments. At the end of each year, I did a summary listing my favorites.

   During the Pulpfest panel, I read some of my comments from this notebook and a couple collectors asked me if I had such books for each magazine that I collected. I used to but I eventually switched to the system of putting a slip of paper in each magazine or book with my comments, grade, and date read. I have thousands of books and magazines with these annotations tucked inside each copy. I still have a few of the notebooks, with the Unknown comments being the most extensive. I see I have one on Weird Tales where I read and noted my reactions to reading three years of issues, 1933-1935.

   So to prepare for the panel, I reread only the stories that received an outstanding rating back in 1969. We often think that we were a different person 45 years ago and for the most part we probably were. I was in my twenties back then and ahead of me were all the usual things like getting married, raising a family, starting a career, buying houses, etc. Of course this series of essays deal with my collecting experiences. So what did I think at the age of 72 looking back on my younger self praising and exclaiming over the stories in Unknown?

   As I reread story after story, I was impressed again at the literary quality of the magazine. I guess that’s why I’m writing about the magazine again in 2014, only instead of just comments meant for my older self, I’m now writing for other collectors and readers and encouraging them to read and reread Unknown.

   What were the outstanding novels? Lest Darkness Fall and The Wheels of If by L. Sprague de Camp, who also wrote the superior Harold Shea novels with Fletcher Pratt. Death’s Deputy and Fear by L. Ron Hubbard; Hell Is Forever by Alfred Bester; Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber; None But Lucifer by H. L .Gold and de Camp.

   Among the shorter fiction, we have several novelettes by Henry Kuttner. I believe these stories represent the first quality fiction by Kuttner. Jane Rice also had several stories and when the magazine died in 1943, she almost stopped writing because Unknown was her favorite market. One of the sad things about Unknown ceasing publication was the fact the Jane Rice had a 33,000 word short novel that was scheduled for a future issue. But the manuscript has been lost by Street & Smith and Rice did not keep a copy. Anthony Boucher, Fritz Leiber, and Theodore Sturgeon also had many shorts.

   But despite all the excellent fiction in Unknown, the magazine can best be described and explained by simply looking at the art of Edd Cartier. He is Unknownwith its gnomes, demons, and fantasy figures that defy description. I once had a chance to buy an original Unknown cover painting by Cartier. In the 1980’s, someone was walking around one of the Pulpcon conventions with the painting but he wanted $2,000 for it. At the time I had bought many cover paintings but the highest price I ever had to pay was $400. One of my collector mistakes. I should have dug up the money somehow because it’s worth a fortune now.

   Cartier dropped out of fantasy and SF illustration sometime in the early fifties but I did manage to meet him around 1990 at Pulpcon in Wayne, NJ. Rusty Hevelin was running Pulpcon and he said Edd Cartier would be available to talk to one night. But it would be for only a special group of pulp collectors who Rusty would choose. Fortunately, I was one of them and it remains a Pulpcon highlight that I still remember all these years later.

   Speaking of Cartier brings up what I think of as one of John W. Campbell’s mistakes. With the July 1940 issue the cover art was discontinued. Campbell must have looking to attract more readers with a literary style cover showing a more bland, sedate listing of stories. Maybe he thought the illustrations too garish on the covers. But the lack of any cover art at all just made the magazine seem a puzzle to many newsstand browsers. One of the big reasons for cover art is to grab your attention while you are looking at scores of magazines. Without cover illustrations the magazine just was lost on the stands. Where do you put it? This experiment was tried by previous pulps like Adventure and The Popular Magazine, and it was never successful.

   I’ve owned several sets of Unknown during the last 50 years and it is still possible to pick up issues. After the panel a couple collectors told me they wanted to start collecting it and I told them to keep looking through the dealer’s room at Pulpfest because I saw several issues for sale. Usually the price is around $20 but I’ve seen higher and lower prices. Ebay also has issues.

   At present I own two sets, one is the usual individual 39 issues and one is a bound set in 14 hardcover volumes. There is an interesting story about this bound set. I only paid $400 for it at Pulpcon a few years ago and neither the dealer or me noticed that it had a signature in the first volume. When I got home I was amazed to realize that I had John W. Campbell’s personal bound set of the magazine. It was inscribed as follows, “To George Scithers, who worked hard for this set”. Signed John W. Campbell. I’ve worked hard for certain sets of magazines, so I know what he means.

   The magazine is not really rare because so many SF and fantasy collectors loved the magazine and saved their copies. It is probably the most missed of all the pulp titles. In the letter columns of old SF magazines, it is often referred to as “the late, lamented Unknown.” For several years after it ceased publication due to the war time paper restrictions, letters in Astounding kept asking when the title would be revived. Evidently Campbell intended to start it up again when paper was available. But that was not until 1948 and then Street & Smith killed off all their pulps except for Astounding in 1949.

   So Unknown remained dead but several magazines were influenced in the 1950’s. Fantasy Fiction lasted four issues in 1953; Beyond Fantasy Fiction lasted ten issues in 1953-1955; and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is still being published, has often printed Unknown type fiction.

   If you are not a collector but you still want to read some of the best fiction, there are several collections available:

UNKNOWN WORLDS: Tales From Beyond, edited by Stanley Schmidt and Martin H. Greenberg (Garland Books, 1988) This is the biggest and best collection. 25 stories and 517 pages.

RIVALS OF WEIRD TALES, edited by Weinberg, Dziemianowicz, and Greenberg. (Bonanza Books, 1990) Among stories from other magazines, there is a section of 11 stories from Unknown, amounting to 200 pages.

THE UNKNOWN, edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid, 1963) This paperback has 11 stories and story notes.

THE UNKNOWN FIVE, edited by D.R. Bensen (Pyramid, 1964) Another collection from Bensen.

UNKNOWN, edited by Stanley Schmidt (Baen Books, 1988) Nine of the longer stories and 304 pages. Paperback.

HELL HATH FURY, edited by George Hay (Neville Spearman Ltd., 1963) Seven stories in hardback.

OUT OF THE UNKNOWN, by A.E. Van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull (Powell Publications, 1969) This paperback has seven Unknown stories by Van Vogt and wife.

   And finally there are two full-length studies of the magazine:

THE ANNOTATED GUIDE TO UNKNOWN AND UNKNOWN WORLDS, by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz (Starmont House, 1991) This is an excellent study of all aspects of the great magazine. A total of 212 pages with a long essay about the magazine, followed with detailed story annotations on every story, a story index, an author index and much more! Highly Recommended.

ONCE THERE WAS A MAGAZINE, by Fred Smith (Beccon Publications, 2002). Each issue is discussed plus author and title index.

   So ends my rereading of Unknown and I hope to return someday. I guess we shall never see a revival of the magazine. I noted over a dozen pleas from readers in Astounding, all asking when Unknown would be revived, but the October 1943 issue was the last one. A digest issue was planned and discussed in the October issue but an order for additional paper reduction came and Unknown was a victim of WW II.

REST IN PEACE: Unknown and Unknown Worlds.

NOTE:   To access earlier installments of Walker’s memoirs about his life as a pup collector, go first to this blog’s home page (link at the far upper left), then use the search box found somewhere down the right side. Use either “Walker Martin” or “Collecting Pulps” in quotes, and that should do it.

THE VIRGINIAN. Paramount, 1946. Joel McCrea, Brian Donlevy, Sonny Tufts, Barbara Britton, Fay Bainter, Tom Tully. Based on the novel by Owen Wister. Director: Stuart Gilmore.

   The Virginian has many of the elements one would expect to find in a solid Western that, all things considered, stands the test of time. This postwar film adaptation of Owen Wister’s 1904 iconic tale of the Old West has romance, a dastardly villain, cattle rustling, a genteel New England woman adapting to life on the frontier, and a friendship strained by one man’s poor decisions.

   Directed by Stuart Gilmore, who is perhaps better known by cineastes for his editing work, The Virginian stars Joel McCrea in one of his earlier Western features. He portrays a man simply known as “The Virginian,” a Wyoming cowhand originally from the Old Dominion who is making a new life for himself out West. He’s playful and stoic, laconic and willing to speak his mind. The Virginian isn’t a man of formal education, yet he has a solid grasp on the way of the world. And he knows the difference between right and wrong.

   The plot isn’t particularly complex. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s 1885, and a Bennington, Vermont, schoolteacher by the name of Molly Wood (Barbara Britton) is restless. She simply doesn’t want to get married and stay put in that small New England town. So she decides to take a train to Wyoming, where she plans to work as a teacher.

   Soon upon arriving out West, Molly encounters two cowhands, the overly enthusiastic Steve Andrews (Sonny Tufts) and The Virginian (McCrea). In a plot device not unusual for Westerns, the story’s primary male and female protagonists, Molly Wood and The Virginian, don’t exactly start their relationship off on the best foot. But it’s the palpable tension between the characters that allows the story to move forward.

   The Virginian is also a story about friendship in a society where law and order have yet to be firmly established. The Virginian and Steve Andrews have seemingly known each other for a long time. They have worked and gone drinking together. When Steve falls in with a cattle rustler named Trampas (a well cast Brian Donlevy), the two men’s friendship comes under great strain. The Virginian may be a bit of a prankster, but he won’t abide cattle rustling.

   The Virginian repeatedly warns Steve against allying himself with the devious Trampas, but his protests are repeatedly ignored. It’s a fatal mistake for Steve, whose hanging at the hands of The Virginian, although it occurs off screen, is nevertheless poignant. There’s a beautifully sad bird song that accompanies the hanging. It’s a truly haunting moment.

   Although The Virginian doesn’t have much in the way of particularly unique cinematography, it does make very good use of color to convey meaning. Early on in the film, Molly sports a bonnet with lavender feathers on top. These blend seamlessly with the couches and curtains of a saloon front room, demonstrating that she fits in more with the domestic, more sedate part of the saloon, than with the rowdy bar area.

   There’s also a scene in which the conflict between The Virginian and Steve is foreshadowed. Both men are standing at the bar, drinks in hand. They are discussing Steve’s plan to get to New York City and to leave the cowhand life behind him. The Virginian bets his friend that he’ll never make it to the Eastern metropolis. In the background during this whole scene, although visible only briefly at the beginning, is a decanter of an unknown bright red liquid. It’s noticeably out of place, even at a bar. The symbolism is clear. There will be blood between these two friends.

   Trampas is also a study in color. He has a dark heart and he wears it on his sleeve. Literally. He’s one color from head to toe, including a black hat and a black gun belt. The contrast between The Virginian and Trampas is best seen in the famous scene in which The Virginian presses his gun into Trampas’s gut and says, “When you call me that, smile.” In every way, The Virginian is of a lighter hue than the villainous cattle thief.

   In conclusion, The Virginian, even if not worthy of critical acclaim, remains worth a look. In some ways, it’s a somewhat mature Western for its time. There are no goofy sidekicks or saloon girls. It’s as much a study of human nature as it is a frontier tale. Best of all, McCrea demonstrates that he is a natural in the saddle. No wonder why his career flourished as he went on to make so many fine Westerns.

MIKE MORAN – Double Cross. Popular Library 494, paperback original, April 1953.

   A recent review on this blog of William Ard’s Hell Is a City produced some opposing opinions on his work, but neither the review or his discussion brought up the fact that Mike Moran was one of Ard’s pen names. (Ben Kerr was mentioned, while Thomas Wills was also not.)

   This was Ard’s only use of Mike Moran as a name to hide behind — for what reason he or someone thought he needed one is a question for which no one living may know the answer — and while I have some good things to say about it, I also have to admit that it’s a wildly uneven piece of work.

   Tom Doran is the PI who tells the story. He’s an independent operator, but when the head of the agency he sometimes works for sends a case his way, he’s happy to take it. He’s hired to be a bodyguard for a boxer whose sparring partners have all been frightened off the job while the fellow and his trainer are in training camp preparing for a big fight.

   Besides an ugly cook who takes a decidedly bad attitude toward Doran, there are two beautiful women involved, the first the boxer’s live-in girl friend Velma, a would-be singer with the morals of a bunny rabbit; the second, the blonde who owns the farm where the entourage has set up camp. Her name is Janet Pearce, and before you know it, she and Doran have taken up housekeeping together.

   It’s that kind of PI story. The opening scene is very tentatively written, and even when the actions of the cook are explained later on, they still don’t make a lot of sense. Nor do those of any of the bad guys, were you to sit down and try to do so, as I am invariably wont to do, even for inexpensive PI fiction, as this one was when it first came out.

   On the other hand, once the characters are introduced and the story is well on its way, it’s smoothly told and very easy to finish in a mere two hours or less. (It helps that it’s only 128 pages long, a mere bagatelle by today’s standards.)

DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Pendergast Trilogy:

       1. Fever Dream. Grand Central Publishing, hardcover, May 2010. Vision, paperback, April 2011.

       2. Cold Vengeance. Grand Central, hardcover, August 2011; paperback, February 2012.

       3. Two Graves. Grand Central, hardcover, December 2012; paperback, July 2013.

   These three books by bestselling writing team Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Relic, The Ice Limit, Gideon’s Sword) comprise the first trilogy within the series that features the brilliant, wealthy, and eccentric FBI agent, Aloysius Pendergast. Previously Special Agent Pendergast and his friend Lieutenant Vincent D’Acosta of New York homicide appeared in a number of stand alone books including Relic/Reliquary and Dance of Death/Book of the Dead which were tied together. The second duo consisted of Pendergast’s battle with his mad brother Diogenes, a master criminal.

   That name, Diogenes, should be a clue to Pendergast’s origins, because he is very much a Sherlockian figure (in Wheel of Darkness he even travels to Tibet with his student Constance), given to keeping his own council, brilliant deductions, and epic battles with his own Moriarity.

   That said, these are not properly mystery novels and certainly not detective stories. They are pulp nonsense on a high level, and Pendergast is less Holmesian than a more literate and literary Richard Wentworth or Lamont Cranston, replete with his mysterious Brownstone lair Bruce Wayne might envy.

   We’re in the country of Frank Packard’s Jimmie Dale, the Gray Seal here, or even Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. The devil is in the details, and the details are for, all the trappings, these are not mystery novels half so much as apocalyptic pulp adventure that Lester Dent or Norvel Page would have recognized as such. The books have a sort of dream-like logic of their own and frequently stray into quasi-science fiction and the supernatural with the same casual verve of the pulps of the past.

   Beginning in Fever Dream we learn that twelve years ago Pendergast’s beloved wife Helen was killed in a hunting accident in Africa on their honeymoon and that Pendergast blames himself. When he discovers Helen was murdered, he sets out for revenge leading to the swamps of Mississippi and a madman cursed with a disease that renders him hypersensitive to life, thanks to forbidden experiments begun by Nazi doctors before WWII.

   Cold Vengeance finds Pendergast discovering his greatest ally, his bother-in-law Judson Estrhazy, may in reality be Helen’s murderer, and to an even more shocking revelation that Helen isn’t dead at all. As he probes the conspiracy swirling about him he moves from Scotland to the bayous of Louisiana and to Central Park where Helen is swept from his arms just as he is about to be reunited.

   Two Graves finds Pendergast very nearly destroyed by his obsessive hunt, withdrawn from his closest friends and allies, pitted against a diabolical serial killer, and about to solve a mystery he would be better off never solving as his adventure carries him to dense South American jungles and a revelation about Helen and himself that will shock him to his core.

   I won’t give more away though you will likely beat Pendergast to the final revelations by at least two and a half books. I am surprised though that it is done this well, considering that elements of the plot weren’t all that new when Ira Levin wrote The Boys From Brazil. They do manage to tie all three books rather neatly into a whole though, which I would have thought impossible for anyone else.

   Half the fun of these is that Preston and Child do get away with things that you wouldn’t allow a lesser writer because they are literate, playful, fun, and inventive (in Brimstone the villain is Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, no less).

   All their books, together and separately, are fun, and I confess the non series Ice Limit and Riptide had some extremely clever ideas in them I wish I had used. Even their novels on their own are highly entertaining, and Preston’s non-fiction Dinosaurs in the Attic about his years at the New York Museum of Natural History is a delightful memoir.

   It’s rare to find anyone this literate, or with their dry wit on the bestseller lists these days. They know exactly what they are doing and do it well. Dumas would have admired Pendergast’s prison break in Dance of Death; Relic is a modern classic and was a terrific film (minus Pendergast but with Tom Sizemore as D’Acosta), though I don’t think most of the Pendergast books would work all that well on screen; and A Cabinet of Curiosities a rare serial killer novel that thrills as much as it intrigues.

   In addition they have created their own little world with characters from other novels appearing in the Pendergast series, with most recently one of the protagonists of Ice Limit showing up in the new Gideon series. If you have ever wondered what Walter Gibson or Norvel Page might have done given the time to polish and play with their apocalyptic adventures these might at least give you an idea.

   Enter this world with willing suspension of disbelief set on high and you are in for high concept entertainment done in a grand guignol style and at least a shadow of Holmesian panache if not detective skills.

   In the right mood and mind set, these are probably the best bang for your buck you will find on recent bestselling bookshelves. These deliver as much as the back copy reviews promise and more.

  RAY HOGAN – Outlaw’s Empire. Doubleday “Double D Western,” hardcover, 1986. Signet, paperback reprint, January 1987.

   Since Ray Hogan is a fellow who has written more than a hundred westerns, I’ll put off discussing his career until another time. He is a fellow who started out in paperback, however, beginning with Ex-Marshal published by Ace in 1956, but he didn’t make it into hardcover until Jackman’s Wolf (Doubleday) in 1970.

   From the little I know of his work, I would characterize it as being in the realistic vein, workmanlike and solid, and that’s a decent description of Outlaw’s Empire too, with only a few quibbles. One of them being the title, which seems to have little to do with the book, and the cover of the paperback, which is extremely nice, but it also does not have much to do with the book.

   Which is primarily a chronicle of the adventures of Riley Tabor, a wandering cowpoke who teams up with a fellow heading west in a grand army wagon, the fellow also being a grand womanizer – anything young in skirts – and therefore being considerably needful of having someone team up with him.

   Quoting from page 23:

   Adam Hale’s life does end quickly, and in very strange fashion, leaving Riley with Hale’s wagon as well as everything else he owned — his rig, his horses, and all of his personal belongings – along with a huge surprise. A surprise big enough that I cannot tell you about it, given the possibility that by either chance or happenstance you find yourself reading this book someday. Suffice it to say that unearned surprises have a way of catching up with you, and that’s what this mostly amiable but somewhat rambling novel, full of interesting people, is all about – building your house on sand.

   Or deciding not to, as the case may be. Not that Riley really has a good deal of leeway either way in the matter, which is perhaps why his story does not turn out all that badly in the end.

[UPDATE] 10-05-14.   Not having any other choice, but definitely wanting to show you the cover of the paperback edition, what I had to do was to take the black-and-white photo I’d included in that issue of Durn Tootin’ and colorize it into a monochrome facsimile of the real thing.

   I also note that I was being so careful about not revealing anything about the big surprise I referred to that I have no idea now what it (and the book itself) was all about. I seem to have liked it, though.

THE BARON OF ARIZONA. Lippert Pictures, 1950. Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Tina Rome, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale. Written and directed by Samuel Fuller.

   Vincent Price, as an actor, had unforgettable charm, an unmistakable voice, and an uncanny ability to convey meaning through an over-exaggerated posture, a wry knowing smile, or, better still, the raising of an eyebrow. Indeed, there are some movies that it is difficult to imagine working at all were it not for Price’s singular presence.

   The Abominable Dr. Phibes, which I reviewed here, is one such film. Samuel Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona, based on the true story of a notorious Old West con artist, is another. In this early Fuller-directed project, Price portrays James Reavis, the self-styled Baron of Arizona, a man who devised an elaborate scheme to defraud the United States government into transferring title of the Arizona Territory to him and his wife. The best scene, bar none, in The Baron of Arizona involves a conniving Reavis gleefully sitting at his desk in front of a gigantic Arizona map ensconced on the wall behind him.

   The plan, at least as depicted in this film, involves him forging land grant documents dating back to the mid 18th century and King Ferdinand VI of Spain. His scheme hinges upon his marrying a peasant girl, Sofia (Ellen Drew), whom he successfully convinces is the direct descendent of Spanish nobility and the legitimate titleholder to the Arizona Territory. Reavis shrewdly cultivates the young Sofia into seeing herself not as a dirt-poor peasant girl who grew up in a shack, but rather as the graceful and sophisticated Baroness of Arizona.

   Along for the wild ride in this unconventional movie is Sofia’s adoptive father Pepito, portrayed with tenderness by veteran character actor, Vladimir Sokoloff. Pepito is smarter than he looks and ends up playing a pivotal role, albeit not in the way you might think, in the unraveling of Reavis’s scheme.

   Reed Hadley, well known to Western fans for his distinctive voice, plays an unusual, slightly jarring, role in the film. He portrays Griff, an Arizona politician celebrating the entry of his State into the Union. His character is film’s narrator for the first thirty minutes or so of the film, recounting the story of Reavis from the perspective of 1912.

   It’s a narrative technique that really doesn’t work and is by far the weakest aspect in this otherwise well-crafted quixotic Western.

CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG – The Balloon Man. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1958. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1969; Berkley, paperback, 1976; IPL Crime Classics, paperback, 1990.

       — The Gift Shop. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1967. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1968. Zebra, paperback, 1990.

   In her twenty-six-year career, Charlotte Armstrong published dozens of novels and short stories as well as plays and screenplays. Her series detective, MacDougal Duff, appears in only the first three novels; Armstrong is better known for her later works, which combine suspenseful plots with a sensitive depiction of ordinary American people whose moral character is severely tested by extraordinary circumstances.

   Armstrong’s heroes and heroines are normal people with considerable inner resources upon which they can to extricate themselves from dangerous situations that they are in through no fault of their own. The author does not flinch from dealing with such thorny moral issues as the abuse of power by the wealthy, the failure of parents to take responsibility for their offspring, and man’s free will; and she has been known to stand firmly on the side of the underdog. These philosophical issues in no way detract from the suspense of her stories, which is always considerable.

   As shown by The Balloon Man, Armstrong likes young women with guts. The heroine, wife of a rich-boy-tumed-drug-addict, sees her husband throw their young son against the kitchen wall, breaking his leg in a fit of drug-induced hallucination. The down-to-earth young mother leaves quickly, with her son, never to return, knowing her husband’s drug problem is beyond her help. She figures his rich family will take care of him; they’ve always hated her anyway, low-class street girl that she is.

   The husband’s father, however, won’t let it go at that and displays an almost insane resentment of her. He’s determined to get custody of his grandson, and while the heroine waits in a boardinghouse near the hospital until her son is well enough to take back east, the father-in-law bribes an unsavory school pal of his son’s to take a room in the boardinghouse and do all that’s necessary to prove her an unfit mother.

   What follows is a delightful picture of the lives of the boarders and the inner workings of greed and evil that will stop at nothing to separate a child from its mother. A wonderful celebration of good old American grit. And, we might add, wit.

   The Gift Shop is a classic example of Armstrong’s talent and view of the world.Here we have an unassuming, lower-middle-class American girl who is putting herself through college by clerking in an airport gift shop. Her life is ruffled by little more than her boss’s occasional temper tantrum.

   Enter the rich, good-looking bachelor — the youngest of three professionally successful sons who are sources of pride and solace to the patriarch who fathered them. The almost unbelievable hero (are there really such soulful rich young men in the world today?) is hot on the trail of an old school chum who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances (last seen in the gift shop) while researching the whereabouts of the young man’s sister, whose existence has just been revealed to the family.

   And the circumstances of this revelation — a demand that the oldest son, governor of the state, stay the execution of an internationally known crime figure in exchange for the sister’s life — are sinister indeed.

   The adventure that the gift-shop clerk becomes embroiled in is refreshingly humane; and in the course of it, the bachelor overcomes the girl’s resistance to arrogant rich young men. The romance does not proceed without difficulty, however; like many of Armstrong’s heroines, she is the self-sufficient kind and not prone to stroking the male ego.

   This is high adventure, the stuff about which any righter-of-wrongs dreams. It is almost unbelievable, but the author has a way of making us feel it would happen to any one of us, any day now.

   Other excellent Charlotte Armstrong titles are Catch-as-Catch-Can (1952), The Better to Eat You (1954), A Dram of Poison (winner of the Edgar for Best Novel of 1956), The Turret Room (1965), and Protégé (1970). The best of her fine short stories can be found in the collections The Albatross (1957) and I See You (1966).

         ———
   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.

   In the late Fifties and early Sixties private eye series on TV were a dime a dozen. One of the lesser known of these was released on DVD by Timeless Media not long ago and, never having watched it back in 1960 when it was first run, I decided to check it out more than half a century later.

   CORONADO 9 was a 30-minute syndicated series, released by Revue Studios, largely shot on location in San Diego and elsewhere, and starring 6’5″ Rod Cameron (1910-1983) as PI Dan Adams, a big beefy guy who conjures up images of a pro football player in middle age.

   What makes the series unusual is that its directors and writers went out of their way to avoid the tried-and-true elements we tend to associate with the PI genre except for the chases and fights, which we also associate with Westerns, and of course for the first-person narration, although almost every episode cheats with scenes outside the narrator’s presence. Adams is so untypical an eye that, assuming he has an office, we literally never see him in it.

   The main reason the series attracted me is that 16 of its 39 segments were directed by William Witney (1915-2002), the Hitchcock of the action film and my best friend in Hollywood. When it comes to visual excitement, most of Bill’s are not on a par with his great cliffhanger serials (one of which starred a much younger and leaner Rod Cameron) and Western features and episodes of TV series like BONANZA and THE WILD WILD WEST and THE HIGH CHAPARRAL, but the best of them are very good indeed.

   Whenever he could take over a locale and shoot his climax there, he did it with glee, commandeering a Coast Guard cutter for “The Day Chivalry Died” and the San Diego Zoo for “Obituary of a Small Ape,” just to give two examples. My favorite among Bill’s dozen-and-a-third is “Hunt Breakfast,” which despite its unintelligible title is a near-perfect film equivalent to those Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original novels that are central to the Fifties experience for many of us. In this episode Adams tries to save a friend and his family whose home has been invaded by three bank-robbing psychos, and the Witney visual fireworks run neck and neck with the violence.

   Of the 23 episodes not directed by Witney the most deserving of mention are at least four which were apparently shot on location in New Orleans and helmed by Frank Arrigo (1917-1977), who usually worked in Hollywood as an art director.

   The segments which take place overseas seem to have been filmed on the Revue back lot with help from stock footage and process plates. I certainly don’t believe that Arrigo shot “Film Flam” in Algiers, or “Caribbean Chase” in then newly Communist Cuba!

   Among the actors who appeared once or more often in the series are John Archer, Richard Arlen, Al Hodge (early live TV’s Captain Video), DeForest Kelley and Doug McClure. The veterans of Witney’s Western features and earlier TV films whom Bill found roles for in CORONADO 9 episodes include Jim Davis, Faith Domergue, Patricia Medina and Slim Pickens.

   Featured in two segments not directed by Witney is Lisa Lu, a well-known Asian actress best known over here as Hey Girl in HAVE GUN–WILL TRAVEL. A friend of mine who recently interviewed her tells me that in her eighties she is still acting.

   As so often when Timeless Media releases a TV series, there are a few technical problems with the transfer of CORONADO 9 to DVD. But if you can snag it for a decent price—it’s listed on Amazon.com for $17.99, and someone on the Web claims to have found it at Sam’s Club for $12.88 — it’s worth having.

   No one would rank Rod Cameron with the great cinematic PIs, like Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP, Ralph Meeker in KISS ME DEADLY and Jack Nicholson in CHINATOWN. But Liam Neeson comes within shouting distance as Lawrence Block’s recovering alcoholic and off-the-books investigator Matt Scudder in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, which is based on Block’s 1992 novel of the same name and came to theaters a few weeks ago.

   Directed and written by Scott Frank and filmed noirishly in Brooklyn where the novel takes place, the movie has garnered mixed notices to date, with the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times going so far as to call it torture porn. I’ve seen nothing on the Web or in print that attempts to stack it up against the novel (except for one cyber-comment that I stumbled upon as I was finishing this column) so I might as well do the honors.

   Since the book is narrated by Scudder, nothing can happen outside his presence, although Block cheats a bit in the first chapter where lovely Francine Khoury is abducted on a Brooklyn street and, after payment of $400,000 ransom by her narcotics-trafficker husband, is returned cut up into fresh meat.

   Unrestricted by first-person narrative, Scott Frank shows us the psycho kidnappers at work here and later in ways Block couldn’t. The novel takes place in 1992, the film in 1999, so that we’re treated to a few allusions to the Y2K panic, which has nothing to do with the plot, and also to the sight of pay phones on the streets of New York City, which do figure in the plot and still existed, I assume, at the end of the 20th century but are rarae aves in today’s cell phone era.

   The film’s climax is something like Block’s but also quite different, in ways that I won’t reveal here. Between beginning and end Frank touches base with Block only on rare occasions.

   A host of the novel’s characters make no appearance: Scudder’s wealthy call-girl lover, the teen-age computer hackers, the various cops Scudder hits up for information. Although one of the perps’ victims in the novel survives her ordeal and gets to talk with Scudder, in the movie there are no surviving women. Indeed two important male characters make it through the novel alive but wind up dead in the film, and several other men in the movie, like the obese groundskeeper and the DEA agents, have no counterparts in the book.

   The bloody incident that made Scudder a boozer is never mentioned in the novel but is dramatized for us in a flashback at the movie’s start, with the difference that Scott Frank morphs it into the catalyst for Scudder’s giving up the sauce and joining AA.

   The streetwise black teen who calls himself TJ has a big role in both novel and movie but Frank’s version of the character unlike Block’s is a vegetarian and a victim of sickle cell anemia, although Frank mercifully spares us the rhyming patter and much of the it-be-rainin-out jivetalk of TJ according to Block.

   Ironically enough, two of Frank’s alterations in the storyline seem to have been expressly rejected by Block. Late in both versions comes a scene in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery where a million dollars, much of it counterfeit, is exchanged for the 14-year-old girl who is the psychos’ latest victim.

   In the novel the exchange comes off without incident, and Scudder specifically tells the girl’s family (on page 269 of the hardcover edition) that “it’s crazy to get into a firefight in a graveyard at night”. That craziness Scott Frank embraces, letting the bullets fly and the cars screech and crash away as in a thousand other action flicks.

   After Block’s badguys have fled the cemetery, TJ tells Scudder (on page 286): “[I]f this here’s a movie, what I do is slip in the back [of the psychos’ vehicle] an’ hunker down ‘tween the front an’ back seats. They be puttin’ the money in the trunk and sittin’ up front, so they ain’t even gone look in the back. Figured they’d go back to their house…an’ when we got there I just slip out an’ call you up an’ tell you where I’m at. But then I thought, TJ, this ain’t no movie, an’ you too young to die.”

   Well, what Scott Frank wrote and directed is a movie and that’s exactly what his TJ does and how Neeson as Scudder finds the perps’ home base.

   What Larry Block thinks of the picture I have no idea. It does capture something of the spirit of the Scudder series, and Neeson’s performance is excellent, thanks in part to his wisely not attempting a New York accent.

   Most of Frank’s innovations help make the movie cinematic in ways that the dialogue-driven novel wasn’t and couldn’t have been. In the same league with THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP and CHINATOWN it isn’t, and the moments of extreme violence, especially to women, are integral to the storyline but may turn off potential viewers. (I saw it with a Vietnam veteran who later told me he had to close his eyes during some scenes.)

   To anyone wondering whether to see it or not, all I can say is: Hit the Web, do your homework, make (or as the Brits would say, take) a decision.

WATERLOO BRIDGE. MGM, 1940. Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor, Lucile Watson, Virginia Field, Maria Ouspenskaya, C. Aubrey Smith. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Waterloo Bridge has elements that all combine to form an excellent movie: two exceptionally talented and strong leads, a hauntingly tragic romance, and Academy Award-nominated cinematography. There’s also a memorable, Academy Award-nominated score by Herbert Shothart, who won an Oscar for his score to The Wizard of Oz the previous year.

   Waterloo Bridge stars Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor as hopelessly doomed lovers, their romance both kindled, and interrupted, by the violence of the Great War. As the film’s narrative begins, a camera pans a London crowd. It’s early September 1939 and Britons are in the street listening to a newscast announcing that Great Britain is now at war with Germany.

   Soon, we see a grayed and somewhat tired looking Colonel Roy Cronin (Taylor) entering a car en route to London’s Waterloo Station. He asks the driver to go by way of Waterloo Bridge and to drop him off at the bridge. He’ll walk across, he says. Cronin exits the vehicle and stands on the bridge amidst the steel girders, his forlorn eyes looking out in the distance.

   We witness him removing a small, white figurine from his jacket pocket. As he remains lost in thought, we hear a voice. It is unmistakably that of actress Vivien Leigh. Through this scene we learn that his story will be told by way of Cronin’s mental flashback, a glimpse backward to an earlier time, a more innocent time. The image on the screen morphs back in time, but not in place.

   Cronin is now standing on Waterloo Bridge, but the steel girders are gone. And there’s an unruly combination of automobiles, horse-drawn carriages, bicyclists, and pedestrians. We’re now seeing a younger, more vibrant Cronin. It’s the Great War and London’s under German bombardment.

   The air raid causes a panic, especially among a group of ballerinas bustling their way across the bridge. Among them, a beautiful woman, Myra Lester (Leigh), who drops a white figurine – her good luck charm – in the street in front of Roy. The two meet for the first time and soon make their way to shelter in the Underground. Their physical proximity in the subterranean transportation network leads to emotional closeness. An unlikely whirlwind romance begins.

   But if war is anything, it is cruel. And the First World War will be mercilessly cruel to these two would-be spouses. Myra is a ballerina, working under the direction of the authoritarian Olga Kirowa (Maria Ouspenskaya) who forbids her to have contact with Roy. But no bitter old woman will let the vibrant Myra from seeing her love. Their love blossoms, and there is talk of marriage. But alas, it is not to be. For Roy, at the very last minute, is called to the front.

   Things get worse. Myra, along with her friend, is promptly dismissed from the ballet company and lives a meager existence, hoping to see Roy again one day. Things then become even worse. She reads in the paper that Roy died in the wartime. It is soul-crushing, causing her to spiral downward into a life of prostitution. Her entrée into the world’s oldest profession is, symbolically, on Waterloo Bridge.

   It is at Waterloo Station, however, that Myra’s tragic fate will be forever sealed. In one of the most vividly portrayed tragic scenes I’ve seen in a 1940s film, Myra makes her way through a crowd in Waterloo Station. Men are returning from the front and she is on the prowl for a client. She tries to look pretty. A smile is forced. She looks awkwardly confused, her face betraying a remarkable sadness. Then we see her eyes and a close up of Myra’s face.

   Her horror is unmistakable. Whom does she see? Roy, of course, a smiling, gallant Roy emerging returning from France. The man who she thought dead, the soldier’s whose non-death caused her to chose to sell her body as a wartime commodity. Roy pursues her and there’s talk of marriage once again. But this is a tragedy, after all. Unless you are a complete cynic, it’s difficult not to be moved by Myra’s fall from an almost marriage into the depth of psychological despair.

   Waterloo Bridge is also a metaphor for innocence lost on a much grander scale. The carnage of the Great War tore British society asunder, ushering in a wave of poetry and literature that reflected the tragic break from the Victorian Era. The peaceful pre-war world would never return. So it is with Roy Cronin, a man scarred by sadness, standing on Waterloo Bridge in 1940, remembering his lost Myra as the world plunges into another maelstrom.

   It’s a wonderfully sad film, with some great moments. Leigh, who apparently wanted real life husband Laurence Olivier to portray Roy Cronin, is simply magnificent. Taylor is very good here too, if a bit – how shall I put this – just too American to convincingly portray a British officer. But that doesn’t stop the on-screen chemistry between the world-weary Myra and the ebullient, if unconvincingly naïve, handsome Roy.

   All told, Waterloo Bridge is a very good film, although one must suspend disbelief to image these two characters falling in love so fast. But war has a strange way of doing things to people. The prostitution angle, which is exceedingly important to the plot, is more hinted at than anything else, probably due to the Production Code. We never even see Myra with a client. But we all know what path she chose for herself. And by the time the film is over, we know how the Great War ended for Myra and Roy. A well made tragedy that is worth seeing.

JOHN McPARTLAND – Big Red’s Daughter. Gold Medal 354, paperback original, November 1953. Macfadden, paperback, 1968. Black Curtain Press, softcover, POD, 2013. Also: Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017, 2-in-1 edition with Tokyo Doll (added March 2018).

   Her name is Wild Kearny, and for young Jim Work, fresh out of the war in Korea and attending a small college in southern California, it is love at first sight. There are two problems, though, besides the young and hip crowd of friends she hangs out with, and the first is the man she is with, a tough guy named Buddy Brown, who is apparently a good friend, and as happenstance would have it, he makes quick work of Jim Work in a couple of very short rounds of fisticuffs.

   Not the best impression to make on a first meeting, but Wild Kearney must see something in Jim Work who tells the story, because it is not Buddy Brown she takes to the airport to meet her father flying in from the East Coast. No, it is Jim Work whom she introduces to her father as her current live-in boy friend, a guy she has met only four hours earlier.

   And her father is the second problem: Broadway Red Kearny, last of the big gamblers, a honest and tough headline-making fellow whom you know does not want just anyone making hay with his daughter. Ever meet the father of the woman you love for the first time? Double that, or quadruple it, and you’ll know how Jim Work feels.

   This all happens with the space of 22 pages, and to tell you the truth, it’s the best part, but the rest of the book is no slouch ether. There’s a murder involved, and while Buddy Brown may be the killer, it is Jim Work who is accused, locked up, and who with the help of a magician friend in the same cell, makes his escape, only to confront Buddy Brown again, and this time the tables are turned, which merely makes Jim Work’s predicament all the worse.

   Only this time he has Wild Kearny on his side.

   The story is plagued with what seems like gigantic coincidences, but somehow or another, McPartland, a writer with a smooth and easy way with words, pulls all of the threads together and more or less makes a coherent whole of them, I think.

   It would make one heck of a movie, that’s for sure. From the cover, I’d say that Robert Mitchum might have made a good choice to play Jim Work, a young Robert Mitchum, though, and I’d to qualify that to say it would work only if you could ever picture a young Robert Mitchum as a serious-minded college student.

   Take a look at that cover again. I’ll let you decide who should play Wild Kearny, if you’d care to.