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10 ACTION ADVENTURES appeared for only one issue in 1939, despite this being listed as Volume 1, Number 3. The newsstands must have been just a little too crowded for it to find its audience, because it looks like a pretty good adventure pulp. The cover is by Norman Saunders, and inside are stories by E. Hoffmann Price (with his name misspelled on the cover), Arthur J. Burks, Carl Rathjen, Lurton Blassingame (Wyatt's brother and better remembered as a literary agent), William J. Langford, and house-names Paul Adams, Ralph Powers, Rexton Archer, Cliff Howe, and Clint Douglas. I have no idea who wrote the house-name stories, but Price is always a possibility. I wonder if Ace Magazines, the publisher, even intended for 10 ACTION ADVENTURES to continue past this one issue, or if it was some sort of clearing house to get rid of some inventory. Chances are we'll never know, but if anybody is aware of the circumstances, I'd love to hear about it.

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copyin the scan. The excellent cover by R.G. Harris illustrates a scene from thelead novelette by Walker A. Tompkins, “Tommy Rockford’s Coffin Clew��.

In this installment of Tompkins�� long-running series about the young railroaddetective who carries a pair of gold-plated handcuffs, Rockford arrives in anisolated Arizona settlement on a stormy night in pursuit of a notorious trainrobber. However, when he gets there he discovers that his quarry has alreadybeen brought to justice, drilled in a gunfight with the local sheriff. Then thesheriff himself turns up dead, and Tommy has to solve his murder. This is oneof those stories where the big plot twist is pretty obvious, but that doesn’tstop Tompkins from spinning it into a very entertaining yarn with his usualskill. I was a little disappointed in the last Tommy Rockford story I read, butnot this one. It’s well-written, atmospheric, and suspenseful. Also, I didn’tfigure out the “coffin clew�� of the title, so that’s one final surpriseTompkins saves for the story’s last paragraph. Fine work in this one.

Hal Davenport wrote a lot of stories under the various WILD WEST WEEKLYhouse-names, including more than 20 novelettes in the Billy West and Circle Jseries as Cleve Endicott. His story in this issue, “Six-guns Say No��, is astand-alone published under his own name. It’s a range war yarn as a youngrancher fights to defend the waterhole on which his spread depends from a bunchof no-good crooks trying to steal it. This story is almost all action, andwhile there’s nothing in it we haven’t seen many, many times before, Davenportdoes a good job of storytelling and comes up with an entertaining tale.

Samuel H. Nickels also wrote prolifically under house-names for WILD WESTWEEKLY, but under his own name he authored almost 140 short stories about apair of young Texas Rangers named “Hungry�� Hawkins and “Rusty�� Bolivar. In thisissue’s Hungry and Rusty yarn, “Rangers�� Rescue��, our intrepid pair set out tofind a rancher’s son who’s been kidnapped by outlaws. This is another tale that’salmost all action. This is the first Hungry and Rusty story I’ve read. Ienjoyed it and found them a very likable pair of protagonists. Definitelywouldn’t mind reading more of these.

Guy L. Maynard was another regular house-name scribe but also wrote severalpopular series under his own name, the longest-running of which featured acharacter called Señor Red Mask. He wrote a dozen stories featuring aredheaded cowboy, trail driver, and adventurer known as Flame Burns. Somelegendary historical Old West characters appeared in these as well, much likethe Rio Kid series. In this issue’s novelette, “Death Riders of Dodge��, Flameis in Dodge City, having just delivered a herd of cattle he brought up thetrail from Texas. He’s set upon by outlaws and robbed of the payoff for thatherd, and the rest of the story concerns his efforts to get the money back andavenge the death of a friend in a shootout. He gets some help in this from noneother than Calamity Jane, who bears only a passing resemblance to thehistorical Calamity Jane. There’s one mention of her nursing the sick during anepidemic, and other than that she’s strictly the fictional version that’s shownup in so many movies, TV shows, and novels. This is the first thing I’ve readby Maynard, as far as I know, and when I read it, I wasn’t very impressed byit. It seemed a little too simple and juvenile. It’s sticking with me more thanI expected, though. I’ll have to read more by Maynard to form a worthwhile opinionof his work.

“King of Colts�� is by Charles M. Martin, who sometimes wrote as Chuck Martin.It’s a vengeance yarn, as a young rancher sets out after the three outlawsresponsible for the death of the grandfather who raised him. That’s all thereis to it, but Martin writes in a terse style that I enjoy, and since he was anactual cowboy, like Walt Coburn, his work has a strong sense of authenticity.Also like Coburn, Martin wound up taking his own life by hanging, which is ashame. He was a pretty darned good writer.

There are some assorted features and one other piece of fiction in this issue,the novelette “Whizz Fargo Springs a Murder Trap�� by George C. Henderson. Thisis one of six linked novelettes about Whizz Fargo that were fixed up into thenovel WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER. I happen to own a copy of that novel, so Iskipped the story in this issue, preferring to read it in the novel version.Which I’ll get around to soon, I hope. I’ve read some stories by Henderson inthe past and enjoyed them, as far as I recall.

Overall, this is a good but not great issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Tompkins’Tommy Rockford story is definitely the highlight. The other stories are allperfectly readable and entertaining, but they didn’t really make a strongimpression on me. Having said that, I’m glad I read it and believe it’s worthyour time if you happen to own a copy of it.

This is the second volume in Ben Haas’s outstanding series about soldier of fortune Neal Fargo. It opens in Hollywood in 1914, where Fargo is working temporarily as an actor, of all things, playing a villain in a silent Western movie directed by Thomas Ince. Ince is the only real-life character to make an appearance in this novel; the hero of the picture is fictional, as is a beautiful actress Fargo meets.

Ince wants Fargo to continue making movies and claims that he can be a big star, but Fargo isn’t interested in make-believe. Having lived a life of adventure, he needs the real thing. So when the actress, Jane Deering, asks him to go to Alaska and find out what happened to her husband, who disappeared there several years earlier while prospecting for gold, Fargo agrees without hesitation. He’s less enthusiastic about the idea of Jane coming along with him to look for the missing man, but she convinces him.

Naturally, things don’t go well, and Fargo and Jane wind up in all sorts of danger in the gold fields of the untamed Yukon country. There are vigilantes, a mysterious killer, blizzards, and assorted mushing around on dog sleds and snowshoes. As usual, Haas spins his yarn in tough, hardboiled prose without a wasted word to be found. He’s one of the best pure action writers I’ve ever run across. This one shows a few signs of hurried writing, but the story sweeps along at such a swift pace I didn’t really care. ALASKA STEEL is a prime example of a short, gritty adventure novel, and like all of Ben Haas’s work that I’ve ever encountered, it’s well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared on April 23, 2010. In the years since then, ALASKA STEEL has been reprinted in an edition by Piccadilly Publishing, along with the other Fargo books by Ben Haas. The whole series gets a very high recommendation from me, even though I actually haven't read all of them, even at this late date. I need to get on that. Also, the copy pictured in the scan is the one I read, and I can tell from the price sticker on it that it came from the Used Book Warehouse in Rockport, Texas, which still exists but is in a different building now since its original location was heavily damaged by Hurricane Harvey. I spent a lot of very pleasant hours browsing through the place and still miss it.)

Louis King got his start in showbusiness as an actor in silent films and then became a director, going on todirect almost a hundred movies and TV episodes. He specialized in Westerns andadventure pictures. I’m bound to have seen some of the TV Westerns he directedin the Fifties. He wrote one novel, the crime/suspense yarn CORNERED, which waspublished originally as half of an Ace Double in 1958 and has just beenreprinted by Black Gat Books in and editions.

Steve Grogan is a cop, a detective who kept on working even after he married anheiress who died giving birth to their daughter and left him a wealthy man.Money doesn’t mean much to Grogan, though. He only cares about the law—andabout that daughter, a three-year-old named Betsy.

So when Grogan is the only one who can testify against a shadowy mob boss andput the guy away for murder, he takes off with Betsy and goes into hiding whenit becomes obvious that the mobster will try to strike at him through thelittle girl. He has a couple of friends helping him, another former cop and awoman who was a carnival sharpshooter. They lie low at a motel in some unnameddesert city—Las Vegas? Reno?—but the mobster has allies, too, and he’ll stop atnothing to track down Grogan and keep from testifying any way possible,including murder.

CORNERED is a good story with some clever twists along the way. Notjaw-dropping twists, maybe, but the sort that make you smile and nod your headin appreciation. Grogan is a well-developed protagonist with some actual depth,and his mobster nemesis is really creepy. The prose is pretty straight-aheadstuff, the sort of writing you’d expect from a no-nonsense movie director whowould bring in his pictures on time and under budget, but it’s very effectivestorytelling.

I got caught up in this book and was really flipping the pages toward the end.CORNERED is a top-notch suspense novel and well worth reading.

I never even heard of this quirky comedy about the cutthroatworld of competitive butter carving in Iowa, but the cast convinced me to giveit a try. Jennifer Garner is usually worth watching, and Hugh Jackman has aminor role. I’m not a fan of Olivia Wilde or Ty Burrell, but I don’t have anythingagainst them, either. The concept seemed offbeat enough that it might beinteresting.

And BUTTER is interesting. But it has a tone problem. Most of the time it seemsto be trying for heartwarming Americana, but then it takes several dark, crudeturns that are really jarring. What kind of movie is this, anyway? I’m not sureeven the people who made it could answer that. But I have to admit, I stayedawake all the way through it, and I didn’t hate it. If you’re in the mood foran odd, obscure movie, it might do the trick.

If you want a much better small town dark comedy, though, watch 1971’s COLDTURKEY, which is also set in Iowa, by the way. I haven’t seen that in manyyears, but I remember it as being very good.

In the early Sixties, there was no bigger Davy Crockett fanthan me. I watched the two Disney “mini-series�� (what they amounted to,although the term didn’t exist yet) with Fess Parker as Davy every time theyaired. I read and reread the juvenile novelizations of them, which I checkedout from the bookmobile. I had a coonskin cap (bought in one of the localstores and quite possibly not the real thing) and a genuine coonskin cap madeby my uncle from the pelt of a raccoon he shot. And not once during that wholeera did I wonder even for a second who actually wrote those TV showsthat made me such a fan.

The answer is Tom W. Blackburn.

Thomas Wakefield Blackburn was a very prolific pulpster, writing hundreds ofstories for the Western pulps in a career that started under his own name in 1938.Before that, but I don’t know exactly when, he got his actual start in thebusiness by working as a ghost for Ed Earl Repp, as numerous other Western pulpauthors did. In the late Forties, he moved into writing novels, screenplays, andTV scripts, including the Davy Crockett episodes for Walt Disney. He even wrotethe lyrics for the theme song, which I’m sure some of you are hearing in yourhead right now. (“Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the Wild Frontier!��)

Well, that’ll be stuck in my head the rest of the day. And yours, too, morethan likely. You’re welcome.

Anyway, to get around to the actual subject of his post, while I’d read a fewof Blackburn’s pulp stories and thought they were very good, I’d never read oneof his novels until now. I started with BUCKSKIN MAN, first published as apaperback original by Dell in 1958. Although it’s set in 1847 toward the end ofthe mountain man era and several of the main characters are mountain men, thisisn’t a fur trapping novel. Rather, it’s about a trade war in Santa Fe andalong the Santa Fe Trail back to St. Louis. Jim King, a former trapper, hasestablished a store in Santa Fe, but he’s burned out by a vicious competitorwho works for Edouard Duval, an evil tycoon back in St. Louis. Jim tries torecoup his losses by striking back against Duval and his minions. Along the wayhe acquires a mysterious, sharpshooting ally and clashes with a beautiful youngwoman with an agenda of her own. While all this is going on, a dangerousconspiracy is brewing in Santa Fe that may plunge all of New Mexico Territory(recently taken over from Mexico by the United States) into a bloody war.

BUCKSKIN MAN is more of a historical novel than a traditional Western.Blackburn does a great job of taking some actual events and spinning acompelling fictional yarn around them. Jim King is a stalwart hero, Toni Bandelier(great name!) is a fine heroine, the villains are suitably despicable, and themountain man supporting characters are colorful. Blackburn captures the settingwell and keeps the pace moving along nicely. My only complaint about thewriting is that the ending seems a little bit rushed.

Overall, I really enjoyed BUCKSKIN MAN and am eager to read more of Blackburn’snovels. This one was reprinted several times by Dell, there were a couple oflarge print editions, and it’s currently in print in both and editions. It’s a top-notch historical novel and I recommend it.

This is certainly an odd cover by Ray Quigley on the May 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. But it's eye-catching, so it did its job. There are some fine authors inside this issue, too: Seabury Quinn (with a Jules de Grandin story), Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Robert Arthur, George Armin Shaftel, Greye La Spina, Malcolm Jameson, Dorothy Quick, and several I hadn't heard of: Weston Parry, Alice-Mary Schnirring, and Alonzo Deen Cole. There are interior illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov. I realize WEIRD TALES was past its peak by the Forties in the opinion of many fans, but I've enjoyed the issues from that era I've read. I haven't read this one, but I'll bet there's plenty to like in it.

The wounded hombre on this cover doesn't appear to be an Old Geezer, but we have two-thirds of our iconic trio, the Stalwart Cowboy and the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead. Great work on this cover by Walter Baumhofer, one of my favorite pulp cover artists. And inside, we have stories by Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Bart Cassiday (also Harry F. Olmsted), Oliver King (actually Thomas E. Mount, who was better known under his pseudonym Stone Cody), John G. Pearsol, and John Colohan. That's a fantastic line-up of authors, but it was just another issue of DIME WESTERN MAGAZINE. I don't own this issue so I haven't read it, but I'm confident that it's a great one.

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book:

He slouched through the squalid gaudy Mexican Quarter. He could feel the bulge of the gun butt against his flat belly, held there, beneath his coat, by his belt.

I’m going to kill her, he thought. I won’t turn yellow this time. This time I’ll do it. I’ll kill her. I mustn’t get caught. I can run fast. I’ve got good legs. I can run like hell.

If you’re like me, there’s no way you’re going to read a classic noir opening like that and not keep reading.

Not surprisingly, after the first chapter ONE BY ONE flashes back to tell the story of how the protagonist, telephone lineman Jerry Ryan, gets in such a bad predicament that he’s considering murder. It was a woman, of course. Jerry is in Los Angeles, separated from his loving wife Verna by work (it’s the fall of 1932 as the book begins, in the middle of the Depression), when he makes the mistake of helping an attractive young woman who’s being thrown out of a dime-a-dance joint. The woman, who calls herself Dolly Dawn because she’s trying to break into the movies, latches onto Jerry with the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. She convinces him to give her a lift to Las Vegas, where he’s headed for a new job. Jerry is basically a good, decent guy, but he rationalizes himself into bed with Dolly and that turns out to be a huge mistake. Since he took her across a state line and then had sex with her, she tells him that she’ll turn him in to the cops for violating the Mann Act unless he continues to take care of her and pretends to be her husband.

After the noirish beginning, ONE BY ONE turns into less of a crime novel and more of a lurid, soap-operatic melodrama, as Jerry continues trying to get out of Dolly’s blackmailing clutches only to be thwarted by her again and again. That doesn’t keep it from being compelling reading, though. This novel was originally published in 1951 but reads like it was actually written during the Depression, as Nichols paints a vivid picture of shabby desperation among the cheap hotels, boarding houses, freight yards, and gin mills of small towns in California, Washington, and Oregon. Jerry is one of those likable, not-too-bright schnooks who populate novels like this, and you can’t help but root for him even though you know he’s going to do the wrong thing nine times out of ten. All of it leads up to a somewhat odd ending that I’m not sure if I like or not.

This is the first novel by Fan Nichols that I’ve read. I don’t know anything about her except that she wrote a lot of what would have to be considered hardboiled sleaze, even though she started in the Thirties before that genre really existed. ONE BY ONE was originally published by Arco Publishing, a hardcover house that put out books a lot like the ones that Beacon would be doing as paperback originals a few years later. Nichols continued to write through the early Sixties, including books for Beacon and Monarch. I liked this one enough that I’ll continue to keep an eye out for her books, although I probably won’t go on-line and order a big stack of them like I have with some authors. I certainly plan to read more by her, though, and if you run across a copy of ONE BY ONE for a reasonable price (I paid three bucks for mine at Half Price Books), my recommendation is to grab it.

(Despite the good intentions expressed in this post, it'll come as no surprise that I haven't read any more Fan Nichols novels since this was published on April 9, 2010. But several of them are available as e-books and I picked them up, so maybe I will. Among the e-book editions is a Beacon Books reprint of ONE BY ONE under the title DOLLY. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it . Also, I've learned more about Nichols, whose real name was Frances Nichols Hanna. She was a concert pianist and model before becoming a writer. If I remember right, Roger Torrey was also a piano player. And of course, one of David Goodis's novels was filmed as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, although that wasn't the book's original title. I believe that was DOWN THERE. I guess there's just something noirish about playing the piano. All I was ever able to play was "Chopsticks", so I guess I'm safe on that score.)

Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler are professional car thieves.However, Wayans is actually an undercover cop and winds up having to protect Sandlerso he can testify against a mob boss played by James Caan. Nobody can trustanybody. Much running, shooting, fighting, and cross-country hijinks ensuebefore everything works out in the end.

BULLETPROOF seems like the type of movie we would have watched when it came outback in 1996, but for whatever reason, we didn’t. It’s an okay buddy movie/roadmovie/action comedy but never rises above the okay level. The script movesright along but is completely predictable. I have a higher Adam Sandler thresholdthan a lot of people, but even I found him annoying at times in this one. But Ilike Damon Wayans and he and Sandler work well together for the most part.Mildly entertaining is the best this movie can do, but that’s all I expectedfrom it so I wasn’t disappointed.