Comanche Vengeance is one of the books I bought back in August at Kayo Books in San Francisco. When I read it the other day, I was struck by the similarity of the plot to a book I wrote, Outrage at Blanco. The revenge plot is common in western fiction, but it's unusual to have a woman as the vengeance seeker, which is the case here. The woman in the book is nothing like Ellie Taine in my own novel, and things certainly don't turn out the way they do in my book, but there's at least a superficial similarity.
Sarah Phelps hits the vengeance trail after her husband and young children are killed by a band of Comanches. The daughter is also raped. But for some reason, Sarah is spared. We never do learn why, though she wonders about it briefly at the beginning. Trained by her father, Phelps is fast on the draw and deadly accurate with pistol and rifle (don't ask me where she got that dress and rifle on the cover to the left; nothing like that is in the novel, and the rifle's nothing like the ones used in the book). She meets a man named Gibson Duke, who immediately falls for her and decides to aid her in her quest for revenge. She makes it clear that she doesn't want him around, but he doesn't give up. She eventually accepts him, but she's the one running the show.
Phelps and Duke have plenty of troubles on their journey -- bad white men, bad Indians, bad weather -- but they persevere. Phelps reflects on her desire for revenge more than once, but she never gives it up. She's one tough woman, believe me. Duke is something of a tough guy, himself, but he's not as tough as she is. This isn't a great book, but it's a good one, and at only 126 pages it packs in more plot and action than many two or three times as long. Check it out.
I've expressed my enjoyment of Marvin H. Albert's work in several genres before, so it will come as no surprise to anybody that I really liked Rider from Wind River. I liked it a lot. In fact, it's my new favorite Albert western. Why? Because it's only 128 pages long, and it has everything.
Everything? You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It has a man wrongly accused of murder who's searching for the real killer so he can clear his name. It has a love story. It has a cattle drive. It has a well-drawn setting. It has a stampede. It has one of the best fist-fight scenes I've read in years. It has the expected climactic gun battle, and it's really done well. It has any number of little twists in the plot along the way. It's pure entertainment and highly recommended.
This is another little zine I found not too long ago while rummaging through a neglected shelf.
As hard as it is for a geezer like me to believe, some of you are probably so young that you don't remember the days before the Internet, the days when information about old paperbacks wasn't easily available, when you couldn't go to Bookscans and see just about every vintage paperback cover there ever was, when instead of searching through little out-of the-way thrift shops for years for that elusive book, you could click on Abebooks and find any title you were looking for, make another click and buy it.
What we had in those olden times was zines like Paperback Forum, although this one came along a bit late in the game. It was quite professionally produced, and it had a lot of B&W photos of paperback covers in addition to the articles.
Probably the most interesting thing in this issue, and still of interest to anybody into paperbacks, is an interview with Knox Burger, conducted by Jon White. I don't have to tell you, I'm sure, that Burger quite a career in publishing, especially as an editor at Gold Medal and Dell. Piet Schreuders has an article on Bantam Books. Geoffrey O'Brien has a review of Goodis: LaVie en Noir et Blanc, available at the time only in French and which has only just this year been translated for those of us cretins who don't read that language (that's Goodis on the cover, as you can see). Barry Kaplan's article is on paperback novels about homosexuality. And of course there's other good stuff including Michael Barson's review of a couple of books about Dell.
It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't around what a thrill it was to get a copy of one of these zines in the mail, but, trust me, it was. I still get a little tingle even now when I thumb through one of them.
You want femmes fatales? Charles Williams has you covered. Not all his books feature fatal women, but quite a few of them do. One of those is A Touch of Death, which I believe is the first book of his that I read. I read the second Gold Medal printing, and I was so taken with it that I went out and got all the other Williams titles I could find. And eventually I found several other printings of A Touch of Death, along with the British paperback, which was titled Mix Yourself a Redhead.
I've never understood why Williams never developed the reputation that some of the other GM authors did. He did a lot of things really well, and yet his books never got the acclaim they deserved. He had quite a range, too. He could write comedy as well as tense noir tales, and his sea novels were excellent. I said a few words about some of these things in this blog post for Mystery*File.
But back to the fatal femme of this post. Madelon Butler is her name, and when she encounters down-on-his-luck former pro athlete named Lee Scarborough, little does he know what he's in for. It's a complicated caper, having to do with a dead husband, big bucks, and several other people who want in on the action. Scarborough always thinks he's one step ahead of Butler, who appears to him to be just a drunk and, after all, a woman. He narrates the story in first person, so we discover along with him [SPOILER ALERT] how wrong he is.[END SPOILER ALERT]
We're a bit into James M. Cain territory here, and while I don't want to give away too much of the ending, I'll just say that Scarborough's final words are quite chilling.
This is the novel that Charles Ardai choose to reprint in the Hard Case Crime series, so it's a lot easier to find than it used to be, which is a nice thing for anybody who's interested in femmes fatales.
Have I mentioned that I miss the old days?
Sure, these days are great, and you can find all kinds of information on the Internet, but back in 1993, before the 'Net was like it is today, the real thrill was to go to the mailbox and find a copy of a great magazine, settle down in an easy chair with a good reading lamp, and page through some outstanding articles.
Just take a look at the cover articles in this issue of Scream Factory, for example. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Feast your peepers on the ToC. It's almost too much too take in. And these aren't skimpy little articles and reviews we're looking at. The issue comes in at 128 oversize (8-1/2 X 11) pages of small print. Nonfiction, stories, reviews, interviews, and it's all great stuff. You can tell that by looking at the writers. They don't print 'em like this anymore. Or if they do, I don't see 'em.
I thought I'd given all my periodicals to the Cushing Library at Texas A&M, but I ran across this one the other day when going through some material on a hard-to-reach shelf. I'm glad I found it and selfishly happy to have it still in my possession.
Not many Gold Medal writers are forgotten, but Richard Himmel seems to be. A brief Google search turned up next to nothing about him or his books. I'm partially at fault here, since I've had a good many of them on my selves for well over 30 years and never read a one of them. Why? Well, you can't read everything. Anyway, I decided it was time to take a look at one. Himmel, after all, sold millions of books. His first one for Gold Medal was I'll Find You, and it was the second novel GM published. (The first was John Flagg's The Persian Cat, and Flagg is another GM writer whose work I've never read. So many books, so little time.)
What did I learn? For one thing, the Gold Medal pattern was set from the very beginning. I'll Find You has just about everything that the later books from this publisher had. The first-person narrator, Johnny Maguire, is a self-proclaimed punk, a night-school lawyer whose attitudes toward women are primitive at best: "OK, so she might have fought. It would have been good that way. Maybe that's what she wanted. Maybe she wanted to get messed up a little bit. Maybe that's the way it was good for her." He says this about a woman he's fallen for, hard. She's the first woman he's ever loved, though of course he's had plenty of sex. Sex is big in the GM line.
As soon as Maguire falls for the woman, she disappears, an apparent suicide. Maguire doesn't think she's dead and decides to find her. Hence the book's title. And he does find her. That's when things get complicated. Gangsters are involved, and there's a murder, but this isn't really a crime novel. In its own twisted way, it's a love story in the Gold Medal vein, with the emphasis on speed, with lots of raw emotion, with plenty of melodrama. And a really great final scene and line, very much in keeping with the character of Johnny Maguire.
Himmel had something going for him, and it's not a big surprise that the book was such a hit. My guess is that he didn't plan to make Maguire a series character. He wasn't cut out to be one. The book sold so many millions, however, that bringing him back must have proved irresistible. In one of the sequels, Maguire is even an investigator for the State Department. I guess I'll have to read another one to see how this came about.
Theodore Sturgeon, The Rare Breed, Gold Medal, 1966
