'The Trailsman' was a very long-running series (398 novels!), employing multiple authors writing under the house name Jon Sharpe. Almost inevitably, the level of quality varies from book to book, sometimes markedly.
David Robbins was one of the better writers in the Trailsman stable, so I selected one of his books to read, since I’m already a big fan of his 'Wilderness' series. (He actually wrote more Trailsmans than Wilderness novels.)
“Mountain Mankillers” is set in the Rockies, where a minor gold rush is underway and a bustling tent city has been established. Skye Fargo stops by, and is very soon caught up in violence and mystery. A number of miners have disappeared, including the father of two sexy sisters, and Fargo helps them out by investigating. It’s pretty clear that the town’s corrupt establishment has something to do with it all, but pulling the strings is an unknown Mr. Big. Who could it be?
Well, a modestly attentive reader won’t be kept in suspense very long, because Robbins telegraphs the identity of Mr. Big on page 130, leaving the remaining thirty-two pages of text a bit anti-climactic. That’s not to say the book is ruined. It’s still a notch or two above average, thanks partly to a couple of vividly violent sequences. One is a brutal beating on a very muddy street, and the other is a savage lashing by a bullwhip-wielding bad guy. Unfortunately for Fargo, he’s on the receiving end of both of these assaults, each of which is nearly fatal. But don’t feel too sorry for him, as he’s rewarded by the author with some mighty steamy interludes with the sexy sisters.
There’s actually a third sister too, a likable ten-year-old who befriends Fargo and is in turn watched over by him. Their scenes together are very charming, and help differentiate this character from the usual two-fisted, fast-on-the-draw western stereotype we’ve seen so many times before. (My inner casting director put Rory Calhoun in the role of Fargo, and that seemed to help bring the character to life too.) The author showed a welcome light touch in another way: Fargo keeps running into strangers who embarrass him with gushing praise for the exploits recounted in earlier novels!
Anyway, there may be better Trailsman books out there (and there are), but you could do a lot worse than “Mountain Mankillers”.
Gold Eagle released “Neutron Solstice” in March of 1987. The novel is the third installment in the long running post-apocalyptic series 'Deathlands' and is penned by Laurence James (as James Axler). The last book, “Red Holocaust”, had our magnificent seven entering a redoubt in Alaska, with the last page promising that the exit would be hot. Thus the stage is set for this book, “Neutron Solstice”, which has it's location in the balmy swamps of Louisiana.
At 254-pages, this book could have shaved 50+ pages off. Aside from a few firefights, it's lacking any forward pacing or substantial plot development. Instead, it methodically sets up exploration, locations and the familiar “kidnap and torture” premise that's overly utilized. Voodoo themes, telekinesis and even the walking dead are par for the course for any destructive fantasy set on the bayou, yet even those factors don't elevate the book to an enjoyable pace. The end result finds this one average at best.
The story has Ryan and his crew facing a squad of bullies led by the tall, crippled Baron Tourment (get it?). He has a physic mutation and fears that his kingdom will fall to a man with one eye – Ryan. The Baron is camped in a Best Western hotel with troops and a lieutenant named Mephisto. Across the village at Holiday Inn lies our heroes, now six after losing a member. There's endless scouting and planning, that ultimately leads to Krysty and Lori being captured and used as rape bait. Ryan's team aligns with a ragtag group of survivors led by Jak Lauren, an albino teenager that has a knack for killing. The finale is entertaining but highly predictable.
Embedded in the narrative is some backstory on Ryan. His home is in Front Royal, VA and he escaped death at the hands of his evil brother Harvey. This sinister sibling killed Ryan's older brother Morgan and is also the culprit behind Ryan's missing eye. Harvey also sired a child with his father's wife. It's messy and will eventually be expanded in the fifth novel “Homeward Bound”. In between is the fourth title, "Crater Lake". I'm on it.
There’s a real paradox about 'The Shadow', especially in the first few years of his pulp adventures. Even in these early novels - which, as any fan will tell you, are the better ones - the stories tend to be clunky and old-fashioned, with lots of cardboard characters and stiff, unrealistic dialogue. Walter B. Gibson, who wrote the 1931 debut novel and most of the rest, can really pad things out and his editors seem not to have tightened up his manuscripts very much.
And yet… the Shadow books are tremendous, because the Shadow himself is possibly the single most compelling character in the entire 125-year history of pulp fiction. Part-detective, part-vigilante, he’s an incredibly secretive figure obsessed with bringing down the most ambitious criminals in the country.
Gibson’s limitations vanish whenever he’s describing the Shadow, or anything he’s doing. These passages are beautifully written, and richly evocative of mystery and eeriness. Except when in disguise, the Shadow operates at night or in dim, gloomy places. He doesn’t walk, he glides silently. He doesn’t shout, he speaks in a commanding husky whisper. He doesn’t hide, he simply melts into the shadows. He comes and goes like a ghost, and if he’s after you, you’d better believe he’ll find you…and you won’t know it until you hear the low chuckle of the dark figure standing behind you.
All of this begins to unravel about 1937, after the overworked Gibson had pounded out upwards of twenty novels a year for several years, and a lot of the Shadow’s mystery and menace starts slipping away. But it’s hard to overstate how captivating the Shadow is in his prime. Take “Six Men of Evil” for instance. It’s the 24th novel in the series, published in 1933, and while he’s hardly more than a spooky supporting character in the very earliest stories, by now he’s taken center stage. The plot is kind of quirky, kind of silly. The action sequences are quite good this time around, and upwards of a dozen crooks will get blasted by the Shadow’s twin automatics before it’s all over. As usual, there’s something very unique about the gang that he’s stalking, and he’ll have to travel all the way to a remote corner of Mexico to uncover its secret. The hunt ultimately leads him to San Francisco, where we’ll get a showdown in Chinatown and a memorable finale. The book’s greatest appeal, though, are in all the passages that show how the Shadow operates, and how he confronts the bad guys. There’s also a great interlude in which he appears in the guise of “Lamont Cranston”, one of the personas he adopts when he needs to work openly in broad daylight.
As Shadow novels go, “Six Men of Evil” has its shortcomings but is more than strong enough to hold the reader’s interest. Forget the narrative, though. The main attraction here is the Shadow himself, the most fascinating, most dynamic character to ever haunt the pages of pulp fiction.
Author James McKimmey’s debut novel, Perfect Victim, was released by Dell Books in 1957. The novel has been reprinted by Stark House as a two-in-one featuring his second novel, Winner Take All, and a 2004 interview conducted by Scottish author and editor Allan Guthrie. McKimmey would later go on to write numerous genre entries, including westerns and science-fiction until his passing in 2011.
Perfect Victim is set in the tiny mid-western town of Willow Creek and introduces us to several characters, including the stereotypical cast of journalist, sheriff, banker, bully and waitress. At the heart of the matter is the mysterious murder of the town beauty, young waitress Grace. While the reader isn’t asking who done it (we were voyeurs on the scene), the rest of Willow Creek is. Like many books and shorts of this style, the real essence of Perfect Victim is exposing the good-hearted with the worst intentions. Hardly anyone is particularly wholesome, including the fingered guy – a traveling salesman who’s innocent but immoral. The only protagonist is the media (by design?), represented by the admirable George Cary.
At 135-pages of physical media, this isn’t a hard-boiled or detective piece. It’s labeled as “crime” but it’s loosely a human exam on small town’s dark crevices. There’s a murder, a body and a small dose of procedure. The book’s closing pages has a dark and violent orchestration amidst a fiery, noose-hungry town. McKimmey brings us full circle from retribution to salvation in this quality, albeit simple, effort.
Quarry's Ex is an excellent entry in the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins. The series is about an anti-hero murder-for-hire hit man. As with all the novels in the series, the first-person narration is conversational, humorous, and compelling.
There are two kinds of Quarry novels: The first type is where Quarry is hired to kill someone, the second is where Quarry is hired to stop another hitman from killing someone. Both types are equally great. In Quarry's Ex, our hero follows a hitman to the on-location filming of a movie to determine who is about to be killed and prevent the murder from happening. Along the way, he gets entangled with a woman from his past, several Hollywood bozos, and a mobster B-movie financier. There’s plenty of sex and violence along with an actual mystery to be solved.
The books were written in both the 1970s and the 2000s with a large publication gap in the middle of the series. The publication order is not the series order. The series begins and ends respectively, with The First Quarry and The Last Quarry. Beyond that, reading order doesn’t really matter. There is no discernible difference in quality between the 1970s installments and the 2000s. All of them take place in the post-Vietnam 1970s and early 1980’s.
I’ve never read a bad Quarry novel, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Highly recommended for hard-boiled genre fans.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
There are two types of Quarry novels: The first is when hitman Quarry is hired to kill someone and the second are the ones where Quarry tries to kill another hitman to protect a client. The Wrong Quarry, the series' 11th entry, is one of the second variety and perhaps the best of that bunch. It was published as a Hard Case Crime novel in 2014, and is written by Max Allan Collins. Aside from the first novel, readers can enjoy the series in any order.
Quarry finds himself in Missouri stalking a hitman who, in turn, is stalking a gay dance instructor who is suspected of causing the disappearance of a teenage girl. All the humor and sex from other Quarry novels is present in this one, but there is also a compelling mystery involving the identity of the person wanting to kill the dance teacher and the whereabouts of the missing girl.
The characters in this one are vivid and realistic. The female leads are sexy as hell. The plot twists are unexpected and realistic. The scenes of violence are brutal and bloody. This is one of the best of the series and not to be missed.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
The first three books in the 'Wilderness' (David Robbins as David Thompson) series were consistently very good, and it became my favorite western series. I’d begun to wonder, though, if things would soon fall into a rut once our hero ran out of new Indian tribes to deal with and new species of wild animals to confront.
Those concerns were misplaced - or maybe just premature (we’ll see) - because the fourth book in the series, “Blood Fury”, is the best one yet. Apart from a scary encounter with a wolverine, the material here isn’t necessarily brand new, but what the author does with it is extraordinary.
As usual, there isn’t really a plot, just a situation which naturally develops into a string of crises. Each crisis will be more dangerous than the last, culminating in a very wrenching climax.
I can’t describe much of what happens without giving too much away. All you really need to know is that if you’re a mountain man and you run afoul of Ute warriors, it’s not enough to just run from them. They will follow you and follow you on a mission of death, tracking you night and day over any sort of terrain, and there’s no escape until one party or the other has been exterminated. Given that much information, you might think you know how this novel will end. But never underestimate David Robbins’ ability to hit you with the unexpected!
You won’t find many westerns that can beat “Blood Fury” for suspense. There’s no shortage of action or violence either.
