“Top Man with a Gun” is a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback first released in 1959. It was re-released again in 1981 with alternative cover art. The author, western enthusiast Lewis B. Patten, wrote a tremendous amount of genre entries from 1952 through 1982 including four titles alone in 1959. While “Top Man with a Gun” isn't a standout western, it continues Patten's traditional western flair for violent and grim journeys by young protagonists.
The harrowing adventure begins with young Clay living in Lawrence, Kansas with his father and sister. Set in 1863, historians could probably guess what was about to unfold. Confederate militia, led by guerrilla fighter William Quantrill, descends on the city to root out the anti-slavery movement. The end result, known now as the Lawrence Massacre, left over 180 men dead and nearly 200 buildings burned. In the chaos, Clay is wounded and must watch his father's murder and his sister's subsequent suicide. He sees the face of the rider and vows to avenge their deaths.
As a classic Patten, the book is straight-laced with violence, vengeance and a good sense of western brutality. As the author plunges readers into the narrative, we learn more about the man Clay is becoming. Forced to ride with his sister's boyfriend Lance, the two are engaged in combat with Union officers, forcing deserter Lance to kill one of his own men. With both Clay and Lance on the run, the novel starts to find its own footing.
Soon, the duo rescue the beautiful Dolly from three armed criminals before heading across the frosty mid-west tundra to escape Indians, Union soldiers and law enforcement. While the first half ends with Clay and Dolly falling in love, the second half briskly moves the location to Texas and a robust cattle drive being handled by Clay and farmhands. Here the action heats up as Clay is forced to fight three men and a spoiled woman whom Clay rejected. This scorned lover's vengeance is about par for the course for a 1960s Gold Medal paperback – a fitting element that enhances this ordinary western tale.
This is my third Patten novel to date and I've really enjoyed all three. There's similarities in Patten's writing style – the weather elements, young heroes, revenge – but they are reminiscent of just about any good western story. Plus, Patten penned over 100 novels under his name and others. Being innovative and original could be challenging under these genre tropes. Regardless, at 133-pages, “Top Man with a Gun” is an entertaining, action-packed western that didn't disappoint.
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Author Frank Castle (1910-1994) began his writing career like most of his contemporaries, writing for pulp magazines as early as the 1940s. With a number of western entries in titles like “Mammoth Western” and “.44 Western”, Castle would later venture into the crime fiction genre. Throughout the 50s and 60s the author penned paperpack novels for Fawcett Gold Medal, some using the pseudonyms Steve Thurman and Val Munroe. While being a diverse writer, his primary body of work is westerns. My first sampling of Castle is the 1969 western “Escape from Yuma”, billed by publisher Tower as a “Big T Western”.
Our introduction to Boone Wade is a rather cramped one – tucked inside the cold steel of Yuma prison. Wade, just the average Joe, was a rancher who joined criminal McGare for a one-time train robbery. The hit and run went off as expected for everyone but Wade. McGare's gang made a successful break and Wade was left behind to face the worst prison in the west.
The 24-year old has become hardened after two years of breaking rocks and succumbing to nightly beatings. So it's with great surprise that Wade finds that someone has tossed him the keys to his cell in the dead of night. After running towards the river, Wade finds a woman and her grandfather waiting with a boat to usher him to freedom. What's the price of his freedom?
Frank Castle uses a familiar crime fiction ploy to lure readers into this engaging western tale. A lawman named Rambo (Frank Castle and Rambo in the same book!) has rigged the escape from Yuma as bait to lure McGare. Rambo wants Wade to rob three trains, all fabricated to the highest degrees of safety by Rambo and his men. Once the news of the robbery, combined with the prison escape, reaches McGare's gang they will want in on the action. That's when Rambo will swoop in for the snatch and convince judges to pardon Wade. But can Rambo be trusted? Perhaps he's really a criminal himself and the train robberies are legit. That's the ultimate question as Wade is forced to choose between cooperating with what he hopes is the law or furthering his escape by fleeing into Mexico.
At 155-pages of intense action, it's hard to put this one down. I nearly read it in one sitting and found Castle's writing to be intriguing. He doesn't spill the beans until the end, using patience to make for a more entertaining finish for his readers. It's this reservation that glues the book together. Will Wade flee, fight or submit in hopes of the greater good? That's the focus of the narrative and it's enough to create a winning formula. Western and crime fiction fans should equally enjoy “Escape from Yuma”.
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The Richard Blade series was published under house name “Jeffrey Lord” and ran for 37 English-language installments between 1969 and 1984. Lyle Kenyon Engel’s Book Creations, Inc. launched the series in which an operative from Britain’s MI6 is transported via government technology into “Dimension X” where he inevitably wages battles and gets laid among different primitive and advanced societies. Every book ends with Blade beaming back to the U.K. with knowledge or technology meant to benefit the British empire. It’s basically James Bond meets Conan.
It’s hard to give this series a full-throated endorsement as the books are mostly pretty bad and rather cheesy. Despite that, I’ve read a handful and found myself enjoying them in a guilty-pleasure sorta way. After Manning Lee Stokes stopped authoring the series, other writers took over the formula including a science fiction writer named Roland J. Green who later wrote a handful of Conan books in the 80s and 90s. I randomly picked Richard Blade #26: “City of the Living Dead” from 1978 to give Green’s work a fair hearing.
As with all the books in the series, the novel opens with Richard Blade in an MI6 bunker far below the Tower of London while scientist Lord Leighton straps the electrodes to his skin that hurl Blade into Dimension X for the 26th time using a new device called “a computer.” The first chapter of every Blade paperback does a nice job of getting the reader up to speed and very few of the storylines carry forward from book to book. The upshot is that the series can be read in any order.
After a false start, Blade awakens in Dimension X. The cool thing about this realm is that it’s different every time, so the authors of the series usually start with a fairly blank canvass upon which they build their story for our hero. This iteration of Dimension X initially reminded me of Mongolia around the time of Genghis Khan - marauding primitive armies lead by warlords plundering peaceful villages for women and food while accompanied by unearthly monsters. Blade rescues a voluptuous female prisoner named Twana from the marauders, and she becomes his first graphic sex partner and tour guide through this strange world. Conveniently, the inhabitants of Dimension X all speak English to Blade’s ears.
Blade and Twana find an urban community surrounded by a giant wall (think “Game of Thrones”). Rumors shared by Twana are that the city beyond the wall is guarded by giant mechanical killer robots. To Blade, these legends hint at an advance society behind the wall in stark contrast to the hordes of savages living on the outside.
I won’t spoil what’s on the other side of the wall for you (the back cover gives away too many cool plot points), but suffice it to say that it’s pretty inventive. The science fiction “City of Peace” inside the walls was a nice contrast to the fantasy world on the outside. Coincidently, the central dilemma in the city thematically reminded me a bit of Pixar’s “Wall-E.” You can decide if that’s a good thing.
I found myself enjoying Green’s imaginative writing and plotting way more than the early installments of the series by Stokes. I recognize this bucks the conventional wisdom regarding the Richard Blade adventures, but “City of the Living Dead” is my favorite among those I’ve read. The author finds a nice mid-point between the family-friendly entertainment of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘John Carter of Mars’ books and the repugnant misogyny of John Norman’s ‘Gor’ series with lots of fun action and bloodshed along the way. Recommended.
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Author Judd Cole experienced success in the 1990s with his Native American themed western series 'Cheyenne'. Beginning with the debut, “Arrow Keeper” (1992), the series ran for 22 installments. Additionally, Cole's name appears on another series entitled 'Wild Bill', which ran from 1999-2001 encompassing eight novels. Digging into the author's past reveals that Judd Cole is actually John Edward Ames, a journeyman who has written horror titles as well as other western entries under the name Ralph Compton and Dodge Tyler.
“Arrow Keeper” is a superb western novel that should appeal to fans of the Piccadilly Cowboys' 'Apache' series of the 1970s. While less violent and more commercially accessible to all ages, the series and its debut centers around a young Cheyenne who was raised by a white family. Centralizing the coming-of-age archetype, “Arrow Keeper” is a sweeping 1840s adventure tale set in and around Powder River, Wyoming.
The book's prologue sets the series off with a whirlwind of action between Pawnee scouts, the U.S. Army and a defending Cheyenne tribe. The battle leaves just one Cheyenne survivor, tribal leader Running Antelope's infant son. An Army lieutenant brings the baby back to Fort Bates and gifts the child to mercantile store owners John and Sarah Hanchon, who raise Matthew Hanchon as their son.
Chapter one leads into the book's narrative, the eventual return of 16-yr old Matthew Hanchon to his people. Raised by white men around Fort Bates, Matthew endures the typical racial injustice of being a lone Native American. Never learning his true origin, Matthew's experience is simply farming, devoid of any rich ancestral skill-sets. After losing a fight, and a lover, Matthew eventually runs away from home and heads into rural Wyoming to seek out his Cheyenne brotherhood.
“Arrow Keeper” really comes into its own as a “fish out of water” story. Matthew finds solace within a Cheyenne tribe but is quickly brutalized in what tribesmen feel is a ploy by the Army to place a spy in their ranks. Facing near death, the tribe's leader, Arrow Keeper, receives a vision that Matthew is indeed Running Antelope's son. Thus, Matthew must endure the trials and tribulations to become a full-fledged member of the tribe and prove his loyalty.
Ames does a fantastic job by painting the indifference between white settlers and Native Americans at this point in American history. His parallel concept of depicting Matthew's loss of a true home both with white men and Native Americans is an intriguing concept that really works under his writing style. Ames, a stirring storyteller, blends customs, rituals and chants within the narrative to provide an authentic look at the life of a Cheyenne warrior. Of course these trials and tribulations are painful, but eventually sets the stage for a rousing battle to close out this book's story-line.
I'm really excited about this series and I've collected the first few books. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and found it's pace, historical depth and side-stories maximized what the genre is capable of in the right hands. I can't say enough good things about this book and it's series potential.
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Atlanta native Ralph Dennis launched the 'Hardman' series in 1974 for Popular Library. The paperback originals ran 12 volumes, finishing with “The Buy Back Blues” in 1977. In December 2018, Lee Goldberg’s Brash Books began reprinting the Hardman classics starting with the debut. Additionally, one of the other acquisitions by Brash Books was a stand-alone heist novel by Dennis originally entitled “MacTaggart's War.”
The story behind “MacTaggart's War” and it's transformation into today's “The War Heist” is a noteworthy literary accomplishment. Originally this novel was released in hardcover in 1979. The book failed to receive commercial success or critical notice, so the novel simply came and went like many new releases do. By the time the author died in 1988, Dennis was operating an Atlanta bookstore with a file cabinet full of unpublished novels adding to his published works that failed to gain traction with the reading public.
A few years ago, New York Times bestselling author Lee Goldberg began negotiating with Dennis’ estate for the publication rights to the author’s complete body of work – published and unpublished – with the initial goal of releasing the 'Hardman' series on the Brash Books imprint. After reading “MacTaggart's War” and seeing the possibilities, Goldberg edited the novel’s composition and structure – deleting entire chapters and re-arranging others - to make the book more interesting to modern thriller readers. The end result of this posthumous collaboration is what we have today, a souped-up and streamlined new novel entitled “The War Heist.” At a whopping 407-pages, this isn't your standard 170-page Fawcett Gold Medal quickie. I can’t imagine how much padding the book contained in its original form before Goldberg culled the fat and was still left with such a weighty novel.
Sadly, the end result is a pretty bland and over-plotted narrative that failed to really excite. In all fairness, I'm not a superfan of high adventure paperbacks by Jack Higgins, Desmond Bagley or Alistair Maclean, so a lengthy novel with a WW2 backdrop felt like a heavy lift from the start. The heist aspect of the plot speaks to fans of crime-noir stories of the 1950s and 1960s, but the intricate theft is cloaked in the dense wrapper of an epic novel.
The story leverages an actual event in WW2 history – a simply remarkable mission known as Operation Salt Fish. In 1940, Winston Churchill and his cabinet felt that the United Kingdom was at real risk of being overrun by Hitler’s Germany. Fearing an imminent invasion and subsequent loss, the British conceived plans to ship their liquid assets to Canada by boat for safekeeping. The idea was that Churchill and his colleagues would continue coordinating the fight against Germany from the safety of Montreal. This continuation of the United Kingdom’s governmental continuity would be funded by 2.5 billion in gold and bonds transferred across the Atlantic through a sea of German U-Boats. Miraculously, not one ship was lost in this secret transfer of assets abroad.
Ralph Dennis utilizes this remarkable piece of history as the backdrop for a fictional heist by U.S. Army personnel attempting to rob the millions in British gold from the shipment. The robust novel covers the planning, recruitment and operation to grab the loot during the transfer from boat to train on Canadian soil. There's more than a dozen characters blurring the lines between valiant heroes and despicable villains. After so much planning – spanning chapter upon chapter – the book's final 90-pages have many of the elements of a top-notch action thriller. Nevertheless, the expansive story leading up to the climax failed to fully grasp my attention, so the final payoff left me feeling weary from the long road to Canada.
Despite my own misgivings, “The War Heist” should have much greater appeal to hardcore fans of classic high adventure thrillers. Kudos to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books for re-introducing Dennis’ forgotten novels to a new generation of readers. I sincerely hope that his body of work is discovered by a modern fan base. Moreover, I'm excited to explore the other unpublished manuscripts from Dennis currently in Goldberg’s possession, and I hope that Brash Books continues their commitment to publish the author’s complete catalog in the years to come.
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Kansas native Fletcher Flora (1914-1969) wrote 13 novels and 150 short stories after returning from WW2 combat. His writing generally falls into the crime fiction genre with a few diversions into the world of lesbian pulp fiction. “The Hot-Shot” is a coming-of-age paperback published by Avon in 1956. The short novel is now available in every format as a cheap eBook.
“The Hot-Shot” is narrated by Skimmer Scaggs, a dimwitted high school senior living on the wrong side of the tracks with his dysfunctional parents. One day he accidentally learns that he has a natural gift for sinking baskets on the court, and with a little coaching quickly becomes a high school basketball prodigy. The author was a high school basketball coach before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, so he knows his way around the game. As a result, the sports action scenes are vividly recounted.
For Skimmer, instant popularity and local celebrity follow his awakening as a basketball star. The school pads his grades, and he’s finally able to lay a girl in the country club set. Moreover, a dead-end future is no longer his destiny as basketball provides the ticket to get out of his lousy town and away from his crummy parents.
For most of the paperback, the coming of age narrative far overshadows the crime story revealed fairly late in the novel. The crime in question involve the dilemma of whether to shave points for a local racketeer in exchange for some steady cash and regular sex with an irresistible torch singer. The point-shaving scheme was probably innovative at the time before Northwestern University’s football team was caught by the FBI doing almost the exact same thing decades later. “The Hot-Shot” is a fun read but shouldn’t be confused with a crime fiction classic.
The writing style adopted for Skimmer’s narration almost perfectly apes that of Holden Caulfield from 1951’s “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. Lawrence Block did the same thing years later with his Chip Harrison series with pleasing results. If you enjoy that type of first-person writing (and I do), you’ll probably enjoy this novel quite a bit (and I did). Just don’t go into it expecting a tightly-plotted hardboiled crime story. Recommended.
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Charles Runyon has worn a number of hats in his lifetime – Army service in Korea, farmer and industrial editor. Quitting his job to become a full-time writer didn't quite lead to the lap of luxury, but it did produce over 25 novels including Edgar Allan Poe award winner “Power Kill” (1972). Runyon's third work, Gold Medal paperback “Color Him Dead”, was released in 1963, just two years prior to what is arguably his most notable work - “The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed”. The novel has been reprinted by Prologue in both digital and physical formats.
“Color Him Dead” introduces us to Indiana prisoner Drew. In the book's prologue, Drew has had a brutal altercation with another inmate that's placed him in isolation. When called to the warden's office, Drew learns that his mother has passed away. In that same frenzied prologue, Drew, accompanied by guards, attends his mother's funeral only to escape in a high-speed chase afterwards. In flashbacks we realize that Drew is after a woman named Edith, but it's too early for Runyon to reveal the reason.
The opening chapters explains that Edith is now married to a Caribbean dictator named Barrington. The two reside on a rural island that Barrington rules with an iron fist. While in command of slaves, villagers and industry, Ian spends his day fornicating with the local slaves while attempting to impregnate Edith monthly. Ian's enforcer is the brutish Doxie, a cruel henchman who repeatedly beats slaves to death in an effort to impress his employer. Where does Drew fit in?
Without revealing too many spoilers, Drew and Edith once had a life together. Due to certain circumstances, Edith sent Drew to prison as an innocent man. Now that Drew has escaped prison his sole purpose in life is to kill Edith. Where the novel excels is Runyon's rather clever idea to have Edith experience amnesia. What's the fun in killing someone who doesn't actually remember the reason you're doing it? That's the focus of the narrative as Drew, shockingly, seduces Edith in an attempt to jog her brain into remembering him. As the ploy continues, Drew starts to fall in love with Edith all over again.
While this novel may sound a little mushy and out of place on the crime rack, believe me...it's a real barn burner. Doxie and Barrington's attempts to displace Drew is brimming with action, fistfights and an exciting gun battle in the island cliffs. Further, there's a whole second thread of action as Drew partners with two islanders to kill Barrington and end his rule. While there's a good amount of romance – and sex – between Drew, Edith and the lovely Leta, it's paralleled by an equal amount of high-octane action. Runyon's writing is fast-paced with an intriguing cast of characters to keep the pages turning. Overall, I couldn't be more satisfied with this book.
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