The Tomb of Dracula #01

In 1971, the Comics Code Authority eased its rules and regulations on horror comics publications. A lot of editors started testing the waters with different heroes and supernatural villains. Marvel Comics decided this would be the perfect chance to explore a more traditional vampire character. Discovering Bram Stoker's Dracula property in the public domain, the publisher developed The Tomb of Dracula. This series lasted from April 1972 until August 1979. I decided to check out the series debut. It was written by Roy Thomas and Stan Lee and penciled by Gene Colan.

Frank Drake inherited $1 million of his late father's money. He explains to readers that it took him a mere three years to blow all of it. Drake's lover is Jeanie, a beautiful woman who doesn't care about his lost fortune. When Drake talks about an old castle with his best friend Cliff, all three characters end up in a real estate quest. 

Drake explains to Cliff that he's actually related to the original Count Dracula. The lineage of his family can be traced back to the original Dracula family. When his ancestors moved out of Romania, they changed their name to Drake. What's left behind is an old diary and a monolithic castle in Transylvania. Drake's father failed in his attempts to sell the "cursed" property. Cliff suggests that this is a golden opportunity for Drake to cash in on his iconic Dracula heritage and open the castle as a tourist destination.

When the book begins, these three people struggle through the rain trying to locate the castle. When they stop in an old inn, they discover that none of the bar's customers are willing to discuss the castle. After failing to find a sufficient means of transport, an old man agrees to bring them by horse and carriage to the property. But, just outside of the castle, he becomes skittish and drops them on the road.

The narrative increases its pace with a heightened sense of dread. As the three investigate the ancient, abandoned castle, the tension and intrigue becomes a thick veil. In the castle's cellar, Cliff discovers an old skeleton with a wooden stake piercing its dry, brittle bones. Is this one of Drake's ancestors? When Cliff disturbs the skeletal remains, he awakens a fiendish vampire. Is this the Hellhound known as Count Dracula?

While this issue doesn't capture the true essence of a Hammer Horror film, the colors and the atmosphere certainly pay homage to the traditional vampire tale. As a story of origin, Lee and Thomas excel in creating a captivating story that is not as horrific as the legend of vampires itself. I understand that subsequent issues invoke a Hammer Horror feel, but for the most part this issue is a dramatic pairing of adventure and romance. By today's "scary" horror standards, The Tomb of Dracula pales in comparison. However, as a nostalgic return to a more innocent age, I loved it.

Get the complete collection as an ebook HERE

Sam Dakkers #01 - Scream Street

Before authoring the successful Pete McGrath mysteries, Mike Brett (1921-2000) wrote a two-book crime series starring a hard-luck bookie named Sam Dakkers for the Ace Doubles imprint. Both books have been reprinted - again as doubles - by Oregon publisher Armchair Fiction. I recall enjoying the second book, The Guilty Bystander, so I figured I’d try the first installment, Scream Street, from 1959.

Sam the bookie is our narrator, and the opening paragraph finds him witnessing a guy bashing a lady’s face on a corner sidewalk. A geyser of blood and the sickening thud of a human skull bouncing off concrete begin the action for both Sam and the reader. Against his better judgement, Sam comes to the lady’s aid by dispatching the thug and bringing the lady back to Sam’s apartment and temporary safety. The girl’s name is Joan and she had been lured to a warehouse by the thug who tried to rape her under some very odd circumstances. Could there be an organized rape ring at work?

Stemming from this encounter, one violent confrontation leads to another for Sam. Dead bodies begin to pile up resulting in Sam running from both the thugs and eventually the police. Yes, this is one of those noir novels where the protagonist needs to solve a mystery to save his own hide from a presumption of guilt. Sam is an unlikely hero who gets his ass kicked, stomped and shot in nearly every chapter. For Sam, this ordeal is less about a quest for justice and more about keeping his bookmaking business intact. Catching bullets and saps to the back of his head is a small price to pay for Sam’s return to normalcy.  

Sam is a very fun character to follow as he bumbles toward a solution. Without question, Scream Street isn’t a crime fiction classic, but it was a light and easy read that never fails to hold the reader’s attention. One quibble: the paperback ends with the obligatory scene with the villain delivering an unbroken monologue explaining the criminal scheme from beginning to end rather than just plugging our hero with a bullet and moving on. Even in 1959, this was a played-out literary trope.

But who cares? You’ll be smiling through every page of this cliche-filled short novel. That counts for something. Check this one out if you want a quick and breezy read. Get the book HERE

In Deep (aka Whiteout!)

British author John Franklin Broxholme (1930-2000) used the pseudonym Duncan Kyle to author a number of high-adventure novels in the 1970s and 1980s. Typically, his novels includes individuals that become unlikely heroes during a dangerous situation. My first experience with Broxholme is his 1976 novel In Deep. It was originally published in hardback and then later re-titled and published as Whiteout!.

Presented in first-person narration, In Deep stars Canadian sales executive Harry Bowes. He's representing his employer's advanced machinery, the high-performance TK4. The vehicle is an advanced hovercraft built for harsh, frosty environment. After successful trials in Canada, Bowes and the TK4 have been transported to Greenland's ice cap. At 7,000 foot heights, the blizzards and Arctic winds will prove to be fierce competition for the new TK4.

Bowes is in this wintery Hell to introduce the vehicle to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is a group of 300 men stationed at Camp Hundred, a research station that is mostly underground. Readers are thrust into the camp's routine as Bowes becomes acquainted with the officers and gains some camaraderie with the men. But, these introductions and sales presentations are severed quickly. Thankfully, In Deep isn't about a sales pitch or a test drive. It's a mass murder mystery.

Like a 1980s slasher flick, the men at Camp Hundred are meeting grisly deaths. Someone is killing these men one by one while simultaneously cutting their supplies. The well is poisoned, reactors destroyed, runway lights extinguished and food is contaminated. At first, Bowes and the camp believe these events are freak accidents. But, as the bodies begin to pile up, it seems that a killer is on the loose and Bowes may be the next victim.

In Deep was nearly a one-sitting read for me. That's unusual considering my busy schedule with work, family, this blog and podcasting. But, Broxholme's narrative is just so addictive. It's the traditional murder mystery, but placed in this unusual location. Often, I was reminded of John Carpenter's excellent survival horror classic The Thing. This isolation and atmosphere is permeated with impending doom. Bowes becomes the credible hero, but thankfully the author creates this character in an average way. There's nothing special about Bowes other than his determination and will to survive.

If you love high-adventure, but have grown tired of stolen Nazi gold or rogue agents, Broxholme's In Deep is written just for you. Highly recommended! Get the ebook HERE

The Girl with No Place to Hide

Between 1958 and 1961, Philadelphia native Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) employed the pseudonym Nick Quarry to write a six-book series starring a hardboiled Manhattan private detective named Jake Barrow. The series has been largely lost to the ages until a recent resurrection by Stark House imprint Black Gat Books. The third installment, 1959’s The Girl with No Place to Hide, is back as a mass-market paperback for modern readers to read and enjoy.

Jake is our narrator for this taut 185-page mystery. After leaving a strip club at 2:30 in the morning, our hero witnesses a woman – a real dish, by the way – being dragged into an alley by a thug. Jake dispatches the mauler, saves the damsel in distress, and brings her to his apartment for safekeeping. Her name is Angela, and she’s filled with secrets. Angela is convinced, with good reason, that someone is trying to kill her. However, she doesn’t trust Jake enough to share the complete story. Jake steps out of his apartment for a few minutes before returning to find that Angela has disappeared.

Without a paying client, Jake takes it upon himself to find Angela and learn who is trying to kill her and why. He makes a logical leap that her threat is somehow tied to a grisly murder of a newspaper ad man around the same time and leverages his relationships with NYPD homicide to get the inside scoop. There’s a side plot involving a middleweight prizefighter with an approaching title bout. There’s also wiretaps, heaving breasts, thugs who kill, thugs who need killing, dirty cops, love triangles, torture, extreme violence, and 1950s stylized sex. No joke, this paperback has something for everyone, and the influence of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer shines brightly throughout every page.

As a character, Jake is a hardboiled archetype who loves the ladies, booze, and using his gat when pushed too far. Albert is an unsung hero of the paperback original era who was equally proficient in the crime and western genres, and The Girl with No Place to Hide presents the author at the absolute top of his game. The mystery and its solution were perfectly crafted with enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing until the satisfying solution. Let’s hope this reprint sells like hotcakes, so Stark House/Black Gat bring back more Jake Barrow mysteries. Highest recommendation.

Addendum

Although The Girl with no Place to Hide is the third installment in the Jake Barrow series, the paperbacks can be read in any order. Here’s the original series order – all published under the Nick Quarry pseudonym by Fawcett Gold Medal:

1. The Hoods Come Calling (1958)
2. Trail of a Tramp (1958)
3. The Girl with No Place to Hide (1959)
4. No Chance in Hell (1960)
5. Till it Hurts (1960)
6. Some Die Hard (1961)

Get the book HERE

The Dawn Tide

Author Victor Rousseau Emanuel (1879-1960) was a British novelist that authored a number of short stories for the early magazines and pulps. He used pseudonyms like Victor Rousseau, H.M. Egbert, and V.R. Emanuel for publications like Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Super-Detective, Weird Tales, and Argosy. Under the pseudonym Lew Merrill, he authored more sexually suggestive work. It's under this name that I first discovered the author. I found the May, 1944 issue of Speed Adventure Stories online and it contains a short story by Emanuel called "The Dawn Tide". 

On Eastern Canada's St. Lawrence Gulf Coast, Yvette and her husband Armand are lighthouse keepers. The windswept coast is battered by brutal storms and piercing ice, making life very difficult for 27-year old Yvette. To complicate matters more, her husband Armand lost the use of his leg in WW1. Thus, Yvette is mostly administering all of the lighthouse's functionality. When faced with a German prisoner, her burden becomes an overbearing weight she's forced to contend with.

Due to WW2, the lighthouse serves as a beacon for many Allied ships coming and going. Most of these ships are floating prisons for German prisoners of war. On a clear night, Yvette hears a man screaming for help in the treacherous sea. When she brings the man inside, she learns that he is an escaped German prisoner. 

The man introduces himself as Volksmann, then becomes increasingly belligerent when he discovers there's only one bottle of brandy on shore. The tension increases when the man states he will be stealing one of their boats the next day for an escape attempt to New York. Armand is crippled and can do very little to stop this German soldier. But, when Volksmann drags Yvette upstairs to rape her, the story takes a very violent, yet thrilling turn.

Merrill's descriptive locale really enhances this moody, suspense thriller. The idea of these two people trapped with a maniacal Nazi soldier is terrifying. The author's use of Yvette as the primary hero is admirable considering the 1940's era. It's stylish, unique and a compelling read. You can read the story for free right HERE.

Paperback Warrior Primer - Orrie Hitt

Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) was a suburban family man in upper New York who was quietly one of the most successful creators of sleaze paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s. His plots were largely noir fiction with a heavy dash of non-graphic sexuality and bad decisions driven by greed and lust. During his life, he authored upwards of 150 novels before dying penniless. As a tribute to his life and literary work, Paperback Warrior offers an extensive look at author Orrie Hitt:

Hitt was born in Colchester, New York in 1916. When he was 11 years old, his father committed suicide. Hitt obtained a job at a hunting lodge in upstate New York to make ends meet while his mother worked as a hotel chambermaid. Meanwhile, Hitt was a high school student. As a sophomore, he advised his teacher that he wanted to be a writer, and his teacher did what all good teachers do – she shattered his dreams by telling him that he was never going to make it as a writer because his English language skills were unsatisfactory and that he was too much of a dreamer.

While working at the lodge, Hitt gained hunting and outdoors experience. Hitt sold his first articles about hunting as a high schooler to hobbyist magazines. When he became a senior, he and his former English teacher both submitted articles to an educational book company. Hitt's article about shooting was accepted, and his teacher’s submission was rejected. 

After Hitt's mother died, he became an orphan. Later, he joined the Army at age 24 and served in some capacity in WW2. After his military service, Hitt married Charlotte Tucker on Valentines Day, 1943, and together they eventually had four daughters. In the years following the war, Orrie worked as an insurance salesman, a radio disc jockey, a roofing and timing salesman, a frozen food salesman, and a handyman. He had about 16 jobs during that post-war period, and he wasn’t writing much because he needed the steady paycheck to feed his wife and growing family of daughters. During that period of time, he relocated to Iceland for a year to work at a hotel. This job afforded him a lot of downtime, so he used it to write his first novel, I'll Call Every Monday, published by Avon in 1953. 

It’s clear that Hitt was a fan of James M. Cain, and a lot of his books were re-workings of Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The formula is that a drifter falls in love with a married woman. Together, they conspire to kill her heel of a husband so they can obtain the husband’s money. Of course, things go sideways, as they do anytime you fall for a murderous wife. That’s the template used by lots of writers in the 1950s, and Hitt went to that well many times in his own writing.

Hitt returned to upstate New York and became a full-time novelist. He set his manual Remington Royal typewriter up on the kitchen table and worked the entire day cranking out 90 words per minute. He lived on iced coffee and Winston cigarettes and he wrote book after book. He was a faithful husband and attentive father while all day, every day, he wrote about guys who were duplicitous heels who couldn’t keep it in their pants. In real life, Hitt was nothing like the characters he wrote about in his books. 

Early in his career, Hitt developed relationships with “adults only” publishers like Beacon and Midwood who bought and published his books. Hitt found a good niche for himself as a writer of sexy fiction – often sexy crime fiction – but his publishers played up the sex and down the noir. Hitt was trying to make a living, so he kept writing the books he knew how to write and receiving advances of $250 to $1,000 per book for his paperbacks. His sleaze publishers gave him a lot of freedom to write what he wanted because they knew that they were just going to slap a silly sleaze cover on his books. 

Between the years of 1953 and 1970, Hitt had about 150 original novels published under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. There is a robust collector’s market for sleaze fiction, and his original paperbacks tend to get top dollar. The most affordable options are the reprint houses like Stark House Press, Prologue Press, and Automat Press. 

Here's a "buyer's guide" on some of Hitt's novels:

If you want a James M. Cain style novel about the protagonist falling for a young woman married to an older rich guy where they plot to murder the husband:

- The Cheaters (1960)
- Dial M for Man (1962)
- Two of a Kind (1960)

Novels starring a young woman trying to survive by using her body to pay the bills: 

- Campus Tramp (1962)
- Four Women (1961)
- Trapped (1954)

Novels that expose the behind the scenes world of prostitutes and their tragic origin stories:

- Trailer Tramp (1957)
- Nude Doll (1963)
- Naked Model (1962)
- Girl of the Streets (1959)
- Party Doll (1961)

Hitt also wrote under several pseudonyms including Kay Adams, Joe Black, Charles Verne, and Nicky Weaver. Between 1953 and 1960, Orrie Hitt was producing about 20 books per year. His productivity slowed down gradually thereafter. By 1964, he was down to about four books a year, then three, then one. He essentially just ran out of ideas. The book contracts disappeared and his money ran out. A lifetime of working 12 hour days at his kitchen table drinking iced coffee and smoking cigarettes caught up with him. In 1979, he died in debt in a veteran’s hospital at age 59. 

Harrow Lake

Hailing from New Wales, Kat Ellis writes young adult horror fiction. Her novels Breaker and Blackfin Sky were published by Running Press Kids. Through Penguin Random House, Ellis has authored Wicked Little Deeds (aka Burden Falls) and Harrow Lake. I haven't had any experience with the author. But, my teen daughter let me borrow Harrow Lake and the premise immediately grabbed me.

Years ago, fictional screenwriter and director Nolan Nox created a horror movie known as Nightjar. The film was about a small town that is nearly destroyed by a landslide. Trapped inside the town, the residents begin eating each other to survive. Nightjar became a cult classic built off the tragedy associated with the film. Nolan shot the movie in a small Indiana town called Harrow Lake, a place where he met his wife, Loralei. During the filming, a crew member disappeared within the town's complex cave system. Fans link this unfortunate disappearance with the film's terrifying plot.

Ellis demands the reader's attention within the first few pages of Harrow Lake. In these non-linear pages is an interview with Nolan about the film, the tragedy and the fact that his own daughter, Lola Nox, has gone missing in the mysterious little town. After this interview segment, the author begins the narrative by going back one year before the interview takes place. 

Lola's mother ran away from her and her father years before. Lola and Nolan have a great relationship, but that is put in jeopardy when Lola finds her father stabbed on their apartment floor. With a long rehab at the hospital, Nolan sends Lola to Harrow Lake to temporarily live with her grandmother. 

Once Lola arrives in Harrow Lake, strange things begin happening. Her quirky grandmother keeps mistaking Lola for Loralei. Lola finds a strange girl always watching her. There's a myth that a creature called Mr. Jitters haunts the town. Beyond physical things, Lola talks to an imaginary friend named Mary Ann, but she could be a ghost. Things in Harrow Lake are very, very odd. 

As a 300-page hardcover, Ellis mostly keeps the reader engaged through a small-town mystery surrounding Lola's mother and her mysterious relationship with Harrow Lake. There's a looming problem regarding Lola's grandmother and some hints that the Mr. Jitters myth is a legit supernatural creature. Enhancing the narrative are Harrow Lake residents that Lola befriends, although she's very introverted and private. Throughout the story, Lola's communications with Nola are severed, creating a sense of isolation and abandonment.

My main issue with the book is that it is written in present tense. This style of narration has gained in popularity, but is an acquired taste. I like the first-person narration, but I don't necessarily want to be in the moment with Lola as she's living this rather abstract existence before my very eyes. This isn't to suggest Kat Ellis isn't a good writer or that the narrative is lacking, it's just not my preference. The presentation subtracted from the overall enjoyment. Otherwise, Harrow Lake is interesting, slightly scary and often disturbing. Get a copy HERE