Should a Tear Be Shed?

Charles Boeckman (1920-2015) authored stories for digests and pulps like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Detective Tales, All-Story Detective, and Dime Mystery. While performing New Orleans jazz for 70 years, the multi-talented writer authored a number of novels with his wife Patti as well as penning sleaze paperbacks under the pseudonym of Alex Carter. Bold Venture Press has spotlighted the author and his literary work with several reprints, as well as his autobiography. I've read a lot of Boeckman over the years, but occasionally I drop in and out of his short stories for quick enjoyment.

“Should a Tear Be Shed?” was a short story published in January 1954 by Malcolm's, a short-lived detective and crime magazine published by mystery fan Malcolm Koch. 

This quick read is a success story that focuses on the rise of a tap dancer named Lawrence Terrace Jr., a young man that suffered a brain injury when a truck ran him over. When a shyster named Jess Norvell catches Lawrence dancing by a bar jukebox, he puts together a scheme. First, he befriends Lawrence, then has an insurance policy placed on the young man for $50,000 (double indemnity for an accident) with himself as beneficiary. The next logical step is to get Lawrence accidentally killed. 

Central to the story's plot is Jess' girlfriend, Candy, who does not endorse the scheme and repeatedly tries to warn Lawrence that Jess is using him for financial purposes. Like any good story of suspense, Boeckman intensifies the tension with multiple attempts at murder. It's an explosive, though not surprising, climax. I loved the story and read it twice.

The best way to read this story is by picking up the collection, Strictly Poison and Other Stories HERE.

Missing in Action

William J. Linn was an associate professor of English literature at the University of Michigan, a position he earned in 1979. He was the recipient of three Fulbright lectureships and taught universally at colleges in Bulgaria, Beijing, and Burkina Faso. During his long teaching tenure, Linn also authored three novels: Missing in Action (1981), Kambi Hai (1987), and The People's Republic (1989). I've always enjoyed a rowdy action-adventure novel featuring the prison-break plot device. With that fondness, I chose to read Linn's Missing in Action, published as a paperback by Avon.

In the novel's beginning, William Tompkins is serving in the Army during America's involvement in the Vietnam War. While the year isn't specified, based on the novel's events, I am guessing this is around 1972. During a firefight (off page), Tompkins becomes the only surviving member of his platoon and is quickly taken into captivity by the Viet Cong. 

In captivity, Tompkins, who is simply referred to as “The Prisoner” in the book's narrative, refuses to provide any information beyond name, rank, and serial number. He's placed in general quarters with a dozen or more fellow prisoners. The narrative flows into a rather one-dimensional plot that provides Tompkins' day-to-day activities, including gardening, masonry, roadwork, and other menial labor. There's an interesting plot device with Tompkins feuding with another prisoner, but that is quickly sewn up.

Eventually, Tompkins makes a break for the jungle and escapes captivity, only to be recaptured days later in a different part of North Vietnam. Here, the menial labor isn't an option. Instead, Tompkins is tortured repeatedly by a sadistic Cong leader nicknamed “No Neck”. These include starvation, solitary confinement, whippings, and mental harassment. Eventually, Tompkins is saved by an older, much wiser Viet Cong leader who was originally educated in America. He forms a unique bond with Tompkins that leads the narrative into a literary trance involving politics, war, peace, and America's involvement in Vietnam's internal struggles. 

Missing in Action has nothing in common with the 1980s action film industry that often used POWs and their captivity as its cinematic bedrock. It's void of the proverbial action star, gunfire, fighting, and so forth. If you thirst for that flavor, then look no further than the M.I.A. Hunter series of paperbacks. This novel is a literary examination of captivity and the concept of mental freedom despite physical boundaries. 

Missing in Action is also a rare example of a book written in the present tense, a fad that consumes most contemporary fiction (one that I'm not fond of). It was interesting to read a novel written in this style in 1981. This perspective makes the novel feel more emotional with the peaks and valleys of Tompkins' daily conditions. 

I did enjoy the book, but I feel like Thomas Taylor's A Piece of this Country is a better example of the prisoner-of-war formula. You can obtain Missing in Action HERE and Taylor's novel HERE.

The Sparrows Fall

Charles Frederick “Fred” Bodsworth (1918-2012) was born in Ontario and worked as a journalist for several Canadian newspapers. He authored five novels, one of which was Last of the Curlews (1955), a popular wildlife novel that was adapted into an animated Emmy-winning film by Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1972. His novels focused on the Arctic and other frosty locales like the Hudson Lowlands. I wanted to try his great outdoor yarn, The Sparrow's Fall. It was published in 1967 as a hardcover by Doubleday. My edition is the first paperback printing, the 1968 edition by Signet. 

Jacob is a member of the Atihk-Anishini tribe located in the Hudson Lowlands. He falls in love with a young woman of his own tribe named Niska. The issue is that Niska has been promised to another man in Jacob's tribe, a great hunter named Taka. It's a forbidden love narrative, but ultimately expands into a much broader outdoor adventure. 

A pastor arrives by plane and dedicates himself to providing Christianity to the tribe. He introduces Jacob and Niska to the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus. Jacob and Niska ask the pastor to marry them, however, the pastor has some qualms about doing so. First, he wants to honor God's commandment to honor mother and father. If he marries the two of them, he is defying the wishes of Niska's parents. However, he also realizes that both Jacob and Niska have shrugged away their pagan religion (animal and wind gods, etc.) for Christianity. He wants them to marry and create a new generation of Christian followers. I will leave his decision out of the review so I don't ruin anything.

The outdoor adventure begins with Jacob and Niska leaving the tribe (the synopsis gives the reason away) and forging a new path deep in the frosty tundra of the Lowlands. But, Jacob, conflicted with a number of emotional things (some of which are his own doing), waits too long to kill deer for the coming winter. He then must go alone to hunt, leaving Niska behind in hopes she can endure until he returns. However, Jacob soon realizes he's not the only hunter. Taka is tracking him.

This book was hard for me, but I appreciated it. What I really enjoyed was the Christian discussion and the perplexing things Jacob asked about God – things I had never thought of before. I also really enjoyed the tribal politics and the adventures Jacob has in his war with Taka. Great stuff. But, the book has very little dialogue. Instead, there are endless pages of descriptions of Jacob hunting. Details on wind conditions, the history of the Lowlands, and the movement of wildlife were interesting to a degree, but I quickly tired of it. Keep in mind that this author wrote Last of the Curlews and the protagonist is a bird. He uses that same formula in this book and has portions of the book dedicated to deer. 

Despite my qualms with the book, I'm still going to recommend reading it. It's great escapism, offers some deep thoughts on religion and its history, and is a wonderful expansion on the Canadian wilds. I confess that I did have to skip some pages of descriptive details on deer and trees, but it didn't detract wholly from my enjoyment. Get the book HERE.

David Agranoff: Writing Against Facism with Fangs and Fire

This in-depth interview explores the work and creative philosophy of author David Agranoff, known for blending horror, science fiction, and political commentary. The discussion covers his literary influences—ranging from heavy metal and punk rock to authors like Alistair MacLean and Philip K. Dick—and how they inform his fast-paced, visceral writing style. Watch the video chat HERE or stream below. The audio portion is available on any podcasting platform or download HERE.

Crash Course

I initially discovered Kathryn Johnson earlier this year when I read her young-adult thriller Winterkill, originally published by Avon in 1991. I enjoyed the novel, leading me to place the author on my radar to find more of her works. Johnson, who used the pseudonym Nicole Davidson, wrote over 40 published novels and was nominated for the Agatha Award. I located plenty of her books and chose her 1995 book Crash Course to read along with a fellow Booktuber named Bryan from Bad Taste Books. 

The plot is rather elementary, leaving the focus to be more of a character study. Eight Maryland high school students are forced to participate in a group SAT study with a teacher named Porter. But, this isn't any normal scholastic study group. Instead, Porter, with parental consent, takes these eight kids to a rural house miles from civilization. The house, sitting on the shore of Deep Creek Lake, will be the students' home for a few nights over Thanksgiving break. Here's the personalities that clash on this mandatory meeting of the minds:

Kelly – protagonist, in love with a student athlete named Jeff and best friend to her neighbor Brian.
Paula – Kelly's rival, the girlfriend to Brian, jealous rager.
Chris – jock and bully, homicidal.
Jeff – secretly loves Kelly, goes with the flow.
Nathan – motorhead biker and food junkie.
Isabel – Native-American mystic and all-around introvert.
Angel – the group's goth witch.
Brian – pal to Kelly, hardworking student, bound for college.

As the kids arrive and settle in, small alliances begin to form. But, the mystery begins when Brian disappears in the lake. The kids begin to question each other on where Brian is, who may have had a hand in his demise, and what to do next. These suspicious increase once Porter leaves to find help. But, when another student is found stabbed, the need to survive the coming days becomes the most prevalent plot point.

By 1991, the slasher film market had reached a pinnacle of success. Johnson hones in on some of the genre's most intriguing tropes – a camp killer, teens in peril, the clashing of raging personalities, and the ultimate guessing game of the murderer's identity. While the third-person narration consistently flips among the characters, the most dominant is Kelly. She's mature, daring, and makes good decisions when facing adversity. She's also the one with the most motivation to discover the whereabouts of Brian's body. It was fun to join her on the search for motives.

Kelly and two other characters from this book appear in the sequel, Crash Landing. 

Get Crash Course HERE.

A-Team #01 - The A-Team

There are distant echoes of a marital dispute that can still be heard today in Florida. It emanates from a lone parking lot in Jacksonville, adjacent to a 2nd and Charles retail store. The legendary disagreement stemmed from an argument with my wife over what she perceived as an overabundance of A-Team paperbacks stuffing shelves in book stores, flea market tables, yard sale boxes, and library sales. Maybe she was right. Maybe there are millions upon millions of A-Team paperbacks littering the planetary surface. Sure. However, to this day, I think she was confusing the A-Team with another similar-sounding title, Able Team. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that Gold Eagle had shipped over 500 million paperbacks across five men's action-adventure series titles they published – one of which was Able Team. 

A-Team. Able Team. Ovaltine? We'll never know. 

Like every kid in the 1980s, I watched my share of NBC's successful television series the A-Team. It aired between 1983 and 1987 and was created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo. The original concept was to simply find a television series for Mr. T, an upcoming megastar that had already appeared in Rocky 3 as Rocky Balboa's fierce opponent (and catalyst for Mickey's terminal heart attack!). The A-Team was the perfect fit for Mr. T to shine as the angry Bosco B.A. Baracus. 

You can journey down any pop culture rabbit hole and learn more about the A-Team on screen, in the cinema, and the various licensed merchandise that dominated everything from toys and comics to lunch boxes and birthday balloons. The concept was an adventure-of-the-week where a four-man team of soldiers of fortune, wanted by the U.S. government as fugitives from the Vietnam War, travel around the globe, with a female journalist, fighting heroically for the people while collecting money from paying clients, although if memory serves me, it was often as a favor.

Where I'm involved in this show is at the book level. According to the trusty Wikipedia, there were 10 paperbacks printed between 1984 to 1986. Only the first six were printed in the U.S., courtesy of Dell. In England, all 10 books were published by Target. These books were mostly published as paperbacks, although a small number appear in hardcover. Charles Heath was the house name used by authors Ron Renauld, who wrote the first five installments, as well as seven and eight. Louis Chunovic wrote the fifth novel, David George Deutsch wrote the ninth, and Doris Meredith wrote the last.

My first experience with the book is the debut, the eponymous A-Team. It was based on the show's pilot episode, “Mexican Slayride”, which aired on January 23, 1983. In the book's opening pages, a California journalist named Al Massey is in a Mexican town doing a story on drug runners. The cartel's leader, a stereotypical villain named Valdez, captures Massey when he attempts to leave town. Massey's colleague and friend, journalist Amy Allen, learns of Massey's disappearance and wants to investigate. She discovers a mysterious team of mercenaries called the A-Team.

Renauld's narrative reads more like the episode's script. There are very few occasions that anything different from the TV episode sneaks in, and that's okay. It is an entertaining read as Renauld learns of the A-Team's enchanting aura, and goes about hunting down clues to their whereabouts. This leads to the introduction of Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, an actor at Universal Studios who leads the team. Next, Amy meets up with the handsome face of the team, Templeton Peck. Through a sequence of events, readers meet the star of the show, “Howling Mad” Murdock, the team's pilot, and B.A. Baracus, the resident tough guy fixer. 

The team flies to Mexico and coordinates a series of tricks that make the local authorities believe they are an international film production company. I always felt that the Three Amigos (1986) comedic western film borrowed the general idea from this A-Team pilot episode. But what do I know? As usual, the good guys fight the bad guys in a small Mexican town – it's an old fashioned, formulated western tale told in a modern way. The team is always mindful of actually killing anyone, so they go to great lengths to avoid murdering any of these bad guys. If blowing away the enemy is your thing, the A-Team isn't those guys. They had more in common with G.I. Joe than The Five Fingers. 

The A-Team is an entertaining, completely unnecessary paperback. The entire series consists of  episode novelizations except the sixth, which may have been an original novel based on the Fog of War blog. Depending on your love of the show may measure how much you need these 180-page paperbacks. Get them HERE.

Secret Agent X #01 - The Torture Trust

First published in Secret Agent X magazine in 1934, The Torture Trust introduced pulp readers to the mysterious figure known only as Secret Agent X. Conceived as a rival to The Shadow and The Spider, the series quickly carved its own niche with fast-paced plots, bizarre villains, and relentless atmosphere. Written under the house pseudonym Brant House (with the bulk of early entries by pulp veteran Paul Chadwick), the stories blended espionage, hard-boiled detective grit, and macabre menace.

The novel begins with a daring prison break setting habitual offender Jason Hertz free from confinement. His guardian angel facilitating this escape is a mysterious attorney named Gibbons who wants Hertz’s help. What would his agenda be?

Meanwhile, the police are dealing with a vexing series of torture-killings with prominent victims. The perps have been dubbed “The Torture Trust” by the news media and the cops are stumped. The killings, as described, are horrific and extreme — victims’ faces burned with acid. Stuff like that.

We then learn that Attorney Gibbons sprung Escapee Hertz from prison to have him get re-acquainted with a mobster Hertz once knew likely affiliated with The Torture Trust. You see, Gibbons is not an attorney at all, but the elusive vigilante crime fighter known only as Secret Agent X.

The reader is treated to a visit to X’s secret lair with his assortment of weapons and disguises. He’s only an “Agent” in the broadest sense that he has the unofficial sanction of the U.S. Department of Justice to fight the criminal hordes preying upon society. Officially within the government records, he is dead. His name and background? No one knows. His budget? Unlimited.

X has a sidekick/secretary named Betty Dale who handles a lot of his back office tasks - like dispersing money X steals from criminals to the poor and needy and being his date when he needs a cover. There’s also a police detective who hates X and his intrusions on police business with his unconventional interventions.

The debut novel is pretty standard - and enjoyable - pulp fare. Disguises and gaseous weapons, a kidnapped damsel in distress, a secret lair, and criminal masterminds deserving some rough justice. It’s not as unhinged as The Spider and the hero isn’t as impressive as Doc Savage, but if pulp heroes are your jam, you’ll enjoy this one plenty. Get it HERE.