Cimarron City: Terror Town

Here’s another TV series I barely remember. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. It didn’t last long (26 episodes) and it was on against Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke (which may explain why it didn’t last long).

Still, judging from a single episode, this was a pretty good show. For one thing, it had George Montgomery, one of the few TV cowboys who'd been a Hollywood leading man before making a series. I know he was a leading man because back in my hardboiled days I had this great 3-sheet (3 times the size of a normal movie poster) for The Brasher Doubloon on my wall. Never heard of the movie? You’re not alone. But it was special to me because it was the film version of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. Yep, George Montgomery played Philip Marlowe.

The female lead in Cimarron City also had a Chandler connection. Audrey Totter was the ultimate deadly dame opposite Robert Montgomery in my favorite detective film, Lady in the Lake. Sadly, Audrey had no role in this particular episode, so I didn’t get to see her slink around Cimarron batting her evil eyes, but I'm hoping she graces the other three episodes on the disk.

“Terror Town” is a familiar story. Travelers and cowhands are being snatched off the prairie and pressed into slave labor in a mine. This mine is more interesting than most because the head guard is a man with a bushy beard, a maniacal laugh and a bullwhip, who happens to be played by a pre-Bonanza Dan Blocker.

Montgomery, as cattleman Matt Rockford (who is also the mayor of Cimarron City), is one of those snatched, to the sudden regret of the bad guys. In the heat of the action, Montgomery whips Blocker with a chain and throws molten lead in his face.

Whether it was merely the screen presence of Montgomery or higher-than-average production values, the show felt more like a real movie than a TV episode. And when Audrey Totter shows up, things can only get better.

Have Gun, Need Holster?

For you well-heeled HGWT fans, Alfonso's of Hollywood offers this this replica Paladin rig, complete with sterling silver knight horse and genuine ruby eye. $675 for a 5 ½ inch barrel, $725 for 7 ½ inch, more for double holsters. Gun not included. BYOS (Bring Your Own Smokewagon). Also available: Eastwood, James Arness and John Wayne rigs.

Hammett first edition: The Continental Op

That last post got me wondering how much those Hammett digests and mapbacks are going for these days. So I took a look at BookFinder. The Continental Op mapback is getting between 50 and $100 for very good to fine copies, while the digest commands 100 to $300 in similar condition. Dang! Some of my copies of this Hammett stuff are pretty nice, but others aren't. Should have paid more attention to condition back in the day. (But take heart, Hammett collectors, no less an authority than Mr. Bill Crider informs us that better deals are to be found on eBay.)

Hammett Mapback: The Continental Op

When I ran out of in-print Hammett stories back in the 70s, the search for more put me on the trail of the elusive Dell Mapbacks. A local paperback exchange owner said, "You have to meet my next door neighbor." And so it was I was ushered into the presence of the King of Paperbacks, the late Lance Casebeer. I found Lance in the basement of his kingdom, in one of his many rooms lined floor-to-ceiling with paperback books, sipping wine and talking books with Mr. Bruce Taylor of the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore (in those days called, I believe, Murder Inc.). And the two proceeded to regale me with mystical lore of both Hammett (Bruce) and paperbacks (Lance). When I left, my head was swimming, but I had my first Hammett Mapbacks, and the promise of more to come.
The Continental Op (Dell 129, 1946) was a reprint of a 1945 Bestseller Mystery digest of the same title. Since the digest was the true first edition of this story collection, it was at the time more valuable, but to me the mapback was much more desirable. In addition to the stories mapped on the back, the book includes "The Farewell Murder." All were originally published in Black Mask ("Death on Pine Street" under the title "Women, Politics and Murder") and all but "Fly Paper" were out of print in the 70s.

I never get tired of looking at these books, so I'll be slapping them up here to give you the same opportunity. Click on the map for a larger view.

The Story With No Name Part 7

Western author Joseph A. West has turned in a fine Part 7 to the Wild Bunch Wednesday Story Challenge over at THE TAINTED ARCHIVE. Joe told Gary Dobbs he's written 27 western novels. I'm impressed. Because his website is under construction, I swiped this bio from Amazon:

Joe West was born and raised in the seaside town of Saltcoats in Scotland. At 19 he became a police officer, but soon turned his love of writing into a career as a journalist, working for the Daily Mirror in London among others. In 1972 West was recruited as a reporter for the National Enquirer, and began working in the United States. Traveling the world in search of stories, West almost froze to death on an Alaska mountain, and a spider bite nearly killed him in the Amazon rainforest. “I swelled up like a balloon and turned a real pretty violet color,” he recalls.

Now a full-time novelist, West and his wife Emily reside in sunny Palm Beach, Florida, where he enjoys tamer pursuits like canoeing the alligator-infested swamps of the Everglades. His 22-year-old daughter Alexandria attends a local college where she studies forensic technology. She will have absolutely nothing to do with canoes and alligators. West researches the settings of his novels by exploring the terrain in person, usually with little more than a sleeping bag and a can of coffee.

Recently he and Emily celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary at the Lodge in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, a gift from the students at Rio Rancho High School who use West’s first novel as a textbook. They then spent a month in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico, often pitching their tent where the air is thin at 9,000 feet above the flat.

For more, check out Steve M's interview with Joe at Western Fiction Review.

Ian Parnham has kindly gathered Parts 1 thru 6 of the round-robin Story Challenge on his blog. But if you'd rather do it the hard way, you can find them here:

Part 1 by I.J. Parnham
Part 2 by Jack Giles
Part 3 by Chuck Tyrell
Part 4 by Evan Lewis
Part 5 by Jack Martin
Part 6 by James J. Griffin

As of this posting, Part 8 is still up for grabs. Want to take a hand? Hop over to THE TAINTED ARCHIVE and say so. No blog required.

Three for a Dime.

Even now, twenty years after acquiring this mag, I remember the excitement at finding three of my favorite hardboiled writers under a single cover. It was rare to find even two. And these three stories are all novelettes featuring series characters. Here, in the March 1942 Dime Detective, we have:

"Over a Barrel" by Robert Reeves

Fair exchange is no robbery but - when hijackers lifted 36 a barrels of fine Havana tobacco from Bookie Barnes' 10-ton behemoth of the highway - and roll down the road after the hi-jacker who had left nothing but a corpse as receipt, Bookie lost no time in jockeying his juggernaut off the Post Road and onto a murder route that wound through a cemetary, past a wedding procession, and came to a dead end in a nudist camp where everything was stripped but - luckily - the gears on Bookie's ten-ton baby.

"The Corpse That Couldn't Keep Cool" by John K. Butler

"Taxi!" And here comes Steve Midnight, cruising into trouble again. He's hot on the trail of an embezzler who's been cold for years - ever since Steve hauled him to La Brea Airport on the night of Black Friday, 1929. The Wall Street Market had just taken a fatal nose dive and the passenger's plane had followed suit - but his ghost lingered on and it was up to the hardluck hacker to drive him to another date with death.

"Have One on the House" by Norbert Davis

The onus of ownership hangs heavy on Dodd when a bail-security lands in his lap in the form of a low-down jive-dive, together with a boogie-playing professor, his sin-chasing wife, his sin-less "sponsor" - and a liquor bill for $613.o2. But when the benighted bail-bondsman finds himself the target of an uncanny killer thirsting for blood, he's damned if he'll let him have one on the house.

Also includes short stories by C.P. Donnel Jr. and Jan Dana.

Mystery and Adventure??

It's true. The Almanack is stretching out to include detectives, pirates, knights, vikings, cossacks and even one-eyed sailors along with continuing coverage of cowboys. They're all pretty much the same, after all. They just wear different hats and carry different weapons.

I was a Wild West fan first, growing up in the Cowboy World of the 50s. Adventure came next, with comic books leading to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Spider. The Mystery bug bit me in 1976. I can date that only because the bug that bit me was Jim Steranko. He announced the publication of his graphic novel Chandler, and I was eager to see what it was all about.

As an aside, my friend Rick Bilyeu reacted by buying a trenchcoat and fedora and running around with a .38 in his pocket. (When I first met Rick he was dressed as Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser, and later had a tailor make him a Battlestar Galactica uniform. You out there somewhere, Rick?) Anyway, my reaction was less extreme, but longer-lasting. Before Steranko's book was even published I'd read the first few Raymond Chandlers and was well into Hammett. Thus began a mania that lasted at least seven years.

Digging deeper into detective pulps I focussed on a group of twenty-odd writers and started collecting everything related to them. Pulps, paperbacks, digests, hardcovers, radio shows, and finally movie posters. Comics would be on that list too, but there wasn't much to collect. Memorable exceptions include a terrific comic book adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett's Secret Agent X-9 comic strips, and some Sunday funnies Wildroot Cream-Oil ads featuring the radio version of Sam Spade.

All of which brings me to the future of the Almanack. I'll be hauling some of my old Mystery and Adventure stuff out of storage (most of which I haven't seen for at least 15 years) and giving it a fresh look. But my mania for the Wild West will never die.

Richard Boone, A Knight Without Armor in a Savage Land

A review by Richard Moore (another member of the OWLHOOT amateur press association gang). Thanks Richard!

Richard Boone, A Knight without Armor in a Savage Land By David Rothel (Empire 2000)

I have read quite a few Hollywood biographies/appreciations lately of western actors and the two best were by David Rothel. In addition to this book, there was his Those Great Cowboy Sidekicks. Rothel starts with “Milestones and Minutiae in a Man’s Life” that presents the basic facts in detail but organized in a Q&A format. Chapter Two consists of interviews with Boone’s sister, his widow and his son. The questions are respectful but not fan-boyish. For example, he asks the son about his father’s drinking, which grew worse as he got older.

The next section consists of interviews with people who worked with Boone including the obvious (Johnny Western and Andrew McLaglen) to a host of actors who were in Boone’s acting classes or played supporting roles on Have Gun Will Travel. These included Peggy Stewart, Harry Carey Jr., Peggy Webber (who met him while both worked on radio’s Dragnet), Robert Fuller, Bruce Gordon, Peter Breck, John Mitchum, Bethel Leslie, Harry Morgan and others.

Carey, Stewart, Western and McLaglen are excellent interviews, but oddly enough, Morgan who may have known Boone best is disappointing. He did two HGWT episodes but couldn’t remember either nor a movie he did with Boone. There is a touching handwritten note Morgan sent Boone when he knew his old pal was desperately ill. Accompanying a photo taken of Morgan, Boone and Milburn Stone at a party in the 1970s, is says, in part: “I miss you Goddammit! I wish… we could work together again and have a few laughs. In my whole life the times working with you have been the most satisfying and the best and most fun in the deepest sense. Love Harry.”

On the drinking, Carey says it never interfered with the work on HGWT. He never saw Boone blow a line. Others say the same thing. I recently watched one of Boone’s last movies Winter Kills with John Huston, Jeff Bridges Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach and someone on the commentary track says that Boone was completely smashed every day on the set but when he was in a scene and the camera went on, he delivered the goods. Carey met Boone in 1953 when he played his son in the movie Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef with Gilbert Roland, Robert Wagner and Terry Moore and later did many HGWT episodes and the Wayne movie Big Jake. Carey summed Boone up well. “Dick had a powerful personality, overwhelming personality. He had probably the most - how can I put it - exquisite sense of humor I have ever seen. He just liked to laugh at things; he laughed at life, but he wasn’t a total renegade or anything. He just got a kick out of people and situations… I never met a guy like him before. He was a fascinating guy and physically very powerful. He’d been a boxer in the Navy and you wouldn’t want to tangle with him. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and what he was doing.” Carey attended some of Boone’s acting classes and wished he had gone more often. (Others attending included James Whitmore, Robert Fuller, Shelley Winters, and others).

The balance of the book is a detailed listing of all of Boone’s work and description of each of his films, roles on television anthology series, and each of his own series. There are several that I would love to view if the ever expanding world of DVDs catches up to them. There is a 1968 movie Kona Coast, filmed in Hawaii in the decade Boone lived there, that is based on a John D. Macdonald story and costars Vera Miles and Joan Blondell. Another is a United States Steel Hour episode called “Little Tin Drum” from 1959 that co-starred Fritz Weaver and Gene Hackman where Hackman and Boone played hospital patients. There is also a Playhouse 90 episode from 1960 called “Tomorrow” which is based on a William Faulkner story with a script by Horton Foote. It costarred Kim Stanley, Chill Wills, Beulah Bondi, Arthur Hunnicutt, Andrew Prine and Charles Bickford. Now that’s quite a cast and it’s hard to beat Horton Foote scripting from a William Faulkner story! Maybe one day we’ll get to see it on DVD.

It’s a fine book and I recommend it to anyone interested in Boone’s career or more broadly on acting (and especially series television) in the 1950s and 1960s.

--Richard Moore