Forgotten Books: Dead at the Take-Off by Lester Dent

Lester Dent’s career has enjoyed a resurgence of late. I expect he’s smiling down - or up - from wherever he now resides. Nostalgia Ventures has put dozens of his Doc Savage novels back in print, with many more to come, and he’s finally getting the credit instead of “Kenneth Robeson”. Heliograph issued a collection called Lester Dent’s Zeppelin Tales. Black Dog Books has published three volumes of The Lester Dent Library: Dead Men’s Bones (air adventures), The Skull Squadron (air war), and Hell’s Hoofprints (westerns). And most recently - and no doubt most satisfying to Mr. Dent - Hard Case Crime released his unpublished novel, Honey in his Mouth.

But there are still forgotten Dent novels. Six appeared in book form during his lifetime. The first of these, published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint in 1946, was Dead at the Take-Off.

The hero of this one is Chance Molloy. Sounds like a good name for a P.I., or maybe a gambler. Nope. This guy is the once-rich and still powerful owner of an airline company. His chief antagonist is a corrupt U.S. Senator, Senator Lord (who is described as having godlike power). The backstory is that Molloy has invested up to his eyeballs based on the belief the army will sell him transport planes after the war. But Senator Lord, owner of a competing airline, has employed dirty tricks to nix the deal. As a result, Molloy’s despondent brother (and partner) commits suicide. Molloy is prepared to use any means necessary to expose Lord, avenge his brother and save his company - even if that means using Lord’s innocent daughter against him.

What follows is a complex plot with a wide cast of characters, many of whom are also quite complex. Though there are a number of stock characters too, this is not a Doc Savage novel. It’s the real thing. Point of view shifts frequently, much more frequently than is common in today’s fiction. There are enough character arcs to make your head spin, but Dent handles it them all with ease.

There are at several subplots going at once. The romantic subplot alone could power a whole book. Both the captain and co-pilot are in love with the stewardess, who happens to be Molloy’s ex-girlfriend - and her soon-to-be-ex husband is aboard plotting revenge. Meanwhile, Molloy is falling for the Senator’s daughter. But as crazy as everything gets, Dent wraps it all up in the end.

The main reason I read this, and the main reason I enjoyed it, is Dent’s style - an easy blend of smart, hardboiled prose and dry humor. I have the second (and last) Chance Molloy book, Lady to Kill, in my to-be-read pile.

An unintentionally interesting aspect of this book is the picture of commercial airline travel circa 1945. Instead of proceeding immediately to the airline terminal, passengers purchase tickets at the company’s office in downtown New York, where billiards, ping pong and reading materials are available in the lounge. They are then ferried by limousine - at their own expense - to the airport.  On boarding the plane, they are allowed to smoke, bring their own liquor, and even carry guns. They’re seated in compartments of four seats each, as in old railway cars, and the seats fold down into beds. The restrooms are spacious lounges, with two toilets on the side. Ah, the Golden Age of air travel.

NOTE: I read the Crime Club edition, but without a dust jacket the cover is less than picturesque. The Ace Double version was retitled High Stakes. Why? Maybe to fit better on the spine with the flipside, Nightshade by John N. Makris.

Look for the list of this week's other Forgotten Books on Patti Abbot's pattinase.

The Finest Frontier Town in the West by I.J. Parnham

Last month I read (and reviewed) the first in I.J. Parnham’s Fergal & Randolph series, The Legend of Shamus McGinty’s Gold, and wondered how he was going to improve upon it. Well, now I know. He made the second book even funnier. This time around, the dumb guys are dumber, the greedy guys greedier, the high stakes higher, and the dire conse- quences more dire.

The closest thing to an honest character in this book is the hired gunslinger who’s after Fergal and Randolph’s hides. Evil as he is, he stays true to his word. But as far as the rest of the cast goes (and that’s covering a lot of characters), all bets are off.

It’s a contest, you see. A $10,000 prize will go the community a panel of judges deem “The Finest Frontier Town in the West.”  The competition has narrowed to two contenders, and both towns are cheerfully pursuing their own crooked agendas when Fergal and Randolph happen along and turn the situation on its head.

Complications multiply as Fergal attempts to hoodwink two towns full of rascals, plus the panel of rascally judges. The tale clips nicely along from one outrageous surprise to the next until Fergal and Randolph are masters of their own fates – they can choose whether to be shot down by a merciless gunfighter or face the loaded weapons of an enraged mob.

I finished this book a week ago and it’s still vivid in my mind. But most vivid of all is a character we never actually meet. His presence looms over landscape, the very personification of Ian Parnham’s American frontier - though he never appears on stage.  Read The Finest Frontier Town in the West (Avalon Books, 2003) and you’ll see what I mean. Try as you might, you’ll never forget the man known as… Warty Bill.

Coming soon: Book 3 - Miss Dempsey's School for Gunfighters

Death at Bethesda Falls

The title of this Ross Morton western is apt, because death does come to Bethesda Falls, and the man who brings it our protagonist, Jim Thorp. The point is hammered home at the end: As Jim leaves town, the livery man is amending the town’s population on the welcome board from 111 down to 107, and that includes the birth of two babies.

Ross Morton, as you may recall from this older post, is actually Nik Morton, a man of many names. This was (I think) Nik’s first Black Horse Western, but hardly his first novel, and shows a writer in command of his subject and his story. Nik’s style is economical and exacting. Every scene has a purpose and does its job well. I was impressed Nik's ability to move easily between several points of view, often for only brief passages, and still keep the story moving quickly forward. As we near the climax, the shifts come even quicker, building suspense on several fronts at once. Needless to say, I’ll be on the lookout for more Ross Morton westerns.

The Legend of Shamus McGinty's Gold

Since reading I.J. Parnham's revelation that the characters in his Fergal O'Brien/Randolph McDougal series were loosely inspired by Blackadder and his toady Baldric, I've been eager to get my hands on one of the books. So I did - the first in the series from 2002. Fergal, as you may know, is a traveling snake-oil salesman and Randolph is his long-suffering bodyguard. As Ian says, they're not Blackadder and Baldric, but rather the two characters turned upside down. Whatever they are, they both mesh and clash to produce a compelling and humorous relationship. Holmes and Watson. Archie and Nero Wolfe. Jeeves and Wooster.

It's not easy to find a series with the blend of action and humor I like, so it's great to find one that not only meets the bill, but is already well along (5 books so far). This means I can jump right into the next adventure without waiting. Ian displays the comic wit and careful pacing necessary to move seamlessly from clever repartee to blazing gunfire and back. The story is packed with wonderfully larcenous characters and unexpected twists - coming to a climax that leaves you eager to see the next book. A cunning plan, indeed.

The Toyman Rides Again

I probably shouldn't dangle this cover before your eyes so soon. It'll make you want the book right now - and it won't be published until March. But I couldn't help myself. So here's my advice: Find a jar and slap a "Toyman Rides Again" on it. Then, every day as you empty change from your pockets, dump the dough in that jar. You won't miss the money, and by March you'll have enough to buy a copy for yourself and another for your Aunt Petunia.

Here's the setup: Former investigative reporter Jack Lorentz just wants to be left alone to run his business dealing collectible toys from the Baby Boomer era. In the first book in this Fivestar series, Love, Death and the Toyman, Jack was dragged into (and solved) a nasty murder case. Now, as he tries to get his toy business back on track, he's plagued by publicity from that case. A new client barges in, insisting Jack investigate mysterious goings-on in a troop of 7th Cavalry re-enactors. The troop is heading for Montana, and the General Custer of the group is getting death threats. Well, Jack rides along, and before you know it he's knee-deep in trouble on the Little Bighorn. It's half-mystery, half-western, and all thrills. Get it now! Oops, I mean get it in March!

Cap'n Bob's Corner: Big Horn Legacy

Another fine review from Owlhoot ramrod Robert S. Napier...

Big Horn Legacy, by W. Michael Gear (Pinnacle, 1988, pb). The main thing wrong with this yarn is its length. At 384 pages it’s 100 too long.
The story, by the way, isn’t bad. A man has six kids, five sons and a daughter. He parks each of them with a different person and when he dies they’re instructed to come together to claim their legacy. Meanwhile, the kids’ uncle wants to kill them because their father killed the uncle’s father (and married the uncle’s sister). Not as confusing as it might sound. Each of the offspring has a Bowie knife that hides a secret to the lost treasure. Toss in a Frenchman on a mission from his government, some hostile Indians, and a little prairie voodoo and you have an overlong novel. The cover, by the way, is totally inappropriate.

Cap'n Bob's Corner: Gun Quick & The Desert Desperadoes

More musings from the reading machine otherwise known as Robert S. Napier, author of Love, Death and the Toyman. This time he tells us about...

Gun Quick & The Desert Desperadoes, by Nelson Nye (Zebra 1978. Originally Phoenix Press 1942. pb) Here’s a treat, a 2-in-1 from a second-tier publisher of vintage reprinted stories. Gun Quick is about a loner who takes on a greedy big shot in gold country. The Desert Desperadoes is about a man who wants to hang up his guns but can’t. Both are pretty good smoke burners but my favorite part of each was the names of the characters. In book one we have Cibecue Toler, Walker Ide, Bronc Eads, Coffin Quelch, Six Key Joe, Jed Stobbins, Click Marvel, Handsome Charlie Haxton, Vilas Forney, Ed Jowls, The Can’t Rest Kid, Dode Glayson, and an hombre known as Pinto Vest. The hero is plain old Dave Shannon and his love interest is Beth Glayson. If you want to read this book it would help to know what a saturnine smile is because it pops up at least a half-dozen times.

Book two is no slouch when it comes to colorful handles, either: Ivory Ames (our hero), Zede Shoan, Streak Wombold, Turk, Praggon, Whisperin’ Curp, Brazos Finn, Scar Arnold, and a Chinese servant named Ah Sung. Oh, and there are also a bevy of saturnine smiles. At this great remove the stories seem dated and simple, but they’re entertaining and the action never slows. A fun diversion if you want some light reading.

Cap'n Bob's Corner: Who Rides with Wyatt

The Almanack welcomes mystery writer and western aficionado Cap'n Bob Napier, who will now discuss...

Who Rides With Wyatt by Will Henry (Bantam 1979; orig., 1954, pb). Wyatt Earp meets a kid with a fast gun and faster temper, takes him under his wing, but isn’t able to shape the young fool into walking the straight and narrow. The kid’s name: Johnny Ringo. From there on it’s pretty much a telling of the Tombstone/OK Corral legend. Somehow, the Earp women weren’t around for this story, but they weren’t needed and I suspect the author decided it wasn’t worth mentioning them. Will Henry is a first-rate writer and you can’t go wrong with any of his books. If you have a Wyatt Earp jones you’ll want to add this to your reading list.

Kid Wolf of Texas

If you’re not familiar with Paul S. Powers, scroll on down to the post of August 14 called "Paul S. Powers, King of the Wild West,” or take the shortcut by clicking here. The quick version is, he wrote four hundred and some stories for Wild West Weekly. Many were under the name Ward M. Stevens, and many featured Kid Wolf.

This book, collecting five novelettes loosely disguised as a novel, was published in 1930 by Chelsea House (a Street & Smith imprint) and reprinted in 2006 in Large Print only by Center Point publishing. I had to hold the book at arms' length to read it, but it was worth the effort.

Kid Wolf was sort of the Doc Savage of the Old West – a wealthy rancher who chose to ride around righting wrongs and punishing evildoers. And like Doc, he had no trouble finding plenty of both. I’ll be telling you a bit on my own, but in large part I’d like let you experience Kid Wolf for yourself. No amount of second-hand yapping can truly describe Power’s style.

Here’s our first glimpse of Kid Wolf and Blizzard: Together, man and mount made a striking picture; yet it would been hard to say which was the more picturesque—the rider or the horse. The latter was a splendid beast, and its spotless hide of snowy white glowed in the rays of the afternoon sun. With bit chains jingling, it gracefully leaped a gully, landing with all the agility of a mountain lion, in spite of its enormous size.

The rider, still whistling his Texas tune, swung in the concha-decorated California stock saddle as if he were a part of his horse. He was a lithe young figure, dressed in fringed buckskin, touched here and there with the gay colors of the Southwest and of Mexico.

Two six-guns, wooden-handled, were suspended from a cartridge belt of carved leather, and hung low on each hip. His even teeth showed white against the deep sunburn of his face.

In the first tale, Kid encounters a man staked stretched out on his back, face up to the sun, with his eyelids removed and ants crawling over him. – He's still alive, but only long enough to warn Kid of a villainous gang leader known as The Masked Terror. The Terror’s plan, it develops, is to waylay a wagon train, and despite resistance from the man leading the train, Kid is determined to stop him.

Kid rides into Santa Fe, all the way to the palace of the Governor. Spotting a Spanish officer mistreating a peon, Kid cannot resist humiliating him. In a shooting match worthy of Wild Bill Hickock, the officer has a sombrero tossed into the air and shoots a hole in it. When the hat is tossed again, Kid Wolf fires off six shots, and all appear to miss. But, of course, it’s discovered all six shots went through the same hole. Needless to say, Kid Wolf foils the Terror’s plans and unmasks him. This is Kid at his absolute pulpiest.

In the second story, Kid is riding along when he sees a half-breed ambush and murder an innocent rider. Kid drags the killer into the nearest town, and is soon in the middle of another wild shoot out.

Kid Wolf is so appealing because he’s absolutely fearless and supremely confident in his ability with his weapons. In addition to his twin .45s, he has his Ace in the Hole, a big Bowie knife in a sheath sown into the back of his buckskin shirt. In times of need, he just reaches behind his neck, plucks out the Bowie and flings it unerringly into the heart of the villain of the week. Very cool.

In the third tale, Kid befriends a widow whose husband has been shot, her ranch hands paid to desert, and her cattle run off. Naturally, there’s a slippery gent in town eager to buy her ranch for bottom dollar. Next, he’s off to Skull, New Mexico, where he encounters such charming folk as rustler and bullwhip artist Blacksnake McCoy and his comparatively respectable boss, Gentleman John the cattle king.

The Kid’s roundup adventure involves a stagecoach rattling along the Arizona-New Mexico line when they’re pinned down by Apaches. A brave young soul rides to the nearest town, Lost Springs, and staggers into the saloon for help. He’s met with nothing but indifference, and when he calls the men cowards, their leader sends him sprawling to the floor. Enter Kid Wolf, sweeping the room with cool, calm eyes. “Isn’t it rathah wahm foh such violent exercise, gentlemen?” “Are yuh tryin’ to mind my business?” asks the bad guy. “When I mind somebody’s else’s business,” Kid Wolf drawls, “that somebody else isn’t usually in business any moah.” The young man from the stagecoach tells Kid his story, ending with “Won’t you help me?”

“Sho’,” Kid Wolf says. “I’ll throw in with you. And these othah men are goin’ to throw in with yo’, too!”

The men in the saloon stood aghast, open-mouthed. But they didn’t hesitate long. When the stranger spoke again, his words came like the crack of a whip:

“Get yo’ hosses!”

Garvey’s heavy-jawed face went purple with fury. That this young unknown dared to try such high-handed methods so boldly in Lost Springs—which he ruled—maddened him! His big hand slid down toward his hip with the rapidity of a lighting bolt.

There was resounding crash—a burst of red flame. Garvey’s hand never closed over his gun butt. The stranger had drawn and fired so quickly that nobody saw his arm move. And the reason that the amazed Garvey did not touch the handle of his .44 was because there was no handle there! The young newcomer’s bullet had struck the butt of the holstered gun and smashed it to bits.

Garvey stared at the handleless gun as if stupefied. Then his amazed glance fell upon the stranger, who was smiling easily through the flickering powder fumes.

“Who—who are yuh?” he stammered. The stranger smiled.

“Kid Wolf,” he drawled, “from Texas, sah. My friends simply say ‘Kid,’ but to my enemies I’m ‘The Wolf’!”

The Man With a Very Short Name

The mysterious Steve M resides in the UK. I know that much. From the interview he granted Joanne Walpole I learned that his love of westerns may have had its genesis in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and a series of books based on The Man With No Name. I know he reads about 6 books a month, not all of them westerns, and enjoys the Executioner. Beyond that, all I know is he’s been putting out one hell of a blog for the past year or so. Western Fiction Review delivers one entertaining review after another, punctuated with insightful interviews with folks like James Reasoner, Ed Gorman, Bob Randisi, Frank Roderus, Ralph Cotton, Jory Sherman… the list goes on. Oh yeah, I know one other thing. I’m glad he’s looking in on the Almanack.

Paul S. Powers, King of the Wild West

Way back whenever, I read the chapter on Wild West Weekly in John A. Dinan’s Borgo Press book The Pulp Western, and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But even then, WWWs were hard to come by, and I let the feeling slide.

Then Laurie Powers popped up on the Black Horse Westerns Yahoo group, mentioning her grandfather’s memoir, Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers, to which she’d written an introduction/conclusion, and the two collections of stories currently in print, Desert Justice and Kid Wolf of Texas.

So I read all three books. And wasn’t sorry.

By way of intro, Paul S. Powers was one of WWW’s most prolific writers. Under the pen name Ward M. Stevens, he created Kid Wolf and Sonny Tabor, who remained two of the magazine’s most popular characters for nearly fifteen years. Under a variety of other names, he had series featuring Johnny Forty-Five, King Kolt, Freckles Malone, Poet Pete, and others, in addition to non-series stories. By 1949 he estimated he’d written over 10 million words.

Pulp Writer is two books in one. About a third of it is sort of a combination detective tale and coming-of-age story about how Laurie came to discover who her grandfather was and what he’d written. In the beginning, all she knew was that he’d written for obscure western magazines and had authored two books: Doc Dillahay (reprinted by Bantam as Six-Gun Doctor) and a “Little Big Book” (a Big Little Book wannabe) called Spook Riders of the Overland. As Laurie begins to investigate, meeting lost relatives and others, she visits the Street & Smith archives and is astounded to discover he wrote as many as 80 stories for WWW. Imagine her shock as she eventually learns the number was at least 440, with sales to other mags as well.

Laurie’s intro is a good story, well told. It’s quite personal, and after reading it I almost feel I know her. An illusion, no doubt, but a pleasant one. Laurie now gives lectures on pulp westerns and has a great blog called, quite appropriately, Laurie’s Wild West.

Still another of Laurie’s surprising discoveries was the manuscript for her grandfather’s unpublished memoir, which forms the rest of the book.

The memoir is a change of pace, diving immediately into the wise-guy style of a pulp pro. Powers broke into magazines by writing jokes, and it shows. His style is breezy and fun. All the trials of an aspiring writer are there, and his tales of pulp writing are fascinating. To those of us who view the great Pulp Era as a magical time, this is like getting a peek behind the legend. On reaching the end, I couldn’t wait to sample his fiction. So I didn’t.

Thrilling reviews of the thrilling Desert Justice and Kid Wolf of Texas will be coming soon.