Book review: Baby Moll by John Farris

Baby Moll by John Farris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first of the Hard Case Crime series I've read. The series has made a name for itself by republishing lots of great but nearly forgotten noir gems. In this book, Peter Mallory, our antihero, has left the mob behind to start a new law-abiding life. He's got it all--a shop by the beach in California, a house, a rich and beautiful fiancee. But then the mob pulls him back, as the mob always does in these books, and he has to help his old boss solve a series of murders--someone is picking off the mob boss's subordinates ones by one and he's convinced the list will end with him. Because the boss is Peter's father figure, he reluctantly agrees to help.
At this point the narrative slows. Much time is spent in the mob headquarters, a beachside bungalow filled with a variety of lost souls. They all have their hangups and madness and they all drink way too much. They also don't seem to do much of anything else. Everyone knows the boss is losing his grip on the territory and is terrified of the mysterious murderer, giving the place a sort of Hitler's bunker feel. While this is effective, there's such a large cast of misfits we don't get to know any of them terribly well, and entire chapters go by without Peter doing anything to solve the murders.
The final third of the novel speeds up considerably as Peter gets out into the world more. He writes about he seamy side of the 1950s brilliantly, showing the poverty, ignorance, and brutality that Hollywood films of the era tended to ignore. There's also an epic fight scene that's handled very effectively.
While I enjoyed this novel and will definitely pick up more from Hard Case Crime, the pacing on this one was too uneven to give it four stars.

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Off to Egypt!

Two of the five Abusir pyramids

Today I'm off to Egypt for another three-week writing retreat. During the last one I worked on The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, the first in a series of neo-pulp detective novels in the Masked Man of Cairo series. This time around I'm going to continue the adventures of Augustus, Moustafa, and Faisal in The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus.

I'll be visiting friends and old haunts in and around Cairo, and seeing some new sites as well. The main one will be Abusir, a V Dynasty pyramid field that was built by the pharaohs after the Giza plateau filled up in the IV Dynasty.

I probably won't be blogging much, but I will be posting regular pictures and updates on my Facebook author page and my Instagram account.

Stela from the tomb of Ptahshepses (vizier under the pharoah Nyuserre)

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons. My own pics coming soon!

Back From A Writing Retreat In Egypt

I'm back from Cairo! Actually I've been back for a few days but returned to a heap of ghostwriting I needed to get done. I'm just now coming up for air.

This is my new writing buddy, the priest Padiamenopet, shown here posing as a scribe. He worked at the vast temple of Ra at Karnak in the 25th dynasty (760-656 BC). His right hand would have held a reed pen, which is now missing. You can see the scroll he's working on. I wonder what his daily word count was? Now he lives in the Egyptian Museum, which was just five minute's walk from my hotel. I ended up going there a lot! I also, of course, visited Giza, Saqqara, and Dashur. The last is the home to the famous Bent Pyramid, seen below. The last time I was in Egypt, way back in 1991, it stood inside a military base and was closed to visitors, so it was nice to finally get there.

I was very fortunate to attend the Cairo Video Festival, an experimental film festival, early in my stay. Because of this I met an interesting circle of Egyptian and Sudanese filmmakers, artists, historians, and writers who kept me busy for the rest of my trip.

Of course I was there for writing, and I got 35,000 words into a novel set in Cairo during the 1919 Revolution, an early major push for independence. Called The Masked Man of Cairo, it's a neo-pulp adventure story of a disfigured WWI veteran who, disgusted with Europe, moves to Egypt and starts a business selling antiquities. Soon he finds just as much trouble as he had during the war! More on that novel as it progresses. Our hero (more like antihero) lives in Old Cairo, a labyrinth of medieval streets and centuries-old buildings. I spent much of my time wandering this wonderful part of the city catching inspiration.

I'll be posting lots of Egyptian photos here and over on Black Gate, where I blog on Wednesdays. You can also see more pictures on my Instagram account. Stay tuned!

Book Review: Singapore Passage Singapore Passage by Donald Barr Chidsey

Singapore Passage by Donald Barr Chidsey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently discovered the all-but-forgotten pulp writer Donald Barr Chidsey when I read his novel The Flaming Island. Chidsey was a regular contributor to the pulp magazines in the 1930s, writing in a wide range of genres as many of the old pulp writers did. He spent much of his youth as a merchant seaman and wrote many stories set on the sea in various exotic locales. Later in life he earned a bit of fame as a history writer, once again focusing on the sea.

As I noticed in The Flaming Island, Chidsey is best when writing about the sea. His scenes on land are routine pulp fare, exciting and fun but not outstanding. When his characters unfurl the sails and get out onto the ocean, however, then Chidsey's prose really shines. His love of the sea and his deep knowledge of maritime life comes through in every sentence.

Luckily, Singapore Passage mostly takes place on the waves. It's the mid-19th century, and a first mate with a near-mutinous crew has to become temporary captain when his boss gets stabbed in a tavern. His goal--make the Singapore Passage with a shipment of opium before the competition. If he wins, he'll get rich and get a ship of his own. If he loses, he's stuck in his current position. Besides the crew, he's got pirates to worry about plus a female missionary on board who hates the opium trade. What's a sailor to do?

Singapore Passage is a great read, with lots of interesting detail about the East Asia trade in the Age of Sail. For example, Chinese ingots, called sycee, came in various forms, including ones that looked like a woman's slipper! There's also plenty of action, and of course some sexual tension between the first mate and the missionary. All in all, a fun little read.

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Book Review: The Flaming Island by Donald Barr Chidesey

The Flaming Island by Donald Barr Chidsey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a forgotten pulp novel from a now sadly overlooked author, so forgotten and overlooked that I had to add this book to Goodreads! Chidsey was a regular contributor to the pulp magazines in the 1930s, writing in a wide range of genres as many of the old pulp writers did. He spent much of his youth as a merchant seaman and wrote many stories set on the sea in various exotic locales. Later in life he earned a bit of fame as a history writer, once again focusing on the sea.
This novel is from 1959, relatively late in his fiction career as he was making the transition to nonfiction writing. It is a tale of an American demolitions expert who gets caught up in the Cuban revolution of the 1890s.
Our hero, George Heritage, thought he was going to work on a land clearance project, which shows just how clueless he is. Didn't he know there was a war on? Soon he's drafted into the revolutionary army, falls in love with a beautiful señorita, and is blowing up stuff all over the island. It's fast paced, exciting, and often funny. One interesting aspect is that the Cubans are shown in a three-dimensional, sympathetic light. The most intelligent character is black. This is rare for a novel from the 1950s (or even the 1990s). Chidsey must have learned a thing or two in his travels around the world.
As a writer myself, I can often tell when a writer is rushed or enthusiastic. Chidsey is at his best when writing about ships and the sea, and in those passages his prose rises to the level of poetry. The description of sailing into Havana at dawn is breathtaking. As was the custom with pulp writers, he was given a set word count and deadline and, like with so many pulp novels, this one feels rushed at the end with all the hero's problems getting resolved in a few short paragraphs. I can practically hear Chidsey's editor: "OK Chidsey, give me 60,000 words by the end of the month and I'll give you 500 smackers. No, I don't care what you write about as long as it's exotic and has some ships in it. You're great when you write about ships. And don't forget the beautiful foreign dames. Readers love beautiful foreign dames. Now hit that typewriter and make sure you're manuscript is on time."
Ah, for the days of the pulps!

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Book Review: Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street

Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a writer, I've always been interested in the pulp magazine era. It was a time when writers could make a living on short stories by writing for the myriad of pulp titles available on the newsstands. Some writers were massively prolific, often churning out millions of words a year.
Paul Powers, the author of this memoir, was one of those writers. He wrote hundreds of short stories and novellas and lived through the golden age of the pulps.
His tale is a sad one, however. He wrote almost exclusively for the Western magazines, a genre that was dwindling as early as the 1930s. Yet Powers forged on well into the 1950s, making less and less money as he succumbed to exhaustion, lack of inspiration, and alcoholism. This provdes a doubly cautionary tale for writers--don't be a one-trick pony and don't get sucked into the bottle.
Besides this important bit of wisdom, the book is less than useful for someone interested in the writing of the period. Much of the memoir is about Powers' various moves throughout the West, and is padded out with a long intorduction and conculsion by his granddaughter, who discovered the manuscript, researched Powers, and finally got it published. A large amount of her writing is only of personal interest to members of the family and I found myself skimming these parts.
If you're going to read only one book on the era, I would suggest The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber, which is far more informative about the lives of writers and editors and the business of pulp magazine publishing. I've reviewed it here. If you want some more detail about the Western pulps, and the sad tale of how the pulp era ground down writers, give the Powers memoir a try.

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Book Review: The Pulp Jungle

The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publishing is changing. Advances are going down, it's getting harder to push through the traditional publishing bottleneck, and more people are choosing indie publishing. Going it alone means having to do all your own marketing and even more importantly, being prolific in order to boost your visibility.

It's for this reason that I've been studying the old pulp days, when writers often got paid only half a cent a word and had to write reams of tales in order to make ends meet. Many starved, while others made a decent living and a few made it big.

Frank Gruber was one of the lucky few. He wrote for all the best pulp magazines (sometimes earning up to two cents a word!) and ended up writing novels and for Hollywood too.

The Pulp Jungle gives a fast-paced, fun account of Gruber's struggle to make it as a writer during the Depression and is filled with anecdotes of those long-gone days. For example, when he was really down in the dumps he'd go to the Automat--a coin-operated, self-serve restaurant--and get a free meal. It turned out that hot water was free, as was ketchup, so presto! Tomato soup.

The story follows Gruber as he works his way up from poverty to middle-class comfort through grindingly hard work, cultivating contacts in the industry, and sheer optimism and persistence. The book is filled with portraits of other writers, such as one who was hosting a party and announced around midnight that he had a 12,000 word story due the following morning. Gruber assumed the party was over, but instead the host went to a corner with his typewriter, banged out 12,000 words, and then poured himself a gin and rejoined the party!

As Gruber says, "They don't make them like that any more!"

Anyone who is a writer will find this book inspiring. Readers interested in classic pulp fiction will find this book to be a fascinating glimpse into how those stories were made.

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Reader News for May 7, 2014

Two of my blogging buddies have books out this month. Jack Badelaire, best known for his popular Commando series of World War Two novels, has dipped into Westerns with his latest. Renegade's Revenge is a 20,000 word novella about two brothers who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War and unite after the end of the war to take revenge on the man who killed their third brother. You can grab it for only 99 cents on Amazon. If it's like his other fiction, expect fast-faced writing and plenty of action.

Also, Hart Johnson has released Rescue Squad, Book 9 of her A Shot in the Light post-apocalyptic thriller series. Or as she describes it, "an Apocalypse Conspiracy Tale about what happens when people play God for fun and profit." The whole series was originally projected to run for ten installments of approximately 100 pages each. Hart knows how to hit that word count!

Have any news to share? Email me at the address shown on the left-hand column of this blog. The news can be about writing, history, archaeology, adventure travel, etc. You know what I cover in this blog, so if it's at all related, send it along to the email on the sidebar to the left.

Reader News for March 11

A couple of blogger/writing buddies are coming out with books. First off, David Meyer has just released Torrent, the third in his popular Cy Reed series of pulp adventure novels. Reed is a sort of Indiana Jones character who investigates all sorts of conspiracy theories.

In 830 AD, a brilliant Maya architect constructed a massive vault deep within a hidden canyon. For centuries, it has protected an astonishing treasure … and a terrifying secret.  
Haunted by tragedy, Cy Reed leads a salvage expedition to one of the last untouched places on Earth. Meanwhile, a shaman senses a disturbing shift in the natural order. And a famous archaeologist searches for the fate of a lost civilization.
Assaulted by endless rain, bizarre phenomena, and mythical creatures, Reed races to solve a puzzle millions of years in the making. Forging a path through cursed tunnels and deadly traps, he fights his way toward an epic discovery that could free him from his demons … or drown him under a tidal wave of destruction.

In other news, Andrew Leon Hudson has announced that his first novel, The Glass Sealing, will come out from Musa Publishing on May 23. Expect an interview with him when it does! I was a beta reader for this one and it's a fun steampunk adventure set in a shared world.

Have any news to share? Email me at the address shown on the left-hand column of this blog. The news can be about writing, history, archaeology, adventure travel, etc. You know what I cover in this blog, so if it's at all related, send it along to the email on the sidebar to the left.