More Writing Lessons from Pulp Writer Frank Gruber

When I reviewed THE PULP JUNGLE by Frank Gruber and how modern writers could learn from one of the most prolific authors of the pulp era. Reading through all the true struggles he endured to bust through and actually make it in 1934, I realized that I, in 2019, with a full-time day job, have it pretty good as I work at my writing craft and pursue my own goals.

But Gruber’s odyssey as a writer can also speak to us writers today. What follows are some key facts and quotes I took away from his book.

The Life of a Pulp Writer Wasn't Glamorous 

From August 1932 (when he arrived in New York) until June 1934 (when he sold the story that enabled him to break big in the pulp fiction market), Gruber wrote 174 “pieces” which totaled 620,000 words, all on a Remington manual typewriter. He called himself a sloppy writer, so he had to retype everything after he corrected the manuscript. The fiction spanned the gamut: Sunday School stories, detective stories, love stories, spicy stories, sports stories, etc. Those words were not solely fiction. He wrote tons of articles often on topics he had to learn on the fly. In the book, Gruber lists the dollar amounts he earned for various pieces. Even in 1932 dollars, those meager sales didn’t add up to a living wage.

My takeaway: Yeah, he had it bad, real bad. I don’t. Not really.

The Big Break Comes When You Least Expect It

The Big Break came in 1934 in one of those great true tales you hear. Gruber gets a call on Friday afternoon. Operator #5 was going to press the next day but was a story short. Could Gruber write a 5500-word story overnight? In his retelling, he started at 8pm and had a character. Two hours later, he had his leading lady. By 3:30am, he had his big finale…but still needed a plot thread to weave it all together. He got it, and delivered the 18 pages by 9am. He didn’t hear back for a few days. He started to worry, so he called on the editor. Oh, he was told, we pay on Friday. Pay? Yup, the story was purchased. And then he was asked for another. According to Gruber, “I was ‘in.’”

My takeaway: sometimes, your best work can emerge out of your brain and through your fingers in whole cloth. Don’t be afraid of going with it. I also mentioned something like that yesterday.

Income from Writing Along Can Fluctuate

His income in 1934 was less than $400 ($7,500 in 2018 money). In 1935, he made $10,000 ($188,000).

My takeaway: Yikes!

Just Keep Learning

Even after his Big Break, Gruber worked steadily and for higher paying markets. The key factor here was that Gruber never stopped working. Yes he had made it, but in those days, a writer was only as good as the next sale. So he kept working on stories, then branched out into novels, both detective stories as well as westerns. All the contacts he had made during the lean years paid dividends later on, including when he moved to Hollywood.

My takeaway: Always keep learning. Always maintain your contacts when you make them. You never know what will happen and with whom.

More Writing Equals More Selling Opportunities

Frederick Faust, the real man behind the famous pen name “Max Brand,” trained himself to write 14 pages every day, year after year. It added up to 1,500,000 words of fiction per year. It took him 2 hours each day. Then he would often drink.

My takeaway: Constant writing and constant production will produce material you can sell. Keep at it. We may not all type as fast as Faust and we may not all have 2 hours in our days, but we do have an hour or so. The words will come, and they will come faster and easier the more you do it.

A Takeaway Quote

"There is equality of opportunity. There is no equality of talent." Gruber said that about the days of yore. With independent writer opportunities, the field is even more wide open.

The story of Frank Gruber’s professional life suggests that hard work, determination, and perseverance will enable a writer to hone the skills necessary to become a full-time writer. It also demonstrates that writers must recognize and seize opportunities when they present themselves. Don’t think you could write a story overnight (or Insert Your Own Personal Challenge)? Perhaps Gruber didn’t think he could do it either…until he said “yes”. And he delivered. Only then did he discover he could. Then he did it over and over again.

The Shadow: The Black Falcon

THE BLACK FALCON is not only the fourth Shadow novel I’ve read in 2018 but my fourth one overall. And, to date, it might be my favorite for all the action, mystery, and zeal of the storytelling.

As the story opens, Rowdy Kershing is at a poker game amongst his criminal brethren. When he loses his winnings, he needs to buy more chips. He does so with a fat wad of money he makes sure all around him see. What he hides is the presence of a falcon’s feather, dyed black. For Rowdy has been assigned a task: recruit some “gorillas” to be of service to the super criminal, The Black Falcon, who has already kidnapped one millionaire and taunts the police that he’ll do it again.

But as gruff a talker as Rowdy is, he pales when the Knight of Darkness enters the room. They all do. Action ensues and Rowdy squeals like a rat.

The next set piece is the preparations the police deployed to protect Elias Carthers, the next millionaire on The Black Falcon’s list. This is a great action sequence mainly for how it plays out and the clues it reveals. I know that in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, authors frequently left clues for the readers to draw their own conclusions. Pulp fiction was not too known for that, but the clues in this sequence are plain to see.

It is after these scenes where The Shadow, in disguise as millionaire Lamont Cranston, takes action not in Shadow garb. Again, I’m too new at reading these stories to know if this is normal or special, but I’m guessing it’s likely normal, seeing as how The Shadow inserts himself as Cranston into the action.

And by poking his nose into the action gets Cranston in hot water. You see, he’s a millionaire and he walks directly into the clutches of The Black Falcon. From here to the end, the action is fantastic, the revelations are eye-opening, and the ending is outstanding in a “how will he get out of this” manner.
Perhaps the reason I like this one so much is the similarities to the villains of Batman. The Joker or The Riddler rarely commit their crimes without letting everyone know ahead of time, and The Black Falcon is right in that wheelhouse. Surprisingly, the Falcon makes some deductions of his own, and that got me to worrying for The Shadow’s safety. This novel is from February 1934 so I needn’t have worried. There was still going to be another fifteen years of stories, but still.

At one point, The Shadow reveals his true face to another character…and author Walter Gibson doesn’t describe the face! He only describes the reactions of the other character. I found that simultaneously great and frustrating. Who really is The Shadow? And what must his visage look like to bring such dread?

Of the new productions by Audible, THE BLACK FALCON is not a full-cast recording but a single narrator. Thankfully, it’s the same narrator as the full-cast versions so there is continuity.
For those of y’all who have never read a Shadow novel, here is a good one with which to start. It’s got all the pieces in place for a rip-roaring pulp adventure tale.

Partners in Peril
The Shadow Unmasks
The Romanoff Jewels

The Shadow: The Romanoff Jewels

In the third Shadow novel I’ve read (actually heard; thanks Audible!), THE ROMANOFF JEWELS begins in the apartment full of wealthy men. Author Maxwell Grant (Walter Gibson) tells the reader who they are and why they’re there. One of those men is Lamont Cranston, otherwise known as…The Shadow.

Another one of those gentlemen is Marcus Holtmann. Unpretentious, Holtmann has a secret buried deep in his brain, a secret other men desperately want. You see, a friend of Holtmann’s casually let slip the hiding place of the Romanoff jewels, the very jewels seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917 when they overthrew—and murdered—Czar Nicholas II and his family. Priceless in value, nefarious men want to steal the jewels and return the czars to power. To bring out his knowledge, Holtmann is kidnapped and tortured by the insidious Michael Senov for the information.

Naturally the Shadow deduces Holtmann’s whereabouts and does his best to save the man’s life. But he was a few minutes too late. Holtmann was poisoned! With his dying breaths, Holtmann relates to The Shadow all that he divulged to Senov. Armed with that knowledge, The Shadow races across the Atlantic to thwart the attempt.

I won’t give away the ending here, but I’ll just say that a piece of information The Shadow relates I didn’t see coming…but it makes all the sense in the world.

This being only my third Shadow novel, I don’t know how prevalent it was for the Knight of Darkness to travel outside the confines of New York or even America, but I appreciated how, to the European adversaries he encountered, The Shadow was a complete unknown. At least the gangsters in The Big Apple are smart enough about The Shadow to be scared. In addition, I liked how The Shadow got injured at one point, so badly that he needed to be nursed back to health, once again proving he is simply a man.

Which leads to a question I hope long-time fans of The Shadow can answer: is there ever a novel in which author Walter Gibson relates The Shadow’s training?

I’m not sure what criteria Audible used to choose which Shadow novels they produced, but I think him traveling abroad might be high on the list. Or the great ending. PARTNERS IN PERIL is a good one because of how it was used in the first Batman story. THE SHADOW UNMASKS was a natural choice that The Shadow’s origin was reveal. THE ROMANOFF JEWELS not only had foreign travel but the revelation of a key aspect of The Shadow’s legacy.

I am thoroughly enjoying these books. Next up: THE BLACK FALCON.

Eighty-five Years of Doc Savage

Eighty-five years ago today, Doc Savage landed on magazine shelves for the first time and, one might argue, helped change popular culture all the way up to the present day.

The brainchild of Street and Smith publisher, Henry Ralston and editor John Nanovic, Doc Savage was the brighter answer to the magazine’s other runaway bestseller, The Shadow. But where the Knight of Darkness fought crime at night and in the, um, shadows, The Man of Bronze was a different type of hero. He strove “every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.” He was a paragon of virtue, the kind of person kids could look up to and revere.

Clark Savage, Jr. appeared in 181 adventures from 1933 to 1949, mostly written by a single author, Lester Dent. In nearly all of them, he was accompanied by his five stalwart brothers in arms: Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, John Renwick, Long Tom Roberts, and William Littlejohn. Each man of the Fabulous Five was an expert in his chosen discipline, but Doc bested each. Doc had trained his mind and body since birth to be a superman. He even had a Fortress of Solitude where he would retire from time to time to study. Invariably he would emerge from his seclusion with some new invention, knowledge, or something else to benefit humankind. His headquarters on the 86th Floor of the unnamed building in New York (but we all knew was the Empire State Building) was a palace of gadgets, technology, and books where Doc and his comrades planned their adventures. And his villains were trying to take over the world long before Lex Luther or Blofeld.

If you’ve read this far, I think you will recognize some names and terms. The obvious descendant is Superman himself. Extrapolate, if you will, what Superman wrought: Batman, DC Comics, other superheroes, Marvel Comics, novels, toys, merchandise, movie serials, major motion pictures with superheroes, and many other things that shape large chunks of popular culture. In fact, the biggest superhero movie to date, The Avengers: Infinity War, can trace its roots all the way back to a pulp magazine character that debuted eight-five years ago today.

I am woefully deficient in my Doc Savage reading, but then just imagine reading one novel a month at the pace Lester Dent and a handful of other co-writers drafted the books. You would finish in 2034! But these stories are fantastic to dip into from time to time for the breathless sense of adventure and wonder.

Generations of readers grew up on the original pulp magazines while other generations were raised on the Bantam reprints of the 1960s and 1970s, with Frank Bama's depiction of Doc with a widow's peak and a tattered shirt.

Nostalgia Ventures reprinted the entire run, adding historical commentary. And Will Murray has been using abandoned outlines from Dent’s personal papers to write new adventures, including one in which Doc teams up with The Shadow, bringing the entire saga full circle.

Now, in this 85th year of Doc Savage, I plan to read a few more adventures, including the black-and-white comics from the mid 70s as published by Marvel Comics. I'll be reviewing these yarns as I get to them, beginning with The Polar Treasure next week. 

What are your favorite Doc Savage stories? How about a Top 10 list?

The Shadow: The Shadow Unmasks

Hot on the heels of my first Shadow novel, PARTNERS IN PERIL, I have now read my second, THE SHADOW UNMASKS. And I loved it just as much.

In order to kick start my Shadow experience, I decided to listen to the new productions at Audible Studios. They feature a main narrator and multiple voice actors for the cast. Both I’ve heard are fantastic and recommended. As a result, however, I’m reading these Shadow novels out of order, which means what I learned in UNMASKS surprised me.

Up until now, I’ve always thought The Shadow was, in fact, Lamont Cranston. If my memory serves me, that simple one-to-one equation was on the radio shows and it certainly was on the Alec Baldwin movie. As I started in with UNMASKS, I was expecting the same, and it started out that way until the story took an interesting turn.

The main plot of UNMASKS involves a crook named Shark Meglo (great name!). He and his gang have a straightforward plan: find, attack, and kill the buyers of some rare and valuable gems before the buyer can utter the name of the seller. For you see, the master crook behind the entire operation recycles the gems in new settings. Every three weeks or so a new member of the wealthy class dies. All of them had recently purchased gems.

Naturally, the story begins with the most recent murder. The Shadow tries to thwart Shark’s evil plans…but fails. He learns vital clues to what’s going on, however, information needed to prevent the next death. But a distant accident lands on the front pages of New York’s newspapers. A plane accident in England injured a few Americans. The story not only listed the names of the individuals but splashes their photos. There, for all to see, is the real Lamont Cranston. The problem is, especially if you are police commissioner Ralph Weston, who reads the newspaper standing outside the Cobalt Club, is that you are literally talking to Lamont Cranston. Only it’s The Shadow in his disguise. There follows a fun subterfuge as the Agents of The Shadow basically try and convince Weston that he didn’t really see Lamont Cranston but Cranston’s nephew. And the commissioner bought it.

The odd turn the story took for me was when Kent Allard, famed aviator who crashed in the Guatemalan jungle a dozen years ago, has made a reappearance. He arrives in New York to great fanfare and very quickly, we learn Allard is really The Shadow. And, lest anyone (me included) wasn’t hip on how it all shook down back then, The Shadow visits the house of an old ally, Slade Farrow (another great name!) and reveals his true identity, complete with the entire background. The reasoning is spot on—The Shadow uses the identity of Cranston as long as Cranston stays out of New York—but I couldn’t help wondering how many times in this series and, of course, the comic book masked heroes, that the characters revealed their identity to others. It also makes me wonder if, after this August 1937 issue (number 131 overall) if Lamont Cranston was ever used again. Long-time readers of The Shadow: please let me know.

Anyway, after that startling revelation, the story continued until the inevitable end. Two things struck me about this ending. One, the big finale was somewhat low key. I guess you can’t have every novel end in a big shoot-out or something. The second thing was that The Shadow is very much like Sherlock Holmes in that he knows the likely ending far in advance and just moves the various chess pieces along the way, usually with his agents none the wiser.

I’ve now read two Shadow novels and I’m not gonna stop now. They are a blast. And, as a lifelong Batman fan, I’m really fascinated to research more in depth how Bill Finger drew on his love of The Shadow and helped shape the Dark Knight Detective.

So, fellow Shadow fans, where does this story rank in the all-time list?

The Shadow: Partners in Peril

Well, it took a while, but I finally read my first Shadow novel.*

I think like most of us, I’ve known about The Shadow for a long time. I first discovered him back in the late 70s when my parents purchased some old-time radio episodes on cassette to listen to on vacations. Ten years later, some of those episodes were broadcast on local Houston AM radio on Sunday nights and I’d listen to them as I returned back to college in Austin. And I’d even began collecting the wonderful reprints by Vintage Library to say nothing of some of the comic adaptations. Actually, up until now, the only time I’d encountered The Shadow in print was the two times he guest-starred in Batman comics (my reviews here and here).

Interestingly, it was because of Batman that I first wanted to read PARTNERS IN PERIL. The good folks a Vintage packaged PARTNERS along with LINGO and commissioned a couple of article about how PARTNERS and The Shadow influenced Bill Finger and Bob Kane to create Batman. The historian in me always gravitated to the historical commentary before I read the stories, and this collection is fantastic with not only historical commentary by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin but an introduction by Jerry Robinson, co-creator of Robin and the Joker. But today, the focus is on this November 1936 story.

Reed Harrington calls the police with a desperate situation: he’s been marked for death at midnight. For over a week, Harrington has tried to evade the mysterious caller, but every time, the mystery man finds him. With no one else to turn to, Harrington asks the police for help. Detective Joe Cardona is assigned the case and he’s there in the room when Harrington receives a call just before midnight…and falls dead! In short order, Arnold King arrives at the dead man’s apartment with the same incredible story. What links these two men? Well, they both were former partners of the Milcote Chemical Corporation. Armed with police protection, King holes up and waits…until he, too, falls dead. King dies of electrocution; Harrington of poison.

Enter: The Shadow. He directs his agents to discover the identity of other partners of the company and land on three: Simon Todd, Thomas Porter and his son, Ray. But what complicates the mystery is that Harrington, King, and the two Porters all are former partners of the chemical company. Who would want them dead? Perhaps it is sinister agents of a foreign power out to discover the secret formula for the new chemical weapon created for the United States to use in the next war.  Perhaps it’s something else, but you know before you even read the first word that The Shadow will emerge triumphant.

THOUGHTS

First of all, I really enjoyed this story. I liked how the action played fairly quick and straight. I have since learned that the author of PARTNERS wasn’t Walter Gibson but Theodore Tinsley. In fact, PARTNERS is Tinsley’s first Shadow novel. I read he studied Gibson’s writing style and aimed to achieve a certain verisimilitude with the prose. Today, I can’t say if he did, but the prose flowed well. An aspect of the writing that was likely a product of the times was the omniscient narrator where you rarely got into the characters heads, much less The Shadow. That was likely intentional because Tinsley has us readers (and certain characters) witnessing a thing only to reveal later that The Shadow had already performed a different task. It was very much like the movie serials of the time.

Speaking of The Shadow himself, I enjoyed his disguises and his ability to blend into his surroundings. He appeared both as a young and old workman and Tinsley treated us readers to a classic sly wink as the disguised hero vacated a scene just as another character paused and frowned in odd recognition. A surprising aspect of The Shadow’s character was when he constantly seemed to be five steps ahead of events. Like Sherlock Holmes who knew, for example, the villain in the The Hound of the Baskervilles before he even left London yet sent Watson on errands anyway. The Shadow did the same thing with his team which consisted of Burbank, a man who communicated the plans to other agents, reporter Clyde Burke, and Harry Vincent, who acts as The Shadow’s second-hand man. Ironically, just like Doc Savage’s compadres, Vincent gets himself in trouble and The Shadow has to rescue him, but Vincent proves an able partner.

I listened to PARTNERS from a new all-cast recording up on Audible. It was fantastic and I got a definite old-time radio vibe. There were no sound effects,  but there was soft jazz music at the end of each chapter. A funny aspect of the narrator was his slight pause every time “The Shadow” was mentioned in prose. Another note on the recording: they edited out much of the attribution. Since I had the hard copy and there was a particularly great action sequence, I marked it to re-read and study. It was then, while the audio was playing in my ears, that I noticed they were leaving out some words. As an avid audiobook listener, I wish other productions would do the same thing.

I thoroughly enjoyed PARTNERS IN PERIL and I’ll be quickly moving on to more Shadow novels. THE SHADOW UNMASKS is the only other full-cast recording while THE VOODOO MASTER and THE BLACK FALCON are narrated traditionally.

*P.S. In 2018, I’m reading mindfully and part of that is to read more of what I already own. Ironic timing, then, when I open up the hard copy to mark the passage I mentioned above only to find the receipt. I checked the date: 14 January 2009. I finished PARTNERS  on 14 January 2018. Nice serendipity.

The Haunted Legion: A Walt Slade Pulp Story by Bradford Scott

A little under a month ago, I discovered Walt Slade, El Halcon, the Texas Ranger extraordinaire as chronicled by prolific author Bradford Scott (aka A. Leslie Scott). It was a chance meeting, Slade and I, in an antique store in Jefferson, Texas. The book was FOUR MUST DIE, which, as it turned out—thanks to some excellent background from James Reasoner—was the one book in the paperback series not written by Scott. But I loved the character so I immediately followed-up by reading KILLER’S DOOM, another novel in the paperback series, this time actually written by Scott himself.

But Walt Slade got his start in the pulps. He was an honest-to-God pulp hero, his adventures gracing most covers of Thrilling Western. If you read James Reasoner’s short history of this character, you’ll learn Scott took Slade out of the pulps and reformulated him for the emerging paperback book audience. Having read two novels—with dozens more to go—I was quite curious about one of his pulp stories.

Last week, I stopped into one of the local Bedrock City comic stores here in Houston because I knew the owner sold pulps. I hoped he would have any issue of Thrilling Western and I was in luck. He had a handful and I bought the May 1947 issue. The Walt Slade story in question was “The Haunted Legion”—and the cover font was that old scary font from the 1940s! What was the pulp version of Slade like?

Well, what immediately jumped out at me were the illustrations. As usual with the pulps, pencil illustrations accompanied nearly every story. With “The Haunted Legion” being the cover story, it had more than a few. I’m not sure who the illustrator was, but his take on Slade was pretty much as described by Scott and how I pictured him. So far, so good.

As the story being, Slade is down at Matagorda Bay, Texas, and before you know it, we get ourselves a story. It’s told by an old Mexican who relates the tale of Black Mora. And when I say he tells the story, I’m talking almost a full first chapter in which the POV actually switching to Mora himself and the legend of this pirate captain and the ghosts that walk the region. Twas a tad odd, but it certainly captured the mood, especially considering Bradford Scott’s penchant for flowery descriptions.

No sooner does Slade hear this story than his eyes catch sight of a group of men on horseback. It’s stormy and he only sees them when the lightening flashes once. The next time electricity illuminates the sky, they are gone. But there is also a major bonfire. A nearby house and barn are engulfed in flames. How? And might the two things be related?

Well, of course they are.

A key difference in this pulp story versus the paperback stories literally jumped off the page: language. In “The Haunted Legion,” Slade talks just like most other characters, and Bradford Scott writes the dialogue using phonically spelled words: Figger, mebbe, yuh, etc. I don’t remember Slade’s dialogue being that way in the two books I’ve read so far. It made Slade seem dumber and, frankly, it irritated me a little. I got used to it, but I guess I just like my heroes to sound smart.

There’s a good dose of gunfights and action, but there was a surprising level of mere investigation. Like a good traditional mystery, Bradford Scott laid out the clues for the reader and the clever one might have been able to deduce the culprit. I didn’t, but then I wasn’t trying to. But Slade gets to tell the local sheriff—another dumb lawman, but one who is loyal to Slade—all the clues that led him to discover the owlhoot. Were it not for his clothes, Slade could easily have come across as a detective from England. It was clever and wrapped up the story neatly.

All the traits that readers enjoy about Slade is on display here, including his fast guns, clever brain, and singing voice. He is a very enjoyable character and I’ll happily be reading more of his adventures. I liked the short form of this story pretty well. It’s an eight-chapter story, and, in true pulp form, each chapter has three sub-sections. They are easily identified by a large first letter and small caps in the first couple of words. It’s pure formula, but when you like something, you can simply consume it and be satisfied. I was satisfied with “The Haunted Legion,” and I may have to make a return trip back to Bedrock City and buy the rest of the magazines.

Killer's Doom: A Walt Slade Western by Bradford Scott

I first made the acquaintance with Walt Slade a couple of weeks ago on my vacation up to East Texas. Then, it was a novel I picked out at random from a wonderful antique store in Jefferson, Texas, and read most of on the vacation itself. I enjoyed FOUR MUST DIE so much that I sought out more Walt Slade westerns. Turns out I already owned one in my large collection of old paperbacks I inherited from my grandfather.

KILLER’S DOOM was that book and man what a title. And it’s a pretty nifty cover, too. The back description leads off with a banner headline: “Catch Covelo!” That is the underlying plot of this novel.

Slide is out west in El Paso and he’s received a threatening letter:

“El Halcon, you will not catch Juan Covelo, but some day Juan Covelo will catch you, and then for you it will be muy malo! Muy malo!”

For those that don’t know, El Halcon is Slade nickname. It means the Hawk, likely because he has such good eyesight. Anyway, Covelo is a legend in the area for he rides around with a great black hood over his face, committing all sorts of horrible crimes and violence upon his victims. Slade correctly reckons it is to hide the bad guy’s true identity so he takes up the case.

Covelo has a gang of owlhoots riding with him, eight if I remember correctly. What makes this novel so grand is watching over Slade’s shoulder as he investigates, gathers evidence, fights, shoots, and whittles down the gang number until there is only Covelo left. That's not a spoiler. That's a western trope, one with which I have zero problem.

When I mentioned to my dad that I had read that first Slade book, he immediately started rattling off all the traits Slade was known for: his horse, Shadow, his singing, his rapid fire shooting, his eyes. I was taken aback with the mention of singing. A singing cowboy? In a book? In FOUR MUST DIE, not all of those were apparent. They were all there in KILLER’S DOOM, including the singing.

Shadow, the horse, was also on full display. I got a sense of his character the first time I met him, but in KILLER’S DOOM, he actually talks! Well, not really, but he and Slade have such a good camaraderie that author Bradford Scott (really A. Leslie Scott; click here for some background) actually wrote dialogue for Shadow, then followed it up with something like “…his snort seemed to say.” Charming.

KILLER’S DOOM also introduces the reader to a past villain, one that Slade already brought to justice. It was nice to see that the author understood weaving ongoing threads throughout this long series even back in the day when each book seemed to stand on its own.

I enjoyed KILLER’S DOOM about as much as FOUR MUST DIE--maybe a tad more--and I really love the character of Walt Slade. I have already started my third Slade western in a row!

When it comes to westerns and western writing, there are still things, techniques, and terminology I need to learn. As part of my education, I read with a pencil in my hand and circle various words and phrases I see over and over again. From there, I extract them into my own files and read them over before and during the writing of my own westerns. Here’s a sample two page spread.

I highly recommend the Walt Slade westerns. Now that I know what to look for (hat tip to James Reasoner), I have spotted them in just about every used bookstore I’ve entered in the past few weeks. I love discovering a new-to-me series in which I get to scour bookstores in the coming months and years hoping to find yet another Walt Slade adventure.

Four Must Die: A Walt Slade Western by Bradford Scott

On a recent trip to East Texas, I stopped in Jefferson, Texas, and scoured a few antique stores. I found a motherlode of old paperback westerns, maybe two hundred or more, all for a dollar each. The issue was which ones to buy? I didn’t need any L’amour or Gray or Short, so I started judging the books by the cover art and cover blurb. FOUR MUST DIE was branded a Walt Slade Western. Something tickled the back of my brain enough that I bought it and read it on my vacation.

And I’m glad I did. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

As I am wont to do—please tell me I’m not alone in what I’m about to tell y’all—I saw a book by an author I’ve read and know (James Reasoner’s Death Head Crossing) so I propped it up for the next buyer to see. So charmed with myself, I took a picture and sent it to James. He thanked me, and then promptly started telling me about the other books in the photo! I told him via email that I very nearly called him to discuss what I was seeing because he has forgotten more about westerns than I’ll probably ever know.

He was the one who told me that FOUR MUST DIE was the last of the paperback originals in this series and the only one not written by Walt Slade’s creator, Leslie Scott. The real author of FOUR MUST DIE was Tom Curry, a fellow author who penned some Jim Hatfield novels prior to this. I have come to the conclusion that if there’s an old-school pulp writer that I want to learn a bit about—especially if it’s a western—all I have to do is google the author’s name and James’s name and there will likely be a blog post. Here’s one for some background on Leslie Scott.

Back to today’s forgotten book. FOUR MUST DIE shows Texas Ranger Walt Slade skulking around El Paso searching for Barney Hale, an outlaw with a peculiar set of instructions: he needs to kill four seemingly random men in the region. Slade muscles his way into Hale’s good graces and convinces the owlhoot that, Slade, can get the job done in half the time. Hale agrees, and Slade sets his plan in motion.

He knows these four men—the editor of the newspaper, a cattleman with land north of town, a worker in the land office, and the owner of a smelting plant—and gets them to vanish for a time until Slade can get to the bottom of this whole shebang. There’s an oily attorney, the Honorable Alton Z. Carson, behind the scheme that even Slade can’t figure out until a single word is uttered: “Gold.”
What follows is a flat-out joyride of a western. Slade is a fun character, quick on the draw and even quicker with his wits. He is tough as nails, but isn’t above actual manual labor in order to root out the bad guys. And I love his horse, Shadow. There’s a unique beast with a special way he runs when the bullets start zinging past them.

You remember me mentioning that tickling I had in the back of my brain when I saw FOUR MUST DIE in the store? Well, that’s because I inherited a Walt Slade book from my grandfather. I’ll be getting to that book next.

As James wrote to me, this was the last of the Walt Slade westerns. Fittingly, the last paragraph reads thus: "With a wave of his slim hand, Walt Slade mounted Shadow, and they [the men left behind] him ride away, to where duty called and high adventure beckoned." That's a great way to end a series...and a perfect starting point for someone like me.

FOUR MUST DIE is a well-written western and if it’s any indication of the type of story of all the other Walt Slade oaters out there, I just found me a new series to collect.

BTW, if you're interested, here is the photo I sent to James.

Forgotten Books: The Fourth Gunman by Merle Constiner

Sometimes, a western features a guy walking, riding, talking, and thinking. But little in the way of shooting.

THE FOURTH GUNMAN by Merle Constiner is the first book I’ve read by him. It is one half of an Ace Double, the flip side being SLICK ON THE DRAW by Tom West. I own a handful of Ace Doubles and, based on the description, I chose Constiner’s book first.

The story revolves around George Netfield, proprietor of a saloon up in Kirkville, Wyoming (I think). He is what you’d typically find in a western written in 1958: tough, lean, cunning, quick on the draw, but quicker on talking. But the end of chapter 1, one of his workers lays dead. He realizes there are some bad men roaming around the county, many of them from the 7 Diamond ranch. Additionally, some of the finer men in the county are gathering up steam in a more legal manner. Lastly, a small cadre of gun totters made their presence known. I think you can guess how many there were by the title.

Little by little, Netfield seems to be the only man who discerns what’s really going on. He’s out to stop it, but roadblocks and bad hombres keep getting in his way. A rich man by the name of Crewe, old and somewhat enfeebled, doesn’t think much of Netfield’s suspicions, especially considering Crewe has employed two of the bad guys. Little by little, the noose around Netfield tightens, and he has only a few allies…if they can stay alive.

Perhaps it’s just an assumption but I’ve always thought of westerns, especially older pulp-inspired westerns from the 1950s, as action-packed romps with lots of shoot-outs and fighting. THE FOURTH GUNMAN certainly has its share of fighting, but it is few and far between. There are a few fine action sequences, one in a lumber yard that’s positively stellar. But I have to admit much of the action was over so quick that I have double-back and re-read certain sentences to verify bullets were loosed. The action was so quick that the gunshots were over in a sentence. At first I was surprised, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that true violence back in the old west was often swift, brutal, deadly, and over within seconds. Then my respect for Constiner’s book grew.

But still it seemed that Netfield did a lot of talking. The story read a bit like a detective tale, where Netfield would go here or there, gathering pieces of information, and then piecing it together. He wouldn’t always tell other characters and, thus, we readers would also be in the dark. But along the way, the cast of suspects keeps growing and  you pretty much figure out what the bad guys are up to, and then it is only a matter of time to see how Netfield would get through the book.

Whenever I read westerns—heck, any book really—I always have a pencil in my hand so I can circle or underline a word, a phrase, or a bit of history. There were few pages without a mark when I completed this novel, not the least of which was Constiner’s great descriptions of the landscape and the towns. For a genre that likes and prefers lean storytelling and descriptions, Constiner made the extra effort to color his prose well.

I enjoyed THE FOURTH GUNMAN and will certain pick up future Merle Constiner books when I see them.

Anyone else read this book? Any recommendations for other Constiner books?

Forgotten Books: The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber

When I read Frank Gruber’s retelling of his days as a struggling then successful pulp fiction writer from the 1930s, I realized something important: I don’t have it so bad here in 2017.

Frank Gruber was one of the more well-known and prolific authors to emerge from the pulp fiction years from the 1920s through World War II. By his own estimates, Gruber wrote more than 300 pulp fiction yarns, 60 novels, and more than 200 screenplays and television scripts. THE PULP JUNGLE is his retelling of his time as a writer, how he started, how he persevered, the decisions he made, and how it all turned out.

In a word, it is a sobering read.

Like many of the successful pulp writers in the depth of the Great Depression, Gruber wrote everything. A ledger from the months August 1932 to June 1934 indicated he wrote 174 “pieces” which totaled 620,000 words, all on a Remington manual typewriter. He called himself a sloppy writer, so he had to retype everything after he corrected the manuscript. The fiction spanned the gamut: Sunday School stories, detective stories, love stories, spicy stories, sports stories, etc. Those words were not solely fiction. He wrote tons of articles often on topics he had to learn on the fly. In the book, Gruber lists the dollar amounts he earned for various pieces. Even in 1932 dollars, those meager sales didn’t add up to a living wage.

But he persevered. His move to New York in 1934 proved to be the kind of starving artist story that sounds good when you’ve made it but horrible at the time. He arrived in the Big Apple with the Remington, clothes that fit into a suitcase, and $40 after paying rent. And “I had something else…the will to succeed.” But those early New York years were bad. He “existed. Some days I had a single meal, some days I tasted no food at all other than the tomato soup at the Automat.” The tomato soup in question is actually warm water (which was free), catsup (also free), and crackers (free). That was the “soup.”

Gruber got two breaks that helped him on his way. One came from honesty. He had been paid twice for a single story and, reluctantly, Gruber had sent the second check back. That ended up paying dividends when the editor of Writer’s Digest came calling to see the man who had returned that check. The editor paid Gruber to be a contact in New York.

The other break—The Big Break—came in 1934 in one of those great true tales you hear. Gruber gets a call on Friday afternoon. Operator #5 was going to press the next day but was a story short. Could Gruber write a 5500-word story overnight? In his retelling, he started at 8pm and had a character. Two hours later, he had his leading lady. By 3:30am, he had his big finale…but still needed a plot thread to weave it all together. He got it, and delivered the 18 pages by 9am. He didn’t hear back for a few days. He started to worry, so he called on the editor. Oh, he was told, we pay on Friday. Pay? Yup, the story was purchased. And then he was asked for another. According to Gruber, “I was ‘in.’”

From that moment on, Gruber worked steadily and for higher paying markets. He cracked the big dog on the block—Black Mask—and kept going. The key factor here was that Gruber never stopped working. Yes he had made it, but in those days, a writer was only as good as the next sale. Not like today. So he kept working on stories, then branched out into novels, both detective stories as well as westerns. All the contacts he had made during the lean years paid dividends later on, including when he moved to Hollywood.

THE PULP JUNGLE is chock full of great little nuggets of truth. Writing to market is a growing aspect of indie writers, but Gruber and his pals did it back in the 1930s. They had to or they didn’t eat. Another modern trend is books or courses or classes on writing. Yes they serve a valuable purpose—I greatly benefited from two online courses with Dean Wesley Smith late in 2016—but constant writing means a writer is constantly improving his craft. By definition, each story or book is better than the previous. I can attest to that as well.

For any person who dreams of a full-time writing career in 2017, that dream is still attainable. But what the story of Frank Gruber’s professional life suggests is that hard work, determination, and perseverance will enable a writer to hone the skills necessary to become a full-time writer. It also demonstrates that writers must recognize and seize opportunities when they present themselves. Don’t think you could write a story overnight (or insert your own personal challenge here)? Perhaps Gruber didn’t think he could do it either…until he said “yes” and then he delivered.

You can, too.

Reading THE PULP JUNGLE is a great snapshot into the life of a real pulp fiction writer and might be essential reading for any writer who is considering the professional writing life.