Friday's Forgotten Books, July 24, 2015

Next Friday, Evan Lewis will  helm FFB while I go to the Traverse City Film Festival.

(From the archives of Randy Johnson)

Bloody Murdock – Robert Ray

It wasn’t a new story. Older man falls for a young woman half his age and it costs him his marriage.

Laguna P.I. Matt Murdock, not the blind lawyer from New York, doesn’t know that at first. Ellis Dean wants to hire him as a bodyguard. It wasn’t until someone in a red pickup tried to kill Dean, forcing Murdock to put two bullets into the engine to get him off that he began to get the full story.

He’d read about the horrific car accident the night before that had crashed, bursting into flames and killing the young couple, a Mexican actor and the young woman with dreams of Hollywood.

Dean had witnessed the accident, which wasn’t an accident at all, when he’d followed them after she’d ditched him at a party. He was in time, and got photographs, of two men in a red pickup and a Porsche hosing down the wreck with a fire extinguisher. 

His client ends up firing him, then gets himself murdered, and the photos are gone. Then the dead girl’s sister comes to find out what happened.

We get a story of pornography, shattered dreams, and Murdock’s obsession with finding the truth though he’s been fired by two clients before the tale ends.

Good one.


From the archives of Ron Scheer.

Elmer Kelton, Texas Showdown

This book is actually two short novels by Elmer Kelton, first published in the 1960s and reissued under one title by Forge in 2007. Pecos Crossing, originally titled Horsehead Crossing (1963), appeared under Kelton’s own name, while Shotgun, originally titled Shotgun Settlement (1969), was published under a house pseudonym, Alex Hawk.

First off, Elmer Kelton is one of my top-10 favorite western writers. He wrote with a strong sense of history and an informed awareness of the West Texas terrain, its flora and fauna, and its weather. I find it easy to believe in his characters. They are not just convenient types but possess an emotional depth that makes them three-dimensional.

I would say he achieves this by conceiving of them as ordinary people who get themselves into all-too-human predicaments that force them into making choices. And these in turn drive a plot that is both inevitable and often unpredictable. As in his novel Other Men’s Horses (reviewed here a while ago), his central characters are fundamentally decent people up against dangerously determined men ready to lie, thieve, and kill.

His women are strong-willed and resourceful. Romance plays a role in both novels in this volume, as a young man falls in love with a girl who complicates matters as he follows his heart, though at the risk of losing his life.

Often, a pivotal character is a lawman who has learned how to wield authority with a firm but easy hand and has earned the respect of others by exercising a strong sense of fair play, even when upholding the law puts him on the unpopular side of a dispute.

One other thing. While there is a kill-or-be-killed element in Kelton’s fictional West, and men carry and use firearms, there is not an assumption that the reader is a gun enthusiast who needs to know the make, model, and caliber of every weapon that shows up in the narrative. It’s probably just me, but this habit of western writers today immediately draws attention to itself--like a fetish. For this reader, it comes across as too much information and disturbs rather than reinforces the illusion of a credible scene.

Pecos Crossing.  The central characters in this exciting yarn are two young cowboys who stop a stage to collect unpaid wages from one of the passengers. In the resulting confusion, a woman is accidentally shot dead. Her husband, a retired Ranger, then tracks down the boys to take revenge for her death.

Fleeing westward, the two come upon a young woman and her father, who is dying of TB. One of the cowboys, Johnny Fristo, wants to help them. His partner, who is chiefly responsible for the trouble the two are in, disagrees. Fristo, with a stronger sense of decency, prevails, though they lose time and the Ranger eventually catches up with them at a crossing on the otherwise treacherous Pecos River.

Like Other Men’s Horses, the story unfolds as a series of adventures encountered while traveling across a rough and mostly unsettled frontier.

Shotgun. The characters in this novel are drawn from the more usual stock of recognizable types that appear in westerns: the big ranch owner, his sons, a problematic neighboring rancher, his daughter, and a cunningly vicious villain who wants both men’s ranches.

Blair Bishop is the cattleman who, over a lifetime, has acquired a vast acreage. At the novel’s start, his main problem is a long drought that is drying up the water supply for his herds and leaving them with little grass to feed on. There has been an invasion of the thirsty cattle of his neighbor, Clarence Cass, and they are being driven back where they came from.

Relations between the two ranchers are further complicated by the fact that Bishop’s son, Allan, and Cass’s daughter, Jessie, make no secret of having fallen in love and intend to run off together if Bishop doesn’t give them his blessing.

Enter the villain of the story, Macy Modock, with a ten-year grievance against Bishop, who once had him sent to the pen for some wrongdoing. Having served his time, Modock hires a gunman and a shady lawyer to put the squeeze on Bishop by claiming legal ownership of parts of his ranch. Strengthening his hand, Modock lures Cass into his scheme.

Elmer Kelton

In a long and suspenseful conclusion, Jessie is holed up in a barn, bravely exchanging shots with Modock, while Allan lies unconscious beside her. Like the young women in Pecos Crossing and Other Men’s Horses, she is a credit to her gender.

Yvette Banek, STAIRCASES AND MURDER
Bernadette, THE UNQUIET DEAD, Ausma Zehanat Khan
Les Blatt,PANIC, Helen McCoy
Elgin Bleecker, NORTH DALLAS FORTY, Peter Gent
Brian Busby, THE SILENCE ON THE SHORE, Hugh Garner
Bill Cride, THE DUENDE HISTORY OF SHADOW MAGAZINE
Scott Cupp, RIVERS OF LONDON, Ben Aaronvich (WELCOME BACK, SCOTT!)
Curt Evans, THE INSPECTOR STODDART MYSTERIES of Annie Haynes
Ed Gorman, BONE JUSTICE, Elizabeth Fackler
John Hegenberger, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, Cay Van Ash
Rick Horton, THE LEOPARD, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Nick Jones, BRIGHTON ROCK, THE LAWLESS ROADS, Graham Greene
George Kelley, THE ARCHER FILES, Ross Macdonald
Margot Kinberg, JAMAICA INN, Daphne DuMaurier
Rob Kitchin, LITTLE GIRL LOST, Brian McGilloway
B.V. Lawson, MURDER AMONG FRIENDS, Elizabeth. Ferrars
Evan Lewis, THE SHADOW UNMASKS, Maxwell Grant (SHADOW MAGAZINE)
Steve Lewis, DEAD LETTER, Jonathan Valin
Todd Mason, October 1950: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, AMAZING STORIES, IMAGINATION, OTHER WORLDS: the US newsstand peers of the new GALAXY, Part 4 of 5
J.F. Norris. THE CAT SAW MURDER, D.B. Olsen
James Reasoner, GUN THE DAME DOWN, Gil Brewer
Richard Robinson, THE SELECTED STORIES OF ERIC FRANK RUSSELL, by Eric Frank Russell
R.T. PIETR, THE LATVIAN, Georges Simenon
Kevin Tipple. FALLING FROM GRACE, J.R. Lindermuth
TracyK, JOHNNY UNDER GROUND, Patricia Moyes