Thursday, July 10, 2025

FACE OFF


FACE OFF

Edited by David Baldacci

Simon and Schuster

356 pgs

 

After reviewing the first ever fictional private-eyes crossover last time, we thought it only fitting to follow with this team-up anthology produced by the International Thriller Writers dated 2014. It is a collection of eleven stories wherein two heroes from various thriller series meet as written by their creators. As Richard S. Prather and Stephen Marlowe proved back in 1960, it really is a very cool idea as twenty-two writers agreed in this collection of eleven top-notch stories.   

It's been our belief that today’s thriller writers are our modern pulp scribes and these twenty-two cement that fact emphatically with their fast paced, action-crammed gems. We don’t claim to be familiar with all of them, but characters like Jack Reacher, Special Agent Pendergast and Detective Harry Bosch are extremely well known.  

When Michael Connelly’s Bosch shows up in Bean Town and crosses paths with Dennis Lehane’s cop, Patrick Kenzie, you know something unusual is going to happen. Then just a few short tales later, Preston and Child’s Special Agent Pendergast finds himself confronting R.L. Stine’s Goosebump world and the eerie Ventriloquist Dummy Slappy. That one is guaranteed to give you nightmares. Of course everyone’s taste is different but not to worry. In this collection, there is a pairing to delight every one of you thriller affectionatos. 

Our personal favorite was the last entry, “Good and Valuable Consideration” wherein Lee Child’s Jack Reacher ends up in a Boston sports bar to watch a Yankees vs Red Sox baseball game and runs into Joseph Finder’s Nick Heller.  Reacher’s a Yankee fan, Heller roots for the Sox. Then there’s the poor slob caught in the middle of them. Easily one of the best, and funniest short stories we’ve ever read. This book is at Amazon, folks. Go grab a copy…now!

 

Thursday, July 03, 2025

DOUBLE IN TROUBLE

 

DOUBLE IN TROUBLE

By Richard S. Prather & Stephen Marlowe

Gold Medal Giant

Copyrighted 1959 Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Second Printing 1960

286 pages

 

In 1960, we were a thirteen-year-old freshman in high school. We are also a veracious reader, having been weened on comic books at an early age. We loved reading and by that year were devouring every kind of paperback book we could get our hands on, from the Ace versions of Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy adventures to the hard-boiled private eye series that seem to proliferate the drug store spinner racks. In that genre, abided some rather heady material for a shy, nerdy teen. Covers sporting sexy femme fatales in skimpy attire alongside tough-guy shamus were the norm and through them we entered the seedy world of such colorful heroes as, Mike Shane, Johnny Liddell, Mike Hammer, Rocky Steele, Stuart Bailey and Nick Carter to name few. Our personal favorite was Shell Scott. With his white hair and wise-cracking wit, Scott operated out of sunny Los Angeles, California; a far cry from the mean streets of the East Coast metropolises. 

Scott was created by writer Richard Scott Prather (Sept. 9, 1921 – Feb. 14, 2007). His cases were Prather’s most successful series. He also wrote under the pen-names David Knight and Douglas Ring. The first Shell Scott mystery, Case of the Vanishing Beauty, was published in 1950. There would be more than three dozen to follow. Before his death, Prather donated his papers to the Richard S. Prather Collection at the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, Wyoming.  The only thing we remember about those .25 cent paperbacks was Scott’s wry humor and weakness for beautiful dames. 

Another private eye series from Fawcett at that time were the Chester Drum books by Stephen Marlowe. Drum operated out of Washington, D.C. and was a no-nonsense guy always ready with both his fists and his .45 Magnum. Marlowe was Milton Lesser, (Aug. 7, 1928) born in Brooklyn, New York and died (Feb 22, 2008) in Williamsburg, Virginia. Unlike Prather, his own work covered a wider field including science fiction and fictional autobiographies of Goya, Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes and Edgar Allan Poe.  He also wrote under various pseudonyms and was awarded Life Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of American in 1997. His first Chester Drum mystery appeared in his 1955 novel, The Second Longest Night. 

Now imagine our surprise when we were looking at the latest paperback releases on the rack when we came across a thick book with both Shell Scott and Chester Drum on the cover. Both writers’ credits appeared under the saucy looking redheaded painted there. We couldn’t believe it. Someone had come up with the idea of teaming these two highly popular characters in one book aptly titled, Double in Trouble. Naturally we plunked our .50 cents on the counter and rushed home eager to read it. That was sixty-five years ago. Whether we liked it or not back then, is a lost memory in time. What was cemented into our still developing brain was the uniqueness of pairing two characters from two successful series.  At 13, it was like Thor fighting the Hulk. Over the years we lost our copy and had forgotten the book until, while online, some twenty years ago, we got into a discussion with other private eye enthusiasts and the title was mentioned. We chimed in with our recollection and bemoaned the fact that no other publisher had ever thought to reprint such a ground-breaking book. Several weeks later, we received a dog-eared copy of Double in Trouble in the mail. It was a gift from fellow writer, Mark Ellis. We were extremely grateful, put it up on a bookshelf and vowed not to lose that one.  Four days ago, at long last, we picked it up and read it again. Honestly, it was pretty much like a first time, as we truly had no actual memories of that first experience. 

So now, the review. One would imagine writing a book where the two stars would narrate their adventures in first person would be tricky to say the least. How Prather and Marlowe managed it, we can only guess. Each chapter is by either Scott in L.A.  or Drum in D.C. Both, through different circumstances, get involved via a mysterious and beautiful woman. They are drawn mystery that revolves around a Senate Sub-Committee investigating criminal activities in a nationwide trucker’s union. As is typical, within the  early chapters, both are threatened by either gunfire or badly knocked around by Neanderthal-like goons.  At some point in the back-and-forth orations, Scott learns of Drum and vice-versa. Then when the two connect on a long-distance phone call, rather than explain their participation in the case, each fumbles his words so as to give the other the impression they are part of the nefarious activities the other is looking into.  

Now this misstep continues all the way to the book’s last act in which they come face to face on a stormy night out in an abandoned Virginia country airport. At which point, they attack each other, and Prather and Marlowe proceed to give us one of the most brutal, detailed and savagely funny fistfights ever put on paper. It alone is worth the price of admission. Thus resulting in both finally awakening to the fact they are actually on the same side and have to team-up to beat the bad guys once and for all. The conclusion is brilliant and, in the end, delivers what the entire premise promised. As for this reviewer, it is now obvious we were much too young to appreciate Double in Trouble when it was first released. Today, we soundly applaud two skilled pulp scribes; masters of their genre and thank them for what is truly a wonderful treasure from the past. Now somebody please reprint the darn thing!


Wednesday, June 25, 2025

SPIDER - Robot Titans of Gotham

 

THE SPIDER : Robot Titans of Gotham

By Norvell Page

Baen Books

358 pgs

 

The Spider – Master of Men was one of the most popular pulp heroes of the late 1930s. All his adventures were over-the-top thrillers written by Norvell Page, himself a remarkable character. Born in Richmond, Virginia on July 6, 1904, Page grew up to become a journalist and between 1924 and 1934 he worked for such papers as the Cincinnati Post, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, New York Times and others. By the 1930s he had begun selling short pulp stories for various publishers and soon became known as the author of the majority of the adventures of the ruthless vigilante, The Spider. He, and other writers, wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. Molded in the tradition of the Shadow and other masked avengers, Page’s innovations to The Spider series included a hideous disguise for the protagonist, Richard Wentworth, and a succession of super-science menaces for him to combat. Dying of a heart attack on Aug 14, 1961, Page lived long enough to see many of his Spider tales reprinted in paperback ala this particular volume. 

In 2007 and 2008, Baen Books published two collection of some of the most outlandish Spider yarns. In this, the second volume, they reproduced three of them starting with

“Satan’s Murder Machines” copyrighted 1939. In a frantically paced adventure, The Spider and his team, to include Nita Van Sloan, Ram Singh and Ronald Jackson, must find a way to stop a squad of giant armored robots wreaking havoc throughout New York City and then disappearing beneath the waters of the East River after their attacks. It’s a typical Page nail-biter, hardly giving the reader a chance to catch his/her breath as the Spider must constantly elude devilish traps set to ensnare by the master mind behind the rampaging metal men. 

The second adventure is “Death Reign of the Vampire King,” and is dated 1935. Moving out of his normal New York haunts, the Spider battles a maniac who controls a horde of vampire bats able to poison and kill a victim with a single bite. Calling himself the Bat Man, he flies aloft with a glider-like suit directing his vicious winged beast in a story that goes from Philadelphia to Chicago and eventually climaxes in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Easily one of the wildest paced Spider tales of them all.  

The third and final story in this volume was our least favorite, as it is not another Spider adventure, but a story featuring a lesser known pulp character, the Skull Killer. Jeffrey Fairchild is a well-to-do man about town who has two alter egos. The first being the old and kindly Doctor Skull, the other the effective nemesis of crime, and master of disguises, the Skull Killer. In “The Octopus” dated 1938, an evil madman employs a special purple ultra-violet ray to turn ordinary people into horribly mutated monsters who much have human blood to survive. Soon a large part of New York’s population is infected and the story becomes one convoluted back and forth story with the protagonist jumping from one identity to the other while dealing with pathetically disfigured victims. It’s one of those stories was happy to finish.  With two out of three good yarns put forth, this is a decent collection and we give it thumbs up.