The Fraudulent Broad (1958)

Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...

James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.

While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.

What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.

However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.

And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...

Recommended.

The Man Called Noon (1969)

Ruble Noon awakens laying on the dirt with a broken window above him, a wound from a bullet that just grazed his noggin, and no memory whatsoever of how he ended up in this predicament or the bad hombres that appear to be after him. Unsure if he's supposed to be a lawman being chased by outlaws or an outlaw being chased by lawmen, Noon crawls his way out of Dodge and ends up hitching a ride on the next train out of town, eventually making his way to a ranch with a pretty lady proprietress and a stable of unsavory hands. Every time Noon tries to lay low and wait for his memory to come back, trouble seems to find him. But Noon will quickly discover that he's not so bad at shooting his way out of trouble...

I'd seen a few western movies based off works by Louis L'Amour (there seemed to be a steady supply of them that appeared as TV movies in the 90's into the early 2000's) and of course I was familiar with the name, but I'd never actually read one of his hundred or so novels... until now. Given my love of pulp, spaghetti westerns, and Old West history in general, it's surprising I'd passed by L'Amour for so long: he's like the Elvis Presley of western fiction in terms of name recognition and his novels continue to sell a tremendous amount of copies even today as reprints. The dude lived one hell of a life and also seemed to be insanely humble about his own literary prowess ("I'm just now getting to be a good writer" he said... when he was 80 years old.)

The Man Called Noon (which was made into a euro western film - Hombre llamado Noon in 1973) starts off with pure action and the pace never seems to let up. One of the more remarkable things I found in this novel was L'Amour's pacing as a writer. This is lean, pulpy fare that doesn't have time for wasted words and unnecessary distractions. Because of this, I breezed through the book in record time. Even the dialogue kept up with the constant forward momentum of the writing: 

"You should have listened when you had the chance," she said. "Now you have no chance."

"That's a matter of opinion," he said cooly.

"There are five of us," she said.

"But only one that's you," he replied calmly, "and that needs only one bullet."

"You'd shoot a woman?"

He smiled. "You've chosen to play games with the boys, and when you do that, you accept the penalties. I see here only four men and one cold, treacherous wench who would betray her best friend for a dollar."

Oh, did I mention the character Ruble Noon is BASED as fuck too?

This is a dude who gets shot I don't know how many times throughout the course of the novel and is still up the next day to drink black coffee and show off his five o'clock shadow. Of course, Noon was played by a different actor in the film version, but the way he reads in this novel kept making me think of a Charles Bronson type of man's man in the role. The manner in which the amnesia plot surrounding Noon unravels is also highly satisfying, with one particular gut-punch twist that forced me to put the damn book down for about twenty minutes and take a walk. Don't you love when a book throws you like that?

The other characters are your usual assortment of outlaws and bad men, along with a friendly maiden, the treacherous wench quoted above, and a helpful Mexican bandito that Noon busts out of jail because at a certain point the odds are so stacked against him he needs another gun on his side. Some might scoff at how cliched the romance between Noon and the ranch owner Fan is given how quickly they appear to be falling in love with one another, but I accepted it as believable considering Fan has recently lost her father and is surrounded by mostly scumbag ranch hands on her property. When another decent fellow finally comes into her orbit, it's unsurprising she'd be interested in him.

The Man Called Noon culminates in a frenzied search for long-hidden gold somewhere in or around Fan's ranch with more than one set of players vying to get their hands on it first. I won't spoil the finale, but it goes without saying that the lure of gold and riches really does bring out the worst in certain people.

Recommended.

Atomic Beasts and Where to Kill Them - Barbarians of the Storm - Book II (2022)

Dan and Fenrik's whacky hijinks continue as the search for a frozen scientist takes them into dangerous waters. But wait! Frank, Merith, and Killer from the previous book want their own subplot, and by God they're gonna get it! But wait! Erzulyn and a suit of sentient armor get to go on their own cosmic adventure! But wait! We also follow the exploits of villainous characters like Xulgog and the Nekroking! But wait! There's a talking sword too? Shit, I need a wiki to keep up with all these characters...

Whereas the previous adventure was heavily focused on Dan and Fenrik's journey, the second book in the 'Barbarians of the Storm' series, Atomic Beasts and Where to Kill Them, turns into the equivalent of what happens when your D&D players want to split the party and you end up with a slew of different adventure threads. Sometimes this kind of balancing act of wildly disparate plot threads can turn into a cumbersome slog, but author and noted Floridaman Rob Rimes is especially efficient in keeping the pace swift and all of the varying conflicts interesting.

And I mean, really, who the fuck doesn't want to read a sequence where a foul-mouthed koala bear goes on a Rambo-style murder spree against a bunch of slimy goblins?

However, I was somewhat surprised to find myself most drawn towards Erzulyn's plot thread and the journey through space and time she undergoes. While the author doesn't go overboard with it like a yawn-inducing doorstopper fantasy novel from the traditional publishing space, there is a significant amount of world-building added to Atomic Beasts... that was perhaps not as prevalent in the initial entry in the series. What I appreciate is that all of the additions to the setting, be they land, sea, or indeed otherworldly terrain, all feel like a natural extension of what was previously established in book one.

My review of Dan the Destructor mentioned the author's present tense writing style briefly, but I want to give you a snippet of the evocative prose you're getting when you crack open these books:

Frank, torn leather jacket flapping in the wind, cautiously walks towards the cavern, sword on his back, survival knife on his leg, sidearm on his hip, and sawed-off shotgun in his hand. The ground starts to elevate but the drake's tracks are still visible, as they lead up into the shallow cavern's mouth.

I don't often encounter this style of prose in the pulps I read, but damn, once you settle in to this series you couldn't imagine it being written any other way. Atomic Beasts... often comes across like a movie script to the most badass 1980's sci-fi/fantasy cinematic endeavor that never was. I'm sure if it was an actual film series, it would be cheaply made by Italian producers, filmed in the Spanish desert, have a cast of questionably dubbed Yugoslavian actors alongside a couple of random Americans in exile like Reb Brown and Cameron Mitchell.... and it would be fucking awesome.

I think my biggest gripe from the previous book in the series still exists here to a slightly larger extent. Atomic Beasts... feels incredibly episodic, which, yes, this goofy reviewer realizes this is part of an ongoing series and would be the author's intention. But it does mean that this individual entry has less opportunity to stand on its own with its own unique contribution to the series. The conclusion comes across like the ending to a weekly television serial with a number of characters in perilous situations. All I was really missing was the "SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT CHANNEL!" narration. Again, this is not a major knock on the book or anything, just a caveat. While the 'Barbarians of the Storm' series definitely has pulp roots, this isn't like a Conan or... I dunno... a Mack Bolan - where one can drop in and out or read books out of order with little consequence. You buy book one, you're in this for the long haul, boyo.

Recommended.

The Long Moonlight - Nightvale Book 1 (2020)

"I hate gang wars. They're coarse and rough and irritating... and they get everywhere." That's probably what the audacious thief known as Xerdes was thinking as he moved from rooftop to rooftop across the city of Menuvia. Xerdes has recently found himself in the crosshairs of rival crime lords, the city guard, hired killers, and a fellow outlaw lass who possibly just walked out of a Whitesnake music video. And all Xerdes wants is one big score to live the good life for a while... but will his next score be his last?

You all know of RazörFist, right? He's that guy on YouTube who cosplays as Bret "Hitman" Hart and has all the catchphrases like "Fuck you, I was right!" and "That's about all. Peace out. Godspeed!" Mr. Fist has also become something of an author in recent years, starting with this absolute banger known as The Long Moonlight. Coming in at a svelte 125 pages, The Long Moonlight is a delectable crossover of fantasy and noir in pulp format that simply drips with atmosphere from beginning to end. Rife with the kind of grandiloquent wordplay you'd expect from the heyday of pulps, it's unabashedly purple, but that's not a bug of the genre, it's a feature.

If you've read any press or watched any of his streams on the subject of his book series, you may know the author is refreshingly open about his writing influences: there's just as much Fritz Lieber as there is Dashiell Hammett in tone, setting, and style. There's a shot of Robert E. Howard with how some of the action is handled, and then there's a chaser of Raymond Chandler with portions of snappy dialogue. In particular, the wiseass rejoinders that emanate from main character Xerdes from time to time has an echo of Marlowe (minus the ungodly chain smoking). There's also Mr. Fist's computer gaming influences that come to the fore - the Thief series being chief among them. I'm about as good at stealth games as Joe Biden is at balancing a budget or keeping his hands off of small children, so I've never even attempted to play Thief. My only experience with these games is watching others play them, but I can absolutely see how some of the gloomy stylings of the series made their way over to The Long Moonlight.

Something else I know RazörFist enjoys are the Death Wish movies. Without spoiling too much here, there's a certain point in the story where a vengeance angle begins to unfold, and while it's not exactly Bronson-esque in the way it's executed, the brutal results do bear some vague similarities to said revenge flicks. It's good to know that even the fictional city of Menuvia can experience its own Summer of Love!

Which brings me to perhaps my only quasi-complaint about The Long Moonlight. In the midst of Menuvia's fiery but mostly peaceful protests is Inspector Coggins, a side character who features in a few brief interludes when our main character is offstage. I actually found Coggins and his no-bullshit attitude to be a pretty based character (well... for a cop, at least) - to the point where I was slightly disappointed this character's side story of solving grisly crimes and ferreting out corruption in the city guard didn't have a tad bit more time dedicated to it. I see this as a positive complaint though, for it means I found myself invested in the author's world, lore, and characters and wanted to see even more of it.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out The Long Moonlight also features a few pieces of black and white art provided by the author himself that are peppered throughout the narrative. The art is just as evocative as the text and compliments it well, hitting the reader with a forlorn dungeon synth album cover vibe that I can get behind.

While I still heartily recommend neophytes go back and read the masters of pulp from yesteryear, there are more than enough worthy successors in this arena in the contemporary to read alongside them, and RazörFist's The Long Moonlight deserves a spot on your bookshelves if you're a pulp inclined reader. I look forward to delving into his follow-up Nightvale novella very soon.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

After a client is killed on his watch, Los Angeles-based private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself embroiled in another puzzle box of a case involving jewel thieves, a corrupt fortune teller, some crooked cops, a gambling ring evading the local law, and a not-so-gentle giant hoodlum on the prowl for his treacherous ex-girlfriend. Grab your cigarette case and the nearest carafe of black coffee, gumshoes, because we're about to get more concussions than a 1980's pro wrestler!

Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe is quite possibly my favorite film noir and after re-watching recently it occurred to me that the novel it was based on - Farewell, My Lovely - was one of the few Raymond Chandler pieces I hadn't got around to reading yet. I corrected this heinous oversight as quickly as possible and found myself once again sucked into the lights and shadows of Chandler's vision of the West Coast with Phillip Marlowe - perpetual smartass and would-be knight in shining armor - as my tour guide.

Those steeped in crime novel lore are likely already aware that Chandler often cobbled his Marlowe novels together by stitching previously written short stories into a singular narrative, but truthfully, the sometimes abrupt changes of pace and plot trajectory in Farewell, My Lovely might give away this trick to even a neophyte reader. I personally don't have a problem with this, but I concede this factor could be bothersome to some, especially keen mystery and whodunnit fans looking for a neat and comprehensive wrap-up by the end of the novel. In bringing different stories together as one, Chandler sometimes inadvertently creates plot holes, drops characters for long stretches of time with no apparent explanation, or introduces what should be an important character extremely late in the narrative.

However, the loose strands of plot surrounding the confounding mysteries Chandler presents never appeared to be of any major concern to the author. His primary objective was drenching the reader in atmosphere, and Farewell, My Lovely, much like its immediate predecessor The Big Sleep, is awash in a delightfully blackened ambiance from the sinful streets of Los Angeles to the broken and disaffected cast of characters each with a stain or three upon their souls. In the middle of it all is Marlowe, a man who should be broken in more ways than one but always finds a way to persevere through the mire and pursue justice... even if no one else appears to be interested in pursuing it.

There are moments of purple prose that wonderfully exemplify the pulp style, where Chandler goes out of his way to describe scenes in lavish detail to really transport the reader into the room. These are the moments where the reader can tell how much Chandler was in love with language, but there are just as many instances where instead of belaboring the point, Chandler's quick wit comes through like a blunt weapon over the head:

"I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face."

Finally, I'll leave you with this: a fun Farewell, My Lovely drinking game. Point your browser to a completely cucked and compromised den of leftist gobbledygook like Goodreads and take a shot every time you scroll past a contemporary review of this novel where the reviewer clutches their pearls and nearly faints at Raymond Chandler's use of colorful language. Congratulations. You're now as much of an alcoholic as Philip Marlowe appears to be. It's no secret that Chandler, much like his pal Ian Fleming, wrote novels that are no longer suitable for mOdErN aUdIeNcEs, which is why you'd be best served picking up an older edition of this book if you're ever interested in reading it, because a master of prose like Chandler deserves to be read free of censorship or abominably tedious "content warning" invasions prefacing his work like bad graffiti.

El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (1934 - 1936; compilation 2010)

Before Conan, before Solomon Kane, there was Francis Xavier Gordon, otherwise known as "El Borak". Equally adept with the gun as he is the sword, Robert E. Howard's ass kicking Texan soldier of fortune battles ruthless Turk bandits, surly Afghan chieftains, and wily Russian despots across all corners of the Middle East. It's the kind of fiction that'll put hair on a man's chest, by God!

Full disclosure here: this review is likely going to be pure gushing rather than any kind of nuanced look at a particular book. The reason for this is simple: Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers and El Borak is my favorite of his characters - and that's saying something coming from a Conan superfan.

This Del Rey collection features all of the El Borak stories Howard dreamed up in the mid 1930's. As such, for brevity's sake I'm reviewing the entire collection as a whole rather than focusing on each individual story here.

I was initially attracted to the El Borak stories thanks to the promise of western style action in a completely different setting - the "eastern" as some have called it. Although the stories take place half a world away from the Old West, it's fair to say they have all of the same visceral, elemental aspects of a great western story: from the man versus nature survival segments to the blood and thunder of cacophonous battles to the hero who was once renowned as a gunfighter back home, it's all here.

Moreover, it is simply remarkable how well the reader can envision the mountains, gorges, and baking desert plains of the Middle Eastern setting given the fact that Robert E. Howard never ventured anywhere near that part of the world during his lifetime. Howard conjured his Middle East from nothing more than guidebooks he acquired for his personal library. His other characters may have gained more mainstream popularity over the years, but Howard's El Borak tales are the true heavyweights of his writing career, giving the reader a glimpse at some of the very best writing the Texan author was capable of producing.

If I had to pick one of the short stories as a favorite it might be "The Lost Valley of Iskander", which sees Gordon stumbling upon a lost city of Greeks living in a secluded part of Afghanistan. It's arguably the closest any of these particular stories gets to the fantastical, but it features a nice mélange of mystery and survival alongside a grandiose final battle. Howard even works some of his beloved boxing pastime into this story when Gordon has to compete in a meaty bare knuckle brawl with the giant leader of the Greeks for macho supremacy.

This particular compilation uses artwork from Tim Bradstreet with actor Thomas Jane modeling as El Borak. The artwork is a fantastic addition to these stories and makes me pine for an El Borak movie starring Tom Jane we never got to see...

I would be remiss in pointing out that this particular compilation also features stories with two other American adventurers: Kirby O'Donnell and Steve Clarney. While these stories are just as enthralling as the El Borak oeuvre, Howard simply didn't write enough of them in his lifetime for these characters to get their own volumes, so the publishers have (wisely, in my opinion) included them alongside Gordon's adventures. Despite sharing a similar premise of an American in the far east searching for treasure or adventure, both O'Donnell and Clarney have their own personalities. Clarney in particular seems to have more of a wiseass style that readers didn't often see in Howard protagonists. Don't sleep on these stories just because Gordon is out of the picture, they're still fun reads.

The Wizard's Stone (2023)

Apprentice wizard Odo is tasked with transporting some precious cargo to a king's court in a faraway land. Odo's protector becomes Inoch, a brutish mercenary captain with grey morals, a crossbow, and an itchy trigger finger. Together, Odo, Inoch, and his band of ragtag mercenaries face down bandits, brigands, and foul creatures with low enough THAC0 scores to ruin anyone's day.

And here I thought you just don't get fantasy like this anymore. The Wizard's Stone is a tight novel at only about 290 pages which doesn't go in for the worst excesses of door-stopper fantasy books yet author Herman P. Hunter indulges in just enough of the deep, descriptive, and dare I say, flowery prose that pulp era stories were known for that the reader can still manage to get lost in its pages. It's as much a coming of age story as it is a road trip from Hell story set in an oftentimes dark and dangerous fantasy world. The only thing missing here was a mysterious dungeon synth soundtrack to accompany the novel.

The main thrust of this novel is the dynamic between Odo and Inoch, two characters who are nothing alike but are teamed together through circumstance and must quickly learn to rely on one another in order to survive the harsh journey they find themselves on. Initially, these seem like two characters who shouldn't co-exist together at all; one a naïve kid who knows little about how the world outside his cloistered upbringing really is and the other a no-nonsense killer who's entire credo is to acquire gold and live long enough to spend it. Inoch's band of mercenaries, while technically side characters, are just as intriguing as the mercenary captain and the author wisely spends a little bit of time developing and expanding their characters so that when shit starts to hit the fan, the reader actually cares about them being placed in potentially lethal peril. This was one of those novels where I was casting an imagined film version of the story in my head as I was reading and for some reason I kept picturing Inoch as Kurt Russell in Escape From New York... only as a D&D character.

Speaking of D&D, the author's own byline acknowledges the Dungeons and Dragons influence in his writing, and as an old-school D&D nerd myself, one thing I found endearing about the magic in The Wizard's Stone was when I could spot exactly which spell Odo was casting from the magic-user spell list in the old Player's Handbook through Hunter's own creative descriptions. There were more than a few times reading where I would say to myself "Oh, there's Odo casting a Magic Missile again." or "Holy crap, Odo knows Shocking Grasp?!" Fun times.

Mild spoilers ahead, so skip this paragraph if you're sensitive to that kind of thing... perhaps the only minor quibble I have with this novel are a few moments of obvious trope adherence. For instance, you kinda knew the end was near for one particular character when they started talking about their potential plans for life after the adventuring days were over like the cop in the movie that's two days from retirement. These moments aren't really enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the novel, but your mileage may vary here.

If you're starved for some hard-hitting pulpy fantasy in an era of large publishing houses only putting out crap from the pronoun politics brigade that no one reads anyway, it's a safe bet you'll devour The Wizard's Stone in short order. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where this author goes next.

Dan the Destructor - Barbarians of the Storm - Book I (2022)

Dan - an unassuming pussy from the Kingdom of South Florida - is zapped through a portal to another world and must team up with barbarian badass Fenrik in order to save the world from an evil sorcerer and maybe, just maybe, find a means of getting himself back home.

Dan the Destructor is a book that does not fuck around. We get the briefest of set-ups and then it's immediately into the adventure. I admit to being slightly thrown off by the present-tense style author Rob Rimes opted for here, but that feeling only lasted a page or two. The present-tense prose actually works in the book's favor and helps the story maintain its no nonsense quick pace. What we are left with is the epitome of a page turner.

In recent years I've become a big fan of creators who can successfully combine a bit of fantasy with science-fiction and still make their story work, so something I immediately appreciated about the Barbarians of the Storm setting Rob Rimes has created is he has zero fear of genre-bending. Barbarians, magic, undead fiends... it all co-exists with big guns, time portals, and post-apocalyptic brio. I can also appreciate how inserting what are ostensibly a few contemporary Earth characters into the mix allows the occasional well-placed pop culture reference to slip into the dialogue, be it pro wrestling or Death Wish 3 (the superior brand of Death Wish, I might add). I was half-expecting a cameo from the Beastmaster or Yor at a few points during the story...

Humor is also prevalent throughout Dan the Destructor, but it never overstays its welcome. For every moment of near-slapstick, there's a brutal fight scene to temper the tone. I would be remiss to not mention an extra short story at the end of the book that serves as a backstory for a character introduced towards the end of the adventure. This story leans even heavier into the brutal side of the scale and certainly concludes things on a strangely satisfying bloodthirsty note.

Perhaps the only minor quibble I can find is this story definitely has a case of sequel-bait syndrome. Of course, it's literally advertised as book one in the title, so I can't complain too much, but Dan the Destructor is obviously the start of a greater narrative and won't exactly be good standalone reading. As I said, it's a minor quibble and if you're anything like me you'll already be ordering the rest of the series before you're even finished with Dan the Destructor.