Availabel Now - RIO MATANZA

http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Matanza-Bodie-Kendrick-ebook/dp/B008QP9CMS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1343661930&sr=1-1&keywords=rio+matanza

Available now on Kindle, print version to follow in a couple weeks.

This is Book #2 in the Bodie Kendrick – Bounty Hunter series. Plenty of gritty, hardboiled Western action to be found here.

This one partners Bodie with another manhunter, Doc Turpin, out of Texas. In quick order, they dispatch the bloodthirsty Klegg-Harrup gang that has mercilessly slaughtered innocent citizens during a bank robbery in the town of New Gleanus. But that's only the start …

Here's the "back cover" blurb:

Bodie Kendrick had a reputation for being one of the most relentless bounty hunters throughout Arizona and New Mexico.

Doc Turpin, out of Texas, shared similar renown.

When the two of them partnered up to bring in the Harrup-Klegg Gang, it was the end of the trail for the bloodthirsty outlaws who had robbed the New Gleanus bank and then needlessly, mercilessly slaughtered innocents as they shot up the town riding away.

The gunsmoke from that encounter has scarcely cleared, however, before Doc is mysteriously lured away in the middle of the night by a rebelista firebrand known only as Estraleta. Troubled by his new partner's sudden and ill-explained departure, Kendrick pursues the pair in order to try and find out what is going on. His only clue is that they reportedly are bound for the notorious south-of-the-border town called Bordados.

Quicker than the rapid-fire discharge of a Gatling gun, Kendrick finds himself embroiled in a conflict between local rebels fighting to regain their town and a corrupt Rurale official backed by a wolf pack of American desperados who've found haven in Bordados and are hell bent on keeping it. Once again, Kendrick and Doc—along with the savagely beautiful Estraleta and a tormented former Confederate colonel—fight side by side against stacked odds.

But that's never stopped either one of them before …

And here's a "teaser" excerpt from the text:

While Doc was keeping his man pinned down, Kendrick walked over to Chulla, who’d managed to smother the flames that had caught his clothing and was now rolling back and forth on the ground, mewling in pain. Kendrick paused long enough to kick him nonchalantly in the head, knocking him unconscious and putting him out of his misery. That done, he drew his Colt and turned to Turpin, saying, "Lend a hand there, Doc?"

"Join in if you like," Turpin answered. "Workin' on flushing out a yellow dog."

But before Kendrick got off even a shot, Bedney called from behind the tree: "Wait a minute!  Hold it!  Hold your fire. I ain’t no match for the two of you, not no how. I’ll throw my guns out … I’ll do anything you say."

"Talk is cheap," Turpin said. "Let’s see those guns come out."

Bedney hesitated. "How do I know you won’t shoot me anyway?"

Kendrick said, "If we’re of a mind to shoot you, then shot is what you’ll get, regardless. Comin' out unarmed with hands high is your best chance. Believe it."

After several clock ticks, Bedney’s Colt sailed out and landed on the ground seven or eight feet from the tree. "That’s it. That cleans me out."

"Haul yourself out from behind that trunk then, where we can see you," Turpin said. "Hands high, like you were told."

Bedney emerged, visibly shaken. His bug-eyed stare swept over his fallen comrades. "My God, look at ‘em … all my pards … every one cut down." His eyes found Kendrick and Turpin, danced nervously back and forth between them. "You two are a couple of holy terrors, you know that?"

Turpin blinked away some of the blood dripping down off his left brow and said, "Not a damn thing holy about us, old man…we’re just doing a job."

           

Hopefully, there's something there to stir your interest.

Hope you give it a try, I think you'll be glad you did.

Persevere — WD

Noteworthy Reads: BLACKJACK by Andrew Vachss

http://www.amazon.com/Blackjack-Cross-Novel-Vintage-Lizard/dp/0307949575/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341958239&sr=1-1&keywords=blackjack+vachss

 

 

No one has portrayed evil—true evil—more powerfully than Andrew Vachss has in his writing. This carries even more of an impact when one understands that the whole purpose of his "fiction" has been to hold a mirror up to the factual evil he has encountered in his life's work (as a lawyer representing children and youth exclusively) combating predators who prey upon the young and vulnerable.

"Family of choice"—as opposed to birth families, who, with tragic frequency, are often at the core of the most brutal acts against their own—is another recurring theme in Vachss's writing.

This is once again true of Cross and the "family" of outcast mercenaries who are at the center of this novel. They are held together by a fierce sense of loyalty to one another and an equally strong lack of loyalty or sense of belonging to anything or anyone else. Their leader is Cross. He is a man for hire; a killer, an eliminator. And his team will help him finish any job he takes on—no matter what.

Many readers will already be familiar with Cross and crew from the series of short stories appearing in past Vachss collections, Born Bad (1994) and Everybody Pays (1999). A seven-issue series of illustrated Cross stories, titled simply Cross, also came out in 1995 from Dark Horse Comics.

In BLACKJACK, the first novel-length Cross, the ultimate mercenary is enlisted by a mysterious group calling themselves Unit 3, admitting only to being part of a "multi-national" organizational that has been tracking a long string of gruesome international killings where the bodies have all been found with their heads and spines removed. They want to hire Cross to hunt down one of these specialized killers—only in this case strictly to capture "the specimen" alive. Cross believes he has spotted a pattern to the series of killings and agrees to take the job but only with some special provisos of his own, one of them being an authorized-at-the-highest-level "Get Out of Jail Free" card for future use by him and each of his men.

The plot is complex and wonderfully twisty, the action intense, the cast of characters large yet distinctly drawn and memorable. All of it presented in Vachss's stripped-down prose, crisp dialogue, and quick-cut sequences that propel the reader along and practically commands you to keep turning the pages.

There is a paranormal element to this tale that builds steadily throughout and finally erupts in the climactic scene at a maximum security prison. Without giving too much away, let me say only that the "specialized killer" turns out to be what might best be described as an almost-supernatural purging force of accumulated rage, bent on removing a specific segment—the worst and most evil—from our species.

Perhaps Cross himself sums it up best when, after surviving the bloody prison encounter, he states: "But if a hard rain's coming—if the filth is being washed out of our race—then, whoever they are, this is one job I want them to pull off."

I predict readers will be echoing similar words, to the extent they'll be glad this is one more job Vachss has pulled off.

Another exciting, provocative read from one of the most powerful writers of our time.

Strongly recommended.

Noteworthy Reads: the ED RIVERS series by Talmage Powell

Thanks to the magic of eBooks and the vision of the good folks at Prologue Books (among others), long out-of-print books and genre series are getting new life breathed back into them. The mission statement of Prologue, in fact, is to: "Bring back to the reading public books that help shape the genres we know and revere today … to shine the spotlight on authors who may have been significantly influential on the current state of publishing, but who have never really received their due for one reason or another."

Toward that end, Prologue has re-released the entire series of Ed Rivers novels by Talmage Powell. For those not in the know, Ed Rivers is a Tampa-based PI circa late 1950s/early 1960s. Actually, he works for the Nationwide Detective Agency and is in charge of their Southeast Office. But, at least for the cases detailed in these novels, he operates pretty much the same as any of the more lone wolf-type PIs we see elsewhere.

There are five titles in the series. They are, chronologically: The Killer Is Mine (1959); The Girl's Number Doesn't Answer (1960); With A Madman Behind Me (1961); Start Screaming Murder (1962); Corpus Delectable (1964).

The titles were somewhat sensationalistic and not terribly evocative of the content (neither of which was uncommon for the era), but the writing and plotting were a cut above much of what else was being done in the genre.

Not only that, Powell dealt with themes that were rather daring for the time (an accused child molester; a WWII vet possibly committing murder while suffering PTSD – or shell shock, as they called it back then; a psycho bent on revenge), and avoided almost completely stereotypical plot devices relying on hoods and dames and blazing guns. Still, there's plenty of action to be found in these tales—Fisticuffs; the hero getting roughed up and frequently conked unconscious; gunplay; and no shortage of beautiful women.

It is the range of colorful characters that Rivers encounters and the sweltering Tampa setting that Powell paints so vividly that also helps to set these books apart.

The dialogue is a little too formal and flowery in spots, but Rivers is compassionate and insightful and plenty tough when he has to be. He's not above appreciating the pretty ladies who cross his path, but otherwise he comes across as tenacious and professional and refreshingly reluctant to toss around an over abundance of wisecracks. He is described frequently as "bearish" and homely or, as he himself puts it, having a mug that: "Women either get a charge from or want to run … and men either fear or trust to the hilt." He carries a .38 and a knife sheathed at the nape of his neck, the latter coming in handy almost as often as his gun.

Powell was a popular writer from the late 1940s through the '60s and wrote in various genres, though primarily mysteries, including a Mission: Impossible TV tie-in.

All and all, the Ed Rivers series is a very good entry in the PI genre and well worth checking out. The books certainly fit into the category of never having "received their proper due", and that's a damn shame.

You can check out all of these titles and more at www.prologuebooks.com .

BOOKS - A PART OF MY LIFE

The other night on The O'Reilly Factor (yeah, I like Bill O'Reilly and I watch Fox News – deal with it), Bill had a brief interview with Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Near the close of the segment, O'Reilly thanked his two guests and then said: "You guys and your music are part of my life."

That statement—or, more to the point, the sentiment behind it—really struck a chord with me. It set me to thinking …

What are the "parts" that make up our lives? For most of us, our parents and siblings, spouses and children, friends and co-workers, personal experiences, etc.—the loved ones and things closest within the orbit of our family and day-to-day routines make up the major "parts" … and, ideally, the most important ones.

But another important part, the part that helps us deal with what is often the grind of that day-to-day existence our lives can become, is our entertainment. Our pastime. Where we go, what we do to escape the grind, to "get away from it all".

Sometimes these escapes can be as simple as hearing an old favorite song on the radio. When you're a certain age (like O'Reilly and me, for example) and you hear the strains of "California Girls" or "Sloop John B", you are magically transported back to a different time and place—the time and place you were at when you first heard those songs. A time and place where you were young and the world around you and your responsibilities in it were far different … A time and a place and a song and a memory that have now become part of your life.

For the purpose of the rest of this blog and the audience it is likely to reach, I want to concentrate that theme on books and reading.

Books and reading have been part of my life for almost as long as I can remember, certainly for as long as I have been able to read.

I remember reading coloring books, not so much for the pictures I could color but for whatever simple story the series of pictures told … I remember reading comic books … I remember the Whitman Classics adaptations of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Robinson Crusoe (the first books I ever really owned) … I remember the old Classics Illustrated comic books (and the agony of ordering them through the mail and then having to wait for their arrival) – the only place I ever really "read" classics like Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, etc. … I remember purchasing Tarzan and the Lost Empire with its wonderful Frazetta cover off a drug store spin rack in Antioch, Illinois … I remember buying Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters off that same spinner …

I could go on and on.

Books have always been a part of my life. A big part.

I still have that original copy of The Girl Hunters. It's been with me for nearly fifty years now. Longer than the blessed 41-plus years I had with my beloved Pam. Longer than I've had my daughter and grandchildren in my life. It has survived countless "moves" from  house to house, town to town, state to state. From where I am writing these words, I can turn my head ninety degrees and see it amongst the other Spillane titles on my shelf of all-time favorites that contains my own personal Holy Trinity—Spillane/Mike Hammer, MacDonald/Travis McGee, and Hamilton/Matt Helm.



I remember when Pam and I were first married and our daughter was a baby, we didn't have a lot of extra money so we never really "went out" much, except for movies (drive-in double features) on a fairly regular basis. Pam didn't work outside the home, except for a brief period after our Michelle started school; after all, she was busy raising two "kids". She would always make sure I had "book money", though, even if we had to scrimp somewhere else.

On Mondays when I would return to work, some of my other co-workers would have tales to tell about partying or driving into the city for this or that event over the weekend. When they'd ask me what I did, I seldom had much in the way of anything exciting to report and I always suspected they may have felt a little sorry for me. What they didn't know (or understand) was that, via my books, I went thousands of places and did hundreds of things they could never dream of doing.

The truth of the matter is: I'm the one who feels sorry … for anybody who doesn't read.



In 1998, when I agreed to relocate from Illinois to Nebraska for the company I'd been employed by for many years, I spent nearly six months out in Nebraska alone while Pam stayed back in Illinois (also alone, but with our daughter and grandkids close by) trying to sell our house there before she moved out with me. By then I'd had some modest success with my own writing, though still was holding down a full-time job and getting very caught up in the grandparent thing. I'll admit (and Pam always knew it, too) that at first there was a part of me that had this cockeyed, romanticized vision of me in my motel room each night —free from distractions, no family obligations—pounding relentlessly on my keyboard like a dedicated pulp writer of old, churning out stories right and left, at a pace I'd never before come close to achieving.

Well, it didn't take very long to find out I was lonely and miserable as hell. I pecked away at writing and got down some worthwhile stuff that eventually turned into a book and a couple short stories, but my heart wasn't really in it and the pace of my output was no better (maybe worse) than before.

So you know what sustained me more than anything else during that long, lonely time?

That's right … Books. Reading. I found a used bookstore in a nearby town and there I was immediately among comfortable old friends who helped immeasurably in getting me through that blue time.

Yeah, books—some more specifically than others—have always been an important part of my life. I don't see that changing. In fact, when I give that final spasm and gasp that last ragged breath, I'd say it would be a real safe bet you'll find a book or my Kindle reader not very far out of arm's reach.

Persevere — WD

Available Now - THIS OLD STAR

Available now in eBook format --- THIS OLD STAR, my 2010 Peacemaker Award-winning short story (still available, too, as part of the Bad Cop-No Donut anthology for those who prefer printed material). Now on Kindle and Smashwords, coming soon to Nook, Apple, etc.
This is a gritty, suspenseful, bittersweet tale of good men having to make hard choices between right and wrong on the Western frontier. It's one of my favorites, I think you'll enjoy it.

 

This Old Star

www.amazon.com

~ A "Dime Novel" - short story ~ Not all men are defined by the work they do. But, for others, their job can become the best – or maybe worst – part of them. 

PULP WRITER ... AND PROUD OF IT

In the past couple years—largely in conjunction with the surge in e-publishing and the growth of blogs, Tweets, and so forth—a number of "old school" terms for popular fiction seem to have come back into vogue.

"Noir" gets freely—too freely, in my humble opinion (or IMO, just to show I'm "with it" as far as current vernacular)—applied to just about anything and everything. I'm expecting the noir line of Archie Comics any day now …

On a happier note, "hardboiled" seems to rightfully be getting recognized as a style that can be found in a much wider range of genres and/or sub-genres than just detective mysteries.

For the most part, the umbrella under which all of this gathers is good old-fashioned pulp fiction—another term back in prominence.

I've known for some time that I was a writer of hardboiled fiction. It's all I ever wanted to be. I cut my writing teeth on hardboiled PI fiction with my signature Joe Hannibal character. Hardboiled Magazine—the small press publication I started way back in 1985, and is continuing yet today under the guidance of Gary Lovisi—pretty much made the statement on where I stood and what my goals were. The Western fiction I've more recently branched into also has an undeniable hardboiled edge to it, as does the handful of other things I've written—including last year's NIGHT SPOOR, a hit man vs. vampire novel that I consider hardboiled horror.



But, for all that, I somehow never thought of myself as a pulp writer. Not that I considered myself above being categorized that way, and sure as hell not because I ever considered the words I put on paper to be great lit-ra-cha in any sense.

What it was, I've decided upon retrospect, is that I figured I was born too late and had missed the boat on being a pulp writer. After all, everybody knows the "golden age" of pulp was the 1930s and '40s. Ancient as I am, I don't go back quite that far.

Hell, I even came in on the tail end of the paperback boom of the 1950s thru the '80s. My first novel came out in 1988 and was in hardback. Fantastic as that was (and here's a little insight into how that quirky little mass I call a brain operates), it wasn't nearly as thrilling as when that same title was re-issued in paperback a couple years later, followed by my first paperback original! Now we were cooking. And then I was able to really feel complete as a writer when I finally spotted one of my titles on the rack at a used book store (see, I told you my thought process is a little quirky).

Anyway, I still never had thoughts of calling myself a pulp writer until fairly recently.

There should have been some hints as far back as '85 when I did Hardboiled—what the hell was that if not a modern-day pulp magazine? I even did the covers on yellow paper so it would look similar to old, yellowed pulp pages.

And on the Joe Hannibal listing at Kevin Burton Smith's terrific Thrilling Detective web site (www.thrillingdetective.com), Mr. Smith wrote some time back that the Hannibal stories and novels were "recommended for those of you who aren't getting enough pulp in your diet"; he went on to call me, thanks to Hardboiled, "a kind of spiritual leader to what I like to call 'The New Pulp'." And in a 2005 response to the site, I myself wrote: "I aim never to lose my pulp roots, and my inclination toward hardboiled is etched pretty firmly … "

Finally, in 2010 and '11, after I'd done a couple stories for David Cranmer's excellent  Beat To A Pulp web magazine (http://www.beattoapulp.com/) and started getting involved in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., I started to get a sense of how an even newer pulp era was starting to catch on in the world of e-publications and participating readers/writers.



What ultimately drove the point home for me came after I'd written COUNTERPUNCH, a novel in the popular Fight Card series created by Paul Bishop and Mel Odom. My friend (full disclosure) Lynn F. Myers Jr. wrote a review of the book in which he stated: "COUNTERPUNCH is pulp, yes pulp, and it is very good … Dundee would have been very popular as a writer for Black Mask or Dime Detective in the olden days."



It was one of those smack-yourself-in-the-forehead moments.

Lynn was exactly right. COUNTERPUNCH was, intentionally, a pulp novel. So were (albeit less consciously) all of my Joe Hannibal stories and books, my Westerns, and everything else I'd ever written … I was a goddamn pulp writer!

Yeah, maybe I'd missed the "golden age" of pulps … and then I fell between the cracks of the paperback boom … but now, in a new century, in my sixties, retired from a full-time job in the real world and thereby writing more prolifically than I'd ever been able to before … I'm doing what I always felt I was born for.

I am a genre pulp writer.

And you know what? I am damned proud of it.

Persevere --- WD

Available Now: THE FIGHT IN THE DOG

Available now - eBook re-issue of a previously out-of-print Joe Hannibal mystery thriller. This one is special to me for a couple reasons: First, I wrote it at the request of my late beloved Pam; Second, I was able to dedicate it to my frie...nd Andrew Vachss. Anyone familiar with Andrew and his work knows how highly he regards dogs. My Pam was a dog lover, too, and especially loathed abuse of dogs (or any animal). There'd been reports of dog-nappings and dog-fight rings in our area just prior to this and Pam wanted me to do a story exposing that kind of thing ... This book is the result. I hope you give it a try --- if you do, I think you'll like it.See More

The Fight in the Dog (The Joe Hannibal books)

www.amazon.com.