INCOMING

• Burt Arthur, Gunsmoke in Nevada.  Western.  "Johnny Canavan was two hundred pounds of fighting man --one hundred pounds in each fist."  
• "Spencer Dean" (Prentice Winchell), Murder After a Fashion.  Mystery featuring department store detective Don Cadee.  Cadee is asked to provide pirate-proof protection for an upcoming display of French gowns.  Interesting premise but in real life something very hard to do.  (A neightbor of Kitty's when she was young used to go  to the Paris fashions shows and draw the designs on napkins to be smuggled out to a knock-off dress company.)  Winchell was a prolific writer  for the radio.  Besides the Dean pseudonym, he also wrote as Stewart Sterling, Jay de Bekker, and Dexter St. Clair.  For the pulps he wrote some of the Black Bat stories, many of the Dan Fowler stories, and (under the house name Grant Stockbridge some of The Spider novels.  Winchell was also on of the primary writers for The Shadow radio show.
• Hal Dresner, The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books.  Comic novel.  Dresner, who has written for television and the movies was once part of a hardy gang of young writers -- along with Lawrence Block, Darion Zimmer Bradley, and others -- who wrote soft-core porn novels for William Hamling's Nightstand Books  This book came from that experience. ( Both Block and Westlake wrote similar books.)  For an interesting look at Greenleaf and Hamlin's publishing empire, see Todd Mason's blog post for November 13th at Sweet Freedom (at socialistjazz.blogspot.com).
• Steve Frazee, The Outcasts.  Television tie-in novel based on the 1968-9 western series starring Don Murray and Otis young.  An ex-Confederate officer and a former slave who fought for the Union team up as bounty hunters.
• Donald Hamilton, The Poisoners.  A Matt Helm espionage novel.  Need I say more?
• L. P. Holmes, Rustler's Moon.  Western.  Only Hugh Yeager "could stop the bloodbath that was about to engulf the town and the vast Double A rangeland."  Holmes also wrote as Matt Stuart.
• Ray Hogan, A Bullet for Mr. Texas.  A Shawn Starbuck western.  'Starbuck came to Hagerman's ranch, 'Hash Knife,' following the trail of his lost brother, Ben, but he stayed to become a hired bullet catcher for the tyrant."  Hogan wrote at least two dozen Shawn Starbuck novels.
• Hans Holzer, Window Into the Past:  Exploring History Through ESP.  Another book of total bushwah.  I can't help myself; I'm addicted to this sort of junk.
• Velda Johnston, Deveron Hall/ "Whit Masterson" (Robert Wade), Hunter of the Blood/ "M. K. Wren" (Martha Kaye Renfroe), Oh, Bury Me Not.  A Detective Book Club omnibus.   Johnston was a popular writer of romantic suspense with some three dozen novels (some as by "Veronica Jason") to her credit.  Masterton was one of the two major joint pseudomyns (the other being "Wade Miller") of Wade and Robert Miller; Wade continued writing under both pseudonyms after Miller's death.  The Wren is the third mystery about Conan Flagg, a former intelligence agent and current bookstore owner in Oregon.
• Harold Q. Masur, The Last Gamble.  A Scott Jordan mystery.  Jordan was a popular character from 1947 through the Sixties and beyond.  Masur also ghost-wrote a mystery novel for opera singer Helen Traubel and was one of the anonymous editors of several Alfred Hitchcock anthologies in the 1970s.
• James McClure, The Blood of an Englishman.  A Tromp Kramer and Micki Zondi mystery.  Kramer is an Afrikaner police detective and Zondi is his Bantu police sergeant  in this highly acclaimed series.
• Lewis B. Patten, Six Ways of Dying.  Western.  The Doniphan "outfit was engaged in a bloody range war, and the bitter hatred of one of the brothers erupted in all its fury against the rival bunch -- and against his own father."  Patten published over 100 westerns, some as by "Lewis Ford" and others (in collaboration with Wayne Overholster) as by "Lee Leighton" and "Joseph Wayne."
• J. B. Priestley, The Old Dark House.  The classic mystery and the basis of James Whale's 1932 comedy horror film starring Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and Charles Laughton,  The novvel was originally published in England under the title Benighted.  The copy I picked up was in terrible condition -- waterstained, torn, and pure-dee ugly. Oh, well.
• Qui Xiaolong, When Red Is Black.  Mystery, the third in the series featuring Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanai Police Bureau.  Qui was in the United States in 1989 when the Tiananmen Square protests; he stayed in the US because he feared reprisal from the Chinese Communist party.  His mysteries are also commentaries on Chinese society.
• Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop, The Texas-Israeli War:  1999.  SF post-apocalyptic novel..  This was Saunders' only novel and Waldrop's first published book.   Anything by Waldrop is worth reading and this one is especially recommended for Texas-philes and for Israeli-philes.
• "Jonas Ward" (William R. Cox), Buchanan's Gamble.  Western.  The Buchanan series of western novels were created by William Ard under the "Jonas Ward" pen name.  After Ard's death, Robert Silverberg completed the unfinished sixth manuscript in the series; Brian Garfield wrote the seventh Buchanan book; William R. Cox wrote the final sixteen books in the series.  Buchanan's Gamble was Cox's third outing as "Jonas Ward.