STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Legion of the Damned  (1953)   by Sven Hassel Sven Hassel was the pen name of Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen, who wrote a total of fourteen novels based in large part on first-hand experience he gained as a soldier for Germany in WWII.  Legion of the Damned  is considered the most autobiographical of Hassel’s works, detailing in first-person narrative the exploits of a young soldier who starts off the book convicted of desertion and placed in a concentration camp.  The inhumanities of the camps are presented in a blunt, matter of fact manner that only adds to the horrors being described. We follow our protagonist through his harrowing time as part of a bomb disposal unit before being assigned to a penal combat unit. The cast of characters expands from this point with much camaraderie and even room for a little ill-fated romance for our narrator before the war intr...

The Laramie River   Crossing  (1973) by Jack Ehrlich After a career as a lawyer, a district attorney, and a reporter for Newsday, Jack Ehrlich started writing fiction late in life. Thank God, because  The Laramie River Crossing  is stunning—a lean, mean, hard-edged adult-oriented western that left me hungry to read everything by the author.  This is a genuinely literary novel that takes the time to craft characters of real depth with myriad shades of gray. Smith (no first name given), and Preacher are bad men with a history of violence and crime. The first half of the book has a classic “men on a mission” set-up as Preacher goes about putting their previous crime ring back together at the behest of The Limey, their old handler and heist mastermind.  Preacher is not above bushwhacking his former colleagues or breaking them out of jail to force their involvement. The plot itself is deceptively simple...

Soldier of Fortune #11: Yellow Rain  (1984) by Peter McCurtin After a several years hiatus Peter McCurtin resurrected the Soldier of Fortune title with #10,  Yellow Rain , in 1984. A few authors are known to have taken on the McCurtin mantle to write this series, among them men’s adventure stalwart Ralph Hayes.  Yellow Rain  however is fully attributed to McCurtin personally, so I was excited to dive in, especially since I had never read a Soldier of Fortune book.  Please forgive me for wading into this slim book with the expectation of wall-to-wall action with little character development or depth of political shading or geographic and cultural detail. Instead I discovered a slow burn of a rescue operation with more of an espionage vibe than a military firepower one. In fact, I was reminded of the master himself, Ian Fleming, in the way McCurtin takes the time to make the ...

The Death of the  Führer   (1972) by Roland   Puccetti If pure literary pulp essence could be distilled and ingested in book form,  The Death of the Führer  by Roland Puccetti might very well be the end result. An outlandish tale relayed in breathless first-person narrative, this book isn’t simply fast-paced, it hurtles relentlessly with reckless abandon from one set-piece to the next, never allowing its reader to dwell on the last preposterous development before throwing its protagonist into the next level of escalating danger.  Our hero is Karl Gisevious, a doctor prior to WWII, who is now a reporter investigating a lead gleaned from a Russian doctor’s deathbed confession. The doctor claims to have been a participant in the autopsy of Adolf Hitler and was a witness to the fact that the body’s brain had been previously removed. This of course means that the Führer may...

Rio Desperado  (1962)   by Gordon Shirreffs As  Rio Desperado  opens, gunslinger Burke Dane cuts down the lynched body of his half-brother on the outskirts of a town where the young family man had gone to buy cattle. Dane’s only clue is the unique style of braided rawhide  reata  that was used to hang his brother.  Armed with basic knowledge of the town and the power-hungry cattle baron who runs it, Dane sets out to find those responsible and exact justice. He also intends to retrieve the $5,000 in poker winnings that was stolen from his brother’s corpse so he can give it to his brother’s widow and children.  This basic set-up is all that is necessary in the hands of a pro like Shirreffs, who wrote over 70 novels in his day. There is a depth of character and a literary flair to this book that belies its pulp roots. Dane saves the life of Jesse, a hot-headed young hired gun worki...

Texas   Fever  (1960) by Donald Hamilton While best known for his excellent Matt Helm espionage series, Donald Hamilton also wrote a fair share of westerns and it becomes obvious within the first few pages of  Texas Fever  that he was a genuine master of the genre. There is an immediate grasp of setting, characters, and purpose that sets the story into motion as we’re introduced to young Chuck McAuliffe following his hardened Civil War hero father on a cattle drive from the McAuliffe Ranch in Texas through Indian Territory to Kansas.  We enter the story in mid-drive and are alongside as their team runs into all manner of obstacles, from deadly bushwhackers in its opening pages to brutally enforced quarantines against potentially disease-carrying Texas longhorns in the border towns. Driving the narrative is a constant revenge-fueled feud with the leader of the bushwhackers who murdered Chu...

A Badge for a Badman  (1967)   by Brian Wynne (Brian Garfield) This is the 6 th  of 8 westerns featuring Jeremy Six, marshal of   Spanish Flat, written by Brian Garfield under the pen-name of Brian Wynne.  A   Badge for a Badman  kicks off in fine   form with an excellent and suspenseful sequence detailing how Marshal Six, his   deputy, Dominguez, and a small   group of devoted friends go into covert action   upon realizing that Burl Marriner and his gang have arrived in town to steal   the   Reservation consignment from the town bank.  Burl is a hard-case whose son,   Cleve, and a nephew, Wes, both share a history with Jeremy Six. It   all ends   with Six outgunning the elder Marriner and capturing an injured Cleve.  The real   villain of the book though is the now widowed Ma   Marriner who immediately pulls   together a large group of outlaws and sets off to free her son and kill M...

False Dawn  (1978)   by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro I first read False Dawn as a 16-year old thanks to my Science Fiction Book Club edition. Its grim nihilistic depiction of a post-apocalyptic America disturbed me greatly at the time; I was excited to revisit it as an adult to determine the cause. The answer came rushing back to me in the very first chapter as I was reintroduced to a brutal world of intense violence, rape, murder, mutants, and giant predatory water spiders. And all described in as muscular a style as possible.  Later in her career Yarbro would become synonymous with the ongoing Count Saint-Germain vampire series that drifts toward gothic romance. But that is far from what we have here as we follow our main characters, crossbow-wielding mutant Thea and former pirate-leader Evan, on a perilous journey through what’s left of America after wars, pollution, famine...

A Trap for Sam Dodge   (1961) by Harry Whittington Harry Whittington, sometimes referred to as “King of the   Pulps,” was an incredibly prolific writer, publishing over 200 novels,  mostly in the  crime ,  suspense ,   hardboiled , and  noir fiction  genres. Even   though  A Trap for Sam Dodge  is a   western, it still clearly adheres to the format of a classic  whodunit  mystery with an   everyman wrongfully   accused of a murder who must work alone to clear his name.  In this case, the   everyman is Sam Dodge who has returned to the town of   Bent River to attend the   funeral of its fast-gun sheriff, Miles Ringo, who was gunned down late at night   in the streets. Sam had a contentious relationship with   Ringo, having been his   prior deputy before a falling out over a woman sends Sam on to a hardscrabble   life as a rancher barely making ends meet. Upon his  ...

Close Combat  (1969)   by Jack Ehrlich I recently discovered and developed a deep appreciation for author Jack Ehrlich through his remarkable western,  The Laramie River Crossing . Ehrlich writes hard-edged, gritty books with painfully realistic characters navigating tricky plots while fighting their own base desires for violence and moral decay.  Such is the case with  Close Combat, a Vietnam-set tale that starts off deceptively resembling a straight-up “men on a mission” war adventure. Our main character, J.J. Hogan, is hand-picked to lead a force into the jungles of Cambodia to destroy The Monster, a top-secret radar installation that is decimating US air power in the region. The task is likely a suicide mission, but critical to the US war machine. The catch is that every aspect of the mission has to remain deniable for the US government, whether successful or not.  This geo...