Movies I've Missed (Until Now): The Colossus of Rhodes

I remember when this movie played at the local drive-in theater, almost fifty years ago, and I wanted to see it then, of course, because I knew it had sword fights in it and I loved anything with sword fights. But I missed it. Then years later, I found out that it was the first movie directed by Sergio Leone, which made me want to see it even more because by then Leone had become one of my favorite directors. Even with that extra motivation, more years went by without me ever watching THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.


Well, I’ve remedied that now . . . and I’m not sure it was worth the wait.


Washed-up American cowboy star Rory Calhoun plays Dario, a Greek visiting the island nation of Rhodes in the year 260 B.C., and looks a little uncomfortable at times in an ultra-short toga. He finds himself in the middle of a lot of political intrigue involving Rhodes, Phoenicia, and Greece. The Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue and one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, stands guard over the harbor at Rhodes and plays a major part in all the plotting and double-crossing going on.


To put it bluntly, the first half of this movie is pretty dreadful. Everybody stands around and talks, and since too many of the characters look too much alike, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. Thankfully, things pick up a little in the second half. You’ve got rebels attacking the palace, Phoenician soldiers smuggled into the city to overthrow Rhodes’ king, Rory Calhoun being captured by the bad guys and escaping several times, molten lead being slung by catapults so it rains down from the sky, and numerous sword fights, including one where Calhoun battles against half a dozen soldiers while standing on the arm of the giant statue, a scene that provoked a comment of “Okay, that’s actually pretty cool” from me.


Overall, though, there’s very little sign of the brilliant director Leone would become only a few short years later. There are a few sweeping vistas, and that’s about it. None of his other trademark shots or pacing, and it probably doesn’t help matters that the music isn’t by Ennio Morricone. THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES could have been a pretty good pulpish adventure movie, but it’s too long, too talky, and too complicated. If you’re a Sergio Leone completist, by all means go ahead and watch it. Otherwise I can’t recommend it.


(As I commented to Livia, a few years later and that might’ve been another washed-up American cowboy star playing Dario: Clint Eastwood. As for my favorite Rory Calhoun movie, it’s probably ANGEL, a surprisingly good piece of Eighties sleaze with a title character who is, according to the movie poster, “high school honor student by day . . . Hollywood hooker by night!” Calhoun plays a homeless denizen of the Sunset Strip who’s a, uh, washed-up cowboy star, and he’s great in the role. If you haven’t seen ANGEL, that one I recommend. The sequel, AVENGING ANGEL, is okay but not as good.)

First Look at the Redemption, Kansas Cover

Available March 1, 2011!  (But it can be pre-ordered at Amazon now.)

The Green Hornet Chronicles

I hold in my hand (well, not literally, but they're right here beside me) my contributor's copies of THE GREEN HORNET CHRONICLES, the new anthology of Green Hornet stories from Moonstone Books.  As a long-time fan of the radio show and a faithful viewer of the TV show when it ran, I loved writing my story in this one.  The rest of the line-up of authors is spectacular, and I'm really looking forward to reading the other stories.  Highly recommended!

Forgotten Books: Escape Across the Cosmos - Gardner Fox

Return with us now to the days when rocket ships had fins and square-jawed heroes carried positron ray guns. Gardner Fox’s ESCAPE ACROSS THE COSMOS has all that and more. It opens with the hero, Kael Carrick, being marooned on the prison planet Dakkan, which is actually more of an execution planet because it’s totally barren of life and anyone left there with no supplies is doomed to death by lack of food and water. This is how the Empire deals with prisoners convicted of murder. Carrick has been convicted of killing the famous scientist Hannes Stryker, who had saved Carrick’s life by rebuilding his body after the former soldier was gravely injured during a battle against an alien race. Carrick’s brain was the only thing preserved, and Stryker was able to regrow a new synthetic body around it. Got all that? This is back-story from before the book even starts.

Obviously, Carrick was framed and didn’t really kill his benefactor, but he’s left to die on Dakkan anyway. Luckily for him, the planet isn’t as bare of life as everybody thinks it is. It’s actually the secret hideout of a society of criminals (this isn’t too much of a spoiler, as it’s revealed very early on) and Carrick falls in with them. Eventually he escapes and sets out to discover who really killed Hannes Stryker and framed him for the crime. Naturally the beautiful blond crook who has fallen in love with him comes along, too.


At this point, ESCAPE ACROSS THE COSMOS takes on a certain Gold Medal-ish “man on the run” feel, despite the science fiction trappings. Fox isn’t content to leave it at that, though. Instead he piles on a conspiracy that threatens the entire galaxy and a heapin’ helpin’ of Lovecraftian horror, along with a lot of colorful, pulpish action, and it all winds up in a fine showdown with the real bad guys. Yes, it’s mostly silly, hokey, very dated stuff, and most modern SF fans would read a few pages, laugh or sneer, and toss the book aside. But if you grew up reading this sort of hardboiled adventure science fiction like I did, ESCAPE ACROSS THE COSMOS is a lot of fun indeed. It’s also about 50,000 words, instead of a bloated trilogy five or six times that long.


Gardner Fox is probably best known for writing comic books, and he turned out some of the most important, influential stories in that medium, most notably “Flash of Two Worlds”. But he was also a prolific pulpster, turning out many yarns for PLANET STORIES and the like, and he also produced a lot of paperback originals in various genres and under various pseudonyms. He was one of the best at swashbuckling historical adventures, and he created and wrote a well-remembered sexy spy series in the Sixties, THE LADY FROM L.U.S.T., under the name Rod Gray. I’ve found his paperback work to be inconsistent but have enjoyed many of his books. ESCAPE ACROSS THE COSMOS, published by Paperback Library in 1964, may have been an expansion of a pulp story, but if so, I couldn’t find any evidence of it. It shares some concepts with some of the comic book stories Fox was writing at the time, so I suspect it was probably an original. No matter what its origins, I found it to be an entertaining novel and well worth reading if you’re an old guy like me who doesn’t mind if the rocket ships have fins.

Rancho Diablo #1 is Now Available!

RANCHO DIABLO #1: SHOOTER'S CROSS is now available on Amazon.  I'm hardly an unbiased observer since I had a hand in the series' creation, but I think Mel Odom did a spectacular job on this book, especially considering that this is his first Western novel.  If you like action-packed Westerns with great characters, this one is highly recommended.

Wipeout - The Surfaris

Another song I like, and some good music to get me up and working on a Saturday morning!  I've never forgotten my friend Dale Sacco playing this song on his drums at a high school talent show more than forty years ago and doing a great job on it.

Forgotten Books: Tickets for Death - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

I’m pretty sure I’ve told some of this story before, so those of you who have already heard it please bear with me. In the spring of 1978, I had been selling short stories to Sam Merwin Jr. at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for a little over a year. Sam and I corresponded frequently – no email in those days, of course – and in one letter I asked him who was currently writing the Mike Shayne stories that appeared in the magazine under the Brett Halliday by-line. Honestly, I wasn’t angling for work, I was just curious. I’d been reading the stories and wanted to know who wrote them, since I knew by then that the original Brett Halliday, Davis Dresser, didn’t write the magazine stories. (In fact, by 1978 Dresser had passed away.)


Sam replied that he had been writing most of the stories himself and named several recent entries that he’d done. Then he asked me if I would like to try my hand at one, since he liked the short stories I’d been writing for him. The Shayne yarns ran 20,000 words, he told me, and paid “a flat, lousy three hundred bucks”.

Well, to a 24-year-old freelancer struggling to build a writing career, the idea of writing a 20,000-word story seemed a little daunting, but $300 didn’t sound lousy at all. In fact, it sounded like a fortune. That would pay the rent for two months on the apartment where Livia and I were living, with some left over to buy groceries. Plus I had been a reader and fan of the Mike Shayne novels ever since I was ten years old and checked out a copy of THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE from the bookmobile that came out to our little town every Saturday from the big library in the county seat.


So of course I wrote back immediately to Sam and told him I’d love to write a Shayne story. He was pleased and said he would send me a copy of the Mike Shayne “bible”. He also instructed me to “just get the story down” and not worry too much about making sure everything was consistent with what had come before. He could go through it and make it sound like a Shayne if he needed to, he said.


But I’d been reading the Shayne novels off and on for years and was confident that I knew the characters, the setting, and the right style for the series. This was the biggest opportunity I’d had so far in my career, though, so I wanted to make sure I got it right. In order to do that, I quickly rounded up the first ten or twelve novels in the Shayne series (I already owned some of them, and the others were still very easy to find back then) and read them one after the other, totally immersing myself in the world of Michael Shayne before I ever wrote a word of my first story, which was published in the December 1978 issue of MSMM under the title I had given it, “Death in Xanadu”. As far as I remember, Sam changed one word in the manuscript, so I think I did a pretty good job of making it sound like a Shayne yarn was supposed to sound.

This is why, with a few exceptions, my Mike Shayne stories read a lot like they were written in the Forties. Those first dozen or so novels by Davis Dresser were my model for all the ones I wrote. (One of my Shaynes was actually set in the Forties, but that’s a whole other story.)

All of which is my nostalgic, very long-winded explanation for why it’s been 32 years since I last read the 1941 Shayne novel TICKETS FOR DEATH. After all that time, it seemed new to me when I recently reread it.

Mike Shayne has been accused of being the generic hardboiled private eye, and in some of the later books that may have been the case, but the early books were something totally different. Those novels are a highly appealing blend of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection. Imagine Sam Spade marrying Pam North and solving cases like Nero Wolfe with a gathering of suspects at the end and a detailed explanation of who the killer is, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the early Shayne novels are like. Phyllis Shayne, Mike’s beautiful young wife, was killed off in the series in the mid-Forties, but she’s still around in this one and is, in fact, the reason Shayne gets mixed up in a case involving counterfeit tickets being cashed in at a greyhound racing track in a resort town north of Miami. When the two of them arrive in town, they’ve barely checked in at their hotel when a couple of gunmen working for a local mobster ambush Shayne and try to kill him. Naturally, they wind up dead for their trouble, although Shayne is wounded in the exchange of gunfire. It’s nothing that guzzling down a few glasses of cognac at every opportunity won’t cure, though.

From there, it’s not long until one of the people involved in the counterfeit ticket racket is murdered. Several more murders occur in fast and furious fashion, because this is one of those books where all the action occurs in the space of five or six hours. You’ll probably think you have things figured out – it seems pretty obvious what’s going on – but things are seldom as simple as they seem in Mike Shayne novels, and that’s certainly the case here. Dresser throws in twist after twist, and I’m reminded of the fact that the plots in these early Shayne novels often rival those of Erle Stanley Gardner’s for complexity. Shayne, of course, is two jumps ahead of everybody else (and three jumps ahead of the reader most of the time), and always figures out not only who the killer is but also how he can collect the biggest fee.

TICKETS FOR DEATH is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year, and if you’ve never sampled a Mike Shayne novel, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start, although the early ones probably are best read in order.

Howard Days Photo

This morning my friend Tom Johnson posted this photo on one of the Yahoo Groups we belong to.  It was taken in Cross Plains, Texas, at one of the annual Howard Days get-togethers.  The absence of the pavilion behind the house tells me the picture was taken sometime around 1996 or 1997.  Left to right in the photo are Charles Gramlich, Tom Johnson, Aaron Larson, and me.  Those were great times, but then, any visit to Howard Days is a lot of fun.

Death Notice - Todd Ritter

DEATH NOTICE is Todd Ritter’s first novel, and it’s a really good one. The small, picturesque Pennsylvania town of Perry’s Hollow is rocked by the murder of local farmer George Winnick, whose body is found in a homemade coffin beside the road. One of the most bizarre things about the murder is that the victim’s lips are sewn shut, which soon leads to the arrival of a special state police task force on the trail of a serial murderer known as the Betsy Ross Killer. But that’s not all. It seems that a death notice for the victim was faxed to the obituary writer at the newspaper before George Winnick was killed.


Ritter gives us several point-of-view characters in this novel. There’s Kat Campbell, the chief of the local two-person police force, who’s also a single mother with a son who has Down’s Syndrome. The head of the task force is Nick Donnelly, whose own sister was murdered by a serial killer when Nick was a boy. Then there’s the obituary writer, Henry Goll, also known as Henry Ghoul because he shuns much human contact and carries terrible scars from a tragic accident in his past.


Yes, this is one of those modern mystery novels filled with much angst and brooding and tragic pasts. It’s to Ritter’s credit that he gets past this set-up that’s rapidly becoming a cliché and succeeds in making them believable characters, as well as making the reader care about them. It helps that he’s come up with a good plot as well. Several times during the course of the book, it appears that the mystery has been solved, only to have a new twist crop up, along with fresh murder victims, of course. Everything leads up to a wonderful, over-the-top climax that’s reminiscent of something out of a weird menace pulp from the Thirties. (For those of you unfamiliar with them, the weird menace pulps were a lurid, very entertaining sub-genre featuring stories filled with grotesque horror trappings and endings that featured rational, rather than supernatural, explanations. In other words, they were the forerunners of the basic Scooby-Doo plot, only played seriously for the most part.)


But to get back to DEATH NOTICE, yes, I figured out who the killer was, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the novel. Good characters, a great pace, enough clues to satisfy fans of fair play detective yarns, enough gore for horror readers, and that dynamite ending . . . what’s not to like? This doesn’t strike me as the first of a series, but it could be. Whether it is or not, it’s a very strong debut and has me looking forward to Todd Ritter’s next book. DEATH NOTICE will be out in about a week, and I highly recommend it.

Down Here on the Ground - Wes Montgomery

If you need chillin' out -- and I often do -- this song'll do it for ya.