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Author: Bob Byrne

What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

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What I’ve Been Listening To is back for another installment. Audiobooks are omnipresent in my life now. Work, home, car, walking, bedtime: I’m constantly listening to them. Often something I’ve listened to before, which lets my mind half-focus to no ill effect. But I’m still listening.

Some recent plays – all Audible, as I need to get Hoopla set up on my ‘new’ used phone. I have listened to five different Bruce Campbell projects recently, so that’s probably another post.

MIDDLEBRIDGE MYSTERIES

I wrote about Mistletoe Murders, which is an Audible original series. It’s like a Hallmark mystery movie. Emily Lane runs a Christmas-themed store, but she has a secret past. Of course, there’s a local cop boyfriend, with a daughter named Violet.

I like the series, and they turned it into a Hallmark TV series as well, though I’ve not seen that yet. It uses different actors, which I’m not too enthused about.

Well, Violet was trying to get into college at the end of season three, and she did. So, Anna Cathcart is back and starring in Violet’s freshman year in criminal justice studies. Her professor is played by Eric McCormack (Will and Grace). I was a big fan of his show Perception and he’s good as a supporting character here.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 3 (My intro)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 3 (My intro)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Pulp Fest took place in Pittsburgh first week of the month. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. I really enjoy it. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the third year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume wrappd up his pre-Cap Shaw career. Here’s my  new intro. Looking forward to Volume IV. 

Welcome to Volume three of Steeger Books’ series on the Continental Op. Hammett had written fifteen Op stories of varying quality for Black Mask, and one rejection found its way into True Detective Mysteries (though they weren’t actually ‘true’).

He had followed hard on the heels of Caroll John Daly, whose Three-Gun Terry Mack appeared in May of 1923, and just two weeks and one issue later came the first Race Williams story, “Knights of the Open Palm.”

After one more Williams shoot-fest, Black Mask printed “Arson Plus,” and Dash Hammett began reshaping the fresh clay that was the new hardboiled school. The quality of Hammett’s work immediately surpassed that of Daly’s, though it was up-and-down. Hammett’s drinking, health issues, personal life, and problems with (his second) editor Phil Cody, made the Continental Op a bumpy ride.

Here we have the final five stories he wrote for Cody – before he quit Black Mask. Yep. Quit. Had Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw not been committed to bringing back Hammett, we would not have had Red Harvest, or The Maltese Falcon. Hammett was willing to quit the Pulps, rather than continue to labor under Cody’s financially-unrewarding yoke.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: T.T. Flynn’s PI-Like Horse Bookie, Mr. Maddox, Volume III

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: T.T. Flynn’s PI-Like Horse Bookie, Mr. Maddox, Volume III

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Pulp Fest took place this past weekend in Pittsburgh. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the third year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume wrapped up his pre-Cap Shaw career.

The talented Duane Spurlock wrote about T.T. Flynn’s Westerns a few Summers past. I’m a fan of those stories, and Duane did a better job covering them than I could have. I did write a Steeger Books intro for a Flynn book, though. Mr. Maddox is a bookie who makes the rounds of the horse racing circuit. And he finds dead bodies and crimes like Jessica Fletcher. I have the first two volumes of these novella length stories, and I wrote the intro for the third. So, here you go!

 

Thomas Theodore (better known as T. T.) Flynn Jr. began selling Westerns to the pulps early in 1932. Dime Western began its run, covering more than 250 issues over thirty years, with a T. T. Flynn story in the very first issue that December. Less than a year later, Star Western launched, with Flynn’s “Hell’s Half Acre” featured on the cover. He continued writing popular Westerns into the fifties, and he survived the demise of the Pulps by transitioning to Western paperbacks. His lone story to make The Saturday Evening Post became the popular James Stewart movie, The Man from Laramie.

But before roaming the pages of the Old West, Flynn was an accomplished mystery and hardboiled pulpster. The venerable Flynn’s (no relation), which ran for over 600 issues under multiple names, was less than a year old when his second story appeared in August of 1925. Three consecutive issues in December of that year included Flynn’s stories.

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What I’ve Been Watching: August 2025

What I’ve Been Watching: August 2025

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“Hey!” (you say to yourself). “I wonder what Bob has been watching? It’s been since May. Well, dear reader, I can’t leave you unfocused on our Monday work day, so let’s take a look, shall we? And – Gasp! – it’s all current stuff. How about that? And this is all spoiler free.

BALLARD

Michael Connelly writes the Bosch books, which spawned a terrific, gritty, seven season streaming series. HIGHLY recommended watch. Bosch an LAPD homicide detective, underwent a career change, which is the subject of the succeeding series, Bosch: Legacy. That lasted three seasons. All of this stuff has been taken from the novels. In the final episode of Legacy, an LAPD detective named Renee Ballard (also from a Connelly book series) plays a central part. And that’s because she’s the star of her own new series on Prime.

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The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

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Dus_BasiliskI was recently talking online about how in the eighties and nineties we bought fantasy books because we liked the cover. And the pic I included was The Lure of the Basilisk, which kicked off the adventures of Garth the Overman. It’s been ten years since I wrote about that, back in the days of The Public life of Sherlock Holmes. So here’s a revisit of to a pretty cool fantasy series that you should check out, if you never have. 

The eighties was full of epic fantasy series’ by the likes of David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks and Katherine Kurtz, to name a few. While many remain giants in the history of the genre, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote a largely forgotten series: The Lords of Dus.

Watt-Evans has written quite a bit of fantasy, science fiction and horror and is probably best known for his Ethshar series. Ethshar was created as a role-playing game world and he ended up writing many novels and short stories using the setting. The Misenchanted Sword is my favorite Ethshar novel.

Watt-Evans had flunked out of Princeton’s architectural school and had to wait a year before he could re-apply. He had heard (the possibly apocryphal story) that Larry Niven started his career by deciding to write for one year and if he sold something, continue on: if he didn’t, he’d give it up. Watt-Evans decided to do the same and wrote a slew of short stories, selling one.

He did go back to school, but he wrote a novel (The Cyborg and the Sorcerer) on a summer break and after two years of college, gave it up to make a living with the typewriter (as a writer, not a typewriter salesman).

Influenced by Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter’s anthologies (Flashing Swords, anyone?), he was ready to spin a fantasy saga featuring a non-human (but less effete than a Melnibonian) hero. Thus, the race of overmen.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Western Noir: Anson Mount & Hell on Wheels

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Hard to believe it’s been almost fifteen years since AMC debuted a gritty new western, Hell on Wheels. In November of 2011, Justified had completed two seasons, and suddenly I had two favorite shows. Back then television shows aired weekly, not in multiple episode ‘drops.’ and they weren’t available on-demand. You watched them when they aired or recorded them on your DVR. I would actually sit and watch both those shows every week, ‘live.’

MILD SPOILERS

I’m not gonna blatantly drop stuff, but don’t get mad if you can infer something from this post. The show’s been out there for fifteen years. Go watch it!

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Grand Theft Auto has been a hugely successful video game franchise for almost thirty years. From Rockstar Games, I’ve never played it. They also make Red Dead Redemption, which I tinkered with a little. It’s pretty high quality and I’ll get to it some day. Among their other titles, the one I have jumped into is L.A. Noire.

Set in 1947, you are Cole Phelps, an LAPD uniformed patrolman, and a WW II Marine veteran. You are assigned cases, and you go to scenes, collect clues, and talk to people. The goal, of course, is to collect enough information to catch the culprit. It’s open-world, but the path to solving a case is rather straightforward. I’ve only failed once so far, and it was clearly trying to tell me what I was missing, but I couldn’t pick up on it. I’m currently assigned to the Traffic division, which is way more than going out for fender benders.

There are also regular side quests which come in as radio calls. You can take the call and go take care of it. This often involves chases and shootings.

I have killed quite a few folks so far. It is frowned upon if you shoot someone that didn’t need shooting. But I’ve been killed (you restart the mission), so it can get tough out there for your and your partner.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Weird Menace: Robert E. Howard’s Conrad and Kirowan

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Weird Menace: Robert E. Howard’s Conrad and Kirowan

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

So basically, I don’t do horror. Robert E. Howard is my second-favorite writer in any genre (trailing only John D. MacDonald), and I’m not really even that into his horror stuff. “Pigeons from Hell” is considered one of his best stories, but I don’t really like it. Other than a few exceptions, like the terrific Robert R. McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson, horror doesn’t work for me (no, I don’t really care for Lovecraft, either, though I’m well-versed thanks to those old Del Rey paperbacks).

But I do like several stories which are in Del Rey’s The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, such as Solomon Kane’s “Rattle of Bones.” There’s an upcoming post on “Out of the Deep,” and we are about to talk about his Conrad and Kirowan tales, which are part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

SPOILER WARNING – Look…the story I’m about to discuss is eighty-one years old. And it’s readily available. If you read my stuff here, you know I try to minimize spoilers. But you’ve had a lot of opportunities to read Robert E Howard. You have been warned.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Kirby O’Donnell and The Bloodstained God (REH)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Kirby O’Donnell and The Bloodstained God (REH)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

 

It can’t be a Summer of Pulp without some Robert E. Howard now, can it? Heck no!!! The looong shadow cast by my buddy Dave Hardy, with his two terrific essays on El Borak, still prevents me from tackling ‘The Swift.’

However, I am comfortable continuing to blaze my own trail regarding the similar, but different, Kirby O’Donnell.

I wrote about “Gold from Tartary,” and “Swords of Shahrazar,” in prior summers. Which just leaves the third, long-unpublished, “The Trail of the Bloodstained God.” Now having tackled this one, I’m sure there’s a Steve Clarney post (“The Fire of Asshurbanipal”) somewhere down the road.

In my first two essays, I explained how the second O’Donnell story, “Swords of Shahrazar,” found print first, in the October, 1934 issue of Top-Notch magazine. It was a direct sequel to “Gold from Tartary,” which appeared four months later in the January, 1935 issue of Thrilling Adventures. It’s quite likely that many people did not read “Swords,” then “Gold” shortly thereafter. But it certainly would seem odd to do so.

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What I’ve Been Reading: June 2025

What I’ve Been Reading: June 2025

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Last week, I talked about the most recent audiobooks I’ve been listening to. After enjoying the Egil & Nix short story, two more Thieves World books, and finishing The Black Company again, I wanted more S&S. I have a Kothar book, but it’s an AI voice. Meh. So, I am listening to volume one of the Elric saga. Which I have read many times. Man – those stories are still terrific.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies and shows lately, so that’s probably gonna be a post soon. And I’ve been working on Fortnite levels. But I have also been sitting down with some books when I can. So away we go.

SEA OF GREED– Clive Cussler and Graham Brown

I used to stay up into the wee hours, devouring Clive Cussler and Robert Ludlum books. THOSE were page turners. Cussler ‘handed off’ his various series’ and seemed to be a franchise manager, rather than a writer. But they were still good (with one exception). Then he passed, so the lines are definitely just the work of the current authors.

I never did the Tom Clancy technical stuff, but I really like The Oregon Files. And I’m okay with Isaac Bell, though after the first one, I liked the concept more than the actual books. I’ve barely tried the Fargo series – meh. And I quit reading Dirk Pitt because Cussler gave it to his son (named Dirk) and he’s a bad writer. I read the first two and quit. Life’s too short to read bad books written through nepotism (Anne Hillerman is the poster child for this).

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