Good morning, everyone everywhere for every time.

I'm Eric and I'm your host for this episode of the Paperback Warrior podcast.

You can check out Paperbackwarrior dot com for reviews, articles, links to more podcast episodes, and stream hundreds of YouTube videos all about vintage fiction.

Today's episode is going to focus on a pulpster that was rumored to have written six hundred thousand words per year for fourteen straight years during the heyday of the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.

He wrote for television, movies, novels, and his name is William R.

Cox.

I had a blast researching his life in literary work, and I think you'll have an equally good time hearing me talk about him.

Also today I have a review of a vintage nineteen sixty seven paperback by John Ferris titled when Michael Calls All that is happening Today.

I also wanted to tell you about this book that's been on my want list.

The book is titled Snowbird and it's written by Larry Levine.

Now I'm not sure who that is, but I know he wrote only one other book, and that was called The Treasure.

But talking about Snowbird, it was published by Falset Gold Medal in nineteen seventy seven.

It's got a great cover of some guys trudging through the snow with ropes and guns.

The blurb ay the top says secret agents don't resign, they vanish.

The back of the book says, what do you do if you're a tough contract killer for the CIA and you find out the director has you marked for death to cover up his own vicious plotting against the country man.

This book is really hard to track down.

I've never actually seen a copy in the wild.

It's on my list to always check when I go into bookstores.

There's a copy on eBay for forty dollars right now.

There's one copy on Abe Books in England for eleven US dollars, but it's thirty five dollars in shipping charges.

So I was delighted when a fan of Paperback Warrior, Brian Brassfield, he reached out to me via Facebook Messenger and asked if I still needed the book.

He found it for a dollar fifty had John King Books in Detroit, and he was kind enough to mail it to me.

Now, this isn't the first time Brian has sent me books.

He also give to me a hardcover of a horror novel titled Devil House earlier this year.

Brian's a cool dude.

Thanks so much for sending this to me, and I look forward to reading this one.

I'm recording this episode in the middle of several writing projects.

I'm working on several things for Bob Dice and Bill Cunningham.

I'm writing introductions for their newest issue of Men's of Venture Quarterly, while alternating my time in between the write book analysis for their third volume of the Art of Ron Lesser, and I'm also writing a few other things as well.

So this episode, so it may seem a little short compared to the last one, which geez, I think I rambled on for like forty five minutes or more.

Let's not do this on today's episode.

How about we just jump right into the feature today after this lovely music number.

Okay, So today's feature is on a prolific pulpster, television and movie screenwriter and novelist William R.

Cox.

I understand this name might be unfamiliar to you, but as I get into this feature, you'll probably realize you've read something by him, or maybe even a related work that he contributed to in some fashion.

He wrote over one thousand short stories, one hundred or more television scripts, and at least eighty novels.

This guy was an absolute beast.

He wrote for a variety of genres.

So let's just jump right into his life.

So.

William Robert Cox was born in nineteen oh one in New Jersey.

He grew up working for his father delivering ice and coal.

As an athlete in high school, we played baseball, basketball, tennis, and he even did some boxing.

He played football in New Jersey in Pennsylvania leagues, and he attended both Rutgers and Princeton Universities.

But he turned to writing at a very young age.

Sometime in his late teens, Cox wrote for a Newark, New Jersey newspaper titled Sunday Call.

In his early twenties, he edited an Italian American newspaper titled La Tribuna.

When he was twenty nine, Cox's first major published work was a short non fiction article titled A Teacher of French Grammar in the October nineteen thirty edition of Parisian Life.

He used the pseudonym of Eric James.

Three years later, his first fictional story was published.

It was a sports short about football published an American Boy, and this was like a gateway to ease into the pulp market with sports stories.

Cox he really got busy on these by contributing stories to Dimes Sports Magazine, a sports monthly, knock out magazine, Ten Story Sports and Sports Novels magazine all through the nineteen thirties.

He pinned well over two hundred sports stories in the nineteen thirties using his own name and also that of Cliff Ferrell, Larry Jones, Roger Spelman, William Haleiger, Frank Gilmour, Bill Arcy, John Easterland, and Daniel Winters.

You see a lot of these magazines featured multiple stories by Cox, so by using the pseudonyms, it would appear to readers like they were written by different authors.

And this was a common pulp trope.

But he wasn't just writing sports stories in the nineteen thirties.

Cox's first detective character was created in nineteen thirty seven.

It was a hero named Donnie Jordan.

Now.

Jordan would debut in the July nineteen thirty seven issue of ten Detective Aces and would reappear in two issues of Captain Satan in nineteen thirty eight, and the last appearance of the character in a nineteen forty two issue of New Detective Magazine.

I haven't read any of these stories, but blackgate dot com to Captain Satan's story appearance and described Jordan as quote one who doesn't like to sit around and wait for the machinery of justice to creak along.

He makes things happen on his own.

One of Cox's longest running series titles was that of John Wade.

The John Wade character debuted in Detective Tales in nineteen thirty nine and would appear nineteen more times in that magazine through nineteen forty five.

Wade is a former con man who now solves crimes and infiltrates criminal enterprises on requests from the state governor.

You can get the first six appearances of this character in one collection from Steger Books.

It's titled The Complete Cases of John Wade, Volume One, and this was published in November of twenty twenty four.

Also in nineteen thirty nine was another of Cox's long running series titles, that of Phil Town.

That's town with an E on the end, so Phil Town debuted in Ace g Mann Stories in the November December nineteen thirty nine issue.

He would appear thirteen more stress in that magazine through nineteen forty three.

Now, Town is a character that works for the FBI and is sent to corrupt towns all across America to weed out crime.

It's a simple setup that deposites Town into investigations of things like gambling, rackets, bank heist, political bullies.

There's plenty of action.

It's all plot propulsive, and that's phil Town.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been any reprints of these stories, but you can read several of the aceg Man issues on archive dot org that include Town.

The nineteen forties roll In and Cox is as busy as ever.

He moves to Florida, and he's now continued to write his sports stories for magazines like Dime Sports, Baseball Stories Magazine and Dime Sports Magazine.

But he's writing a lot of standalone crime fiction two and these are appearing in some of the glossy magazines like Colliers, Liberty, and Argacy.

His first Saturday Evening Post story was published in November nineteen forty.

This decade, he also added even more pseudonyms like Jackson Schultz, Dave Crewe, Lance Kermit, Jewel Reeve, and John park Hill.

He also creates another recurring series character in Tom Kincaid, not to be confused with a painter.

This character first appeared in Dime Mystery magazine in May nineteen forty one, and would appear fourteen more times for that magazine through nineteen forty six.

Now Kincaid is a gambler, and he's got a partner named Matt Durkin.

Kincaid was once a guy named Timothy Kinsoving.

He was an honest gambler that ran a chain of gambling places across the US.

His motto was always give a sucker and even break you might get a return bout.

But his empire crumbled when a millionaire named George Gray began to kill off all of Kinsoving's gambling houses and all of his honest men.

Gray also killed Durkins's cousin, so both Kinsovving, who's now going by the name Kincaid, and his partner Durkin, are out to avenge their losses by nailing George Gray and his criminal network of dishonest gamblers.

I'm going to circle back to the Kincaid when we get into Cox's full length novels, so just stay with me.

Another new thing that happens in the nineteen forties is Cox's penchant for writing westerns.

It begins with his first published Western story, The Night of the Blood Bucket Raid, in Dime Western Magazine in January nineteen forty one.

He becomes a prolific writer of Western fiction, with stories and novels appearing in magazines like Western Adventures, Star Western, Street and Smith's Wild West Weekly, and Western Tales, among others.

This helps solidify another recurring series character for Cox, a cowboy named Duke Bagley.

He debuted in Star Western's December nineteen forty two issue, and he would reappear fourteen more times through nineteen forty six.

The character's history is that when he was a boy, his family's ranch was swimmed out from under him.

He grew up, he left home and became a wild adventurer.

I don't believe these stories have been reprinted and the Star Western magazines, well, they're not on archive dot org from my attempts at locating them, so not much luck in reading those.

Blue Book Magazine was like a second home for William Cox.

He wrote tons of stories for the magazine using the name Joel Reeve.

I want to tell you about all these series titles.

Again, the name was Joel Reeve.

The first is a recurring set of characters in the nineteen forties called the Fabulous Moraineys.

They debuted in the September nineteen forty three issue of Blue Book under Cox's pseudonym of Joel Reeve.

They would appear six more times through November nineteen forty four.

Now, I don't have much info on this family of characters, but here's the little bit of info I gained from the August nineteen forty four issue of Blue Book.

The Mad Morainees, as they are often described, features brothers Picasso, Matisse, Elgrico, and Tommy, with Tommy being the narrator of the stories in this issue.

Tommy is serving in the US Coast Guard and the Moraines live on eighty ninth Street, I assume in New York, and they're a wealthy family.

The family's father is a painter and he's an illustrator.

Again, I don't have much info in the characters, and these stories haven't been reprinted anywhere that I can see, but from what I can sell, this is maybe sort of a literary sort of thing.

Also, Cox appeared in Blue Book with another literary work under the name of Jewel Reeve as well.

These are stories featuring the Old Neighborhood.

The debut was the September nineteen forty four issue, and there would be twenty of these stories in Blue Book through nineteen fifty two.

Now, the Old Neighborhood is just a few blocks in New York City that feature characters like newspaper reporters, police officers, detectives, shopkeepers.

Cox's stories kind of changed the main characters around, but central to the stories is always a beat cop named Patrolman Murphy, what is eventually considered the champion police officer of their neighborhood.

I think these are mostly crime fiction stories, but I also believe they have a more literary flavor.

Again, these haven't been reprinted that I know of, and only a few issues of these Blue Books appear on archive dot Org.

It's a real shame because this is a series I really would enjoy reading from beginning to end.

It seems really interesting to me.

Now Blue Book couldn't get enough of William Cox.

Once again, using the name Joel Reeve, the magazine published a new series created by the author, starring a young, up and coming boxer named Willie Boulder.

The debut was in the February nineteen forty six issue of the magazine, and there would be eleven further appearances of this character through March nineteen forty seven.

Three issues of Bluebook are in archive dot Org featuring these stories, including the debut story Boy in a Hurry.

Babe Lucky Young was another Blue Book gig for Cox, using the name Joel Reeve.

The character again is Babe Lucky Young.

First appearance was July nineteen forty seven, and then eight more appearances through November nineteen forty eight.

Babe Young is a college boxer and he hesitantly gets his first start in the ring in the debut story.

Again, these aren't available in reprint or anything, so I don't know how to read them.

Again.

The name Joel Reeve pops up in three issues of Blue Book April and May of nineteen forty seven, and then March of nineteen forty eight.

The stories concerned a carnival Midway, so the series is referred to as The Midway.

I don't know the particulars of it.

The only story available in archive dot org is the last one.

Noney of these have been reprinted.

From a glance, it seems similar to the Little Dock series, which I'm going to tell you about now.

Cox's pseudonym Joel Reeve was used in Detective Tales to write a series of stories starring a little doc.

He's a carnival owner that travels the country keeping his carnes and roustabouts out of trouble.

He does this by working with all the local police officers.

This also involves crimes that typically haven't been committed by his own carnival employees yet the police suspects.

Since they're new in town, they're the general suspects early on.

It's a cool idea.

There were four Little Dock stories published in Detective Tales between December nineteen forty five and January nineteen forty seven, again all using the Joel Reeve name, and also none of them are in proNT now.

Another recurring series character for Cox is Malachi Manatee.

He appeared in Dime Detective magazine from August nineteen forty four through September nineteen forty six, with nine total stories.

Now.

Malachi is a disabled veteran who returns from the World War Two and starts up his own detective agency in Florida.

The narrator on these stories is another VET named tec Ta's got scar tissue on his lungs from a Japanese attack, and now he kind of wonders around with Manatee and a girl named Eileen Carver.

The three of them saw of crimes together again.

These stories haven't been reprinted that I know of, but you can read a few issues on archive dot org that feature the character.

Cox also created the Dan Trout character.

He first appeared in Detective Tales in March nineteen forty five and would appear in eleven more stories in that same magazine through September of nineteen forty eight.

Dan Trout is a US Navy veteran and he's a detective that works for the Carlson Detective Agency.

When Carlson is murdered, Dan learns that detective agency is willed to him and also the agency has a secretary named Betty Boulder.

He also has a police detective friend named Mike Kurbali.

These stories have not been reprinted, but you can find several issues on archive dot org.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but unfortunately archive dot org is kind of the only thing we really have for William R.

Cox other than his novels, so really all we have.

The Whistler Kid is a Western hero that Cocks created in the nineteen forties.

The character first appeared in ten Story Western Magazine in November nineteen forty five.

The character would appear in nine more issues of that magazine through March nineteen forty nine.

Now, the Whistler Kid is a gunfighter named Willie Wuten.

Wuton is a member of the Cattleman's Protective Association, which employs Willy as a sort of troubleshooter.

Never been reprinted but the December nineteen forty eight issues on archab dot org, and it features the story Hogtie That Devil Whistler.

I swear William Cox must have been writing a short story every single day in the nineteen forties.

There's just so many stories in all these pulp magazines.

It's just uncanny, and it really is frustrating because I would love to read more of his stories.

In all these characters that he's created, it's a shame that, you know, they're just lost to the ages.

I don't even know if you know.

Obviously, someone out there has scanned a great deal of the blue Book magazines, but there's a ton of issues out there that are just missing, and I don't know if anyone's got them, if they have the ability to scan them, I just don't even know.

But this gets us all the way up into the nineteen fifties and Cox is still a machine behind the typewriter.

He's still heavy in the sports pulps, but he's also contributing standalone adventure and war stories at this point to Argasy blue Book Adventure, and he starts working in some digest as well, like Mike shane mystery magazine Manhunt.

There's more stories and Colliers and the Saint Detective Magazine.

Compared to his production in the pulps and magazines of the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, Cox is really slowing down or writing short stories.

And one of the reasons why is because the pulpin magazine market in the nineteen forties is really starting to dwindle down.

And this leads to William Cox to go looking for work in Hollywood.

So he moves from Florida to Sherman Oaks, California, and it's there that he writes two movie screenplays for Universal Studios.

The first is ten Gannika and then the other one is The Veils of Baghdad for television.

It's like a Who's who.

He wrote scripts for Bonanza, ge Theater, The Outer Limits, The Virginian Wagon Train, Tails of Wells, Fargo, Root sixty six, Lassie.

The list just goes on and on.

And this is all through the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.

But he also used his free time away from writing scripts and screenplays to focus his efforts on writing original paperback novels.

So let's go ahead and get into those and now.

His first published novel was Make My Coffin Strong, which was actually an unsold movie treatment that was published by Fawcett Gold Medal in nineteen fifty four.

Cox had originally wanted the title to be called The Big Noise, but the publisher changed it, and Cox had been quoted as saying, what does that even mean?

Make my Coffin Strong?

Remember the Tom Kincaid series I mentioned earlier in the pulp magazines Tom Kincaid.

He used the character for three novels.

The first was Hell to Pay, which was nineteen fifty eight, Murder in Vegas nineteen sixty and Death on Location in nineteen sixty two.

All three of these books were published by Signet as paperbacks.

The great news on these is that they won't cost you that much because Bold Venture Press has all three books available in beautiful reprints now.

Cox wrote a number of young adult sports books as well, like Five Were Chosen, The Wild Pitch, Big League Rookie, Trouble at Second Base, Gridiron Duel, and Goal Ahead.

He also had a three book series of sports books about an athlete named Frank Merriwell, and he wrote these books as Mike Frederick.

But along with the sports books, he also wrote more detective novels like The Tycoon and the Tigris, Death Comes, Early, Way to Go, daw Baby, and Hot Times.

He wrote at least twenty standalone Western books as well.

He wrote two Western novelizations.

One was Bonanza Black Silver published in nineteen sixty seven, and Fire Creek in nineteen sixty eight.

There are two Western series titles that Cox created that I see a lot of people still talking about today.

The first is the Buchanan series.

Now.

Obviously, the Buchanan Western series was created by a writer named William Ard, who he featured in a previous episode.

He wrote detective novels starring heroes like Johnny Stevens, Barney Glens, Lou Largo, and Tom Durant, but he also wrote westerns.

Two His nineteen fifty six Faucet Gold Medal paperback titled The Names Buchanan, used the byline of Jonas Ward.

The book was a success and led to four more sequels written by Art until his death from cancer in nineteen sixty.

The publisher then hired Robert Silverberg to finish Art's six Buchannan novel Eight years later, Fawsett decided to keep the Buchannan series continuing by using other authors to write the novels.

The first writer they used was twenty nine year old Brian Garfield.

He wrote one novel before handing the project off to his friend William R.

Cox, and then Cox took over in nineteen seventy one and wrote nearly fifteen more Buchanan novels through the nineteen seventies.

The other Western series that Cox created was that of Cemetery Jones.

The first appearance of this character was in the nineteen eighty five falset paperback of the same name.

Four more books were published through nineteen ninety.

Now this whole series is available in reprints by Piccadilly Publishing.

Cemetery Jones is a US Marshal.

He's embroiled in gunfights involving stuff like cattle rustling.

In terms of short stories, by the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, William Cox's only appearing in The New Yorker, Zane Gray, Western Magazine, and Mike Shane.

Now it's said that William R.

Cox averaged six hundred thousand published words a year for fourteen straight years during the era of the pulp magazines.

That's amazing.

Some of his accomplishments outside of writing included serving the Western Writers of America as president between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty six and then again between seventy one and seventy two.

He was also their vice president, committeeman, and director.

Cox was also a member of the Writers Guild of America.

His papers at the University of Oregon include correspondence he had with notable authors like Elmore Leonard, Alan Rifkin, and Ray Bradbury, as well as letters with movie producer John Ford and correspondence with sports announcer Red Barber.

William R.

Cox died of congestive heart failure on August seventh, nineteen eighty eight.

He was sitting at his typewriter writing the next Symmetry Jones novel.

The night before his death, he had dinner with Brian Garfield, a friend of over three decades.

A couple of Cox's quotes, I may not be a great writer, but I'm a born writer.

And I wasn't the best, but I was fast.

I wrote for the markets, for the money.

A big reference for this feature was David Lawrence Wilson's introduction The Kid in the Champ, featured in the Black Gap Books twenty twenty two reprint edition of Make My Coffin Strong.

Other sources were mystery file dot com, The Fictionmags Index Archive dot org, Steeler Books dot com, Jessnevins dot com, Electronics and Books dot com, Archives, West Piccadilly Publishing dot org, and Fantasticfiction dot com.

All right, so my last thing to get to today is a review.

But before I do all that, let me ask you to follow Paperback Warrior on Facebook, x, Instagram, tick talk, and YouTube.

Whatever your stomping ground is, if you don't mind.

Also, if you need a writer or a researcher for your book, series, magazine, articles, online post, please keep me in mind.

I'm in the middle of a number writing assignments and I'm always looking for freelance work.

If it's introductions you need, or some assistants just creating your content, reach out to me.

Five four zero three one two seven zero six two again five four zero three one two seven zero six two.

And if you're on Medicare, my main gig is writing medicare plans.

Don't hesitate to give me a call.

Let's mix business with pleasure, all right.

Next up is the review for a nineteen sixty seven vintage book called Win Michael Calls by the great John Ferris.

This was a thriller that was adapted into a nineteen seventy two made for television movies starring Michael Douglas and Elizabeth Ashley.

Now, a lot of my pleasure reading this book was robbed from me because I saw the movie about ten or twelve years ago, and I just happened to remember the ending, really frustrating.

I normally don't remember movies that well, but for whatever reason, I remember that one, so I already knew who the killer was.

The book still entertained me enough, but I wish I had read the book first.

In the past decade or more, I don't really even watch that many movies.

I've just sort of gravitated to watching old television shows with my wife, or we watch old movies.

We just did a don Nott's marathon this month of how to Frame a Fig, and we watched Incredible Mister Limpet, and we'd watch The Ghost Mister Chicken a little while back.

But anyway, I'm off the subject, getting back to this book.

This is a suspense thriller, but the first half of it is steeped in the idea of this paranormal, ghostly horror thing.

The reason is that the main character, who's a widow named Helen, she's receiving phone calls from this little kid that claims to be her nephew, Michael.

The problem is that little Michael died in a blizzard years ago when he was a small child.

Helen, who now has a child of her own named Peggy, receives these calls and she finds them disturbing because Michael keeps calling her Auntie Helen, which is exactly what Michael called her when he was still alive.

As the calls continue to plague her, they turn more ominous.

Michael tells her that people in town are going to slowly die.

Now I should say that the book is set in a small Missouri town.

Everyone knows everybody here.

The first victim is the doctor, then the sheriff, and so on, and these murders they played out like a slasher movie where the victims they'll hear noises or they'll see a shadow or something, and then when they go investigate, they get knocked off.

It's a very slash esque kind of a book, which I really enjoyed.

There's also a number of suspects that could be Michael.

As I mentioned earlier, the main suspect is Michael himself, either as a ghostly demonic child or as the possibility that he never really died and now he's grown up and returning to haunt the town and targets certain individuals for some reason.

So Michael is the number one suspect.

The other is Michael's older brother, Craig, who works in town as a psychiatrist and still has a great relationship with Helen.

Other suspects are Craig's girlfriend Amy, and also the idea of an out of towner like the doctor's labor that comes to work on the family farm.

Now with this book, the phone calls, they're creepy, the kills are satisfying.

But my favorite part of this book is a character named Drimas.

He's a hard boiled retired homicide detective that's a widow himself, and he comes to Helen's aid.

Well really he comes to the sheriff's aid, but when the sheriff gets killed, he's helping Helen and the deputies.

But this guy, he loves playing chess with someone or even to himself.

He rides a scooter around town, but he's still this hard boiled guy, like right out of a detective novel.

In one scene, Drimus and Amy, they're in the forest, are trying to get to safety.

In uses this wet rag to viciously slap Amy to tell her he isn't going to carry her, and then she needs to walk.

This was like straight up pulp.

Overall, When Michael Calls is an enjoyable book, and I felt the pace was just right to allow the murders to happen, and then the investigation was stretched just far enough to introduce the next murder.

It was kind of like a chain reaction that just seemed to work well.

Amy, Helen, and Deimus are all excellent characters, and Ferris gives it plenty of time to develop those characters in the novel.

If you haven't seen the movie, definitely steer clear of it.

It's on YouTube for free.

It's on tuby, but make sure you read the book first.

Again, this is called when Michael Calls by John Ferris, and this is my call to end this episode.

Thanks for tuning in and listening to me ramble on and on about old books.

Remember to follow Paperbackwarrior dot com, follow Paperback Warrior on social media, spread the word about posts and videos.

Sharing is caring and I appreciate it.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks for another podcast or two before we get into October spooky season.

Thanks again for listening, and I'm going to talk at you next time.

Bye for now,