A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

The Faust Award

IAMTW’s 2024 Grandmaster and Faust Award Winner

With great pleasure, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers presents the 2024 Faust Award for Grandmaster to James Reasoner.

A veteran writer with over four decades in the publishing industry, James Reasoner has written more than 350 novels and more than 100 short stories. Although perhaps best known for westerns, he has written across many genres from mystery to fantasy to science fiction. In addition, he’s penned essays, articles and reviews. He has contributed tie-in novels to the following series: Abilene, Longarm, Lone Star, Trailsman, Cody’s Law, Wagons West, Wind River, Stagecoach Station, and Tales from Deadwood. His non‑western tie-ins include The Dead Man series, Kolchak, and Walker Texas Ranger.

This is a tremendous honor, and I’m very pleased and proud to be considered a grandmaster of tie-in fiction. My history with tie-ins as a reader goes back to the Whitman juveniles and Big Little Books of the Fifties and Sixties. I loved reading about Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Leave It to Beaver, Spin and Marty, and all the other TV shows and movies that served as the basis for those books. Those were the first tie-in novels I read, although nobody used that term then. They were just books that I enjoyed.

Then, almost 60 years ago, I went into Buddies’ Grocery and picked up an Ace paperback called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., written by somebody named Michael Avallone. From that point on, I picked up everything I could find by Avallone, and many of them were tie-in novels and movie novelizations. The Get Smart novels by William Johnston were also early favorites. I couldn’t tell you how many tie-in books I read over the years, but there were a lot.

As a writer, I had been in the business for only a little more than a year when Sam Merwin Jr., the editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, who had been buying short stories from me, asked me to try my hand at one of the Mike Shayne novellas that were published in the magazine under the house-name Brett Halliday. As Sam put it, “they run 20,000 words and pay a flat, lousy $300.” Three hundred bucks didn’t seem so lousy to me, so I told him, sure, I’d love to, and he sent me a copy of the Mike Shayne bible, which he had put together for the series’ writers. I didn’t really need it; I’d been reading the original Mike Shayne novels by Davis Dresser (the original Brett Halliday) for years and was a big fan of the series.

Sam also said for me not to worry too much about the details, just to get the story down and he’d fix anything I got wrong. As far as I could tell when I compared the published story (“Death in Xanadu”, MSMM, December 1978) with my original, he changed one word in the manuscript.

That was my first try at writing characters and settings created by other authors, and I knew right away that I had a knack for it. Since then, series work has made up the vast majority of my writing. Some highlights: Being asked to write a couple of Lone Ranger stories. The Ranger was probably my first hero. I never missed the TV show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Almost as exciting was writing a Green Hornet story. Inside the grown man typing that story was the eight-year-old kid who stayed up ‘way past his bedtime sneak-listening on a transister radio to syndicated reruns of the radio shows featuring the Green Hornet and the Lone Rangers. (The Shadow was in that same package and I’ve never written a Shadow story, but maybe one of these days.) I never missed an episode of Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and writing a Kolchak story was a great opportunity. One day my editor at Berkley called and asked if I was familiar with the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. I answered honestly that not only had I seen every episode of the series, I could sing the theme song. Luckily, I didn’t have to sing, but within minutes I was on a conference call with Chuck Norris’s brother Aaron and a couple of CBS executives in New York, and I had the job of writing three novels based on the series. Those of you who have worked on tie-in projects for properties that you love as a fan know how much pure fun it can be.

My thanks to everyone in the IAMTW. I can’t express how much I appreciate this award, but I’m truly grateful for it.

Forgotten Books: Cheyenne and the Lost Gold of Lion Park - Steve Frazee

When I was growing up, I loved the TV show CHEYENNE, and I also read a bunch of the juvenile novels published by Whitman and based on different TV series, so how come I never read this one until now? Basically, I never knew it existed until recently, but once I found out about it, and that it was written by well-respected Western author Steve Frazee, I had to hunt up a copy. That's it in the scan above.

As I’m willing to bet that most of you know, Cheyenne Bodie, played by the great Clint Walker, was a drifting cowboy/army scout/stagecoach guard, or whatever else that week’s story required him to be. In CHEYENNE AND THE LOST GOLD OF LION PARK, he’s working for the railroad, trying to locate a fortune in gold stolen in a train robbery twenty years earlier. The outlaws, a trio of brothers, had a hideout in a high mountain basin called Lion Park. Supposedly, they cached the loot somewhere in the basin and then disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them or where the missing gold is.

Since these Whitman novels were marketed to kids, the protagonists always had to a young sidekick, except in those books where the actual protagonist was a kid. In this novel, there’s a young man living in a nearby town who has done some hunting and exploring in Lion Park, and he volunteers to help Cheyenne as a guide. His father, a former lawman, allows him to go along with Cheyenne. They’re searching for a mysterious old-timer who may have some connection to the missing outlaws. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones on the trail of the gold. A couple of hardcases follow them into the basin, and then it’s a race to see who can locate the gold first . . . and if they can survive.

Frazee was an excellent author of hardboiled Westerns, so it’s a bit of a surprise that the main flaw in this novel is a lack of action. Most of it is Cheyenne and Rory, the kid sidekick, puttering around the canyon and trying to avoid the two hardcases. But Frazee does a great job with the setting, and when violence does erupt occasionally, it’s quite effective. Also, he captures Cheyenne’s personality pretty well. Sometimes in these Whitman novels, the characters have the same names as their TV counterparts but don’t really act or sound like them. That’s not the case here. Plus Rory is a good sidekick, only occasionally doing dumb stuff.

Overall, CHEYENNE AND THE LOST GOLD OF LION PARK is just too blasted mild to reach the top ranks of Whitman TV tie-ins. But it’s well-written and a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. It also made me want to watch some episodes of CHEYENNE. I have the first season on DVD. May have to dig out those discs and revisit it.

Forgotten Books: Markham - Lawrence Block

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on April 20, 2007. My apologies for all the reruns. I just haven't had much time to read lately.


This is a book I’ve had on my shelves for many years, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. It’s a tie-in novel, based on a short-lived series that ran on NBC in 1959 and 1960, starring Ray Milland as New York-based private eye Roy Markham. Now, if Ray Milland isn’t exactly your idea of a hardboiled private eye, well, I feel pretty much the same way. Maybe a lot of other people did, too, and that’s why the series didn’t last long. This novel didn’t come out until 1961, after the TV series was over. I guess Belmont had it in inventory already and decided to go ahead and throw it out there. Lawrence Block wasn’t a big name at the time, so that wasn’t the reason (as it probably was a few years ago when this novel was reissued under the title YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER, with no mention of the TV series or its original Belmont edition).

As for the book itself, it’s pretty standard PI stuff. As a favor to a friend, Markham takes on a wandering daughter job. The girl has disappeared from the fancy private university she attends in New Hampshire. Markham starts investigating and then gets roped into what seems to be a completely different case – but you know the jobs will wind up being connected, and sure enough they are. There’s a lot of small-town college scenes, some late Fifties/early Sixties hipster stuff, a suicide that might be murder, some other deaths that are definitely murder, blackmail, gangsters, and lots of drinking and smoking. Everybody in this book spends a lot of time taking out cigarettes, lighting up cigarettes, putting out cigarettes, etc. Markham gets hit on the head and knocked out. Eventually he untangles everything and exposes the killer, of course.

Not surprisingly, despite the generic plot Block’s use of language is excellent, as always. Even though this book came early in his career, he could already put sentences together in a consistently interesting and entertaining fashion. I didn’t really see anything in this book that was a precursor for, say, the Matt Scudder books. (There is a minor character named Keller, however.) It’s worth reading, although it’s not on the same level as his other early books that have been reissued by Hard Case Crime.

Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-in Writing - Lee Goldberg, editor

I haven’t done all that much in the way of tie-in writing – three Walker, Texas Ranger novels, a Kolchak the Night Stalker story, an upcoming Green Hornet story – but I’ve been a fan of the genre for decades, going back to those Lone Ranger novels I checked out of the Odessa Public Library and the Man From U.N.C.L.E. paperback I bought brand-new in 1964 off the paperback rack in Buddies Grocery Store. (Notice how smoothly I work in those bits of book nostalgia.) I’ve read many, many TV tie-in novels and movie novelizations over the years and still enjoy them.


Despite my somewhat limited professional experience in the genre, I’ve been a member of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers since it was founded several years ago by Lee Goldberg and Max Allan Collins. The IAMTW has just published a new non-fiction book on the subject of tie-ins, and it’s an excellent work that offers something for just about everybody.


If you’re an author interested in writing tie-ins, TIED IN offers advice from the top names in the business, ranging from the general guidelines of a round table discussion of the business and craft of writing tie-ins to specific subjects such as writing tie-in novels for the YA market (from Aaron Rosenberg), novelizing video games (from William C. Dietz), writing soap opera-based tie-ins (from Alina Adams), and writing movie spin-off novels (from Greg Cox). If you’re a fan of certain TV series, such as STAR TREK, PSYCH, MURDER SHE WROTE, and BURN NOTICE, you can get all the behind-the-scenes stories on how the novels based on those series came to be written.


For someone like me, who’s very interested in the history of popular fiction, the highlight of TIED IN is David Spencer’s “American TV Tie-ins from the 50s Through the Early 70s”, which is almost a book in itself. It’s a fascinating historical discussion of how the TV tie-in novel originated and evolved over the years and touches on many of the books I was buying and reading when they were new. This article really brought back a lot of good memories for me. Along similar lines, also of great interest to me were fine articles by Paul Kupperberg about comic book and comic strip tie-in novels (I read a bunch of those, too) and Robert Greenberger about the connection between pulp magazines and tie-ins.


TIED IN is available as an e-book right now, with a print edition coming out soon. Either way, I don’t think you can go wrong. It’s informative, entertaining, and a must-have if you have any interest in tie-in fiction. Highly recommended.

Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop - Lee Goldberg

MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP, the latest novel in the tie-in series by Lee Goldberg, will be released next week, and you should do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. I’ve mentioned here before how much I enjoy these books, and this one is no exception.

MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP finds Adrian Monk being forced out of his comfort zone again (as if Monk actually has a comfort zone). Budget cuts cause his old friend Captain Stottlemeyer to fire him from his job as a consultant for the San Francisco Police Department, so Monk winds up going to work for a snazzy, high-tech private detective and security outfit called Intertect (a deliberate nod on Goldberg’s part to the old MANNIX TV series – and not the only such nod in this book, either). Naturally, there are several cases going on, and also naturally, some of them wind up being linked in ways that aren’t readily apparent at first. Monk, with the able assistance of narrator Natalie Teeger, sorts through them in his own distinctive way. The stakes are raised higher than usual, though, when someone he’s close to winds up in jail, charged with murder.

As always, Lee Goldberg has the voices of the characters down perfectly and spins his yarn in smooth, often funny, and occasionally poignant prose. The plot has just the right level of complexity. There are a lot of excellent tie-in novels out there (the level of writing in the genre has never been higher than it is right now), but the Monk books are some of the very best. Don’t miss MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP.

The Rat Patrol #6: Desert Masquerade -- David King

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and thanks to Scott Cupp, I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.