"A Broad Named Maude"

It was a long walk back from the Santa Anita racetrack to downtown Los Angeles. Every once in a while Ben Blagwell would stick his thumb out, but nobody stopped. What the hell, Ben wouldn’t have picked himself up either if he saw himself standing on the side of the road in his cheap Robert Hall suit, a big ginger bruiser who looked like he’d kill you just as soon as look at you. It was almost midnight by the time he got back to Bunker Hill, and all the lights in the rooming house were out, which was good – maybe he could avoid the landlady at least until morning. But someone was sitting on the porch glider up there in the dark. Ben started climbing the creaky wooden steps, hoping to hell that the someone wasn’t Mrs. McGrath, the mean old harridan. And then the someone struck a match, and lit a cigarette, and Ben stopped where he was at the head of the steps.

“Hello, big boy.”

Maude. Maude Collins. Three thousand miles he had traveled to get away from this broad, and here she was.

“You look like hell, big boy,” she said.

I look like hell, thought Ben.

And now I am in hell.

A Broad Named Maude, by Horace P. Sternwall, a Signet “paperback original”, 1956. (“Not a reprint”, but actually serialized in abridged form as “Devil’s Flight” in Torrid Tales, October-November-December, 1953, by “Harry P. St. James”.)

"Big Gun for a Little Lady"

“Hey, buddy,” said the dame sitting to Ben Blagwell’s right. “You wanta do me a favor?”

She was a redhead, but not with orange hair like a normal redhead. Her hair really was red, just like her dress.

She didn’t wait for Ben to say anything, but she opened up the sparkly red purse on her lap and brought out a .45 automatic, locked and cocked.

“Here,” she said. “Hold this for me a minute.”

Ben looked up and down the bar. Nobody was paying attention, and the kind of joint this was, even if somebody was paying attention they probably wouldn’t give a damn.

Ben took the gun out of her hand and held it on his thigh.

“Pretty big gun for a little lady,” he said.

“Sometimes a little lady needs a big gun,” she said. “Now put that thing away and let me buy you a drink.”

Big Gun For a Little Lady, by Horace P. Sternwall, a Ballantine paperback original, 1955. (Originally serialized in abridged form as "Little Lady With a Large Gun" in Savage Tales for Men, August and October, 1954.)

(Kindly scroll down the right-hand column of this page to find a listing of links to the opening passages of many other inexplicably out-of-print novels by the legendary Horace P. Sternwall, "The people's novelist.")

"The Young and the Damned"

Ever since he was a mere stripling of eleven and had first delved into a twelve-year-old copy of The American Mercury at his local public library, Seymour Krabbe wanted nothing more out of life than to be what was known in those more innocent times as a “public intellectual”; and so it was, at the age of eighteen, carrying only his high school gym bag and a second-hand Remington portable typewriter in its case, he arrived on a Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Terminal in New York City. He had only twenty-three dollars in his Cub Scout wallet, saved up from his newspaper route, but Seymour figured this would easily last him until he sold his first article or perhaps a short story, or maybe an in-depth book review, or who knew, perhaps even a sonnet or a villanelle…

The Young and the Damned, by Horace P. Sternwall, a Gold Medal paperback original, 1954. (Republished as The Young and the Unfortunate, by “Harry P. Stockhausen”, Panther Books {UK}, 1955.)


(Kindly scroll down the right-hand side of this page to find a listing of links to the opening passages of many other curiously out-of-print works of the legendary Horace P. Sternwall.)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 63

"hoo boy"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrated by roy dismas and konrad kraus

artistic supervisor: rhoda penmarq

*Associate Professor of Classical Literature, Assistant Home-Room Coördinator, Olney Community College; editor of A Girl Named Trixie, a Guy Called Spike: 27 Short Stories and 4 Novellas of the Slums by Horace P. Sternwall; Olney Community College Press, “The Sternwall Archive”, made possible in part by a generous grant from The Pep Boys™, Manny, Moe and Jack: “Serving your automotive needs to the best of our abilities in these trying times.” This week only, mention “Horace P. Sternwall” and get a free bottle of Turtle Wax© with every purchase exceeding $100. (Offer void where prohibited.)




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