A Foundation for Pulp Fictioneering: Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Like the 1973 film, this novel is a romp. The camaraderie of the four heroes, and their contrasting characteristics -- that sometimes put their intentions at odds until adversity rears its head -- lays the groundwork for a multitude of teams that follow: Doc Savage’s scrappy adventurers, the Shadow’s slew of agents, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, the X-Files, even Luke and Han and Chewie and a couple of robots, and so on. Dumas includes lots of action, with a dose of historical events (which aren’t necessarily accurate in their historic details), plus humor and court intrigue. And swordplay! - Read this article

"The Sinister Ray" by Lester Dent

Gadgets, colorful characters with catchy names, and a lack of conjunctions mark Lester Dent’s work on the Doc Savage series in its early supersaga years. The same can be true in some of his pre-Doc work. - Read this article

The Hero in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days

Heroes, as we know them from pulp and other popular fiction, comic books, action movies, and TV shows, do amazing things: rescue maidens, battle dragons and monsters and alien civilizations attempting to enslave Earth, find treasure, discover lost civilizations, and light out for the territories to explore unknown lands, seas, planets, or simply The Unknown. - Read this article

Tom Lovell, Pulp Artist

Thanks to the efforts of Anthony Tollin and Will Murray, more pulp fans today are more familiar with the artwork Tom Lovell created for the pulp magazines. - Read this article

Blue Book Artists

I want to pass along some links to a dandy blog I visit on a frequent basis, Today's Inspiration. It focus on illustration -- for magazines, books, whatever -- and the illustrators who have made their mark in our cultural awareness of our world. Many of them toiled away, basically unknown -- not everyone became a household word like Norman Rockwell. - Read this article

Edgar Poe, 200 years on

2009 marks the Bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe. Given a variety of titles posthumously -- the United States first literary critic, creator of the detective story, creator of the horror story, among other things -- his was a unique talent in our country's literary history. - Read this article

Pulps at the New York Comic Con

A panel of pulp fiction a-fiction-ados will discuss Pulp Fiction at the February 6-8 New York Comic Con, courtesy of Ed Catto. - Read this article

The Longest Running Pulps

by Mike Ashley. Mike Ashley is an indefatigable bibliographer, anthologist, and historian of fiction magazines. He’s sort of a genre fiction bon vivant. Mike wrote the following article for the Pulp Era Amateur Press Society (PEAPS), a collection of pulp fiction fans, collectors, and readers. Mike very graciously provided permission to publish it here, and I am very, very happy to do so. - Read this article

Inspector Frayne, the Best-dressed Man in the Police Department

By Monte Herridge, who brings us another essay about a series character from Detective Fiction Weekly. Harold de Polo created a short-lived series about a dandy police inspector named Frayne. Frayne prides himself on being the best-dressed man in the police department and one of the best in the city. His personal assistant is a red-haired detective named Don Haggerty, who was known in the department as Frayne’s right-hand man. He did many of the basic detective chores required in investigations, such as looking over the crime scene for any interesting signs or clues. In this role, he serves as a sort of Archie Goodwin to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. - Read this article

Igor Kordey on Tarzan: The Rivers of Blood

On the Newsarama web site, which focuses on the comic book industry, an interview with comic artist Kordey appeared in 2002. Kordey had this to say about Tarzan: The Rivers of Blood: - Read this article