by Duane Spurlock
Believe it or not, whether you imagine that Santa will shimmy down your chimney, it's time for The Pulp Rack's Eccentric Shopping List for 2007. (You can see my reasoning for providing the title's adjective in last year's list by clicking here.) Certainly this list will say more about me and my particular interests than it may meet the desires of all other pulp readers. For that, it's probably not only eccentric but idiosyncratic, to boot.
You can purchase some of these items from Amazon.com. I've simplified the linking process by setting up The Pulp Rack's Book Rack using a tool supplied by Amazon. (You can reach The Book Rack by clicking here.) By clicking the link accompanying my item notes and purchasing through The Pulp Rack's Book Rack -- or by purchasing some other item during the same Amazon session -- you'll drop a few pennies into the Pulp Rack's piggy bank and help defray its online expenses, for which I thank you.
Now, on to the Eccentric List!
1.
Otto Penzler is a formidable name in the ranks of crime fiction anthologists. He's performed an admirable service to pulp fans with this year's Big Fact Tome, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The '20s, '30s & '40s. With so many stories included, it's hard to complain if a favorite author didn't make the cut. Click here.
2.
Continuing in the crime fiction vein, Hard Case Crime continues to bring us hard-boiled joy with our boiled custard. Recently they've released books by two stalwarts of the pulp magazines, Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis: Woolrich's FRIGHT; and Goodis' THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN. The former first appeared under one of the noir master's pseudonyms, and is published here under his own name for the first time. Goodis' novel is not one of his better known books, and it's sure to put a damper on holiday cheer -- so save it for a rainy day in 2008. Click here.
3.
Anthony Tollin's Nostalgia Ventures continues to release handsome two-in-one books starring The Shadow and Doc Savage, which feature reset type and introductory material by Will Murray. Volume 9 of The Shadow series features two stories that foreshadowed and influenced the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger's Batman: Lingo and Partners in Peril. Here are some notes on the volume from Tollin's The Shadow Sanctum site:
"First, a powerful new underworld kingpin crosses swords with The Shadow in Lingo, which inspired Batman's Batarang. In Partners of Peril, by Theodore Tinsley, Lamont Cranston investigates chemical syndicate murders in the crime thriller that serves as the model for Batman's debut adventure in Detective Comics #27. 'With this astonishing discovery, Anthony Tollin and Will Murray have rewritten the history of Batman. We always knew that Batman was inspired by The Shadow -- we just didn't know how much he was inspired by The Shadow!' -- ROY THOMAS
"This extra-long volume also reprints Tinsley's The Grim Joker, a 1936 tale featuring a clown-faced crime boss called 'The Joker'! PLUS: Will Murray documents the 'Shadowy' origins of The Batman, and Anthony Tollin chronicles how Partners in Peril was adapted as the first Batman story. Cover by George Rozen; illustrations by Tom Lovell." Click here.
Volume 4 of the Doc Savage series includes a tale by one of The Pulp Rack's favorite fictioneers, Ryerson Johnson. From The Shadow's Sanctum: "In Land of Always-Night, a strange being who kills with the touch of a finger leads Doc Savage on a quest to a lost underworld civilization, in an epic 1935 collaboration by W. Ryerson Johnson and Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson. Then, in 1938's Mad Mesa, the Man of Bronze awakens to discover that he's in another man's body and imprisoned in a penitentiary! Hundreds will die unless Doc can escape and solve the mystery of the mesa madness. These thrilling pulp adventures are reproduced with the original color pulp covers by Walter Baumhofer and Emery Clarke, interior illustrations by Paul Orban and historical articles by Will Murray (who wrote seven Bantam Doc Savage novels)." Click here.
4.
Set the mood for your pulp reading by spinning a CD with some Old Time Radio shows. Everybody deserves a laugh -- what better gift is there than to make someone smile? So check out this collection of OTR comedy shows, Comedy: Original Radio Broadcasts. Click here.
If you're in a more adventurous mood, try Mystery: Old Time Radio Shows. (Personally, I prefer westerns, but the one I wanted for the list was sold out at Amazon.) Both of these compilations are from Anthony Tollin's Nostalgia Ventures. Click here.
5.
I said ECCENTRIC, and I mean it.
Gasoline Alley was a great, down-to-earth comic strip that aged with its characters, that showed readers humor in the everyday lives of normal people. Drawn & Quarterly has begun assembling chronological collections of these daily and Sunday strips, written and drawn by Frank King. No super heroics, no adventures in exotic lands, no lost races, no terrorizing dinosaurs from outer space. Just the warm human drama of domestic life in a neighborhood of Americana, USA. To this real life setting the pulp magazines brought color and larger-than-life Gosh-Wow-Pow! This is great reading. The series starts with Walt and Skeezix: Volume 1, collecting the years 1921 and 1922. Highly recommended! Click here.
6.
Speaking of Gosh-Wow-Pow! . . . Jack Kirby distilled SF pulp magazines, World War II, superhero comics, and cosmic high drama informed by the mind-expanding culture bursting forth in 1960s-1970s California to create what DC Comics called his Fourth World series of books. The issues of those various titles –- beginning with Jimmy Olsen, moving to The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle –- are being reprinted in publication order in a handsome set of tomes titled Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. The action starts in Volume 1, with essays by Grant Morrison and Mark Evanier accompanying 18 titanic tales of eye-popping, energy-crackling excitement by The King. This is Big Fun! Click here.
7.
Sticking to our comic theme for the moment, let me thank Checker Book Publishing Group for launching its campaign to reprint in book form Milt Caniff's great Steve Canyon comic strip. When I was a wee lad, each afternoon I'd crawl up in my mother's lap as she sat in the rocking chair so she could read the funny papers to me. I'd endure the daily drama of Rex Morgan and Apartment 3-G, but my favorites were Kerry Drake and Steve Canyon. With the first Checker volume opening with the strip's launch in 1947, we see Steve encounter the sort of femme fatales and snappy patter that you may be accustomed to seeing in noir films from the era. Fresh after the War, infused with a Raymond Chandleresque feel for heroes and villains only a step or two removed from Black Mask magazine, this is great stuff. Click here.
8.
If you've read your way through Horatio Hornblower but can't quite gird your literary loins for reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series, try a nautical series with an Argosy-magazine pace similar to Forester's Hornblower tales: Richard Woodman's Nathaniel Drinkwater series. The series opens with An Eye of the Fleet, with Drinkwater a midshipman on his first vessel, learning about life in the Royal Navy the hard way –- facing Spanish battleships and the Swamp Fox's militia in Revolutionary War North America. Click here.
9.
Continuing with a nautical flair, consider Jules Verne's Magellania. Set near Terra del Fuego, this first authentic translation into English of a novel written by Verne in 1897, but not published until after his death in a version extensively rewritten by his son, Michel, under the title The Survivors of the Jonathan (1909). Translated by Benjamin Ivry, Magellania returns to Verne's original manuscript and his intentions for this novel about a mysterious man – is he from America or Europe? – who settles among the natives to escape the evils of civilization and anarchy. Click here.
10.
In another post to The Pulp Rack I touted Christopher's Ghosts as another entry in Charles McCarry's Paul Christopher espionage series that keeps alive the traditions of realistic pulp writing as it was practiced in top-tier fiction magazines like Adventure and Blue Book. There’s a straightforward elegance in McCarry’s writing that recalls the excellence in storytelling encouraged by the editors of those publications. Much adventure writing today offers a shadow of Lester Dent’s and Ernest Hemingway’s brief sentences –- short telegraphic bursts of information, delivered bluntly and gracelessly. McCarry’s writing has style –- unobtrusive style that carries the reader along, instead of that precocious, “look at me, I’m so clever” type of style we expect from hot shot so-called literary bestseller young lions and lionesses and academic-based post-modernists. It’s a style honed in the pages of some of the best nonfiction magazines of the 20th Century -– National Geographic, Life, Time, and others that once were the pinnacle of mainstream popular reading, whether you picked up the issues at home in your armchair or at the barber shop.
Christopher's Ghosts, the latest entry in McCarry’s exploration of the enigmatic Paul Christopher, examines Paul’s youth in Berlin during the early days of the Third Reich, the Nazis impact on his life and family, and his first love; then it turns to his early days as a spy in post-War Berlin as he encounters familiar –- and new –- faces in the new war, the Cold War, before the Soviet Union erected the Berlin Wall. Click here.
11.
Paul Feval was writing pulp before anyone knew what pulp was. This French writer of thrillers produced a novel, Vampire City, that featured Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe as its heroine battling a vampire and his minions as they attempt to enslave her friends. The vampires live in a city of their own, invisible to the eyes of men, in the heart of Europe. All this excitement years before Bram Stoker brought the world Dracula. Click here.
12.
Chris Roberson has re-imagined the scientific romance as practiced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Kline, and Leigh Brackett in his novel, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. In Roberson's updating, a 1960s-era Soviet cosmonaut is plucked from her space mission to a strange, parallel universe. Retro SF fun with a contemporary twist. Click here.
13.
For a baker's dozen: And now for the Shameless Self-Promotion section of our list.
Fictioneers during the heyday of the pulps were often known for jumping from genre to genre, appearing in clutch of titles in a single month. I’m hardly so prolific (nor are so many outlets for non-novel-length fiction available these days), but I’m doing my own genre hop-scotching from jungle tale to contemporary adventure story to western tall tale. At this time none of these books are available from Amazon, but from small independent presses, so you won’t find ‘em on The Pulp Rack’s Book Rack.
First is “Moon of the Demon Men,” one of four stories in a WildCat Books anthology, Ki-Gor, Jungle Lord. Ki-Gor was a Tarzan-style hero whose adventures were published by Fiction House in Jungle Tales magazine during the 1940s and ‘50s. The character has fallen into the public domain, and a group of writers -– me, among ‘em –- has written some new stories featuring this jungle hero. Walt Disney has brought us an animated Tarzan and Tarzan on Broadway, but fans of jungle fiction are unlikely to see any new, non-musical Tarzan tales for awhile. So it’s nice to be part of this jungle genre revival. You’ll find Ki-Gor, Jungle Lord by clicking here.
Second is Two-Fisted Tales of La Plata, Missouri. Edited by Mark Lambert, this collection of six new stories was compiled in conjunction with the La Plata Doc Con 2, a celebration of Lester Dent in his home town. Dent was the main creative force and writer of Street & Smith’s Doc Savage character, who starred in novel-length adventures in his own monthly magazine from 1933 to 1949. Doc was a larger-than-life hero who influenced the creation of Superman, Batman, James Bond, the Fantastic Four, and Indiana Jones. My story in this collection is “A Quiet Night in the Dark in La Plata, Missouri, 1942,” in which Dent hosts a mysterious visitor to his home –- and unexpectedly encounters some dangerous company trailing his guest. You’ll find Two-Fisted Tales of La Plata, Missouri, by clicking here.
Finally, my entry in the western genre appears in Where Legends Ride, published by Express Westerns. This collection of 14 new tales includes work by a number of authors who are typically published by British publisher Robert Hale’s Black Horse imprint. Hale publishes only novels, and the company’s distribution in the United States is very limited, so this anthology offers the writers to stretch their wings in the short story form and expand their readership in the States. My tale is “Pretty Polly,” but the title is a bit deceptive, for the story –- part tall tale, part animal fable, part trickster story combined in a western setting –- offers both humor and violence. You’ll find Where Legends Ride by clicking here.
That's it for this year's shopping list. Hope you enjoyed it. Happy shopping and happy holidays!
Posted by ds at December 14, 2007 06:56 AM
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