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!

You can find The Pulp Rack's Book Rack by clicking here.

In a previous post, I’ve promoted Charles McCarry as a contemporary writer keeping alive the traditions of realistic pulp writing as it was practiced in magazines like Adventure and Blue Book. I find a difference between McCarry’s work and other contemporary pulp adventure writing -- like that of Clive Cussler, James Rollins, and the team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child -- in the ways the writers go about representing their stories in reality. For instance, the latter-listed writers focus on larger-than-life, over-the-top characters influenced by the hero pulps (like Doc Savage, the Shadow, and so forth) and television shows like The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, or The X-Files, as well as the James Bond series of movies. McCarry’s novels, while focusing on spycraft and politics, are more closely aligned with the real world’s events and governments. For example, you can still read some of the best stories from Adventure and Blue Book today and find writing of a different stripe than appeared in the hero pulps. Perhaps the distinction is artificial, but it suits my purposes.

Let me revise that last statement: remove the word perhaps. Because you can find elements in McCarry’s work that hark to the hero-pulp tradition. For example, take a look at the following paragraphs from Christopher’s Ghosts. This passage of the book comes from a section set in 1939 Berlin, during Paul Christopher’s childhood. McCarry has described Paul in previous books as a remarkable spy for the U.S. government. That, in itself, suggests the character is informed by heroic DNA. (Anyone for some Wold Newton investigations?) In Christopher’s Ghosts, Paul’s parents are in trouble with the Reich for their heroic activities, as noted in the first sentence below. Further, Paul’s mother, Lori, is described in terms that would make her the perfect Mrs. Clark Savage, Jr.

Also, their enemies -- the agents of the Gestapo -- represent the greatest evil super-villain of the 20th Century, the Nazi regime. Finally, Major Stutzer -- the Christophers’ bete noir -- is given a nickname, just as every pulp villain has a colorful moniker to set him apart from his fellow villains. Stutzer’s traits could easily be lifted from a list of character tags compiled by Lester Dent.

<<
The Christophers were suspected of crimes against the Reich, and they had in fact helped several enemies of the dictatorship to escape from Germany. There was no real need for the secret police to prove these charges. On his own authority Major Stutzer could send them to a concentration camp or even summarily execute them, but for reasons of his own he wanted to prolong the questioning, to maneuver them into full confessions. His interest in the Christophers, especially in Paul's mother, was deeply personal. They had a history. Always Stutzer's eyes were fixed on her, staring hard, when he fired his questions and threats, as if he was deeply interested in the impression he was making on her. He rarely looked at Hubbard or Paul.

The Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police, abbreviated as Gestapo, have been imagined by later generations as a collection of freaks, but in fact they looked like any other Germans. Stutzer was a recognizable type--bony, erect, triangular face, long nose, thin wet pink lips, quick mind. He spoke educated German. He was not, however, educated in the sense that Lori Christopher was educated. She spoke German, French and English with equal fluency. She knew Latin and ancient Greek and had read the greatest books in all those languages, she recognized almost any European musical work immediately and played the piano expertly, she knew painting and sculpture as well as she knew music, she had memorized the poetry of Goethe and other giants of German letters, she remembered mathematics through the calculus. Stutzer had no need for such a body of knowledge. As Hubbard said, secret policemen were like all tribal peoples--they might not know a lot, but they all knew the same things. The Christophers called Major Stutzer Major Dandy because Dandy was what his surname meant in English and because he was almost comically dapper.
>>

Although the dust jackets of another writer, Alan Furst, carry blurbs describing him as “widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel,” McCarry better qualifies as following the tradition of American adventure writing. Furst’s style draws more on the tradition of the British spy novel -- we can perhaps use as an example the spy novel as written by Graham Greene. Furst is a master of creating an atmospheric setting weighted with melancholy and foreboding, and he writes conversations that sound more real than those of Elmore Leonard’s novels.

On the other hand, McCarry focuses on storytelling in the mode of those directed by pulp magazine editors -- “Tell a good story!” -- with a narrative energy that follows the classical traditional requirements of plot and character. While Furst’s tales (which, don’t get me wrong, are very good) seem more a series of character snapshots assembled to form a portrait of an event or series of events, McCarry wraps us in characters’ histories and anecdotes to spin a story with a climax and an ending. His style doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling -- in fact, one doesn’t notice his style, which is praise due the best storytellers. The reader reaches the end of a McCarry novel with a sense of closure. That’s not always true at the end of a Furst novel.

I first encountered McCarry by reading his 2004 novel, Old Boys (another novel that features Paul Christopher and his cousin, fellow-spy Hubbard, and the enigmatic and remarkable Lori Christopher). After that, I followed up by starting to read McCarry’s preceding novels in reverse order. Shelley’s Heart (1997) is an engaging story about a disputed Presidential election (published three years before the scandal of hanging chads) and the ways political extremism and polarizing political partisanship can derail the traditions of democracy; it also describes Hubbard’s role in a scandal and his eventual disgrace. Second Sight (1991) is a wild romp (worthy of the pages of Adventure or Blue Book) involving Paul, an exotic psychic who knew his parents in Berlin, his lost daughter, a community that may be a lost tribe of Israel, and a plot by Arab terrorists; some critics complained that this novel was too unrealistic, but I found it very entertaining and enjoyable; only an accomplished storyteller could manage to wrap together so many plot strands convincingly.

Consider also McCarry's background -- a secret career as an actual spy for the CIA, with his public career as a magazine writer (for Time, Life, National Geographic, and more) his cover.

And now back to McCarry’s latest, Christopher’s Ghosts, which again examines the mysteries of Paul’s mother during his childhood years in Berlin, then flashes forward to 1959 in the same city, before the building of the Berlin Wall. In 1939, Paul meets his first love, the daughter of a Jewish doctor. In the second half of the novel, Paul -- now an agent of The Outfit (McCarry’s version of the CIA) -- hunts down Major Dandy, who hasn’t escaped the war unscathed, but who still plots and destroys. McCarry brings in characters from other novels, building not only a family saga that chronicles the secret career of Paul Christopher but also a history of the 20th Century’s public and secret wars.

Shorter -- and darker -- than some of McCarry’s previous works, Christopher’s Ghosts is an excellent and entertaining addition to the Christopher history. I recommend it to any pulp fans looking for a contemporary continuance of the pulp storytelling tradition.

Links:
Fans of McCarry and of spy fiction will be pleased by Overlook Press’ efforts to bring the Paul Christopher saga back into print. You can find these all at Amazon.com.

Christopher’s Ghosts

Old Boys

Shelley’s Heart

Second Sight

Mountains Of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey In Antarctica by John Long (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2001).

Edgar Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym initially presents itself as a true account of an actual sea voyage, and H.P. Lovecraft attempts to ground “At the Mountains of Madness” in the real world with a seemingly realistic account of an expedition to the Transantarctic Mountains. Mountains of Madness, by John Long, flips the card by being an actual account of fossil-hunting fieldwork in those mountains. He takes Lovecraft’s book along, and the field team members take turns reading aloud from it while the terrifying polar winds howl and beat at their tent.

The jacket blurb -- very similar to the description I wrote in the preceding paragraph -- sounded intriguing, so I checked out this book from the library. Well, as often happens, the expectations generated by a blurb didn’t quite meet the reality of my reading experience. Long references Lovecraft’s AMM only a few times in the book’s 250 pages, and usually as a joke.

He recounts two fossil-hunting expeditions (in 1988 and 1992) in this volume. The style is pleasant and informal, almost conversational, but at times this becomes disinteresting. The book paints a good picture of what fieldwork in such an extreme location is like, including the rugged preparations and training a scientist must take before he’s even allowed onto the Antarctic continent. The lonely and danger are made clear, but that sometimes glib style occasionally undermines the weight of what Long is recounting.

Certainly there are interesting passages about preparing food in that sort of environment, and Long’s digressions about past explorers who had none of the technological marvels available to present-day researchers are very enlightening. The history of the Antarctic continent and the geographic conglomeration known as Gondwana were very interesting, and it’s fascinating to think of the coldest place on Earth once being home to a tropical jungle. On the other hand, it’s easy to bog down in his technical lexicon when Long begins droning on about fossils. But over all, he manages to balance the technical and the goofy into a suitable travel book for a popular audience.

Pulp fans looking for strong links to HPL and AMM will probably end up dissatisfied, but the conceit for the book is interesting and worth investigating.

Links:
Read Part One of this essay, "The Mountains of Madness: 1931," by clicking here.

Mountains Of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey In Antarctica by John A. Long is available from Amazon.com. Click here.

The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi, is available from Amazon.com. Click here.

Learn more about the Transantarctic Mountains at the Antarctic Connection site...

...and at the Geosciences pages of the University of Arizona...

...and find out about their mysteries revealed, according to Science Daily.

In “Clues Found in Mystery of Antarctic Mountain Formation,” H.P. Lovecraft gets a mention in this LiveScience.com essay.

You can go there too, thanks to the Adventure Network. Watch out for the giant penguins!

Archives of The Southern Literary Messenger, including the issues in which Poe's novel appeared, are available at the University of Michigan.

Other articles of related interest at The Pulp Rack:

Edgar Allan Poe and the Road to Pulp Fiction

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras: Verne Lays the Foundation for Fictional Pulp Adventures to Foreign Lands

You’ll find other related articles at The Pulp Rack's "Jules Verne: Pre-Pulp Pioneer Extraordinaire" page.

By examining Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym we took a look at one of the authors and books that helped set the stage for pulp magazine writing in the 20th Century. It’s now appropriate to look at a work strikingly influenced -- perhaps inspired -- by Pym.

1931
“At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft, in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Dell Publishing, 1997). Originally published as a serial in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

Joshi’s notes tell us Lovecraft wrote this short novel between January and March 1931. It was rejected by Weird Tales, and the author set it aside. Later it sold to Astounding Stories, in which it appeared in 1936. Apparently Lovecraft considered “At the Mountains of Madness” (AMM) to be one of his best works, but the editorial cuts made for the appearance in Astounding made the author see red. The version that appears in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft is based on the author’s original typescript, which resides in the John Hay Library at Brown University.

(One wonders about the reader reception to AMM in Astounding. It doesn’t have the rayguns and space ships and alien planet [that “Buck Rogers stuff”] elements I typically associate with Astounding’s fiction, although AMM’s Antarctic setting is certainly as exotic as any far-off planet that might appear within the magazine’s pages. Does anyone with an Astounding collection have letters columns to check in appropriate issues? Maybe no one commented on the story at all.)

AMM is a sequel to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. That it is a sequel isn’t explicitly clear until the last dozen or ten pages of the story, although the narrator (never named, but identified in “The Shadow Out of Time” [according to Joshi] as Professor William Dyer of the Miskatonic University geology department) early on mentions Poe’s novel. The association arises from the setting for Dyer’s story: Pym ends -- or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it suspends its action -- near Antarctica; Dyer leads a research expedition to that same southern continent. That the two stories are more tightly intertwined by the end of Lovecraft’s tale is made clear by a sound Dyer and his companion hear -- a strange, exotic call that narrator Pym mentions in Poe’s novel.

Lovecraft exploits this sound, and another element of Poe’s novel -- the author’s seeming ambivalence about this story -- to promote the horror within his own tale. To understand how Lovecraft does this, let’s look briefly at Poe’s novel.

The first two chapters of Pym were published in the January and February 1837 issues of The Southern Literary Messenger, for which Poe had served as editor. The opening passages have the feel of a typical nautical adventure tale -- a youngster wants to assert his independence from his family by stowing away on a whaling vessel for an adventurous trip at sea. After these two installments appeared, Poe apparently reconsidered his efforts, and the subsequent chapters take the form of a literary hoax.

The complete novel -- if by complete we mean the story as ended by its author -- then appeared in book form in 1838 from Harper Brothers. Here Poe’s intentional ambiguity or ambivalence about his longest piece of fiction comes clear -- although in a rather muddy fashion. In its book form, the tale opens with a preface ostensibly by Pym -- filled with “Defoesque posturing,” according to the Oxford University Press’ edition’s editor, J. Gerald Kennedy -- in which he describes E.A. Poe as simply an editor of Arthur Gordon Pym’s narrative of his “extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere.” Here he claims Poe published the first two chapters of his book in the Messenger “under the garb of fiction,” but letters from readers suggested that they saw the truth in the narrative despite its “air of fable” -- or so “Pym” claims.

To throw another glint of light on Poe’s seeming ambivalence regarding his own novel, it’s worth noting Claudia Kay Silverman’s statement at her web site on Pym, at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/frame.html, about John Cleves Symmes’ 1820 novel about a hollow Earth, Symzonia, which may have influenced or inspired Pym:

“The journey enacted in Symzonia, the journey to the interior of the earth, can be construed as a journey of anti-discovery. It is a journey to discover an emptiness.”

This discovery of emptiness (or anti-discovery) -- of finding nothing -- conflicts with our desire for closure in stories about exploration, where closure comes with discovery, or reaching a destination. The discovery of nothing -- like Pym’s ambiguous non-ending -- thwarts the reader’s expectation of discovery, of explanation or solution, of closure.

This lack of explanation or revelation harks back to Pym’s preface, in which he deliberately withholds information: Although he encounters gentlemen in Richmond, Virginia, “who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public" . . . “I had several reasons, however, for declining to do so, some of which were of a nature altogether private, and concern no person but myself, others not so much so.”

This leads us next to the “editor’s” Note at the novel’s end, which opens with the statement that Pym is dead, and so can’t provide the details that would resolve his narrative’s mysteries. But the reader is further frustrated in his desire for information by the statement, “The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press.” This is a fiction, of course; and not only does the reader not know the circumstances of Pym’s death, he learns no other details about that death -- essentially thrashing the reader with a frustrating literary pun by rendering Pym’s end doubly unresolved (Pym the novel, and Pym the narrator).

Back to Lovecraft. Early on in AMM he refers to Pym as a work of fiction, as AMM’s narrator, Professor Dyer, mentions having read the story. This sort of real-world detail lends verisimilitude to Lovecraft’s tale, particularly as AMM includes a full description of preparations for Dyer’s expeditions, an apparent requirement for any exploration narrative. For example, the detail Lovecraft uses to describe the construction of the airplanes to be used on the journey and the references to articles about actual expeditions give factual weight to his fiction and ground his readers in reality before he escorts them to the alien frights Dyer encounters in Antarctica. Jules Verne provided similarly detailed descriptions of his characters’ preparations and outfitting -- and especially of their conveyances -- in his novels. (Look, for example, at Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras [which was influenced by Pym, as discussed elsewhere on The Pulp Rack], or From the Earth to the Moon.) Poe, although he doesn’t give up so much on the vessels in Pym, also provides details about Pym’s provisioning in an “iron-bound box, such as is used sometimes for packing fine earthenware,” in which he stows away in the Grampus. However, Poe’s descriptions of Pym’s adventures in Chapters One and Two before leaving on the Grampus certainly ground the story -- at least in its beginnings -- in a world the reader can sense is “real.”

Likewise, Lovecraft continues to create verisimilitude in his descriptions of the environment and landscape the Dyer expedition experiences in Antarctica. This level of realistic description continues during Dyer’s exploration of the abandoned city and as he encounters the more fantastic elements of that setting. (Interestingly enough, in June 2007, reports were published on results of a study by North Carolina State University paleontologist Julia Clarke about fossils of giant penguins found in Peru -- remarkably similar in size to those penguins Lovecraft describes in AMM.) Lovecraft is clearly working with the conventions of the exploration narrative genre here, just as Verne does with his encyclopedic lists of marine life in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the geological and subterranean descriptions in Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Poe also lends the weight of a simulated reality to Pym in the way he devotes space to detailing the landscape of the uncharted island, Tsalal, on which Pym and Dirk Peters are marooned -- particularly the carved figures of the chasm investigated by the two sailors. The precise descriptions given in the body of the narrative are followed in the editorial Note at the novel’s end by an explanation -- although unsatisfying in the way it fails to clear up any mystery -- of the alphabetic nature of the carved figures’ shapes. These touches of verisimilitude serve to amplify the mystery of Pym’s ending.

Lovecraft exploits this teetering balance between verisimilitude and fiction in the last passages of AMM. The “reality” of Dyer’s world in AMM bursts when he hears the strange, exotic call that narrator Pym mentions in Poe’s novel. At that point, the novel Pym tears through that veil separating fiction from Dyer’s real world, and Pym the hoax/novel becomes Pym the true narrative for Dyer. As Dyer’s horror is revealed, Lovecraft’s reader feels a polar chill down his neck.

copyright Duane Spurlock

Links:
You can find The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi, at Amazon.com. Click here.

A related book, Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica, by John A. Long is also available there. Click here.

You can visit Claudia Kay Silverman’s web site on Pym by clicking here.

Learn more about the Transantarctic Mountains at the Antarctic Connection site...

...and at the Geosciences pages of the University of Arizona...

...and find out about their mysteries revealed, according to Science Daily.

In “Clues Found in Mystery of Antarctic Mountain Formation,” H.P. Lovecraft gets a mention in this LiveScience.com essay.

You can go there too, thanks to the Adventure Network. Watch out for the giant penguins!

Archives of The Southern Literary Messenger, including the issues in which Poe's novel appeared, are available at the University of Michigan.

Other articles of related interest at The Pulp Rack:

Edgar Allan Poe and the Road to Pulp Fiction

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras: Verne Lays the Foundation for Fictional Pulp Adventures to Foreign Lands

Inspector Porky Neale was an interesting series by Roland Phillips that ran in DFW from about 1930-34. Porky was a nickname, and his real name was rarely if ever mentioned. His initials and middle name are stated in the story “Walk Into My Parlor.” His initials are J.O.N., and his middle name is Oswald. It is not stated what his first name is. There is a bit of an inconsistency regarding his name. In “Feathered Doom” it is revealed that he was known as Bob Neale when young. Even though Neale is a large man, that is not the source of his nickname. He is described as having a “gaunt face . . . bleak as a polar sunset, whose stiff, bristly hair stuck up like quills of a porcupine, and won him his sobriquet . . .” ("Spook’s Progress") He is a single parent, and his only daughter, a girl of eighteen named Sadie, lives with him. He gives her an expensive jeweled watch on her eighteenth birthday. The daughter is mentioned in some of the stories, but never is featured in any of them.

Neale smokes a briar pipe, which Sergeant Wallace calls a “vermin-exterminator.” Wallace prefers unlit cigars.

A bit of his past comes to light in the story “Feathered Doom,” in which he investigates the murder of an old friend named Captain Brennan. Brennan was a retired sea captain, and when young, Neale had served on a ship under him. The ship was probably an old sailing vessel named China Girl, which Brennan had a model of in his apartment.

Another hint of Neale’s past appears in “Pitch and Catch,” when his first cousin Gus Whimple from Walla Walla brings trouble with him. Whimple is a baseball player visiting the city, and gets mixed up with bank robbers. He is the son of Neale’s Aunt Hattie.

He lives on the sixth floor of an old fashioned apartment building, “one of the few remaining older types, dwarfed by ornate and towering structures on both sides. Unpretentious, it boasted of neither doorman nor liveried flunkies.” So Neale is not interested in moving into a newer type of apartment, and is happy with the old style to which he has become accustomed.

The Inspector may not be a workaholic in his police work, but he seemingly has no other life. One experience with trying to take a vacation turned into a miserable, boring time for him, and he came back from it with the firm opinion that “Vacations were the bunk.” ("Walk Into My Parlor") However, he had changed his mind the next year, when he went to the Florida Keys to do some fishing. He was lucky, catching one large tarpon after a day’s work of fishing ("Brought to Gaff"). He also caught a murderer during his vacation, as he stepped into a double murder incident during his time there. Neale liked the tarpon fishing in Florida so well he went back down there for vacation the next year, and wound up getting involved in another murder case with complications involved ("Jeweled Bait").

Most of the stories in the series involve regular police cases. There are a couple of exceptions besides the vacation cases mentioned above. One is the story “Walk Into My Parlor,” where Neale comes back from vacation to find that someone has been impersonating him and using his apartment. Another exception is the story “Hocus Pocus,” where Neale is a guest in Palm Beach of a wealthy New York family. He spends a week dressing up and going to parties and functions with the rich elite. However, there is police work for him after all, when on the final day a jewel thief decides to raid the fancy party Neale is attending. Neale shows himself able to outthink the crook, and also shows himself physically able to defend himself even without a gun.

The series of stories shows that Neale is able to be observant when it comes to clues of crime, and is not just brawn like other detectives. Another good example of this is the story “Exit to Murder,” where Neale is after a slippery and smart crook. However, Neale does like a good brawl with criminals if it comes his way, and enjoys a good scrap with a jewel gang in “Goldfish Tell.”

The first story in the series has a few aspects that do not occur in later stories. In the this story, “Spook's Progress,” Neale sits behind a desk and gives orders to his subordinates about investigating crimes. In later stories, Neale is out and about doing investigating himself. Another interesting point about the first story are the statements about Neale’s attitude towards and philosophy of interrogation of criminal suspects. He did not believe in giving suspects the third degree, or rough stuff. “He maintained that ‘sweating’ was a scientific process, and devised startling methods for extracting information from sealed lips.” ("Spook’s Progress"). One of his “surprises,” as they are called, comes in useful when a criminal enters his office and threatens him in “Spook's Progress.”

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Many and original were the “surprises” bestowed upon the unfortunates who found themselves in the hands of the inventive Neale. His dingy office became a stage upon which he personated the director, electrician, and property man. He held the script and pulled the strings that set his marionettes dancing -- literally. No zealous producer devoted more time or displayed more ingenuity; none took greater delight in opening his bag of tricks than Porky Neale.
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These surprises are not much in evidence in later stories in the series. Neale is too busy investigating crimes. His assistant on cases is Sergeant Wallace, who knows the Inspector very well. In fact, on more than one occasion Neale has invited the Sergeant to dinner at his apartment with him and his daughter. One case where Neale put on one of his surprises is “Feathered Doom,” where Wallace encouraged him to “Get that ingenious mind of yours steamed up. Put on one of your sideshows.” It is the first time Neale does so outside the confines of his office.

Regarding the inspector’s personality, some details are given in the stories. Sergeant Wallace remarks that “Neale, outwardly gruff and hardboiled, inwardly as soft as a two-minute egg!” ("Catch as Catch Can") Neale dislikes lying at any time, even when dealing with criminals, so he lets Sergeant Wallace do the lying when it is necessary. Neale also has his bias. He has an intense dislike of tabloid photographers and private detectives. Possibly based upon personal experience.

One thing that stands out in the series is the inspector’s long experience at his work, and his use of this experience in his investigations. In one story it was noted, “Long experience had taught the inspector the value of camouflage, of covering his trail, whether it seemed necessary or not. He assumed that the hunted was every bit as crafty as the hunter, and played the game accordingly.” ("Time to Kill")

This is an average series, without any great pretensions to it. However, it is well worth reading for the character of Inspector Porky Neale and his entertaining exploits.

A mostly complete list of the stories in this series is below. There are probably more not yet seen.

Inspector Porky Neale in Detective Fiction Weekly by Roland Phillips:
Spook's Progress - - - June 14, 1930
Feathered Doom - - - April 11, 1931
Red Night - - - July 11, 1931
Catch as Catch Can - - - September 5, 1931
Walk into My Parlor - - - January 2, 1932
Hocus-Pocus - - - May 7, 1932
Time to Kill - - - June 18, 1932
Brought to Gaff - - - November 4, 1933
Pitch and Catch - - - February 3, 1934
Goldfish Tell - - - April 21, 1934
Masterpiece Murder - - - April 28, 1934
Jeweled Bait - - - July 14, 1934
Exit to Murder - - - August 25, 1934

copyright Monte Herridge

Links:
There's an interesting little article about Roland Phillips at "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection" site. You can read it by clicking here.

You can find other articles at The Pulp Rack by Monte Herridge about series characters from Detective Fiction Weekly.

You can read "Tug Norton, Detective" by clicking here.

"Hugo Oakes, Lawyer-Detective" -- a precursor of sorts to Perry Mason created by J. Lane Linklater -- can be found elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.

Monte also has supplied a biographical sketch about Linklater that was originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly. You can read it elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.

Linklater has a story in the anthology, 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories. Click here to purchase a copy.

Jules Verne’s works continue to influence and inspire artists today. For contemporary examples, readers need only look at the graphic novels – or albums, to use the word typically given European works of this type – in the Cities of the Fantastic (Cités Obscures) series by Benoit Peeters and Francois Schuiten. Written by Peeters, who is French, and drawn by Schuiten, who is Belgian, the books in the series present a picture of the present or future as seen from the past – specifically, a future depicted according to a 19th Century extrapolation of mechanical science that is part steampunk, part world of marvels, part dystopia. The result is rather Vernian in its feel, thanks greatly to Schuiten’s art style, which suggests the engraving style used for reproducing illustrations in 19th and early 20th Century publications. Further, such consistently amazing architectural wonders haven’t been seen in the graphic storytelling form since the days of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo.

Indeed, the two creators acknowledge Verne in their works with the names of characters (Ardan, Robur, Hatteras) and more. For instance, in Echo of the Cities, we learn that someone named Captain Nemo -- or perhaps Jules Verne -- has visited a city called Samarobrive. Even the umbrella title for their album series, Cités Obscures, suggests a familiarity with the title of Verne’s series as published by Hetzel, Voyages Extraordinaires. That their intentional efforts to evoke a Vernian universe of marvels have been successful is demonstrated by Schuiten’s having been selected to illustrate a French edition of Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century), an early (1863) Verne novel essentially unknown until its publication in 1994. According to Jean-Michel Margot, president of the North American Jules Verne Society, “Schuiten is well known in the French speaking community for having done the collection of 'Les Cités obscures,' where several volumes contain vernian references and glimpses. 'La Route d'Armilia,' 'L'Enfant penchée' and 'Le Journal des Cités' are among the most vernien volumes. . . the illustrations sometimes are influenced by Hetzel's editions engravings of the Jules Verne in-octavo volumes.” Further, “Schuiten was the main artist who decorated in 2005 the house of Jules Verne in Amiens (2, rue Charles-Dubois), mainly including a half Earth planisphere on top of the tower, which is wrongly supposed to be Verne's study (in fact, the tower is only a straircase).”

Some of the titles in the Cités Obscures series follow. Some are available in English translations available through Amazon.com, ABE.com, and elsewhere.

The Great Walls of Samaris (Les Murailles de Samaris)
Fever in Urbicand (La Fièvre d’Urbicande)
The Archivist (L’Archiviste)
The Tower (La Tour)
The Road to Armilia (La route d’Armilia)
Echo of the Cities (L’Écho des Cités)
The Guide to the Cities (Le guide des Cités)
The Shadow of a Man (L’ombre d’un homme)
The Invisible Frontier (La Frontière Invisible)
Brusel

To offer an example of the sort of marvels and mystery carried in these books, let’s look at two definitions related to The Great Walls of Samaris and found in the Dictionary of the Universe of the Cities of the Fantsastic web site:

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Samaris An Obscure City that sits almost exactly on the Equator, close to the SEA OF SILENCES, hence its damp climate. A protectorate of XHYSTOS, ruled by a Governor, it has for emblem the DROSERA and it is apparently physically impossible to take photographs (GC, MS). The city was already in existence at the time of the construction of The TOWER (LT). It is quite isolated and difficult to reach; those travellers who come back are often struck by the SAMARIS EFFECT (MS). See BAUER, BOOK OF SAMARIS, MARK, MONT ANALOGUE, MOREL, PIERRE and VOYAGE À SAMARIS.

Samaris Effect. A strange affliction that visits some visitors to SAMARIS when they come back. The major symptom is a severe form of space-time confusion (MS, EC, GC). See BAUER and ELKAÏM.
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Just as the Wold Newton universe postulated by P.J. Farmer has been taken up and expanded and researched by a growing number of fans and enthusiasts, so the Cités Obscures series has been the launch pad for many web sites and conferences. The “factual” reports by fans of the occurrences in the cities of the series are brought to light in Our World thanks to a number of mysterious passages that link Our World to the Obscure World.

There are a number of web sites dedicated to the Cités Obscures series, in a variety of languages. Some that might help you learn more and clarify some of their mysteries (certainly these cities’ mysteries shan’t be solved) are the following.

NBM (Nantier-Beall-Minoustchine)
The publisher in the US of the Cités Obscures (Cities of the Fantastic) series.

Dictionary of the Universe of the Cities of the Fantsastic
A dictionary of characters, cities, events, and more about the series.

Gateway to the Obscure Cities
Offers a comprehensive review for English-speaking fans.

I mentioned three elements of Peeters and Schuiten’s presentation of the future as seen from the past: part steampunk, part world of marvels, part dystopia. Steampunk is a handy bit of shorthand that really isn’t accurate in this case, because rather than retrofitting 20th and 21st Century technology onto a 19th Century platform, as many steampunk fictionalizings do, Peeters and Schuiten follow a methodology similar to Verne: Verne was very concerned with basing his extrapolations on existing knowledge. For instance, when someone compared his work as similar to that of H.G. Wells, Verne "openly criticized Wells' novels as lacking in scientific verisimilitude.”

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We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to the Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. . . But show me this metal. Let him produce it. (Robert H. Sherard, "Jules Verne Revisited," T.P.'s Weekly [Oct. 9, 1903]: 589; quoted in Jules Verne, Invasion of the Sea [Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001]: 209)
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Following this way of thinking, Verne gives us perfectly possible modes of transportation in Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, The Children of Captain Grant (aka In Search of the Castaways), Around the World in 80 Days, and so on. The means of locomotion in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (the Nautilus) and From the Earth to the Moon (a shell blown from a cannon) may have been improbable in Verne’s time, but were reasonable (if exaggerated) extrapolations of existing technology. So Peeters and Schuiten adopt Verne’s methodology in the books of the Cités Obscures, and the anachronistic technology the reader encounters seems more an extrapolation of reality and doesn’t seem quite so jarring as in stories by, for example, Joe R. Lansdale or Paul Di Filippo.

Likewise the two creators present a world of marvels in each of the Cités Obscures books. (Simply the detail Schuiten renders in his artwork is a marvel, and parallels the detail Verne includes in his many lists of species and varieties.) For instance, in The Fever of Urbicande, a strange cube is found and starts growing in size and complexity, evolving into a Network that, while remaining tangible, passes harmlessly through solid objects. It soon envelops the whole city. Similarly, The Tower features a Babel-like structure so vast its perimeters can’t be grasped by those living within it –- no one alive as ever visited its entirety. In Echo of the Cities we learn about a city, Alta-Plana, that is devoted entirely to archive keeping. Amid the marvels is mystery, a Vernian touch. For while Verne encyclopedically catalogs the world’s marine life in Twenty Thousand Leagues, he also leaves unanswered the secret of the Nautilus’ energy source and its engineering, along with the source of Captain Nemo’s driving passions. Similarly, the explanations regarding the existence of the giant shepherd encountered by Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel in Journey to the Center of the Earth remain unrevealed, as does the ultimate fate of Arne Saknussemm, whose notes launch the trek into the earth’s bowels.

The understanding of Verne in the popular imagination, given us by movies and TV shows, is one of a world full of amazing gadgets. This appeals to our childhood love of toys and enthusiasms for exploration and adventure. But Verne’s later works – many of which were originally badly translated or mistranslated or not translated at all -- carry misgivings about the world and its use of technology. So linking the elements of dystopia that appear in the Cités Obscures with Verne’s worlds isn’t a great stretch.

In Peeters and Schuiten’s worlds, a mechanical or architectural utopia is usually hindered by human shortcomings. Efforts to create an apparently perfect world are typically undermined by human effort – by the limited vision of bureaucracies, by petty jealousies or efforts at control, by intentional facades meant to make the public think everything is running smoothly just the way it’s meant to do.

In Verne, what would be a perfect world of wonders for marine scientist Aronnax aboard the Nautilus is tainted by his being a prisoner, by Nemo’s melancholy and moody rages, by the secrecy that rules the submarine, and by its crew’s war with the surface world. In Around the World in 80 Days, what should be a simple trip to win a foolish bet by Phileas Fogg, with a perfectly scheduled timetable, is hampered at every turn by human misunderstanding, greed, and limited imagination -- Inspector Fix’s dogged determination (despite his quarry’s behavior and plans) to prove Fogg is a thief and fugitive from the law.

This brief discussion should provide a bit of detail to see how Verne continues to inform creative work today -- specifically in one series of books by two skilled and talented storytellers.

Links:
To accompany those links given above (which will include links to other Obscure sites), here are a few others:

The North American Jules Verne Society's web site is available by clicking here.

Paris in the Twentieth Century is available from Amazon.com. Click here.

The Book of Schuiten, an oversized book of art written by Benoit Peeters, is a great place to start an appreciation for Schuiten’s work. It’s available at Amazon.com. Click here.

The English translation of The Great Walls of Samaris is no longer in print, but you might find a used copy through Amazon (click here) or ABE.com (click here).

The English translation of Fever in Urbicand also is no longer in print, but you might find a used copy through Amazon (click here) or ABE.com (click here).

The English translation of The Tower also is no longer in print, but you might find a used copy through Amazon (click here) or ABE.com (click here).

The Invisible Frontier is available in two volumes, both of which are available from Amazon.com. Click here for Volume One, and here for Volume Two.

The English translation of Brusel seems to be out of print, but you might find a used copy through Amazon (click here) or ABE.com (click here).

The Kitty stories are amusing in ways that his better-known stories of intrigue and adventure are not, although those tales include amusing scenes. Certainly the conversations Mundy created for the Kitty stories demonstrate his ear for dialog, and one sees in the manipulations and personal intrigues he recounts here the foundations for the plotting and intrigue-driven characters that appear in the JimGrim novels and other tales.

Clearly Mundy knows women and their wiles -- or perhaps he well knows wily women -- and it’s likely he learned much during his days as a rogue abroad before he settled in America to become a respected author. One who’s read Peter Berresford Ellis’ biography of Mundy, The Last Adventurer, is familiar with Mundy’s reputation as a rounder who knew his way round a number of good and bad women. The many maneuvers by Kitty that Mundy describes seem to set the foundation for innumerable plots of feminine intrigue in soap operas and vicious cat fights in television shows like Dallas and Dynasty.

Before proceeding to the stories, Mundy scholar Brian Taves has a few words about Kitty and her place in Mundy’s oeuvre.
- Duane Spurlock

Mundy, Kitty, and the Feminine
By Brian Taves

I’m glad Duane has posted "The Lady and the Lord," because it is one of the best of Talbot Mundy’s stories, indicating his talent for humor and romance. Contrary to general assumptions, Mundy did not set out to be an author of adventure/fantasy stories, but found it to be his most lucrative genre, as I note in my biography and with added detail in "Talbot Mundy’s Earliest Stories: An Author in Search of His Genre" in Ed Hulse's magazine, Blood ‘n’ Thunder, No. 12/13 (Fall/Winter 2006).

The first woman to figure as the central character in a Mundy series was Kitty Crothers, in an amusing series of four 1911 All-Story short stories. They told of the various entanglements and vicissitudes of a self-absorbed, good-hearted. not-so-young widowed actress, who is independent from both the men and women around her. The first person narrator is himself a writer, not taken too seriously by the vivacious Kitty (she describes him as a "nonentity," in an obvious analogy to Mundy himself). Kitty began in "The Lady and the Lord," where she invests in a stock at random that, as luck would have it, skyrockets in value. Returning to New York, no longer needing the stage for a living, in "Kitty Burns Her Fingers" she resolves to put her financial independence to good use by becoming a patroness of young talent. Her "first victim," as the narrator calls him, is the son of a Russian refugee, Paul Gurwicz, and she uses his infatuation with her to ensure that he actually marries a more suitable woman.

In "Vengeance is Kitty's," she finds herself pitied by a fellow actress who had earlier befriended her, but now spreads gossip about her relationship with Gurwicz. In revenge, Kitty arranges for the other actress also to become apparently involved with a younger man, to the point that his family warns her to stay away from him. In "Kitty and Cupid," she uses the marriage of a couple to block a threatening blackmailer.

The Kitty stories provide the first indication of the vivid feminine characterizations Mundy would create, and the concern for gender equality. Two years later, he united feminism and his fascination with India in the greatest character in all his writing, the remarkable, matchless Yasmini, and in subsequent years, with two books on history’s most absorbing woman, Cleopatra. Mundy’s characterizations of Yasmini and Cleopatra are of women scheming to carve an empire, and who are sometimes devious, manipulative, and always surprising, like his Kitty Crothers, only on a very different scale.

Yasmini initially appeared in two Adventure novelettes in early 1914, "A Soldier and a Gentleman" and "Gulbaz and the Game," and you can read the former reprinted for the very first time in my Mundy anthology, Winds From the East. And for probably his most purely feminist novel, try Guns of the Gods (still in print), Mundy’s story of Yasmini’s youth, in which the principal characters are all women, of East and West, and the men secondary or villains.

"Mundy, Kitty, and the Feminine" (c) Brian Taves
(author, Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure, and editor, Winds From the East: A Talbot Mundy Reader)

"The Lady and the Lord"
This story, originally appearing in the June 1911 issue of All-Story Magazine, is quite different from the exotic action tales that Mundy wrote for Adventure and Argosy. Still, it has elements of the club story, in which some adventurer or explorer recounts a thrilling tale in the smoking room of a gentlemen's club; and from the escapades Kitty relates, one can see how Mundy drew on his own rascally experiences as a sometime confidence man to lend verisimilitude to his protagonist's tale. Click here to read the story.

"Kitty Burns Her Fingers"
Terraforming is an element of some science fiction. SF and Fantasy writers are frequently critiqued on their abilities at worldbuilding. In this second outing of Mundy's vivacious heroine, Kitty Crothers, attempts something far more difficult: building a person. Mundy does a very nice job -- with some chuckles along the way -- of demonstrating how trying to recreate a person in one's own image (even when it's "for their own good") usually has problematic consequences. Click here to read the PDF of "Kitty Burns Her Fingers."

Links:

For more information about Talbot Mundy at The Pulp Rack, click here.

Learn more about Talbot Mundy's adventurous life from Brian Taves' Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography, which is available at Amazon.com. Learn more by clicking here.

For Winds from the East: A Talbot Mundy Reader, click here.

Mundy’s Guns of the Gods, published by Wildside Press, is available from Amazon. Click here.

Visit Georges Dodds' R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site! It's full of interesting stories and e-texts. Click here.

For Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy by Peter Berresford Ellis, click here to visit Amazon.com.

Terraforming is an element of some science fiction. SF and Fantasy writers are frequently critiqued on their abilities at worldbuilding. In this second outing of Mundy's vivacious heroine, Kitty Crothers, attempts something far more difficult: building a person. Mundy does a very nice job -- with some chuckles along the way -- of demonstrating how trying to recreate a person in one's own image (even when it's "for their own good") usually has problematic consequences.

Again, many thanks to Georges Dodds, who maintains the R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site -- where you'll find a number of electronic texts (including the Talbot Mundy story, "The Soul of a Regiment") -- for providing this text.

Click on the following link to read the PDF of "Kitty Burns Her Fingers."

http://pulprack.com/i/burnsfingers.pdf

These columns of type provide a look at Mundy's life after he had settled down to being a popular author of adventure fiction. Here we see that his writing about exotic lands has led to his being considered something of an expert on foreign relations. It is very interesting to read Mundy's views on the Islamic world and on America's place in the international community from nearly 100 years later.

* * *

From New York Times
May 25, 1919
page 50

AMERICA AS PROTECTOR OF ARMENIA

Talbot Mundy Reviews Reasons Why Oppressed Nation Looks on United States as Only Logical Mandatary

TALBOT MUNDY, English novelist and now living in this country, says it is Incumbent upon America to accept the mandatary of Armenia. His opinion was asked because of his long experience with affairs in the Near East.

"To an outsider looking at this question it would seem that its answer might easily be found along three different channels, each one as satisfactory as the other," he observed. "England fought a war for democracy, France fought a war for democracy, and America fought a war for democracy. Why, then, select America, of the three, and say that it is her duty to take upon herself the responsibility of foster-mothering Armenia until the time that she can stand on her own feet? There is every reason in the world.

"The East thinks in terms of religion. The West does, too, for that matter, but it doesn't admit it. The West calls it morality or ethics or civilization or what you will. It boils down to the same thing. But in the East they frankly come out on the principle that all action, political, educational, economic, industrial, and every other kind you can think of, revolves about the question of religion. You mention the word Turkey, and the thought association connected with it is Mohammedanism; you mention China, and it is Confucianism; you mention Persia, and it is Buddhism or Brahmanism or some other cult of creed fostered there. In any case and in every case it is religion.

"The biggest group in the East is the Mohammedan. Just how powerful it is the world little appreciates. I have knocked around the different Eastern territories of England and have seen the Orient as the Americans do not and cannot see it. Americans have never had to buck up against the question of preserving the religious integrity of a people, or, what's more to the point, the Americans have never bucked up against the question of preserving the religious integrity of a people to whom no other integrity is important. They have heard of the Turks making inroads against the Armenians and they have tried to stem those inroads, but there are few among them who appreciate the fact that the aim of the Turk has not been subjugation of territory or subjugation of people, but subjugation of religion. It has been the battle of the East against the West, the religion of the East against the religion of the West, centered in territory almost completely surrounded by Mohammedanism.

"The English and the French have for years been cognizant of this situation. They appreciate fully the strength of the religious feeling in the East. To England the knowledge has come through her possessions and suzerainty in India and Egypt; to France it has come through her dominions in Africa. The policy guiding both in the rule and control of these countries has been that of guidance along lines of government, industry, education, but -- hands off religion. That point cannot too greatly be emphasized.

"Let me give you an illustration: In Egypt, for instance, the public schools teach the three R's. The Mohammedan learns how to read, write, and do accounting for the English Government. What most of them do when they come out of the English schools is to get the numerous clerical jobs offered by the Government. But the public schools do not teach ethics or morality. They dare not. The Mohammedans would rise up against it. To them morality as practiced by the English or by any of the Western countries is interpreted in terms of Christianity. The explanation of the right and wrong of a situation, as seen from the standpoint of an Englishman and given by an Englishman, is considered in the light of proselytizing, than which there is no greater crime. As a result of this flaw in his education the Egyptian is a liar and a scoundrel, judging from our standards, but a likable enough fellow if let alone.

"To preserve the peace and to maintain a harmonious relationship, England had let the Mohammedan alone in her territory, and, what's more, will continue to let him alone. Therein lies her strength in his country. This, in the same manner, is true of the French. They have the Mohammedan problem in Morocco. They, too, let it stand.

"As a result of this policy, which these two nations have had to adopt perforce, England and France are today considered by the Mohammedans in the light of protectors and preservers of Islam. This fact may fundamentally be fallacious, but nevertheless it is the belief of the Mohammedan peoples in the East.

"Should, therefore, either England or France abruptly overturn this belief by suddenly making herself the protector of a Christian nation hemmed in between Mohammedan nations, the result would be disastrous. The Mohammedans would interpret it in the light of an effort to spread Christianity by using Armenia as an entering wedge. A good deal of the territory now belonging to Armenia was formerly Turkish. Establishing Armenia as a Christian nation, which most assuredly it is, would mean declaring part of the former Turkish territory Christian. England dare not take such responsibility upon herself: neither can France. It would mean the setting fire to a new war, based, if you please, on religious belief. It is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but, let me assure you, it is a highly probable one.

"Eliminating England and France as possible mandatories, only the United States is left in the field. The question may naturally then arise why the Turks would make less objection or no objection to an American suzerainty of a Christian Armenia, whereas they would rise up in revolt against an English or French suzerainty for various reasons. First of all, the Turk is convinced that America entered into the war for no territorial reasons. He feels that she was prompted by nothing but a desire to carrry [sic] into effect the words of President Wilson making the world safe for democracy. He feels, too, that any division America might make of his territory would be done with an effort to be fair to every party concerned, with no bias or prejudice of any kind. And what's more, he knows that America in Armenia would mean America in Armenia alone and nothing more. There would be no reaching out and gathering in of outlying districts.

"America, you see, has an unprecedented record in the history of territorial acquisition. She had control over Cuba and could have kept it by force of arms if she had wanted to, but she returned it. No other nation had ever done that before. France has not that record, nor has England. On the part of the latter it has been unfortunate but true that every time she placed her foot on foreign territory she has made it her own. Territorial expansion has seemingly been her doctrine.

"And Armenia has the greatest desire to be taken under the wings of the United States. For years the Armenians have been helped by Americans. No other country but America has sent missionaries there; no other country has taken an interest in the education of her people. All their teaching has been saturated with the wonders of American freedom and American democracy. The aim of the young Armenian is to grow up and help turn his country into a republic like the one he has studied and dreamed about, or, failing in that, to come here to America and live the life of a free man.

"Now that the war is over and there is hope of his seeing his ideal of an independent Christian Armenia brought to realization, he wants the help of the country in whose image he is anxious to mold his own land. The Armenian distrusts any other. He is afraid of any other. Fearful lest the American will not come to his help and assume this responsibility out of a spirit of generosity, he tries to logically prove that America ought to take over the mandate through very justice to his country. His logic goes something like this: America waited three years before she entered the war. At the end of that time she went into it because she decided that it was a just war and that the enemy of the Allies had to be beaten. If, then, the war was a just war three years after it was started, it was just in its very inception. The entrance of America was the deathblow to the Germans. If America had entered three years before she did the Germans would have been beaten three years sooner and the Armenians would not have suffered at the hands of the Turks. The tardiness of America is therefore regarded as responsible for the devastation of their country. The least America can do under the circumstances, they argue, is to help Armenia get on to her feet.

"Whether that argument holds water, the fact remains that America is the only country that can solve the problem there. It is not a very difficult one. The Armenians are a fine, industrious, educated people. The fact that they have survived after so many years of oppression and cruelty tends to show that they are a strong race. The Turk has tried to give them the reputation of immorality, treachery, and cunning. They are not immoral. They could not have survived if they had been. Degeneracy and immorality in a race is suicidal to it. As for being treacherous and cunning, they are so from the point of view of the Turk only. They have had to be so to maintain what little national integrity they had. The Turk beat and persecuted them, and for the purpose of carrying on their work a great many of them confessed to a belief in Mohammedanism which did not exist. That, however, was the only way in which they could live. When it came to joining the armies of the Turks they refused, and hence were scorned and looked down upon as traitors and renegades. I repeat, they were that only from the point of view of the oppressors. But from the point of view of the oppressed, they were showing the fine mettle of a Christian Armenia.

"At present the Armenians are divided into groups and sections. That is the result of the rule of the Turk. His motto has been that of the Roman -- divide them up and weaken them. The Turk has sowed distrust among them and has caused many dissensions on petty differences of sects and creeds. That however, is fast changing. The Armenians, assured of life as an independent nation, are forgetting their minor differences and uniting on the principle of the new freedom.

"The outcome of this freedom will depend vastly on the attitude of the American people. That attitude cannot be the same today as it was four years ago. At that time America was saturated with a spirit of pacifism that hid its head under the name of neutrality. The people in this country refused to have anything to do with 'Paris politics.' It didn't concern them what the other half of the world was doing. It took them three years to find out that they were a vital and integral part of the brotherhood of nations.

"It would be most unfortunate if they adopted the same tactics today. I say in all honesty and in firm belief that if America does not assume suzeranity over Armenia for the necessary period of years it will take that country to establish itself firmly, warfare will not cease in the European countries. Should England or France take over the mandate, it will simply mean that we are sidestepping our destiny as we did at the beginning of this war. And when things once more come to a crisis, America will again be pulled into the strife. That is certain.

"This country is suffering from mental inertia. Now that the war is over, the people are deluding themselves with the belief that all America has to do is to sign the treaty and come home, and forget all about what has happened on the other aide. They want to sit smug and tight and play their own little games without being bothered by the pastimes of the little fellows across the sea. It can't be done.

"You can't sit back and sanctimoniously give voice to the question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' As far as I can remember, that fellow Cain was never a very popular fellow nor a very noble one. America is popular and America is considered noble. She can't break faith with the little fellows who have learned to depend upon her. At most, the Armenian dependency will last for a period of ten years. All the distaste for the job and the discomfort connected with it will be more than made up by the numbers of lives saved and the success in the guidance of a nation toward the ideal of American democracy."

LINKS:
Learn more about Talbot Mundy's adventurous life from Brian Taves' Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography, which is available at Amazon.com. Learn more by clicking here.

Visit Georges Dodds' R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site!

Learn more about Talbot Mundy's work from The Pulp Rack's selection of essays on Mundy. Click here.

Georges Dodds, who maintains the R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site -- where you'll find a number of electronic texts (including the Talbot Mundy story, "The Soul of a Regiment") -- provides this Mundy story about Kitty Crothers, the first of about half a dozen tales about this character. Many thanks to Georges!

This story, originally appearing in the June 1911 issue of All-Story Magazine, is quite different from the exotic action tales that Mundy wrote for Adventure and Argosy. Still, it has elements of the club story, in which some adventurer or explorer recounts a thrilling tale in the smoking room of a gentlemen's club; and from the escapades Kitty relates, one can see how Mundy drew on his own rascally experiences as a sometime confidence man to lend verisimilitude to his protagonist's tale.

Click here to read "The Lady and the Lord."

Georges Dodds, who maintains the R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site -- where you'll find a number of electronic texts (including the Talbot Mundy story, "The Soul of a Regiment") -- provides this Mundy story about Kitty Crothers, the first of about half a dozen tales about this character. Many thanks to Georges!

This story, originally appearing in the June 1911 issue of All-Story Magazine, is quite different from the exotic action tales that Mundy wrote for Adventure and Argosy. Still, it has elements of the club story, in which some adventurer or explorer recounts a thrilling tale in the smoking room of a gentlemen's club; and from the escapades Kitty relates, one can see how Mundy drew on his own rascally experiences as a sometime confidence man to lend verisimilitude to his protagonist's tale.

Click here to read "The Lady and the Lord."

Dodds found these newspaper materials came at the Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (BETA) 1900-1910 web site. The source and date for the story is noted at its beginning.

According to the story, among those named in the suit by Mundy was A.J. Drexel, Jr. I wonder if this might be the same A.J. Drexel who was a famous financier and founded Drexel University?

One of the Mundy stories involved is King, of the Khyber Rifles. This has been filmed twice, once as the 1929 movie The Black Watch (starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy and directed by John Ford), and again in 1953 under the novel's title (starring Tyrone Power, Terry Moore and Michael Rennie, and directed by Henry King). The other story mentioned, "The Soul of a Regiment," apparently was never adapted to celluloid.

From New York Times
February 22, 1919, p. 3, c. 4

BRINGS $150,000 FILM SUIT

Talbot Mundy Names A.J. Drexel, Jr., A.B. Duke and Others in Action.

A suit for $150,000 damages for alleged fraud and misrepresentation filed in the Supreme Court yesterday by Talbot Mundy, African explorer and author, includes among the defendants Anthony J. Drexel, Jr., his brother-in-law, Angler B. Duke, George A. Hurty, member of Henry Clews & Co.; James R. Williston, member of the New York Stock Exchange, and Eliot Norton, a corporate attorney.

The suit is brought as the result of the sale of stock in the Standard Film Industries, Inc., of 69 West Ninety-first Street, in which the plaintiff alleges that he and other persons who got stock in the corporation sustained losses through the misrepresentation of several of the defendants and the neglect of others. The complaint also names as defendants Alexander H. Jackson, Secretary of the Corporation, and Louis B. Jennings, who was a voting trustee with Drexel and Norton.

Mundy sues as the result of two contracts made with the corporation, under one of which he got 500 shares of stock for the film rights to his story, "The Soul of a Regiment," and another giving him 334 shares for "The King of the Khyber Rifles," which, he says, had a sale of 15,000 copies in book form.

LINKS:
Learn more about Talbot Mundy's adventurous life from Brian Taves' Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography, which is available at Amazon.com. Learn more by clicking here.

Visit Georges Dodds' R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site!

Learn more about Talbot Mundy's work from The Pulp Rack's selection of essays on Mundy. Click here.

[Editor’s note: The following essay was written by Library of Congress researcher and Verne scholar Brian Taves as an introduction to The Ice Sphinx, published by Wildside Press as An Antarctic Mystery Or, the Sphinx of the Ice Fields: A Sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 2005. The Wildside edition is a reprint of the 1899 English translation by Mrs. Cashel Hoey published in Philadelphia by J.B. Lippincott Co. Many thanks to Brian for sharing this piece. You'll find a link to the Wildside edition at the Links section after this article.]

During his twilight years, the French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote two original sequels to books that had fired his own youthful imagination, but which he felt to be incomplete: Johann Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson and Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Arthur Gordon Pym (1845) was only one of many Poe stories that Verne admired; no other single author had more impact on his writing.

Verne acknowledged this debt in his only major piece of literary criticism, a detailed 1864 article entitled "Edgard [sic] Poe and His Work." Poe (1809-1849) was just emerging on the French literary scene in translation as Verne was writing his first plays and short stories. Verne was familiar with a broad range of Poe's works, the well-remembered stories as well as many that are obscure today. What is to be admired in Poe, Verne wrote, "are the novelties of his situations, the discussion of little-known facts, the observations of the unhealthy faculties of Mankind, the choice of subject-matter, the ever-strange personality of his characters, their nervous, sickly temperaments, their ways of expressing themselves by bizarre interjections. And yet, among all these improbabilities, exists at times a verisimilitude that grips the credulity of the reader."

What chiefly interested Verne was not the American's imaginative thrust, but his handling of scientific questions. Verne examined Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," displaying the deductive powers of Auguste Dupin, the detective who presaged Sherlock Holmes. Verne was fascinated by the narrative use of Dupin's ratiocinative processes, which he found echoed in the decipherment of the cryptogram in "The Gold Bug." In that story Verne saw a new narrative pattern in Poe's emphasis, not on the treasure, but the logical, analytical process that leads to its discovery. Similarly, Verne noted that Poe's "Three Sundays in a Week" capitalizes on the potential change in time resulting from crossing what became known as the International Date Line. Verne would adapt the idea himself in Around the World in 80 Days (1873).

Verne also seems to have known of Poe's life, for it appears to have contributed to the characterization of the disillusioned, struggling poet, Michel Dufrénoy, in Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, written at the same time as his essay on Poe. Dufrénoy meets a macabre peroration not unlike Poe's own mysterious end, when he wandered for several days, lost, before his death. In the novel, starving in the winter's cold, Dufrénoy semiconsciously walks in circles around an old cemetery. There, in a surreal fashion, he sees the modern tool of criminal execution, the electric chair, and freezes to death.

However, such characters are rare in Verne's oeuvre. Although he uses eccentrics and villains, and larger-than-life figures, they are realistic men and women of intelligence who are seldom susceptible to hallucinatory conditions. Only in a few stories of his own did Verne utilize the mystical and supernatural; "Frritt-Flacc" (1884) used the theme of the double that was the basis of Poe's "William Wilson." "A Drama in the Air" (1851), often hailed as Verne's most "Poe-like" story, was actually written before the American's works had appeared in France, and so cannot have been indicative of his influence.

Verne was intrigued by the idea of the lunar journey in Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall," but criticized it for not having provided a convincing mode of transport. "The most elementary laws of physics and mechanics are carelessly transgressed. This has always surprised me, for Poe could have rendered his narrative far more plausible by the use of a few inventions," Verne noted. Having just completed his comparatively realistic Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne faulted the obvious contradiction in the explanation of Pfaall's journey: as Poe's balloon ascends into the ether, Pfaall is still able to breathe. Verne speculated that "another [person] more inspired -- if not more audacious," will undertake to carry on the trip -- a goal he was probably already planning with From the Earth to the Moon, published a year later. Yet Verne adapted the idea of a balloon approaching space in Hector Servadac (1877), in which refuge in an airborne gondola becomes the means to survive a comet grazing the Earth.

Nowhere are the similarities and differences clearer than in Verne's sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym, entitled The Ice Sphinx, published in 1897, over three decades after his article on Poe. Like Poe's characters, Verne had a near-obsession with the Polar regions, initially the North but later shifting to the South Pole as well. The frozen wastelands of the Arctic are the setting for A Winter Amid the Ice, Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and The Fur Country. Like The Ice Sphinx, A Winter Amid the Ice recounts the trials of a search party who set out to find a missing sailor but in turn are themselves stranded. The Antarctic had been the locale for other Vernian incidents; in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Robur the Conqueror, respectively, Captain Nemo lands at the South Pole, while the Albatross flies over it.

Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym was in a sense incomplete, ending with Pym rushing toward a giant, shrouded white figure. As Verne commented, since Pym is the narrator of the published volume, he must have returned to America, but the climax has been left unexplained. While using Poe's plot, Verne departs from its tone. His structure is similar to his own Journey to the Center of the Earth, itself ostensibly a return journey following the fragmentary evidence of a previous traveler.

As some of Poe's characters try to rescue Pym, their explorations discover the natural sources of the strange apparitions he encountered, and Verne draws his denouement of the magnetic mountain from the 'Arabian Nights,' translated into French at the beginning of the 18th century. In retelling, expanding, and concluding Poe's nightmarish saga, Verne fundamentally transforms it. He provides a rational basis for all that Pym saw, shifting the generic context into Vernian science fiction. (Another direction was taken in the other best-known sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness [1931].)

Verne believed the literary road Poe had followed led to a dead end, so he lifted the scientific qualities he admired, and deleted the fantasy and horror. Expanding on the form Poe had used, Verne blazed a fundamentally different path, one he regarded as more literary and true to life. These distinctions are vividly evident in the differences between Arthur Gordon Pym and The Ice Sphinx. Despite the influence, the directions and contributions Verne made to literature are entirely original, beyond what Poe attempted or foresaw.

copyright Brian Taves

LINKS:

You may purchase Wildside Press’ edition of An Antarctic Mystery Or, the Sphinx of the Ice Fields at Amazon.com by clicking here.

A recent book by Brian Taves also of interest to Pulp Rack patrons is Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography. You’ll find it at Amazon.com by clicking here.

Certainly The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, also by Brian, is of interest to Verne completists. Click here to learn more at Amazon.com.

Learn more about Jules Verne and his connection to Edgar Poe by reading some other essays at The Pulp Rack. Click here.

Dodds found these newspaper materials came at the Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (BETA) 1900-1910 web site. The source and date for each story are noted at the beginning of each.

From New York Sun,
Saturday, October, 2, 1909, p. 1, c. 3
THUGS' VICTIM FOUND DYING

TALBOT MUNDY, ENGLISHMAN,
BEATEN AND ROBBED.

His Wife Says She Was Formerly the Wife of Lord Rupert Craven, Brother of Bradley Martin's Son-in-Law -- Arrived From England Only Two Days Ago.

When the White Star liner Teutonic arrived on Thursday two passengers aboard the steamer were Talbot Mundy, an Englishman, and his wife, Inez.

Mundy is now in Bellevue Hospital probably dying as a result of the work of thugs.

When Mundy was taken to Bellevue last night in an ambulance the reporters learned that he had taken an apartment at 503 East Fifteenth street and they went there to see his wife. Mrs. Mundy thought the reporters were detectives from 'your Scotland Yard,' as she put it, and she said:

"When we arrived on the Tuetonic [sic] we took these rooms, as we knew nothing of New York and had this address from London. My maiden name was Inez Morton. I was first married to Lord Rupert Cecil Craven and was related in marriage by that way to Mrs. Bradley Martin, whose daughter Cornelia married the present Earl of Craven. I was divorced from Lord Craven in Mombasa, British East Africa, and was married to Mr. Mundy, who was district commissioner there and a former newspaper man connected with the London Mail."

Mrs. Mundy related this without showing emotion and did not seem to notice the surprise of the newspaper men. She was questioned about the facts of her former marriage amd told them again, and again still later repeated them word for word to the police.

According to Whitaker's Peerage Inez Morton, a daughter of George Broom Morton, married Rupert Cecil Craven, younger brother of Earl Craven, in 1899.

Mrs, Mundy said that soon after they had settled themselves in their rooms yesterday Mr. Mundy left the apartment to go to a newspaper office on Park row to see about getting work. He also took with him £100, English money, to have changed into our currency. Soon after he left three men presented themselves at the apartment and asked for a Mr. Franklin.

"I told them he didn't live here," said Mrs. Mundy. "They then said they wanted beer. I thought that queer, but was alone and so gave them a pitcher. Then they went out for the beer and a short time after returned and insisted on drinking it in my apartment. They looked tough and I was frightened and they made me take a glass also."

"Soon after my husband came home. The men had just gone. I told him about the men and had just finished when they returned and had a talk with him. He does not drink, but he thought the easiest way to get rid of them was to but them a drink and went out with them. Two of the three men came back to the apartment this evening without my husband. After talking a while they said they were J. White of 128 East Twenty-ninth street and W. Franklin, who gave no address. Then one of the men left."

Mrs. Mundy said the man who remained at once attacked her, knocked her down and took from her a gunmetal watch which she was wearing on a chain. After the man got the watch he ran downstairs and out. Mrs. Mundy had with her an English police whistle and she blew this.
Detective Barry, who was passing, heard the whistle and came to her assistance. She told him what had happened, when Policeman Erhard came from Bellevue Hospital to tell Mrs. Mundy that here husband was there and would probably die.

In the hospital Mundy was barely able to tell his part of the story. He said he had gone out with the men to a saloon. One man remained with him for a while and the other two went away, but soon after returned. Then they went down together and walked down the street. That was the last Mundy could remember of what had happened to him.

Mundy was found by a watchman of a factory lying in the middle of Nineteenth street between Avenues B and C at 9:30 o'clock last night, which corresponded to the time as near as Mundy could remember it that he had left the saloon with the three men.

There was a deep depression on the skull that looked as though he had received it from a heavy blunt instrument. His clothes had been rifled and the $500 he had just received in exchange for his English money was gone. So also was a watch.

Mrs. Mundy gave the police a description of the three men last night and at 11 o'clock they arrested James Cahill of 500 West Fifty-third street as a suspicious person. Mrs Mundy identified him as the man who had said his name was Franklin and he was taken to Headquarters.

** ** **

From New York Times,
Saturday, October, 2, 1909, p. 3, c. 4
THUGS BEAT TALBOT MUNDY.

Husband of Once Noted English Beauty May Die.

When Talbot Mundy, an Englishman who was once District Commissioner at Port Florence, in the Mombassa section of British East Africa, regained conciousness in Bellevue Hospital last night, where he had been carried after he had been discovered by a watchman of a factory in the neighbourhood, almost dead from the beating he had received at the hands of thugs who robbed him of $500, the man sent the police to 503 East Fifteenth Street, saying that his wife was there.

The woman, the police found, was still beautiful and was evidently cultured, and it was no surprise, therefore, when she said that once she had been the wife of the Hon. Rupert Cecil Craven of London, brother of the Earl of Craven.

Mrs. Mundy, for such is her name now, said she had once been Miss Inez Broome, whose beauty was famous in London ten years ago. Mundy, she admitted, had been named by her husband when he divorced her.

The couple came here from London, arriving on Thursday last, and Monday, when he was assaulted and so badly beaten that he may die was on his way to look for work on a newspaper having corresponded for a London newspapers while he was in Africa.

** ** **

From New York Sun,
Sunday, October, 3, 1909, p. 5, c. 5
MORE ARRESTS IN MUNDY CASE.

Man Identified by Mrs. Mundy Held to Wait Result of Englishman's Injuries.

The police made two more arrests yesterday in connection with the assault upon Talbot Mundy, the former District Commissioner of Port Florence, East Africa, who was found last Friday night lying unconcious on the pavement in Nineteenth street between Avenues A and B. The men arrested yesterday are Robert Moore, 28 years old, of 407 East Eighteenth street and Joseph Ford, 28 years, of 127 East Eighteenth street.

Both Moore and Ford, according to Policemen Barry and Adams, who arrested them, are active members of the "Forty Thieves" gang and were seen hurrying away from the spot where Mundy was found shortly after the assault. They were arrested on a dock at the foot of Eighteenth street.

James Cahill of 500 West Fifty-third street, who was positively identified by Mrs. Mundy as one of the two men who attacked her and made off with her watch just before the assault on her husband was held without bail by Magistrate Corrigan in Yorkville Court to await the results of Mundy's injuries, which are still said to be serious. Mrs. Mundy told the reporters on Friday that she was the divorced wife of Lord Rupert Cecil Craven.

She was allowed to see her husband at Bellevue for a few minutes yesterday morning and had not returned home yesterday evening.

Mrs. Mundy when seen last night said she had sent letters to two friends asking for financial aid. One was to William Gray, a steward on the steamship Teutonic, who she said was once a groom on her stud farm in England when she was in better circumstances, The other was to Charles Van Alen, and was addressed to the Knickerbocker Club, Fifth avenue and Thirty-second street.

** ** **

From New York Sun,
Monday, October, 4, 1909, p. 3, c. 5
ANOTHER MUNDY ARREST

Mundy Is Still Unconcious at the Hospital.

The police made another arrest last night in the case of Talbot Mundy, the Englishman who was assaulted and robbed in East Nineteenth street some time on Friday night. From the description given by Mrs. Mundy Detective Barry of the East Twenty-second street station picked up Stephen Drennan, 22 years old, who says that he is a laborer and lives at 404 First avenue, and took him to 503 East Fifteenth street, where Mrs. Mundy positively identified the man as one of the three who came to the house and insisted that her husband go with them to a saloon and buy beer for them.

Drennan denied that he knew anything about the assault upon Mundy and said that he could show that he was not in the neighbourhood of Nineteenth Street on Friday night.

Mundy is still unconcious at Bellevue Hospital.

** ** **

From New York Sun,
Tuesday, October, 5, 1909, p. 3, c. 4
MRS. MUNDY IDENTIFIES TWO.

Is Positive That They Are Men Who Assaulted Her Husband.

Mrs. Talbot Mundy, the English woman whose husband was assaulted Friday night and is lying in a critical condition in Bellevue Hospital, appeared against the four men arrested as the persons who entered her apartment at 503 East Fifteenth street just before the assault.

James Cahill of 500 West Fifty-third street and Stephen Brennan of 404 First avenue were identified by Mrs. Mundy as two of the men. Magistrate Corrigan held them over without bail. She was not sure of the other two, "Brockie" Ford of 418 East Eighteenth street and "Nigger" Moore of 408 East Eighteenth street, and the Magistrate ordered them taken before Mundy for identification.

In the hospital the injured man said he was certain Ford was one of his assailants, but wasn't sure about Moore. The latter was held, however.

LINKS:
Learn more about Talbot Mundy's adventurous life from Brian Taves' Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography, which is available at Amazon.com. Learn more by clicking here.

Visit Georges Dodds' R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site!

Learn more about Talbot Mundy's work from The Pulp Rack's selection of essays on Mundy. Click here.