REVIEW: WHITE SUN OF THE DESERT

Dir. By Vladimir Motyl

In the late ‘60s Vladimir Posner (father of Phil Donohue’s buddy), the boss at Mosfilm Studios wanted to make a western. He gave the job to a pair of screenwriters, Valentin Yezhov and Rustem Ibragimbekov. What Posner got back was not exactly a Western, but the very first Eastern.

Yezhov and Ibragimbekov transposed the Western cliches into a distinctly Soviet setting. Instead of a cowboy, the protagonist is a Red Army soldier, instead of the War Between the States, the era is the Russian Revolution, instead of Indians or bandidos, the antagonists are basmichi, Turkmen rebels. The result is a classic adventure tale told in a distinct and refreshing style.

Sukhov (Anatoli Kusnetsov) is a Red Army soldier on his way home. In the middle of the desert he finds a man buried up to his neck. This is Sayid (played by Spartak Mishulin), who, once rescued, promptly departs vowing revenge on the outlaws that killed his pa.

No sooner does Sukhov get underway than his is diverted again. This time he must guard a group of women rescued from the harem of Abdullah (played by Kakhi Kavsadze), a basmichi chief. Sukhov’s only help comes from Petrushka, a young private and Vershchagin, a former Tsarist customs officer.

Motyl takes a light approach to White Sun of the Desert. The film is part comedy, part action movie, with as much of the feel of a Russian folk tale as of a Hollywood shoot-‘em-up. White Sun was an instant hit in the USSR (thanks to an enthusiastic review by First Secretary Brezhnev) and is the prototype of the many “Easterns” that followed. This is perhaps one of the most accessible of that genre for Western audiences. I recommend it for someone looking for a departure from the usual Hollywood fare.

-Dave Hardy

THE FRIENDS OF PANCHO VILLA

By James Carlos Blake

An outlaw telling the tale of his life and how it intertwined with that of Pancho Villa, the revolutionary, bandit, & warlord of North Mexico, in the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution is apt to have more than a few cynical observations. As in, all his observations are cynical. Rudy Fierro relates his life as Pancho Villa’s right-hand man from the coming of the Revolution to Villa’s death in the 1920s (in fact Fierro is based on a historical figure, one of Villa's lieutenants). Fierro is not interested in revolution as a means for social justice, he’s interested in as a way to be utterly free of any restraints. He kills, boozes, and screws his way across Mexico with absolute abandon. There are no social bandits in Fierro’s world, except by accident. For Fierro is an unreliable narrator, filtering everything though his own self-centered world. He recognizes Villa’s charisma and appeal to the masses, yet survival means keeping to the code of the killers that overthrew the old regime. Indeed Fierro bears little ill-will for the rich and powerful as such, only contempt for their inability to hold on to what they had.

The Friends of Pancho Villa is perhaps less a novel than a running commentary on the nihilism of war. What Mexico endured was less a revolution than an unraveling of society, where violence became the norm, and those who were personally adapted to use it as the first resort were the fittest for survival. Blake views the whole from one skewed corner, yet manages to cut right to the heart of the contradiction that purging society of injustice by violence, merely creates greater scope for injustice.

-Dave Hardy

 

REVIEW: THE FLYING LEGION

By George Allan England

If George Allan England were around today, he might find himself in the same boat as Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, and the editor of the Jyllands Posten. Some sensitive folks might take offense at a story about a plan to loot Mecca of its holiest treasures. 

The Flying Legion is about a WWI ace, known only as “The Master”, he is bored by peace so he gathers a group of fellow soldiers of fortune, steals the worlds most advanced airship, and takes of to find a lost city deep in the Arabian peninsula. Along the way super-science weapons are deployed and a mysterious masked airman shakes things up. Things don’t go quite as planned, which makes it all the livelier.

I must make a few observations here. The Master is not a likeable character. Despite his reluctance to shed blood, he is still an outlaw and a rather stiff one at that. Frankly I found myself sympathizing with the Meccans as the Flying Legion descends on the holiest city of Islam. Not that I can say for certain that England didn’t intend those effects. At times he almost seems to be satirizing the conventions of pulp fiction more than playing to them.

First penned in 1919, The Flying Legion is out of print, however electronic versions are available from Project Gutenberg and other online sources.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: THE MAN IN THE YELLOW RAFT

By C.S. Forester

Better known for his Horatio Hornblower tales, Forester also wrote this series of short stories about the US destroyer Boon set in the Pacific during WWII. Forester is an odd sort of adventure writer, he always seems more at home with the unassuming fellow who does his duty quietly in a very decent, English sort of way. I am particularly fascinated by Forester’s attention to the role of supply and the men who get supplies where they need to be. It’s a subject close to me, for my mother served as a supply clerk in the WAVES in 1944-45 and later worked as a civilian employee of the navy in the supply department.

Quite frankly supply departments are not terribly dramatic. Supply issues get rather more interesting when they involve unloading thousands of gallons of gasoline while being bombed by the Japanese. But that is really Forester’s drawback. While he’s excellent at depicting the quiet, unassuming fellows, who keep the machine running even in the midst of disaster, one seeks in vain for a sense that sometimes things just won’t work. I occasionally found myself yearning for a character to snap under pressure. Or a hint that landing the gasoline is not enough. That war is about pointless death and waste. But that is antithetical to the style of heroism Forester strives to depict, the quiet, unassuming execution of the plan, until the job is done. It’s not a bad sort of heroism, I think a lot of people got through the war that way. God bless ‘em.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW OF: THE CAVE GIRL

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

If there was one theme that drew Edgar Rice Burroughs in like a flame does a moth, it was the confrontation of flabby civilization with muscular primitivism. The Cave Girl explores a belated Tarzan finding his inner ape.

Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is a stuffed-shirt’s stuffed-shirt. He’s a Bostonian (perhaps Midwesterner ERB’s dig at the Eastern elite) from a family that has raised being effete to an art form. Consequently it comes as a shock to Waldo when he’s washed ashore on a desert island. But Waldo finds just the right motivation to get primitive when he meets a comely cave-girl. Facing successive threats from panthers, cannibals, rival ape-men, and pirates, Waldo must unite the sound mind and the sound body or perish.

For readers who like the more light-hearted aspects of ERB’s tales, this is a good one. Despite the lighter moments there are plenty of ferocious battles and hair-raising peril. If you’re not an ERB fan, it may come across as unbearably corny. But if that’s the case you should try swinging on a vine sometime.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: THE LION OF CAIRO

By Scott Oden

Scott Oden has built a reputation on historical thrillers such as Men of Bronze and Memnon, swashbuckling tales of adventure set in ancient times. In Lion of Cairo, Oden moves the action forward to Medieval Cairo as rival factions vie for power in murderous court intrigues while ambitious warlords oust with zealous Crusaders for supremacy over the Holy Land. All this occurs along with a strange cursed blade and a rather depraved necromantic villain in the mix.

Oden’s protagonist is Assad, the Emir of the Knife, a Hashashin, or an assassin as commonly known. Assad is no hired sword, he is a hitman with a cause, a deadly secret agent for the mysterious Lord of Alamut, the master of a radical sect that stands aloof from the mainstream of Islam. Assad’s mission is not simply murder, but to sway the ruler of Egypt into an alliance.

Oden recreates the Cairo of the caliphs with astonishing skill. I often felt I was gliding down the mean streets and marble palace halls of Cairo along with the beggars, pimps, thieves, spies, fanatics, harem girls, and killers that people this story.

Needless to say, a lot of blood gets spilled along the way. Though Oden acknowledges Robert E. Howard as his model, Lion of Cairo is often closer to film noir. Assad is less a Conan than a homicidal George Smiley, a very patient man who strikes only when ready. The feel of Lion is often closer to a serie noir than a Sword & Sorcery tale. The prevailing mood is paranoia as treachery and deceit are the order of the day.

When it comes down to it, the battles are furious and the heads fall with astonishing speed. Yet there is clearly room for a sequel. I am looking forward to it.

-Dave Hardy

THE VIOLENT LAND

By Jorge Amado

You may have thought that chocolate comes from little elves in pointy caps who dance around as they pour giant (relatively speaking) vats of gooey fudge on tasty cookies. Well you’re WRONG! Actually chocolate grows on trees, unlike money, unless you are a chocolate farmer when prices are up in which case money does kind of grow on trees.

Anyway, Jorge Amado was from south Bahia, a state in Brazil, where the cacao (ka-kow) nuts grow. Instead of gold rushes they had cacao rushes back in the 1910s. It was a tough land, and ruthless cacao-barons would send their cacaoboys out to claim choice bits of jungle and hold it with guns and machetes against all comers. 

Amado tells of the rivalry of two families over a strip of jungle and the people around them: wives, sisters, hired guns, lawyers, and a con man from Rio. This is a colorful book about a colorful place and time. If you want to read a Western with all the adventure, triumph, tragedy, and wonder of the West, without the cliches, this is a good one to take in.

-Dave Hardy

TROS OF SAMOTHRACE

By Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy created his best character more or less by accident. He was a favorite at Adventure, one of the top quality pulps in the ‘20s & ‘30s. He had committed to a historical yarn about Queen Cleopatra (first it would appear as a serial in Adventure, then as a hard-back novel). But he kept stalling, it turns out he found a rather minor character to be far more interesting. The story of Cleopatra’s captain proved far more compelling. The Queen got a novel eventually, but Tros got a novel three times as long and another that followed Queen Cleopatra!

Tros is a Hellenized Samothracian. Like many other Mundy heroes he is a member of a highly ethical secret society that seeks enlightenment. A bit of derring-do in the service of good is on the menu too. Tros is blackmailed into acting as a secret agent for Caesar in Britain. Instead Tros hooks up with Casawallwn (Cassiavellaunus of Caesar's Commentaries) and his Britons, builds the world’s most advanced warship, and recruits a bunch of Vikings to crew it!

The action doesn’t flag. Tros follows through, trying to avoid bloodshed in a bloody world, chasing Caesar’s schemes through Roman Spain, Gaul, all the way to Rome itself. He faces crackpot sorcerers, treachery, Roman arrogance, and even gladiatorial combat before Britain is safe.

While it may seem odd in our Celtophilic days, Mundy’s depiction of Caesar as an ambitious militarist building a dictatorship was controversial. It is a mark of Mundy’s influence that his ideas are pretty much the norm now.

The book has a complex publication history. It appeared as four volumes from Avon in the 1960s and as three from Zebra in the 1970s. A peculiarity of the Zebra editions is that Robert E. Howard got bigger billing on the cover!

-Dave Hardy

 

 

TIGERS OF THE SEA

By Robert E. Howard

If there was anyplace that Robert E. Howard loved more than his native Texas, it was Celtic fringe of Europe, the sea-girt isles where the Gaels made the last stand of Celtic culture. Most of his heroes are of Celtic descent (Francis X. Gordon, Kirby O’Donnell), or from pre-proto-Celtic groups (Kull the Atlantean, Conan the Cimmerian), or actual, honest-to-Crom, Irish Gaels (Turlough Dubh, Black Vulmea, Cormac FitzGeoffrey). Among the latter is the Gaelic sea-rover, Cormac Mac Art.

Cormac Mac Art is a true Scot, the scotti were the Irsih pirates who descended on late Roman Britain along with the Picts and Saxons. Cormac sails with his blood-brother, Wulfhere the Viking, in the days when Arthur tries to hold together the fading remnants of Roman glory.

Only two of the tales, “Swords of the Northern Sea” and “Night of the Wolf” are entirely by REH. The other two, “Tigers of the Sea” and “The Temple of Abomination” include material written by Richard Tierney. While I am usually quite negative toward “posthumous collaborations” and re-writes, I am just about willing to give Richard Tierney a pass! He is perhaps the only writer I have encountered who really seems to understand the basic motivation of REH heroes and the appropriate structure of his tales.

REH tended to thrust his Celtic heroes into exotic, hot southern lands (like Scots-Irish settlers entering the Mexican province of Tejas?). In the Cormac Mac Art series REH brings the Celtic fringe to life as Gaels, Britons, Vikings, and Picts struggle for mastery over remote isles on the fringes of the known world. These are excellent tales of action and adventure (there is relatively little fantasy, except in “Temple of Abomination”). REH’s treatment of Dark Ages Britain is a sharp contrast to the sentimental depiction of the 5th century as the flowering of pre-proto-Hippie Pagandom. Although it is out of print, Tigers of the Sea is well worth hunting down.

-Dave Hardy

 

Tigers of the Sea 

TARZAN OF THE APES

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the longest-lived and influential of all pulp-action heroes: Tarzan is not just a character, he is modern myth. The novel tells of how the Greystokes were shipwrecked on a remote African shore and slain by a ferocious man-eating “Great Ape” (a species Burroughs created, he knew real gorillas didn’t fit the bill for his story). Only little baby Greystoke survives, adopted by one of the she-apes. He grows to manhood as Tarzan, the fiercest beast and cleverest man in the jungle.

ERB’s novel is ferociously un-PC, some might even say offensively racist (some, post-modern literary critics, have). ERB’s world is explicitly Darwinian, both in nature and society. It is also laden with any number of crazy contrivances (even my teen-age eyes, dazzled by derring-do, found the way Tarzan learns to read to be a stretch) and wacky coincidences (evidently lots of folks get shipwrecked on this one stretch of African coast, they might even be related). But lord-a-mercy, this novel has adventure! Tarzan gets to do, if not all, many of the things that nice boys in dull American suburbs don’t get to do. He is a wild-man, like Enkidu of ancient Sumer, savage and heroic at the same time.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE SWORD WOMAN

By Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard is considered in some quarters as the ultimate writer of tales for guys about hyper-masculine men. Some might say he was the most testosterone-soaked bard of machismo to ever grunt and spit.

Maybe so, but there is another side to that. REH was fascinated with women who broke out of the restrictions society imposed on them. His tales have quite a collection of strong-willed swordswomen who contrast sharply with the rather passive and well-behaved misses his heroes rescue. The most striking of these is Dark Agnes de Chastillon, a 16th century Frenchwoman who ends her arranged marriage rather abruptly with a dagger.

So she heads to New York to sleep around and talk about shoes, OOPS! Sorry, she girds on a blade and proceeds to teach assorted French chauvinist cochons a thing or two about swashbuckling. This ain't Sex and the City, no siree.

This is a decent little set: “Sword Woman”, “Blades for France” are complete stories featuring Dark Agnes and her male sidekick Etienne de Villiers. Along with the skullduggery and sword play REH includes some intelligent observations about women’s roles in a man’s world and well-researched history.

Alas, the rest of the book doesn’t met the high quality of the first two tales (which do form over half the volume). “Mistress of Death” is based on an uncompleted Dark Agnes tale (finished by Gerald W. Page). But as Jessica Amanda Salmonson noted, the “posthumous collaboration” doesn’t live up to the quality of REH’s own work. There are two unfinished tales: “The King’s Service”, an adventure tale of a Gaelic sea-rover in Medieval India and “The Shadow of the Hun” a Turlough Dubh tale set in Russia.

One of the coolest parts is the introduction by Leigh Brackett, the multi-talented author of detective, science fiction, adventure, western stories, novels, and screenplays.

This is certainly one to add to your collection, if only because Dark Agnes is one of REH’s least known yet most interesting characters.

-Dave Hardy 

 

PS: Since writing this review, Del Rey has issued a new anthology of REH's historical adventure tales, titled,  Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures. Even more thrilling adventure! -DH

 

SON OF THE WHITE WOLF

By Robert E. Howard


(This is an old review, pre-dating the publication of El Borak & Other Desert Adventures)






Once upon a time, when people studied geography, there was a taste for swashbuckling adventure tales set in remote places. While best known for creating the fantasy world of the Hyborian Age where Conan dwelt, Robert E. Howard created his own fantastic versions of the Arabian Desert and the mountains of Afghanistan.

One of REH’s most popular series characters was Francis X. Gordon, called “El Borak”-The Swift. Arising from an imagined persona young Bob Howard created when he was ten-years old, El Borak took shape on paper as an El Paso gunslinger who has made his life among the unconquered tribes of Afghanistan and the Middle East. Along with The Lost Valley of Iskander and Three-Bladed Doom, Son of the White Wolf brings the El Borak stories together.

There are three stories in this collection and each one is a truly ripping yarn. In “Blood of the Gods” El Borak must rescue his friend, Al Wazir-a politician turned hermit, from a gang of cutthroats who want to steal a treasure Al Wazir is rumored to have. A sheik that has a blood feud with El Borak comes along for the massacre making things a bit unpredictable.

“Country of the Knife” follows Stuart Brent, a gambler who goes to Afghanistan to find El Borak and ends up in the mysterious City of Thieves where the Black Tigers hold sway. Led by a ruthless adventurer, this secret society holds the key to empire in Central Asia, but El Borak is guarding the door.

The title story is the only El Borak tale set in the Arab Revolt in WWI. While Lawrence and the geopolitics of the Great War hover in the background, in true REH style the conflict is personal. A Turkish lieutenant stages a mutiny and decides to found a new, pagan Turkish empire on the ruins of the old, Muslim one. When Lt. Osman kills one of El Borak’s friends, the hero must step in.

Son of the White Wolf is classic swashbuckling adventure in pulp style. You could say it mates Conan to Kipling, but without the sentimentality and devotion to empire that Kipling had. The closest approaches are Talbot Mundy’s Jimgrim and King series. But Mundy’s heroes are team players, they prefer to use verbal power to firepower. El Borak is a flickering blade, roaring guns, and blazing passion.  

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

NIGHTRUNNERS OF BENGAL

By John Masters

I do love a good book by an old Indian army hand. John Masters was pretty well steeped in the Raj and he created a series of novels about Englishmen in India from the 1600s to 1947. In this case the hero is Rodney Savage (in Masters’ novels the Savages have a family tradition of serving in India). He finds himself, his family, and the army he loves caught up in the Great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. More aptly described as a war of independence, most of the Bengal army and many North Indian rulers joined in a bloody, but unsuccessful bid to oust the British from India. 

The tale builds slowly, quite slowly actually, depicting the simmering discontent of the sepoys, the native soldiers who served Britain and the ennui of the over-refined British officers, civil servants, and memsahibs who formed the ruling class. I for one found the discontent a little underplayed, and the ennui rather overplayed. But once the flag goes up it’s tally-ho and off to a pukka scrimmage jaldi!

Masters takes the issues of the Mutiny seriously, the mutineers are not mindless, murdering drones, and the Brits are often closer to serial killers than enlightened stewards of the natives’ welfare. Even so the result doesn’t quite come off artistically, as if Masters was a little too focused on 1947 than on 1857. Masters is idealistic and deeply knowledgeable about the Raj, where a bit of distance might have served better. It’s a good novel, though for my money the best I’ve seen about the Mutiny is The Siege of Krishnapur.

Really cool ‘50s (1950s, not 1850s) era cover illustration: Savage with shirt open, naked, bloody whip-lashed mem-sahib at his feet, demure begum in foreground. BONUS: a glossary, you’ll need it!
 

-Dave Hardy

 

THE MOON POOL

By A. Merritt

Since its publication in 1919 The Moon Pool has repeatedly come back (most recently in 2004). It is truly a classic of early American SF.

The tale concerns a search for a lost group of scientists that leads to Nan Matal, the basalt ruins of Ponape. Things get really weird when the Shining Devil of the Moon Pool shows up and a disparate band of adventurers end up in a lost civilization. The narrator is a stuffed-shirt scientist, backed up by a romantic Irish airman, a Norwegian sailor who acts as a modern-day Viking, and a shady Bolshevik agent.

Honestly the first half of this novel is slow, rather more so than I usually recommend. Merritt spends a little too much time building his palace of wonders. But they are grade-A, USDA approved wonders. When I got to the battle of the Frog-warriors against the dwarves of lost Lemuria on the shores of the crimson sea where float the flesh-eating moon globes, I could see why this one keeps coming back!
 

-Dave Hardy

 

THE LOST VALLEY OF ISKANDER

By Robert E. Howard

There once was a time when Afghanistan was a remote country, little touched by the vicissitudes of global politics. It was also one of the few countries in the world not ruled by someone else’s empire. For Robert E. Howard, Afghanistan was a land where bold warriors lived and died by the code of the hills, an iron law of equal parts honor, loyalty, and revenge.

The Lost Valley of Iskander is a collection of REH’s excellent tales of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier (nowadays known as the part of Pakistan where Osama bin Laden hides and the US drops bombs, sometimes inaccurately).  The hero of the yarns is Francis X. Gordon, an El Paso gunslinger who traveled east and now lives with the Afridi tribe. Known as El Borak (the Swift) by the Afghans, he is a character from the Wild West in the Wild East.

The tales here lean on the fantastic side. There are plenty of crooked Europeans, international spies, and foreign agents. REH was a fantasy writer, he created larger than life heroes with larger than life adventurers, and they couldn’t be fenced in. The title tale involves El Borak with a lost city founded by no less than Alexander the Great, and still inhabited by Ancient Greeks! The collection leads off with "The Daughter of Erlik Khan", another “lost city” adventure involving a pair of English desperadoes, an old friend of El Borak’s, a horde of Turkoman bandits, and a tribe of devil worshippers. Alliances make and break with dizzying speed in this one. The third tale, "Hawk of the Hills", is a straight up range-war story. El Borak’s Afridi friends have been treacherously attacked and now they’re fighting back. But a British diplomat has showed up to end the fighting. El Borak has to show him that not all things are equal in tribal warfare. El Borak is the sort of REH character who cuts through prevarication to separate right from wrong. The wrongdoers are punished and the innocents are protected. We could use El Borak today.

This is a great little collection. While a number of El Borak tales are back in print, there is no one collection that gives El Borak the attention he deserves. It’s a great pity, so beg, borrow or steal a copy of this one.

-Dave Hardy

PS Since this was written, Del Rey has published  El Borak and other Desert Adventures, containing all that is in this volume and more. -DH

LORD OF SAMARCAND

By Robert E. Howard

I thanked the editor personally when this came out and let me tell you I don’t do that often. Mostly, because I’m not on a first name basis with many editors, but even if I DIDN’T know Rusty Burke I would want to pump his hand up and down and tell him I wanted to have his baby on account of Lord of Samarcand is one butt-kicking collection of REH yarns!

Most readers know Robert E. Howard from his enormously successful Conan stories and their myriad spin-offs in comics, film, and endless pastiches. But what is often missed, especially in the cheap-n-cheerful spin-offs, is REH’s deep love of history, especially when told as a blood and guts adventure tale. The Conan tales are infused with bits and pieces of the romantic furnishings of martial conflict. Assyria’s bronze-clad warriors might tackle a Free Company straight from a chevauchee, or swaggering buccaneers could hold converse with horsemen from the Golden Horde.

Naturally when REH got the chance he wrote straight-up historical adventure. There was quite a taste for adventures set in the wild outlands of Asia back in the ‘30s and REH did his best to satisfy. This collection brings under one set of covers material heretofore scattered adventure tales. The reader will find REH’s tales of Crusaders and Saracens, Tatars and Cossacks and others of the great pageant of history.

Some standouts here are “The Lion of Tiberias” a tale of a man’s climb to power and the bodies he climbs over. It is a story that brings to the fore one of REH's most characteristic themes: arrogance humbled by an indomitable will to acheive vengeance. The title tale follows a similar arc, and brings together Tamerlane the Conqueror with a Highlander called Donald MacDeesa, a true Central Asian odd couple. Two of my favorites are “The Road of Azrael” which shows just how completely REH could go off the rails in crafting a denouement and just how enjoyable it is when he chucks all the rules of writing out the window. I won’t breathe a word about it because it’s a surprise. The best entry is “Shadow of the Vulture” the tale that introduced Red Sonya to the world. She emerges not as a fantasy (ok not a Sword & Sorcery) character but as a 16th century mercenary swordswoman. This is a gal who can handle heavy artillery. Her comrade-in-arms is Nicholas von Kalmbach, a rougish German landsknecht. Together they battle Sulemein the Magnificent’s jannisary hordes at the siege of Vienna. Dashing heroes, unstoppable legions of doom, a turning point of history, “Shadow of the Vulture” has it all. Buy it for this story.

For REH scholars there is a wealth of fragments, synopses, and odds and ends to show REH tinkering with his work. I bought my copy in Providence at the Brown University bookstore. Who says the Ivy League is out of touch?
 

-Dave Hardy

 

KING SOLOMON’S MINES

By H. Rider Haggard

This is the novel that launched the fictional career of Allan Quartermain and the literary career of an obscure imperialist named H. Rider Haggard. They are both still going strong. Allan Quatermain has been played by a variety of movie stars (including Richard Chamberlain, the edition of the book I have ties in with the 1985 film version) most recently Sir Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Although Haggard died in 1925, post-colonialist lit-crit types still like to review his books and prove he was a British Imperialist.

What this book really is, is a prototype of the “lost city” adventure. Readers of the Solomon Kane yarns by Robert E. Howard will feel at home. Allan Quartermain is a British South African. He is an old hand at scouting and hunting, a South African equivalent of Kit Carson. A couple of British gentlemen approach him to guide an expedition into the interior to locate a missing friend. They also find a lost civilization that didn’t even know it was lost. Legends of startling antiquity mix with frontier rumors. There are great heaps of treasure and even bigger heaps of trouble to be found.

Haggard essentially wove a South African “Western” into an adventure story of the fantastic unknown. He knew what he was talking about. Haggard’s dad informed his son he was a useless blockhead and should get up and do something with his life if he didn’t get killed in the process. With that bit of paternal support Haggard went to South Africa, specifically the Transvaal. It was a rough time and Haggard departed after the local Boer settlers kicked the Brits out in a brief war of independence.

Perhaps there were men that Haggard knew in South Africa that were the model for Quartermain. He’s certainly not the typical action-hero. Quartermain is a little guy, he’s past his prime, describes himself as timid, and has an unfashionable brush cut. He makes an engaging narrator, offering detailed info on the best type of oxen to buy for travel on the veldt, describing the muddled interaction of Europeans and Africans who can’t quite grasp each other’s culture, and of course telling of thrilling adventures.

The edition I have includes stills from the Golan & Globus version of King Solomon’s Mines that was apparently intended to get a boost from the popularity of Indiana Jones. I’ve never seen it, but it seems to refer to some other story than the one I read (mine had fewer women and Germans).
 

-Dave Hardy

 

JAN IN INDIA

By Otis Adelbert Kline

Otis Adelbert Kline was a literary agent and author back in the heyday of the pulps. Although well known to readers and writers of the era, today he is little remembered.

One of the few volumes of his work that can be found on library shelves is Jan in India. The novel is a sequel to Jan of the Jungle, a feral child tale set in South America. This sequel finds Jan caught up in skullduggery among Kali worshippers in India. Jan tackles just about every dangerous jungle creature one can find in the sub-continent before he saves the day.

This is decent action-hero stuff, although there’s not a whole lot going on besides cobra strangling. Chandra Kumar is the one character that really stands out and OAK uses him for comic relief. Jan in India is an easygoing sort of jungle-boy tale that’s good for whiling away the afternoon. Get it through interlibrary loan, but unless you are serious collector of pulp authors don’t spend a lot of money on it.

Originally run as a serial in Argosy, it was re-released as a novel by Fictioneer Books in 1974. The text is accompanied by good black and white line drawings by Steven Leialoha and a “glossary of characters”.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

A HERO OF OUR TIME

By Mihail Lermontov

Mihail Lermontov was a Russian aristocrat back in the 1840s. He intensely admired Pushkin and was publicly outraged when the powers that were arranged a fatal duel for the poet. For the boldness of his tongue Lermontov was packed off to the Caucasus, Russia’s southern frontier and the home of Cossack frontiersmen and wild hill tribes.

So you might think he went off and wrote something drearily literate and of interest only to Post-Modern literary critics. Not a bit, when Lermontov wasn’t leading a hard-riding bunch of scouts in Injun country, he wrote all-out pulp adventure yarns with smugglers, dashing bandits, and tough-as-leather soldiers. His hero was Pechorin, a rough and tumble version of the Byronic hero, who was equally at home in a drawing room or a gunfight. He’s no angel, he goads a native into stealing a prize horse so he can steal a woman, and he meets a former friend in a duel that must end in death. Above all Pechorin is a cynical and detached observer of the people around him, but one with a mysterious past.

Really these are Russian Westerns with a dash of European drawing room veneer. Kipling once said something about Russians being barbaric Orientals who only appear civilized. Well thank God, it kept their fiction from being too dull.

As for Lermontov, he survived his battles on the Chechen frontier only to be killed in a duel arranged by authorities who’d never forgiven him for being too outspoken.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

CONCLUSION TO THE HUNGER WITH THE HEART OF ICE ONLINE

The second part of "The Hunger with the Heart of Ice" is online here. The third and final part is online here. Be sure to check out Adventure! for much more about your favorite writers of thrilling stories.