THE EARLY LONG

By Frank Belknap Long

I’ve always been a sucker for collections like this. Anthologies of tales from the pulps are the lands I go prospecting for fiction gold. Sometimes I strike pay dirt and sometimes I find rocks. There is a bit of both in The Early Long.

Although he is often recalled as HP Lovecraft’s friend, Frank Belknap Long had a very long career in science fiction and fantasy writing. This collection begins with some of his earliest sales to Weird Tales in the 1920s and winds up with stories he sold to Unknown in the mid-1940s.

It’s an interesting set, particularly regards the aspect of watching a writer develop. While never a Lovecraft clone, his early work shows some affinities with HPL’s style and preoccupations. The "Hounds of Tindalos" is one of Long’s best known tales and is generally considered a part of the larger Mythos cycle of stories. It is a good example of cosmic horror deployed effectively, although Long was still polishing his writing style. It’s not everyday one finds a tale in which a character writes his death-scream.

Later tales manage to combine science fiction with fantasy to create a modern type of horror story (much as HPL’s critical theory called for) but on a human scale. Long’s tales from the ‘40s are memorable and polished. "Grab Bags are Dangerous" is a fine exercise in dark-fantasy leavened with humor and "Step into my Garden" mixes fantasy, myth and fear for a memorable tale.

If you come across this one, it’s well worth a read.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DESTINATION INFINITY

By Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner was a prolific and popular sf writer, his career spanned from the 1930s to the 1950s when he died young from a heart attack. Destination Infinity is one of the many books he wrote under a pen name, most likely in collaboration with his wife CL Moore.

The tale is classic ‘50s science fiction, set on a Venus covered with roiling seas, and jungles full of man-eating plants. The conflict isn’t exactly about the best means to prune gigantic Venus fly-traps though. It concerns Sam Reed, an illegitimate child of a family of wealthy immortals and his rise from lowly outsider to savior of mankind. Sam is a consummate anti-hero, deliberately abandoned by his father and full of angst and ambition in an uncaring world. The tale follows Sam as a gangster, land-speculator, pioneer, and military dictator.

What Kuttner writes here is sociological science fiction, part speculation on society and part soap opera. Earth was long ago destroyed by nuclear war and mankind lives in undersea habitats on Venus. A few families have developed a hereditary trait of immortality, and live for centuries, aging little if at all. The mass of mankind has stagnated, allowing the immortals to do their thinking for them. Sam Reed blows it all apart in his relentless drive to make it to the top.

This is a book I liked despite itself. The opening is overlong and is basically a lot of exposition to set the story for the rest of the novel. Judging from the names (Reed, Harker, Hale, Delaware, Nevada, Plymouth) and dialog (‘50s Middle American) the only survivors of Earth’s nuclear wars are a bunch of WASPs from North America. I’m not sure I buy the sociology either, immortality is an advantage, but it is practical bribes and threats that keep a society in line, not spiritual intimidation. Just take a look at Eastern Europe in the ‘70s or Medieval Christendom’s struggles with heresy to find examples of orderly, stultified societies. But Kuttner pushes his logic to the end and spices it with soap opera of great verve. Overall, I wasn’t disappointed when I got to Sam Reed’s Destination.

 

-Dave Hardy

DEADLINE AT DAWN

By Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich was the Homer of bleak, urban landscapes, of heroes that the gods had forgotten, and of epic battles fought by desperate losers struggling to carve out a brief moment of love before the relentless wheels of heaven grind them underfoot. His stories were the essence of that strange thing called the roman noir.

Deadline at Dawn is one such epic. A taxi dancer meets a laborer. They have no reason to experience the least amount of sympathy or interest in one another, except they discover they were neighbors back in their small hometown back in Iowa. Now they are alone in the soulless and predatory city, dying by inches as their souls are abraded away to end up dead husks, existing but not alive.

So they plan to head back to Iowa, but the laborer stole some money, and he will be caught because no matter how cleverly he did it, he knows THEY will divine his secrets. Only it won’t be theft he is caught for, it will be murder, because other forces are at work. In true Woolrich style, these innocents are caught up in someone else's crime, not by accident, but because coincidence is a mask for cosmic cruelty that makes sport of humanity. They have until dawn to find the real murderer and escape the malignant forces that stalk them.  

Woolrich’s obsessive attention to detail is matched by his characters’ certain knowledge that every single clue is meaningful and can be used to reconstruct actions and psychologies. Woolrich works his stories like a crazed “CSI: Deadend Town”. It’s a vision of the world that ranges from pitch-black to blinding light. 

Originally published in 1944 under Woolrich’s penname William Irish, Deadline at Dawn was one of many Woolrich novels reprinted by Ballantine in the ‘80s.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE DARK FRIGATE

By Charles Boardman Hawes

Charles Boardman Hawes’ tale of piracy upon the high seas in the days of King Charles is just as fresh today as when it won the Newberry Award in 1923. The Dark Frigate is an excellent work, though classed among young adult novels, it should have a lot of appeal to readers who love a good adventure and can still recall their reading tastes from when they were 13.

The hero is Philip Marsham, a lad who goes to sea in the Rose of Devon. But certain “gentlemen of fortune” under Martin Berwick make themselves masters of the Rose and the honest sailors have no choice but to turn pirate.

This is a dark version of Treasure Island, and Martin Berwick is a grim and tragic Long John Silver. The tale concerns itself with the thin line that divides the lawful from the lawless, and when men are adrift in an uncaring world, how easy it is to cross that thin line. Don’t be looking for easy or happy endings here. Crime is punished, but it’s a near run thing that nearly takes down the innocent too.

The Little, Brown and Co. edition has a good, moody cover illustration and nice black and white line drawings as chapter headings.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DARKER THAN YOU THINK

By Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson is a pioneer in science fiction, he was around before it was science fiction, they called it “scientifiction” back then. But like other pioneers he was not content with tilling the same fields, he had to pick up his musket and wander over where he couldn’t see the smoke from his neighbor’s cabin. His wanderings took him around to sword and sorcery, adventure tales, and horror. His most notable foray into the field of horror fiction was Darker than You Think, now a classic in the genre.

The story’s protagonist is Will Barbee, a hack journalist with a drinking problem and a sense of bitter longing in a New Mexico city (Williamson is nearly as dotty about his home state as Robert E. Howard was about Texas). When he meets a strange red-haired woman at a press conference held by his former professor, Barbee is launched into a nightmare world of murder and madness that rips apart everything he knows about himself and the human race itself!

This is some of Williamson’s best work, more polished than the often crude “scientifiction” he wrote in the ‘30s, but still with a naïve romance that gives the tale great power. Interestingly, Darker than You Think was a favorite of Jack Parsons, the rocket-scientist/occultist who helped found America’s missile program. Parsons’ may have been a grade-A nutjob, but he had very good taste in fiction if we may judge from this.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE CONQUEST OF NEW SPAIN

By Bernal Diaz

This is a grunt’s eye view of Cortes’ conquest of Mexico. Bernal Diaz was a gentleman soldier who came to the New World to seek his fortune. He saw Spain’s greatest conquest at first hand in all its grit, glory, and gory excess. The book is not exactly an apologia, few thought an apology necessary at the time. Rather it was written to set the record straight regarding other Spanish chroniclers who Diaz felt had distorted Cortes' record.

Diaz was not much of a stylist and translator JM Cohen has cut down the narrative to a manageable size. What is left has the immediacy of vivid, first-hand recollections. Diaz probably spared the reader quite a bit, but what he put in can be horrid enough. He describes Spanish soldiers using fat from Indians’ corpses to make grease for their weapons. Along with the greed, inhumanity, and fanaticism there are human touches. He describes Montezuma (who Diaz guarded) as a kindly gentleman, who offered to arrange marriages for his captors with Aztec ladies, an offer Diaz accepted. The friars are present always, and Diaz describes how they often moderated demands for immediate, forcible conversion. Perhaps it was respect, but it was also pragmatism. There were a lot of pagans, and not all were ill-disposed to the Spanish, but would be if pushed.

Diaz is a man who was born in the Middle Ages and helped create the Modern Era. This isn’t just the story of exploration, or conquest, or adventure, or genocide. It is literally a day-by-day account of how the world, for better or worse, changed.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE COMING OF CONAN THE CIMMERIAN

By Robert E. Howard

This anthology is part one of a three-part collection of all Robert E Howard’s Conan stories. The editors have arranged the tales in the order they were written (a major departure from the de Camp series that arranged the stories to relate to phases in Conan’s life).

Let me just say I consider Robert E Howard’s Conan series as one of about three perfect sword and sorcery series (the other two being Fafhrd and the Grey Mouserand Elric of Melnibone) so this stuff is straight up gold to me.

Which is not to say it is all that to all readers. REH was still getting his feet with the character in these early stories. "The God in the Bowl", a curious mix of sword & sorcery with the detective story, is probably the weakest of the lot. What is amazing is how many of them are so powerful. "The Frost Giant’s Daughter" manages to bring modern fantasy into myth (of the dark and ferocious kind). "Queen of the Black Coast" is perhaps the best of them all, it has adventure, wild love, battle, and the epic saga of the rise and fall, not of a civilization, but of an entire undreamed–of pre-human race.

For a fan who knows these stories well, the real bonus is to see them in the order that they came off REH’s typewriter. We see how one tale would inspire the next, from king to thief, to pirate to mercenary, not as a random agglomeration, but as a that-reminds-me-of-the-time cycle.

Extras include fragments, synopses and a very good critical essay by REH scholar Patrice Louinet. The art by Mark Schultz (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) is excellent. The Coming of Conan is part of a growing library of REH classics released by Wandering Star in conjunction with Del Rey. Wandering Star editions are hardbound with full color illustration (publisher Marcello Anciano will occasionally pulp a run if the color balance is less that perfect). The Del Rey trade paperbacks have black and white versions of the color plates along with a plethora of line drawings. Mark Schultz’ masterpiece here is “The Dance of Belit”, barbaric and sexy.

The Coming of Conan is a must have for any fan of sword & sorcery.
 

-Dave Hardy

A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS

By Eric Ambler

This is one of Eric Ambler’s best novels from his early days, back when he was an anti-Fascist idealist in the ‘30s. While that led to some odd effects in other novels, A Coffin for Dimitrios shows ideology in action, rather than telling about it. The story tells of Latimer, an English journalist, who follows the life history of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek exile who is by turns a gangster, spy, and terrorist for hire. While it’s definitely not a blood-spilling shoot-‘em-up, there is plenty of tension. The novel is really a set of short stories, each telling of some phase of Dimitrios’ career while Latimer gets closer to the truth about Dimitrios’ ultimate fate. Made into a film in 1944 (as The Mask of Dimitrios), A Coffin for Dimitrios is a good old-time thriller. Don’t look for super-weapons, acrobatics, villains in underground fortresses, or heroes jumping into bed with lots of spy-chicks, just good characterization, suspense and an acute eye for the European underworld of the 1930s.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

By H.P. Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was a Rhode Islander and a Providence native. His settings are invariably the towns and countryside of New England and especially the imaginary area around Arkham, Massachusetts. But in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward he used his beloved Providence to give this tale a very real backdrop.

This story is really a novella issued in a single volume by Del Rey back in 1982 (it’s assuredly still in print, but I’ve still got the Del Rey edition on my shelf). It tells of young Charles Dexter Ward who takes a deep interest in genealogy, much to everyone’s regret. It seems Ward is a descendant of a certain Joseph Curwen, an old RI settler of dubious and disturbing repute. The reader is led through Curwen’s biography and Ward’s descent into madness with a chillingly clinical precision, heightened by the loving references to Providence landmarks (my brother and sister live in Pawtuxet which Lovecraft describes as the site of Curwen’s farm, check your basement kiddies!).

Compared with better known tales such as “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth” Charles Dexter Ward is low-key. The antiquarian references may sometimes be a bit overwhelming. For me these quirky touches are what make reading Lovecraft’s work enjoyable. He truly poured himself into his stories. I recommend you sit down on a dark night and pour yourself into The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

CHANGEWAR

By Fritz Leiber

This collection of short stories is a sequel of sorts to Fritz Leiber’s landmark novel The Big Time. The stories are set in the Changewar, a secret battle that spans all space and time. The rivals are the Spiders and Snakes, though all we really learn of them is through the mercenaries they recruit from all of history. Their mode of battle is to change the past in order to promote an advantageous outcome at some point in the unimaginably distant future.

These tales break out and explore some (a very tiny fraction!) of the immense ramifications of the Changewar. “Try and Change the Past” explains with a grimly humorous example just why altering the path of time is a job for intergalactic empires. “The Oldest Soldier” lets a regular guy meet a Changewar soldier, with some dramatic results. “A Deskful of Girls” shows just how a renegade could exploit Changewar technology: the factions don’t use a person’s physical form, they use a sort of psychic impression. In an attenuated form, it creates a spiritual zombie. Don’t try it at home folks, the Spiders and Snakes don’t like it. The collection winds up with “No Great Magic” bringing us full circle to the characters from The Big Time and showing a bit of Changewarfare in process. As always, Leiber’s quirky humor and quirkier word-play is in evidence.

While I definitely recommend this book, you should read The Big Time first. The stories here are good, but perhaps are too mystifying without the background from the novel.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS

By Joe Lansdale

This is the latest novel in the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series, by Texas author Joe Lansdale. Hap and his buddy Leonard are security guards at a chicken processing plant in East Texas. If you aren’t familiar with these guys, Hap is an easy-going redneck who drifts from one loony predicament to another. His pal Leonard is a tough-as-nails black war vet who happens to be one of the very few openly gay guys in the hick town where they live.

When Hap saves a girl’s life he and Leonard are rewarded with a vacation. After a series of confrontations with pushy waiters and Mexican cops Hap and Leonard end up befriending an old fisherman and his beautiful daughter. Hap actually gets very friendly with her, Leonard less so. Of course it doesn’t end there and our heroes end up on the wrong side of a sadistic Mexican gang boss who happens to practice nudism.

It’s a good novel, but not as weird as its predecessor, Rumble Tumble (really bizarre and bloody, funny as all get out too). Still the smart aleck humor of Hap and Leonard is in full force along with Hap’s attempts to make sense of why his life is so aimless and why someone always wants to kill him.

Strangely enough the British edition is what ended up on my bookshelf, which is what happens when you buy all your books at used bookstores.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE CANDLEMASS ROAD

By George MacDonald Fraser

You could say that The Steel Bonnets is the sort of history a novelist would write, conversely you could say that The Candlemass Road is the sort of novel a historian would write.

George MacDonad Fraser is the author of the hugely popular Flashman novels. He also wrote a compelling history of the Scots-English border in the 16th century, titled The Steel Bonnets. Fraser is border-born and bred and he took that history to heart, from it came The Candlemass Road.

The novel is about Lady Margaret Dacre, raised at the court in London and now returned to her father’s lands in the North. She discovers that the Dacre family has been running on reputation for a long time past and now face the prospect of survival in lawless land of feuds, plunder, and murder. Her only help is the outlaw Hobbie Noble. In classic Western style Lady Dacre and Noble defy the counsel of those who insist on not rocking the boat and proceed to capsize the gol-durn thing.

This is very familiar country for those who’ve read The Steel Bonnets, Fraser even includes a historical postscript to round out this novella. It is the kind of writing that one sees all too seldom: historically literate, tightly paced, filled with characters that grab a reader's interest, but not by re-imagining the past to suit the prissy sensibilities of the present. The Candlemass Road is a lean wolf in a field with too many lumbering oxen.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BOWIE’S MINE

By Elmer Kelton

Elmer Kelton is something of a favorite of mine. I have to qualify it a bit since my tendency is for headlong lunacy while Kelton is always cautiously aware of human frailty. However, in Bowie’s Mine he cuts loose with a band of raffish knuckleheads on the trail of the legendary lost San Saba Silver mine. The central character is a poor but honest farm boy who decides to have a bit of an adventure. It doesn’t quite work out as the clueless wonders he hooks up with can never pull off their capers as well as they claim.

A darn good western, full of dash, vigor, and rollicking good fun.

-Dave Hardy

THE BLOODY CROWN OF CONAN

by Robert E. Howard

This is book two of the three-part collection of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories by Wandering Star (released as a trade paperback by Del Rey). In these tales REH had hit his stride, and the Cimmerian was loose in all his grit and glory. For those readers more familiar with the old de Camp edited editions of Conan, this collection features the Conan stories in the order they were written with no “posthumous collaboration”: pastiches, re-writes of stories to convert them into Conan tales, or fleshing out of uncompleted synopses.

What you’ll find is two novellas and a novel. The opener is People of the Black Circle. Conan is in the lands of the East leading a gang of Afguli bandits. It’s the sort of thing that would get you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay these days. He ends up kidnapping a princess entirely by mistake while trying to rescue some of his men from jail. A lot of writers would stop there, but Howard involves a sect of ghastly evil wizards, a spy from a rival empire, and a renegade adept and his girlfriend who are sort of a sorcerous Bonnie & Clyde. REH takes all this complex set of rivalries, adds a few here and there and juggles ‘em all until the end when he begins pitching them through plate glass windows.

The bulk of the book is The Hour of the Dragon, a full scale Conan novel. Conan is king of Aquilonia here, but a conspiracy of rebel nobles, rival kings, and an undead wizard deposes him. Conan sets off of a trek that crosses much of the Hyborian world in his quest to regain his throne. In addition to sword-play, treacherous twists and turns, and perils from grisly demonic forces, Conan has to confront what it means to be king. He has to choose to regain his throne rather than return to the life of a footloose adventurer. The action is cranked to maximum from beginning to end.    

The collection winds up with A Witch Shall be Born. Conan is serving as a mercenary captain for a remote kingdom when a conspiracy overthrows the ruling princess. In the process Conan faces his ultimate challenge: he is crucified (the scene is reproduced in the movie Conan). It is the ultimate in tough guy tale-telling, pushing the Cimmerian into the realms of Odin and Christ.

There are lots of tidbits in the appendices. There are drafts, synopses, and an unpublished fragment. There is also a critical essay by Patrice Louinet and copious notes on the typescripts. While this is of interest mostly to REH scholars, everyone will enjoy the many black and white drawings and plates by Gary Gianni (who also illustrated Bran Mak Morn and Savage Tales of Solomon Kane).

This is the ultimate in sword and sorcery. Buy it now!

-Dave Hardy

BLOOD IS NOT ENOUGH

Edited by Ellen Datlow

This collection of vampire tales was issued by Berkley in 1990 and edited by Ellen Datlow. The goal here seems to be to cast as wide a net as possible and sample every possible variation on the vampire tale one can find. There are blood drinking vampires and emotion drinking vampires and time wasting vampires and kids who think they are vampires, etc…

Some of these tales just misfire for me. Tanith Lee’s “The Janitha Tree” is a good example of her subtle and enigmatic style of weird tale that is so subtle and enigmatic I’m not too sure what happened. Other tales here just aren’t my cup of tea, “A Child of Darkness” by Susan Casper is a decent portrait of a young woman who believes she is a vampire, but ultimately the character comes across as more a pathetic loony than someone interesting in her own right.  

On the other hand there are some true standouts. Fritz Leiber’s tale of blood-sucking advertising “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” appears here. It is subtle and enigmatic, but not too subtle. The best in the collection is Scott Baker’s “Varicose Worms”. This is a tale full of surprises! It tells of a Romanian immigrant in Paris who discovers the secret magic world of Shamanism and his epic battle to hold his place in it. Along the way Baker satirizes psychiatrists, politicians, Mircea Eliade, and homeless beggars, not necessarily in that order. I finished that one and was left begging for more, though I daresay Mr. Baker knows how to wrap up a yarn. If you ever run across this book, read “Varicose Worms”!

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE BLACK MASS OF BROTHER SPRINGER

By Charles Willeford

Charles Willeford was the king of Florida noir. He wrote taut novels of odd loners who just couldn’t stay alone and draw others to their ruin.

Sam Springer is a dry-as-dust accountant who decides he’s a writer because he sold a novel. Broke and in search of new material to write about he visits a monastery in the Florida backwoods. The abbot and sole occupant is a career soldier who’s forgotten more about doing nothing while getting paid than most men ever learn. He helps Springer skip out on his wife and life by dispatching him to be pastor of an all-Black church in Jacksonville. But preaching actually takes some work and Jax is in the throes of a civil rights conflict. Rev. Deuteronomy Springer is a long way from a saint and so is Merita, the very beautiful wife of one of his deacons.

Black Mass is a sardonic send-up of bigots, zealots, preachers, and believers. Even more than that it is a story about how wanting is quite different from having. If you like good, dark comedy, you should want to read this one. Having done so will be satisfying.

-Dave Hardy

THE BIG TIME

By Fritz Leiber

The Big Time is a masterpiece of contradiction. It is set in a dazzling science fiction universe of limitless possibility, yet the tale itself is one of claustrophobic confinement. The fate of all time and space itself hangs in the balance, armies battle on all fronts, yet the characters are the most minor of rear-rank spearholders. And they are all the more fascinating for it. 

If you are unfamiliar with the premise, The Big Time tells of the Changewar between the Spiders and the Snakes, two mysterious factions battling for control of space and time. Their mode of battle is to change history, their foot-soldiers are agents recruited from all of history and every planet in the universe.

But forget all that, Leiber never tells you what any of the missions mean, only that faceless, nameless commanders say it’s important. And if they order a British WWI vet to help the Nazis win WWII, he just has to assume they know what they're doing. The central character is not a soldier, but an entertainer at a trans-tempoal USO station. Tangled webs of love, jealousy, and mutiny swirl through the lives of the entertainers and the time-soldiers they care for.

The Big Time is all Fritz Leiber, starting with his love of the theater. In fact The Big Time is written much like a play, with a very rigorous observance of Aristotle’s unities (I’m not being very original in noting that). Indeed, the one place, one time approach is perhaps the only way to make sense of a concept as big as the Changewar. Leiber’s love of word-play and his interest in Germans and Shakespeare are very much in evidence.

The Big Time is a science fiction novel you can recommend to people who don’t read science fiction.

-Dave Hardy

ALMURIC

By Robert E. Howard

There is a certain sub-genre of science fiction that is sometimes called “sword & planet”. It has its roots in A Princess of Mars and other tales of John Carter on Barsoom by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The hallmarks are an alien world filled with decadent science, barbaric warriors and an outsider from earth who shakes up the scene.

Robert E. Howard of Conan fame made his own foray into the field with Almuric, perhaps his most extended science fiction work. In fact Almuric is one of REH’s few novels (it was serialized in Weird Tales but never issued as a novel until the ‘70s). The hero is Esau Cairn, a man too strong for civilized life. When fate puts him outside the law a kindly scientist helps Cairn out with a dimensional transporter that shoots him to Almuric, a planet remote from earth. The inhabitants are shaggy ape-men and gorgeous barbarian princesses. On Almuric, a fellow is judged by his courage and strength, not his bank account so Esau Ironhand fits right in.

Alas, there is always a hitch. The demonic Yagas, a race of winged fiends, tyrannize over Almuric. When they massacre Cairn’s friends, it means war. 

While not as well developed as the Hyborian Age, Almuric is an entertaining imaginary world. I enjoyed the naïve and romantic story telling of A Princess of Mars. In Almuric we get REH’s take on that style of story telling: bold, direct, and swashbuckling.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

 

BLACK VULMEA’S VENGEANCE

By Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, though best known for his horror and sword & sorcery, was at heart an adventure writer. He buckled anything that swashed. What better subject for swashbuckling adventure than piracy on the high seas?

Black Terence Vulmea is REH’s pirate hero. He is an Irish sea-rover, a survivor of England’s tyrannous rule over the Emerald Isle. We get two Black Vulmea stories: “Blades of the Red Brotherhood” and “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance”. “Blades” should be familiar to many Conan fans. It was originally a Conan tale and re-written as apirate sotry. L. Sprague de Camp re-re-wrote it as “The Treasure of Tranicos”. It’s a darn fine adventure as Black Vulmea finds himself stranded on a remote shore and involved with an exiled French nobleman, a rival pirate, hostile Indians, and a legendary lost treasure. It’s a festival of sword-play, double-crosses, and thrilling action.

“Vengeance” lets us get much closer to the pirate’s character. Vulmea is captured by Wentworth, a haughty Royal Navy captain. But the pirate is nobody’s fool and soon the tables are turned. This yarn is an interesting one in that REH gives full vent to his feelings on England’s rule of Ireland, and how a strong man deals with a bully. You might be surprised.

“Isle of Pirates Doom” rounds out the book. While it is a pirate tale, Black Vulmea is not present. Instead REH gives us one of his one of his sword-women: Helen Tavrel, the wildest she-pirate afloat. While Helen Tavrel has never gotten the notice that Belit (“Queen of the Black Coast”), Valeria (“Red Nails”), or Dark Agnes (“Sword Woman”) have received, this is an interesting story. Helen Tavrel isn’t just a man in drag or a sex-kitten with a sword. She has her own complex web of relationships and womanly sense of propriety. She’s no man-hater, but don’t take liberties, you’ll regret it.

Sadly out-of-print, Black Vulmea’s Vengeance is as fine a set of pirate yarns as was ever penned by a salty sea dog.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: MORE STORIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES TO BE READ WITH THE DOOR LOCKED
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S BEHIND THE DEATH BALL

Back when magazines contained stories and not just 893 pages of ads, they used to collect them and publish them in book format. Stories, not ads, that is.

One of the old reliables was the “Alfred Hitchcock” sets. Not that the great director actually selected the stories for these books (or maybe he did), but it tied in with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents tv show.

Don’t look for “locked door” puzzlers or accounts of how Mrs. Gillysquid the elderly librarian showed up Scotland Yard (except maybe as parodies). These collections focus on crime stories, stories told from the point of view of a criminal, a victim, a bystander. The emphasis is less on detecting than the motivation and effects of crime. Mostly the effect on the reader, the more outlandish the better.

Straight up fantasy is not neglected either. Theodore Sturgeon’s classic tale "Shottle Bop" is featured in Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, and there is a fine homage to Lord Dunsany in More Stories My Mother Never Told Me, titled "The Man Who sold Rope to the Gnoles" by Idris Seabright. And of course one must read John Keefauver’s How Henry J. Littlefinger Licked the Hippies’ Scheme to Take Over the Country by Tossing Pot in Postage Stamp Glue because it has such a cool title, if nothing else.

Should you come across an Alfred Hitchcock collection, it’s worthwhile to take some time to peruse. 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE BUCCANEERS OF AMERICA

By Alexander Exquemelin

No it’s not about an NFL team from Tampa, it’s about swaggering, cut-throat desperadoes who terrorized all in their path. No, I don’t mean the creative team that brought you Gigli either, I mean real pirates.

Alexander Exquemelin was a young Dutchman who went to the West Indies as an indentured servant, a slave with a contract that is. Finding the life of  a servant brutal, he went off to join the buccaneers, roving bands that hunted wild cattle in the interior of Hispaniola (nowadays Haiti & the Dominican Republic). These men were in constant conflict with the Spanish and many had taken to the sea to rob passing ships. In Exquemelin’s day they had grown strong enough that under leaders like L’Ollonais, Rock Brasiliano, Bartholomew the Portuguese, and Captain Henry Morgan, that they could form powerful fleets capable of seizing major cities and pillaging extensively.

Exquemelin gives us a unique first hand account of the hardships of frontier life in the West Indies. He is concise but there is a wealth of detail about the plants and animals, daily life among the colonists, and the trades they engaged in (besides armed robbery). Above all this is an account of the most notorious buccaneer chiefs and their war against the Spanish Main. The portraits of L’Ollonais and Morgan dominate the book. L’Ollonais is shown as a sociopath, practicing savage cruelty as matter of routine, but possessed of reckless personal courage in battle. Morgan comes across as a smooth, cozening rogue, but also as a man capable of using his abilities to unite disparate outlaw crews to undertake military campaigns of surprising strategic finesse and daring.

If you have any interest in piracy in the days of sail, you MUST read this book.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BRAN MAK MORN: THE LAST KING

By Robert E. Howard

This is Wandering Star's comprehensive collection of Bran Mak Morn tales and it’s a stunner [Note: While WS has moved on, Del Rey still publishes this book as a trade paperback]. It is very thorough and includes all the Bran Mak Morn tales (“Men of the Shadows”, “Kings of the Night”, and “Worms of the Earth”) and the Turlough Dubh yarn, “The Dark Man”. It also has another Pictish tale, “The Lost Race” as well as poetry, fragments, an early draft of “Worms” and a whole chronology (including excerpts from REH letters) of REH and the Picts. Even so it is still not a complete Pictology when you consider the import of Pictish supporting characters and foes in the James Allison stories, the Conan series and the Cormac MacArt tales. To get all that in there you’d need another volume.

For those readers unfamiliar with Bran Mak Morn and the Picts these were some of Robert E. Howard’s favorite themes. The historic Picts were the inhabitants of Northern Britain outside of Roman control. Historians and archaeologists believe their culture was a mix of Celtic and indigenous, pre-Indo-European peoples. For Howard they represented the old-people, the precursors of his beloved Celts. They were his Big Other, playing Indians to the Celtic cowboys. Bran Mak Morn is their last hope as Rome’s power grows. He knows his people’s time on the stage of history is just about up, but they ain’t going quietly.

The stories range from the ok (“The Lost Race”) to the outstanding (“Worms of the Earth”). Quite frankly, “Worms of the Earth” is one of REH’s best yarns. Don’t expect tons of blazing action, this is the story where REH displayed his talent as a creator of mood and atmosphere. The feel is closer to Lovecraftian horror than Conan-style sword-and-sorcery. It is also a good example of REH at his most thoughtful as Bran must repeatedly confront the question: how far would you go to strike at a foe?

The illustrations by Gary Gianni are magnificent. Gianni depicts bloody hand-to-hand struggle as deftly as he captures the moody, fog-bound feel of the Celtic twilight.  True some have criticized the cover art as making the Picts look too much like dwarves. Well, how the hell do you depict people regularly described as stunted giants?

As for the historical Picts, their kingdom survived into the Dark Ages. Finally, racked by internal wars and Viking invasions, the Picts succumbed to a take-over by the Scots of Dal Riada. The kingdom of the Picts became the home of the Gaelic Highlanders.

-Dave Hardy

BARBARIAN DAYS: THE TRAILER

I just recently saw the trailer for "Barbarian Days" a documentary from the fellows at Goodspeed Productions about the annual gathering of Howard Heads in Cross Plains, Texas and the people who make it special. The film follows Rusty Burke, Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, all super REH scholars and, I am proud to add, good friends of mine. Watch the trailer for special appearances from Paul Herman, Lee Breakiron, & Mrs. Dave. Not to mention a very special guest!

You can find it on FaceBook at: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/video/video.php?v=434270614084&ref=mf

SORCEROUS SIGNALS

A quick note that I have a new story online at Sorcerous Signals an amazing Fantasy 'zine edited by Carol Hightshoe. My yarn is "Prisoners of the Glittering Plain." It's a tale of Vikings, curses, and monsters in the frozen North. Enjoy! -Dave

THE BIG SLEEP

By Raymond Chandler

“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.”

Raymond Chandler could make his words stalk off the page and into your life like a gimlet-eyed dame with a .45 in her purse and too many white nights in her past.

Anyway, before I start to sound like Robert Parker writing a pastiche with a WAY too short deadline, let me just say that The Big Sleep is deservedly one of Chandler’s best known works. He paints LA red with a lurid tale of high society, low company, depraved kicks, and noble intentions gone wrong.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, it is narrated by Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s fictional PI. Marlowe’s job, taken as much for a loopy sense of honor as for green semolians, is to look into the disappearance of Rusty Regan, General Sternwood’s son-in-law. Chaos abounds as the General’s daughters, Vivian and Carmen, do their best to muddy the waters.

The plot is a complex one, pulled together from short stories Chandler had sold to Black Mask. Honestly, sometimes the stitching shows. But the characters just pull you into their loony world and hold on until the tale is done. Along the way you find gems like “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts,” and, “using his strength like an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.” Above all it’s Marlowe, the dogged PI, going back again to uncover, or bury, the truth as he must in the service of his odd sense of duty.

-Dave Hardy

THE ANGEL OF THE WEST WINDOW

By Gustav Meyrink

Gustav Meyrink evoked the brooding spirit of Prague in novels rich with mystical symbolism, novels that might be coded with kabalistic messages themselves and capable of working a strange alchemy in their readers. Meyrink was a banker and man-about-town in fin de siecle Prague until series of duels and a false accusation of mishandling bank funds smashed the manacles of respectability that held him back. Thereafter he penned his odd novels mixing his Judeo-Buddhist mysticism with zestful fantasy yarns.

The Angel of the West Window relates the mystic quest of John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist and secret agent, in parallel with the story of his modern descendant who finds his own life drawn onto the strange path his ancestor once trod. But the path to illumination is perilous and those who would pervert it to their own ends wait for the unwary.

Meyrink’s vision is a dizzying one. His work has been hidden behind a language barrier too long, and Meyrink deserves to take his place alongside Lovecraft, Tolkein, and Howard as a master of modern fantasy. First published in 1927, Angel and other Meyrink works were newly translated and reprinted by Daedelus in the 1990s.

-Dave Hardy

Strange reviews of the recent past

Since the old Fire & Sword website is defunct (well not defunct, just redirecting to the Fire & Sword blog), I've decied to revive a few reviews from there, because they were so good. OK, because I'm to lazy to write new reviews. In perfect candor, I always intended it to be an archive of reviews and commentary on books that I liked. I still like 'em, so why no post them here. Without further ado, here's my review of All shot Up by Chester Himes.

ALL SHOT UP
By Chester Himes

So you think Shaft was the baddest cat in Harlem? Well long before Richard Roundtree ever donned a black vinyl driving coat, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were keeping it cool when things got hot.

Chester Himes was an ex-con who took to writing. He penned some well-regarded but very uncomfortable (for honkies) novels about crime and race. Eventually he moved to France in 1953 (except perhaps for Muslims, it seemed relatively less racist than America) and started writing for the local market for romans noir . The French didn’t know that all detectives were white guys who spoke entirely in snappy comebacks so they went for it.

Himes mixed deadpan absurdity with deadpan brutality. All Shot Up opens with a tire thief watching a solid-gold Cadillac driven by a guy in a coonskin cap run over an old lady. She gets up and is promptly sent flying by a coal-black sedan with three cops in it. The thief drops the tire and it keeps on rolling with the novel.

Himes follows up on that opening. The crime here is a pretty complex one, but that’s perhaps of less importance than Grave Digger and Coffin Ed’s rather ruthless methods of getting to the bottom of things.

This is excellent Harlem hard-boiled fiction, not a classical detective story or a police procedural, but an urban adventure tale. If you like tough-guy tales, you should have some of Chester Himes work in your library.

-Dave Hardy

SWORDS OF FIRE NOW AVAILABLE

Swords of Fire is now available from RAGEMachine books. This is a collection of pulse-pounding Sword & Sorcery novellas by C. J. Burch, Jack Mackenzie, G. W. Thomas, and your humble blogger. Artwork is by the amazing MD Jackson. I've been reading the galleys, and this stuff is good if I do say so myself. While you are at it, treat yourself to a copy of GW Thomas's supernatural-mystery anthology No Ghosts Need Apply and his werewolf collection By the Light of the Full Moon. The four issues of Dark Worlds are still available too. You won't regret it.

-Dave Hardy

Coming features

First off what's new:

"Demons of the Dark Sun" is online at Sorcerous Signals. It's by the multi-talented Mitch Allen. I say multi since there are two writers at work here. If you like Pre-Colombian America and Sword & sorcery this is up your alley. Coyotl the Chcihimec is a ttribal warrior who meets the Aztec empire. There are more of Coyotl's adventures waiting to be told.

Next what's ready to order:

El Borak and other Desert Adventures is available from Del Rey. If you don't know about this. El Borak is the nom de guerre of Francis Gordon, a Texas gunslinger who has migrated to the Wild East. Instead of outlaws and Apaches, the stories about Afghans, Central Asian bandits, psycopathic fascists, and Lost Cities in the Hindu Kush. It's not exactly Indiana Jones, these tales more like hard-boiled Westerns in the Near East.




Finally, what's on the horizon:

The Early Adventures of El Borak from the REH Foundation collects the early efforts of Howard to write El Borak Stories. This set of fragments and juvenalia is for collectors and REH scholars. Also collected are the early Sonora Kid fragments, ranging from domestic drama to Westerns.

Enjoy!

-Dave Hardy

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

The original fireandsword.com is no longer with us. In an effort to simplify, everything will be posted on the blog, and the domain forwards to the blog. It is much easier to manage content in this format. We will post the content from the old site as we have time.

COTTON COMES TO HARLEM

By Chester Himes

Cotton Come to Harlem is another off-kilter detective tale from Chester Himes. This is about rival back-to-the-land scams operating in Harlem. Rev. Deke O’Malley is leading the back-to-Africa movement, a mysterious Southern colonel is recruiting for a back-to-the-South movement. A heist of Rev. O’Malley’s money turns violent. The only clue is a bale of cotton that mysteriously appears and disappears throughout the story.

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed do not so much unravel the mystery as they unravel O’Malley’s duplicitous life. In particular, his multiple lady friends and their mutual antipathy provide a reminder that a man who can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar risks a great deal.

-Dave Hardy

STRANGE MONSTERS OF THE RECENT PAST

By Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop seems to be an expert on everything just so he can write about it. It’s a bit like encountering a strange eclectic encyclopedia where the entries come to life and hold a booze party in the subconscious.

In this case the entries include Monster movies as seen from the point of view of the last survivor of humanity. A pair of travelers journey through a landscape created by Heironymous Bosch. There’s a loving tribute to the publishing empires of Onitsha, Nigeria (I’m not making that up either). The icing on this cake is “A Dozen Tough Jobs” detailing Hercules’ adventures in rural Mississippi. Strange Monsters is about as weird and weird fiction can get and highly enjoyable.

-Dave Hardy

GW THOMAS & DARK WORLDS

It has been a while since I mentioned the talented GW Thomas. Here's a few links to his fiction & poetry online: http://www.gwthomas.org/stories.htm. Mr. Thomas is definitely worth spending some quality time with.

Don't forget that you can still get Dark Worlds #4 not to mention #1, #2, & #3. And of course Dark Worlds Adventures and much more.

Over on Kings of the Night there is a crop of new stories: "The Obsidian City" by James Lecky, "THWACK, the Last Arrow's Tale" by Peter J. Welmerink, "Brock Strangebeard and the Towers of Matterkill" by Robert E. Keller, and "The Crypt of the Cobra" by CL Werner.

Finally Swords of Fire will be coming soon! In the tradition of Lin Carter's Flashing Swords anthologies, Swords of Fire is a quadruple dose of Sword & Sorcery fiction, novellas of heroes and magic, featuring: "The Temple of Rakshasa" by David A. Hardy,"The Deathmaster's Folly" by G. W. Thomas, "Two Fools for The Price of One" by C. J. Burch, "Pieces in the Game" by Jack Mackenzie, and cover art by MD Jackson.

-Dave Hardy

DIES ATER DRACONIS ONLINE

My latest story is now online in the October 2009 edition of Static Movement, it is "Dies Ater Draconis." It's a short-short story in the steampunk manner, but using the Late Roman Empire instead of the Victorian era. I wrote it after seeing a documentary about the rediscovery of a lost work by Aristotle. The story is less about Aristotle than about a world where Hero of Alexandria's steam powered inventions became a force to be reckoned with.

In other news I've been a topic of interest in the British fanzine Ansible. David A. Hardy the space artist is a bit non-plussed to find that I write under the name David A. Hard. From the September Ansible:

Outraged Letters. THE David A. Hardy dissociates himself from a David A Hardy who writes stories for Dark World magazine. 'A fake David A. Hardy? I've had this name for 73 years; who is this pretender? Can any of your readers throw any light upon this travesty?' (Your editor's Cosmic Mind is quite able to imagine a real David A. Hardy II. The net is littered with other David Langfords.)

My reply in the October Ansible:

• David A(llen) Hardy assures us his name is authentic. 'It is true that I've only had it for 42 years (one less than David A. Hardy has been doing freelance art), but I've gotten attached to it in the interval. [...] If it will help prevent confusion, I am prepared to swear that I, the David A. Hardy who writes for Dark Worlds, can't draw anything more complex than stick-figures.'

Good thing my parents didn't name me Harlan Ellison.

-Dave Hardy

THE GHOST PIRATES

By William Hope Hodgson

The third of Hodgson’s trilogy of weird tales (Boats of the Glen Carrig and House on the Borderland were the first two), The Ghost Pirates is also about survival when the very boundaries of reality are under attack.

If you are expecting a stoned, metrosexual freebooter, be warned. Hodgson’s Ghost Pirates is more like H.P. Lovecraft as re-written by Joseph Conrad than Keith Richards meets Blackbeard. The narrator tells of how he shipped aboard the Mortzestus, trying to get back home from ‘Frisco to England. The Mortzestus is a Jonah, an unlucky ship that few man sail in twice. The narrator soon learns why. Shadow-men climb from the sea aboard the ship at night. Sailors report unexplainable and deadly happenings in the rigging. Soon the vessel is under siege.

Hodgson gives way to far more technical sea-jargon (perhaps necessarily) than in previous stories. However that artlessness gives the story a bit more verisimilitude: it is told as a sailor would tell it. The Mortzestus is essentially a haunted house at sea. The “ghosts” are no more explicable than the creatures that beset Hodgson’s other narrators. They come from somewhere else, wreak havoc and vanish.

While the story is slow paced, it does have much of Hodgson’s strange and creepy imagery. Perhaps the best image I retain is the glimpse of shadowy masts and a hull, seen backlit by a sinking sun at sea, slowly turning to stalk the doomed ship. Read this one when the lights are dim and the wind is howling off the sea.

-Dave Hardy

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

By William Hope Hodgson

Nowadays critics like to talk about the “New Weird”. Me, I’m still getting a handle on the Old Weird. A good place to grab it seems to be at The House on the Borderland.

The book is the second of William Hope Hodgson’s trilogy of dislocation, survival, and doom. The first was The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Like its predecessor, House on the Borderland also employs a first person narrator. But instead of being castaway in a boat at sea, the narrator is trapped in his own home adrift in time itself.

The nameless narrator tells how he came tot he house to live with sister in a remote part of Ireland. He soon finds that he has terrifying experiences. Whether they are dreams, insane delusions, or real journeys is never quite clear, but the narrator finds himself hurled through space and time to an amphitheater under the last dying sun. Giant forms of animal headed gods watch as the narrator battles hideous pig-beings, the last human fighting for survival in front of his home which has traveled too.

Just as quickly the narrator is whirled back to his own time where the pig-beings have broken through to besiege his home. While his sister is mysteriously absent, the narrator and his faithful dog Pepper battle the pig-beings on our own plane. Then things get really weird.

The narrator explores the cellars of his home and a strange pit on his property, all the while he is subject to attacks of time-slippage where he lives millions of years seemingly in a moment. The end of the Earth becomes a familiar sight.

House on the Borderland is a very strange story. Often Hodgson’s love of bizarre imagery overwhelms the pace of the narrative. Critics will find a cornucopia of material for Freudian, Jungian or other forms of analysis. But readers do get to some memorably weird places, which is the point after all.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG

By William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was a sailor who left the sea to run a physical fitness and health food store before he took up writing. His stories are filled with deeds of action, physical courage, and adventures at sea.

Boats of the Glen Carrig tells the adventures of a boat of castaway sailors shipwrecked near the Sargasso Sea in 1757. The narrator is a passenger of the Glen Carrig. He gives a dead-pan recitation of the strange events that befell the unfortunate seafarers. They find a rotting hulk in a creek on a nameless island where strange and unnatural things roam at night. It’s a place to make a ship-wrecked sailor long for the sea.

The castaways escape only to find themselves trapped in a continent of floating seaweed locked tight about another island. They battle monsters that creep about the forests of fungi at night. Around the island are more hulks of vessels entombed in the seaweed. Led by the clever and courageous boatswain, sailors fight tooth and nail to survive the horrors the encounter.

Boats of the Glen Carrig is a unique sort of book. It is crammed with Hodgson’s deep nautical lore and told in an Eighteenth-century style. The result is sometimes awkward and sometimes a bit overloaded with nautical terms. But for all that it may work a bit better, for it avoids the contrived style of a professional writer making up a crazy story and sounds like an old sailor telling a crazy story. At times I felt like I was hearing an echo of a Ray Harryhausen script channeled by an old salt. At other times I thought of the wildly improbably D&D scenarios of teenagers whose imaginations were fired with Coke and Doritos. The story has a naïve love of wonder and action that ranges from Lovecraftian horror to Howardian blood-lust.

Hodgson was a favorite of H.P. Lovecraft, I expect that Robert E. Howard would have liked his work too. Myself I truly enjoyed it. The story has a freshness that overcomes the occasional amateurishness. It is also part of a trilogy of sorts that includes The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates. Boats of the Glen Carrig is a delightful, creepy, action-packed monster-story of a kind that you just don’t see anymore.

-Dave Hardy