Rod Serling is famously the creator and voice for The Twilight Zone, but as I recently discovered in a new graphic novel by Koren Shadmi, Serling was an influential creator at the dawn of the television age. Courtesy of Humanoids Press, I got an advanced copy of Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, a graphic novel biography of Rod Serling. The publisher description reads:

We recognize him as our sharply dressed, cigarette-smoking tour guide of The Twilight Zone, but the entertainment business once regarded him as the “Angry Young Man” of Television. Before he became the revered master of science fiction, Rod Serling was a just a writer who had to fight to make his voice heard. He vehemently challenged the networks and viewership alike to expand their minds and standards — rejecting notions of censorship, racism and war. But it wasn’t until he began to write about real-world enemies in the guise of aliens and monsters that people lent their ears. In doing so, he pushed the television industry to the edge of glory, and himself to the edge of sanity. Rod operated in a dimension beyond that of contemporary society, making him both a revolutionary and an outsider.

I’ve got some exclusive excerpt pages to show you below, and some examples of the depiction of Serling’s military time.

{Click the images for Twilight-sized versions.]

Koren Shadmi is the Brooklyn-based illustrator and cartoonist behind Twilight Man. He’s created half-a-dozen acclaimed graphic novels, including Rise of The Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and The Creation of D&D. I got a chance to interview Koren.

First of all, thanks for making this graphic novel, Koren. I really enjoyed it. The black and white visuals, the period environments, the quirky expressions that I remember from Serling’s original Twilight Zone run all felt very authentic. And the spooky opening on the timeless flight gave the whole story a feeling of impending disaster.

Thank you, Derek! I really put in my best effort on this book to try and have it as loyal to the spirit of Serling himself and his work.

I was surprised that Serling had been considered a sought-after artistic writer. I had no idea he’d done so many works of serious drama. Was this a surprise to you too? If not, what did surprise you in researching for this biography?

It was a surprise. I was not aware of how important he was during the early days of television; he was really one of the most respected television writers of the era and had an almost overnight success story. Serling, along with writers like Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayefsky, tried to bring a literary quality to the works that they were writing for television. Serling wrote his teleplays as if they were a quality dramas set for the Broadway stage.

You were quoted as saying: “In my late twenties, when I was first exposed to the original Twilight Zone, I felt a strong connection to the themes and visuals.” Could you talk about the themes and visuals that resonated with you? Was it the darkness or the social commentary or the brevity and simplicity of the art at that time, or something else?

There’s a lot of elements I connected with. The visuals, for one: these stark lonely images steeped in atmosphere. If you look at episodes like ‘Time Enough At Last’ – this view of the world after an atomic apocalypse, it’s pretty simple but so effective. There’s also something about the black and white film stock that gives the show an additional glow. The story lines are set in the science fiction realm but deal with actual human emotions and problems. There’s a lot of anxiety, fear, and horror.

It felt to me like your pages communicated a deep affection for a creator and artist who died long before you were born. I felt some of his on-screen charm in the pages. What was it about his life—as a soldier, as a sufferer of PTSD, as a creator both successful and conflicted—that made you connect so strongly with Serling?

It seems to me that Serling was a very warm and personable guy, if you met him, but dealt with a lot of inner demons due to his PTSD from war. So he’s a very conflicted and contradictory figure. Again, I didn’t meet him or know him, so I’m just deducing from what I read, but he seemed to have a lot of inner conflicts—for instance, being this young hotshot writer who was blazingly successful but also felt very insecure about his work and always had a chip on his shoulder for not being ‘a real writer.’ I think he always had to defend the medium of television as worthy and respectable, and it made him unsure of himself.

Serling’s military service, takes up a quarter of the graphic novel. That’s a lot of real estate in a story, and this invites the reader to ask ‘what if?’ questions. How much of what came later was driven by those three years in the army? If Serling had never served, would there have been the death-daring test parachutist? Was the darkness in Serling and his stories born in the Pacific Campaign, or did he bring it to that conflict where it became magnified?

I don’t think that there would have been a Twilight Zone without Serling’s military service; I think it changed him and made him look at the world in a different way. A lot of the time, people coming back from ware are so changed that they feel as if nobody can understand them, nobody other than other veterans, that is. And I think this sense of alienation and the fragility of human life is prominent in a lot of Serling’s work.

Twilight Man leaves a strong impression with the reader. What enduring piece of Serling will be sticking with you?

I think my favourite works of his are still some episodes of The Twilight Zone, such as ‘Eye of The Beholder’ or ‘The Hitchhiker.’ I think his early teleplays are great, but they do not survive as well, mostly since they were shot live and the quality is so eroded. I think there’s a reason why The Twilight Zone endures.

Thanks so much for the chance to chat, Koren!

It was a pleasure, thank you.

Twilight Man is a 168-page softcover book and will be published on October 8, 2019. I really recommend it if you have any interest in science fiction or television history or graphic novels with real-life settings. And we are getting to gift-giving time. Books are an easy idea for someone on your list.

Derek Künsken writes science fiction and fantasy in Gatineau, Québec. His first novel, The Quantum Magician was nominated for the Aurora, the Locus and the Chinese Nebula Awards. Its sequel, The Quantum Garden, will be released on the 15th of October. He tweets from @derekkunsken.

Lester del Rey is one of the most important figures in the long history of Science Fiction. Along with his fourth wife Judy-Lynn del Rey, he was the editor at Del Rey Books, the hugely successful fantasy and science fiction imprint of Ballantine Books, from 1977 until his death in 1993. He wrote the long-running The Reference Library review column in Analog magazine, and was a member of the Trap Door Spiders, the New York supper group that was the basis for the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov’s fictional group of dining detectives. But he was also a gifted writer, author of over three dozen novels and collections.

But I think my favorite book by Del Rey is his non-fiction SF history The World of Science Fiction: The History of a Subculture, written in 1979. which looked back at fifty years of genre history from 1926-1976. This is an entertaining and embracing read for true SF fans, one which wraps us up in a warm hug and lets us know we’re not alone in obsessing over obscure stories published in Galaxy magazine in the 1950s.

The World of Science Fiction is not an objective history of SF. There’s plenty of those out there — and besides, that’s not what we want or expect from del Rey. This is the story of an enormously successful publisher, the man who published the first true bestselling science fiction book in North America in 1977 (The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks), yet who remains a steadfast fan in his heart. A man whose primary emotion, as he sits atop the publishing empire he built with his own hands, is ill-concealed resentment that it took so long for the rest of the world to finally accept the genre he loves.

[Click the images for science fiction-sized versions.]

Inside cover copy for The World of Science Fiction

This is not a very in-depth book, though I think that’s one of its strengths. Del Rey covers five very full decades in five parts, and he moves quickly through a lot of history to do it:

The Age of Wonder (1926-1937)
The Golden Age (1838-1949)
The Age of Acceptance (1950-1961)
The Age of Rebellion (1962-1973)
The Fifth Age (1974 –)

The first four sections are roughly 60 pages, give or take, though the last is much shorter. There’s also an opening Foreword and Background section (covering “What Science Fiction Is,” “The Rise of the Pulps,” and other basics,) and a closing Part VI titled Parallels and Perspectives, which includes some thoughtful ruminations on the field, with chapters on Fantasy, Buck Rogers and Mr. Spock, asking But What Good is It?, and After Star Wars.

Each section covers a lot of ground, and Del Rey endeavors to be thorough, hitting all the highlights for each decade. The result is pretty much what you’d expect — he doesn’t linger too long on each topic. If you’ve come here looking for a detailed history or study of your favorite writers, you’re in the wrong place.

What we get instead is the equivalent of a fast-talking tour guide for 20th Century SF, one who’s determined to make sure you don’t miss anything. This is a marvelous resource for anyone who’s interested in knowing what fans were talking about in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Who were the writers getting all the attention? What stories turned heads? What magazines were everyone reading, and why?

Del Rey on the launch of F&SF and Galaxy in 1950

I’m a little conficited on the results. I wish this book were a bit more rewarding for casual readers, or young fans who want to be introduced to the deep history of science fiction. Del Rey moves so quickly through his manys topics that I fear it’s all likely to be a blur.

But for those of us with at least a passing knowledge of the subject, it’s pure gold. To tell the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever read The World of Science Fiction cover-to-cover. Every time I pick it up, I end up scurrying off to find a copy of Roger Zelazny’s “…And Call Me Conrad,” or Larry Niven’s The Coldest Place,” or some other piece of classic SF.

Dipping into this book is like resuming a long-running conversation with a magnificently well-read fan with impeccable taste, one who delights in steering you towards overlooked gems. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come back to it, and how many great tales it’s reminded me of, or pointed me towards for the first time. If you love science fiction, you’ll find del Rey is an enthusiastic fellow traveler, one whom you’ll be very glad you struck up a conversation with.

There are no books that tell you what’s awesome about SF in 1965. Except this one.

Mind you, Del Rey isn’t very controversial, at least not on the page. Whether that was true of the man himself, or simply a a conscious choice he made for a mass market genre history, I couldn’t tell you.

But the fact is he generally sticks to the usual script. John W. Campbell single-handedly created the Golden Age, Harlan was the Angry Young Man, Heinlein was the Best, the New Wave was… well, we’re still working that out. There’s very (very) little attention paid to women and non-white creators in SF. You could say Del Rey was a product of his time, but that excuse is wearing a little thin. He should have known better.

Del Rey on 2001 and other SF films

For all that, I still very much enjoyed this book. It’s warm and cordial, and talks appreciatively of Del Rey’s competition in the industry, like DAW, Ace, and others. This is clearly the work of a man who’s a genuine fan first, and not a publisher trying to promote his own success. That’s no small thing.

This book is a very solid addition to the fan-written histories and memoirs, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Astounding Days, Damon Knight’s The Futurians, Frederik Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, and Sam Moskowitz’s Classics of Science Fiction library, including especially The Immortal Storm.

A sampling del Rey’s many SF novels and collections

The World of Science Fiction: The History of a Subculture was published by Del Rey in November 1979. It is 416 pages, priced at $5.95 in trade paperback. It has been out of print since 1980, and there is no digital edition.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Conscience Place by Joyce Thompson (Dell, 1986, cover by John Harris)

In a conversation with my son this week, the term “neurological diversity” arose. It entered the room courtesy of Greta Thornburg in conversation with Naomi Klein. Greta described her prodigious ability to research, absorb and synthesize complex information as a sort of compensation for lacking the more common gift of social intelligence. My son, who’s teaching an undergrad lit class in Berkeley’s African American Studies department about invoking and communing with ancestors surmised that the ability to see and communicate with the dead might be a real if not common human gift — another way of being differently able.

Click.

I recently read my 1984 novel Conscience Place for the first time in 35 years. It was about to be republished. My task was to proof the scanned text, and I secretly gave myself permission to make small tweaks if I thought they were needed. Thirty five years is a long time, after all, and I feared being embarrassed by a writer I no longer am telling a story in ways I no longer would to an audience of readers who might no longer give a s—t.

Click.

While I no longer remembered the text, I have never forgotten the experience of writing Conscience Place, never forgotten being thrown headfirst into a strange new world. I was supposed to bring all my skills as a writer with me, but none of my assumptions or prejudices. Until then, all of my work — 3 novels and a book of stories — had begun with a voice speaking inside my head.

Click.

Here’s what I wrote in the introduction to the new edition:

Conscience Place arrived as an image. It wasn’t a picture of anything recognizable, but a luminous silvery shape suspended against deep black. I was working hard on something else at the time but the silver image sucked all the air out of that story and left it dead by the side of the road.

I more or less got it that the image was a feeling tone, that last con­summating chord played on the keyboard of nerves and hormones, skin and memory that is the human instrument. It’s how a story makes you feel, if only for a moment. The image of the silver shape on black was how the incoming story was supposed to make people feel. And I was supposed to translate that image into words so they could.

When I opened my notebook and took up my pen, the story was ready. It started with a set of premises, pitched in the other-worldly voice of an origin story. I decided I’d take down the ideas and get rid of the voice later. In the end, it persisted. What the voice set up was a sort of mythic long shot. When I zoomed in I was at The Place, among The People.

Click.

Last May, I was afraid my former self would shame me. Instead, I got sucked into the story once again. I remembered writing every word, in a kind of heightened state that was both composition and transcription. I remembered the sense of not making things up but letting them show up and pass through me. I remembered choosing words and writing scenes as if they were poems, with as much attention to rhythm and image and the silence of white spaces as to event. I found that the voice of the prose still lived in my central nervous system and it still had the power to carry me into a place of elastic compassion and surpassing strangeness. Now and then, I recognized a fleeting image or a moment or an attribute that reflected my then-real-life, but mostly, the Place felt like a whole-cloth creation. In today’s living room, I wept. A thirty-five year old story still had the power to break my heart.

Click.

When my son and I talked about neurological diversity this week, I realized I’d been noodling on the knowledge that the best of my six published and even-more-written novels are stories that passed through me, not ones that arose as ideas in my brain. They arrived with the sense that the story itself already existed in some alternate space and it was my job to bring it into this one. I’ve surmised in the past that this is simply a means of banishing self-consciousness, getting out of my own way, but I don’t really believe that’s true. Almost all of my short stories — and I’m quite good at the form — arise directly from my real life. Writing them is trying to make truth out of past. My stories happen through deep memory and conscious craft. My best novels — and these are all genre novels — happen through a sort of extended trance possession.

Click.

One last data point. I’ve taught lots of writing workshops over the years — a couple weeks at Clarion among them — and it’s sometimes though not always my experience that a student’s work-in-progress has an intention that’s at odds with what the writer is trying to make it mean or do. In most cases, I respect my role as medium and deliver the message to the writer. Once the vision is clear, I can help with craft.

I am willing to believe that there’s a channel through which story flows into the world. I am willing to believe there can exist a neural channel that lets us hold that water in our hands. I am profoundly grateful to have experienced this story mind a time or two.

Joyce Thompson’s The Blue Chair was published by then-Avon editor, Susan Moldow, in 1977. Five more novels, two collections of short stories and a memoir followed. As the single mother of two and needing money, she novelized the film Harry and Hendersons, which became a popular kids’ book club selection. When fifth grade teachers gave their annual Write your Favorite Author assignment, bags of mail turned up on Thompson’s front porch. Unable to answer, she hid it all in the crawlspace under the stairs where it remained until her daughter found and read it. 30 years later, she sincerely apologizes for not thanking the young fan who named his pet bunny after her.

Since 1995, Thompson has supported her writing habit as an interviewer and technology product marketer for a number of prominent hardware and software companies. She lives in Oakland, CA where the barrio meets the hood with her husband Schuyler ingle, and a moody geriatric cat.

I don’t get enough steampunk in my diet these days. Once the industry was awash with it; that’s not true so much any more, although there are still a few publishers catering to readers like me. Parvus Press is one of the better ones, and their flagship steampunk series is R J Theodore’s Peridot Shift. The first, Flotsam, was published last year, and the sequel Salvage just arrived earlier this month. The novels deftly blend First Contact, Magic, and Steampunk, in a floating world where religion meets alchemy and the gods are not what they seem.

I was hooked from the moment I read the description for Flotsam last year.

Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies.

Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves.

Talis and her crew have just one desperate chance to make things right before their potential big score destroys them all.

R J Theodore continues to explore her imaginative setting; the next title in the series, the novella Hunter and the Green, arrives on October 22 from Theodore’s creator-owned press Creative Jay.

I was especially excited to discover that there’s now an audiobook version of the first novel, since that’s how I consume most books these days.

Here’s the deets on all three books:

Flotsam (Parvus Press, 409 pages, $14.99 trade paperback/$4.99 digital, February 28, 2018) — cover by Julie Dillon
Salvage (Parvus Press, 452 pages, $15.99 trade paperback/$7.99 digital, September 3, 2019) — cover by ??
Hunger and the Green (Creative Jay, $3.99 digital, October 22, 2019) — cover by ??

Our recent coverage of Parvus Press includes:

Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Ragged Blade by Christopher Ruz
A Tale of Two Covers: If This Goes On edited by Charles Nuetzel and Cat Rambo
Necropolis PD by Nathan Sumsion
The Future of Politics, a Desert Fantasy, and Murder in the City of the Dead: Spring Titles from Parvus Press
Scavengers in a Crowded Galaxy: Union Earth Privateers by Scott Warren
Flotsam by RJ Theodore

See all our recent coverage of the best in Series Fantasy here.

OK: The kidney stone passed and I spent last week trying to dig myself out of…well, everything! So, it’s another repeat colum this week. I happen to think this the best thing I ever wrote before I joined Black Gate. Yeah – you’re actually getting my good stuff here at Black Gate. Sad, ain’t it?

I wrote this for Sherlock Magazine, where I wrote a column reviewing mystery websites. Then-editor David Stuart Davies (a notable writer of Sherlock Holmes stories and non-fiction) let me write a feature. I will probably revisit this some day, as I’ve learned a lot more about hardboiled since then; but I still think this is pretty darn good. Let me know what you think!

And we’ll be back on track next week. 

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

By now, readers of this column (all three of you) know that I’m ‘all-in’ on Sherlock Holmes and Solar Pons. But I am also a long-time hard boiled fiction afficionado. I’ve got a section of the bookshelves well-stocked with private eye/police novels and short stories, from Hammett and Daly to Stone and Burke.

Now, I wouldn’t bet my house on the premise of the following essay, which first appeared in Sherlock Magazine back when I was a columnist for that fine, now defunct periodical. But I believe that I make a more compelling argument than you thought possible at first glance. The roots of the American hard boiled school can be seen in Sherlock Holmes and the Victorian Era. Yes, really.

And if any of the hard boiled heroes mentioned catch your fancy, leave a comment. I’ll be glad to tell you more about them. Without further ado, I bring you “Hard Boiled Holmes.”

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Raymond Chandler wrote these words in his essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ Ever since, the term ‘mean streets’ has been associated with the hard-boiled genre. One thinks of tough private eyes with guns, bottles, and beautiful dames. But was it really Chandler who created those words to describe the environment that the classic Philip Marlowe operated in?

Is it possible that it was Victorian London that gave birth to the mean streets, which would later become famous as the settings in the pages of Black Mask? Could it be that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were followers in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes?

The era of detective fiction between the two World Wars is known as the Golden Age. This was the time of the country cozy and the locked-room mystery. Closed settings and high society were staples of the style, exemplified by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and Dorothy Sayers.

In America in the twenties, a counter to the Golden Age developed. Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel and Raoul Whitfield, among others, wrote ‘hard-boiled’ detective stories for Black Mask magazine. The two schools were reflections of conditions in England and America. The quaint country manor, never really an American setting, had little relevance to a United States economically booming after World War I, yet entangled in Prohibition.

The rise of the American gangster and the big city lifestyle lent itself to tough-talking, fast-shooting detectives in the Roaring Twenties (an era colorfully described by twenties New York City newspaperman Stanley Walker in The Night Club Era). The hard-boiled school was writing from the day’s news.

Dashiell Hammett, the first great hard-boiled author, said that all of his characters were based on real people he’d come across as a Pinkerton operative. The hard-boiled school and the Golden Age detective mysteries are very different. But what about the generation once removed: what about the Sherlock Holmes era?

Arthur Morrison is remembered (when he is remembered at all) as the creator of Martin Hewitt, the private detective who replaced Sherlock Holmes in The Strand when Doyle sent our hero over a cliff at the Reichenbach Falls. Before that, in 1893, Morrison wrote a series of fourteen short stories that were published in The National Observer and released in book form as Tales of Mean Streets.

Famed Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget also drew Martin Hewitt.

They were the depressing stories of the desperate people in London’s East End. These were the same streets that noted wilderness author Jack London would write about in The People of the Abyss. London went to the East End in the summer of 1902 and lived amongst the poorest of English society. Talk about delving into your subject matter!

The bleakness and utter despair of such an environment often resulted in crime and depravity. Dorset Street, well known among Ripperologists, was considered to be the most crime-riddled street in the entire city. In 1888, an estimated 1,500 people lived on the one hundred-and-fifty foot long street. It was said that the police were afraid to enter it after dark, and certainly did not go in alone. The seedy streets of Victorian London were a far cry from the halls and manors that Holmes often visited.

We know that Holmes frequently moved about the upper class, but he also often disguised himself as a workingman or other commoner for an investigation. The Canon is replete with instances of Watson being fooled by one of Holmes’ disguises. Even ‘The Woman,’ Irene Adler, was taken in not once, but twice, by Holmes’ theatrical abilities during “A Scandal in Bohemia” (although he gave himself away the second time).

Holmes was not simply a problem-solver for the rich. He investigated cases among the middle and lower classes as well. And some of those affairs took him to the rougher side of London. He traversed those mean streets that Morrison had written of.

Holmes certainly ventured to country houses and rural villages to solve crimes. The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Sussex Vampire” and “The Solitary Cyclist” are just a few examples. But he was very much an urban sleuth. And Holmes-era writers helped paint a picture of the more dangerous side of England’s greatest city.

James Coburn played a very Hammett-like Continental Op here.

However, the mean streets of hard-boiled stories were more than just the physical environments that they were in Holmes’ time. Many of the authors were writing about the good and evil in mankind, not just the roads and towns that the detectives found themselves in. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op books are very much about the fundamental issues of morality and humanity, and the streets that he traveled extended to the criminals he pursued. The mean streets of The Dain Curse are more about the diabolical Owen Fitzstephan than the thoroughfares of San Francisco.

In “The Norwood Builder,” a successful businessman arranges a frame job, making it appear that his body was found in the remains of a building fire. It is not difficult to picture Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer encountering a similar situation as he investigates a southern California tycoon. The literal Victorian-era mean streets were redefined and reshaped for the new heard-boiled era. But the concept was already there in Doyle’s stories.

No one is going to confuse Victorian London with Hammett’s Poisonville. But the back alleys and opium dens of Doyle’s stories sometimes come to mind when reading Chester Himes’ excellent tales set in Harlem. Raymond Chandler popularly coined the phrase created by Arthur Morrison and transplanted it across one ocean and several decades. Doyle’s mysteries were primarily about Holmes and the crime itself. The best hard-boiled mysteries had deeper themes in their plots. The mean streets of Morrison were not simply copied, they were turned into something more.

But what about Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade? Even a cursory glance shows us that the hard-boiled and Golden Age schools of mystery fiction were dissimilar. Were those characteristics that were so well developed by the American pulp writers of the twenties and thirties present in Doyle’s stories of the great detective?

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple seemed to find more crime in the village of St. Mary Meade then existed in the entirety of London. It’s hard to believe how much malice and mayhem there was in the place. It simply wasn’t realistic. That element of realism, a key characteristic in the hard-boiled school, had more in common with Doyle’s tales.

Sure, there were the fantastic stories. Can you see a hard-boiled version of “The Devil’s Foot?” Didn’t think so. The ‘wax figure of Holmes’ ruse from “The Mazarin Stone” would not fly in a Paul Cain short story. But several of the Holmes stories had elements that could be read in the day’s headlines.

Perhaps a bit factually stilted, The Valley of Fear had a very real basis in the story of James McParland (Birdy Edwards) and Pennsylvania’s Molly Maguires (The Scowrers). The Five Orange Pips incorporated the Ku Klux Klan. Anyone familiar with the case of Hawley Crippen, ‘The Mild Mannered Murderer,’ can see elements that appeared in Doyle’s “The Retired Colourman.”

Holmes’ competition, the private detective only identified as “Barker,” shadows Josiah Amberley in that story. Hammett’s Continental Op did a great deal of tailing suspects, just as the Pinkerton agent-turned-author himself did.

Another very important element of hard-boiled fiction was that of a “personal code of honor.” Sam Spade sums it up at the end of The Maltese Falcon when he turns in Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Near the end of a speech where he explains why he can’t let her go, he says “I won’t because all of me wants to – wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it..” It is the perfect example of the knight-errant putting ‘the code’ before his own interests.

Conan Doyle was certainly a proper British gentleman whose patriotic loyalties we see reflected in Watson. The author instilled his sense of personal honor into Holmes. Quotes are sprinkled throughout the Canon that reflect Holmes’ code of conscience over the dictates of law. A few examples:

I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience (“The Abbey Grange”)

I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul (“The Blue Carbuncle”)

I suppose I shall have to commute a felony as usual (“The Three Gables”)

Legally, we are putting ourselves hopelessly in the wrong, but I think that it is worth it (“The Yellow Face”)

That first quote is a very representative look at Holmes’ attitude towards his personal code. In “Charles Augustus Milverton,” one could argue that Holmes aided in the murder of ‘the worst man in London.’ He does not put the law, or even legal justice, before what he believes is right.

A superb film. Not ‘My Three Sons’ Fred MacMurray!

This code was not a mandatory element of hard-boiled/noir writing. Jim Thompson’s gritty looks at American life didn’t usually feature detectives, and it’s often hard to find a code of honor when you can’t even locate a sympathetic person in the cast of characters. And James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are almost bereft of moral conviction. But the code is important to the hard-boiled detective.

John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee carried on this code in a series of successful novels over twenty years. MacDonald’s favorite image of McGee, an unofficial private eye, was as a weary knight riding a worn-out steed, jousting with a broken lance. Travis McGee, perhaps as much as any detective from the pulps, personified the detective’s personal code of honor.

McGee differs from Holmes in this regard in that he was a much more humanized version of the character. But the elements of Holmes’ sense of personal right and wrong carried through the entire hard-boiled genre and on to its pulp private detective descendents. The hard-boiled hero was a man of honor, just as Holmes was decades before.

Rex Stout’s books starring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin featured strong elements of the golden age and hardboiled schools. Goodwin was the tough-guy private eye who refused to compromise his code of ethics, frequently quitting when he felt his honor demanded it (though rarely even leaving the room before Wolfe agrees to placate him and Goodwin resumes work).

Black Mask was for the hard-boiled school what The Strand had been for Sherlock Holmes and the British mystery school. The mean streets of Holmes’ London had counterparts in the urban and moral settings of Hammett and Chandler. Doyle used real-world events in his plotting, the same way the American hard-boiled authors tore the headlines out of the daily papers and shaped them into action-packed tales.

Though not a direct model, Sherlock Holmes was a Victorian-era predecessor of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Since we started with a quote from Chandler’s essay, we’ll finish with one as well: “…and Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” It’s a fitting epithet for Raymond Chandler’s own hard-boiled detective.

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2019 Series

Back Deck Pulp Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Doc Savage
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hugh B. Cave’s Peter Kane
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Man Called Spade

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2018 Series

With a (Black) Gat: George Harmon Coxe
With a (Black) Gat: Raoul Whitfield
With a (Black) Gat: Some Hard Boiled Anthologies
With a (Black) Gat: Frederick Nebel’s Donahue
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Walsh
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – January, 1935
A (Black) Gat in the hand: Norbert Davis’ Ben Shaley
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: D.L. Champion’s Rex Sackler
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Dime Detective – August, 1939
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #1
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Day Keene
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – October, 1933
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #2
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – Spring, 2017
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Frank Schildiner’s ‘Max Allen Collins & The Hard Boiled Hero’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Campbell Gault
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Parker’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Maynard’s ‘The Yellow Peril’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Andrew P Salmon’s ‘Frederick C. Davis’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Rory Gallagher’s ‘Continental Op’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #3
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #4
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #5
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw on Writing
A (Black) Gat in Hand: Back Deck Pulp #6
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Black Mask Dinner

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ was a regular Monday morning hardboiled pulp column from May through December, 2018 and was brought back in the summer of 2019.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate  from March, 2014 through March, 2017 (still making an occasional return appearance!).

He organized ‘Hither Came Conan,’ as well as Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series.

He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’) and blogs about Holmes and other mystery matters at Almost Holmes.

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Parts III, IV,  V and VI.

And he contributed to The New Adventures of Solar Pons.

Nax has wanted to be a space pilot his whole life, but he washes out of the Academy on his very first day. Walking to the shuttle that will take him back to Earth in disgrace, he realizes that he will never get behind the controls of a real spaceship. His dream of cruising among the stars is over before it even began. He’ll spend the rest of his life on his family’s farm, feeding chickens and herding goats.

Three other Academy rejects are waiting for the shuttle when he arrives at the gate: Case the girl genius, Zee the athletic doctor, and Rion the smooth-talking diplomat.

The shuttle arrives. They’re about to board it when Case notices something bright blue and green on its hull.

That’s when the lights go out and alarms start to sound.

Six soldiers in black vacuum suits spill out of the shuttle and invade the station. Four head for the control room. Two stay to guard the shuttle.

Gunshots. Bodies hit the floor. The attackers are taking out everyone in their path.

There’s the hiss of air escaping. The loudspeaker cackles, announcing a life support error in atmospherics. The station only has two minutes of breathable air remaining.

Nax takes charge. “The shuttle, now!”

All four sprint across the loading zone, totally exposed.

More gunshots – pointed at them, this time.

They run straight into the guards. Good thing Zee is a total badass. After disposing of one, she kicks the other senseless right before she’s going to shoot Nax.

They board the shuttle, and Nax leaps into the pilot’s seat. He doesn’t have a flight permit. He’s never flown a real craft before. Only simulators.

But he can sure fly. He’s just gotten the shuttle off the station when the last of its air filters out if it in a billowing cloud.

Everyone onboard who hadn’t been wearing a vacuum suit is dead , including all their teachers and classmates at the Academy. Nax, Case, Zee and Rion are the attack’s only survivors. They had thought that fate had dealt them a losing hand. But they’re actually the luckiest people on the whole station.

Except that’s when the invaders’ spaceships start coming for them. The attackers have weapons, while they’re stuck in an unarmed shuttle.

Nax’s display flashes red. The enemy has missile lock on them.

In M. K. England’s The Disasters, Nax and his group of misfits must save the universe from terrorists who aim to destroy humanity’s space colonies and take over Earth. This fast-action space romp moves at a nearly breathless pace. It’s unclear if the novel’s title refers to the main characters themselves, or the chain of terrible events that befalls them. Either way, it’s a highly enjoyable read that keeps readers flipping pages. Anyone who has ever felt like a failure will appreciate the book’s story of redemption. As Nax and his friends come into their own, it becomes clear that the Academy grossly misjudged them.

Harper Teen published The Disasters in December 2018. It is YA librarian England’s debut. The publisher’s list prices are $17.99 for the hardcover, $10.99 for the paperback, $8.99 for the ebook, and $23.99 for the digital audiobook. To read a sample, point your browser here.

Elizabeth Galewski is the author of The Wish-Granting Jewel, a fantasy novel, and Butterfly Valley, a tale of travel and transformation based on true events. To learn more, please visit her official author’s website at www.elizabethgalewski.com.

Donald A. Wollheim

The Milford Award was created by Robert Reginald and was first presented in 1980 at the J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature at the University of California, Riverside. It is presented for lifetime achievement in published and editing. The award recipient is chosen by a jury that was originally chaired by Reginald. Originally, the award was a hand-lettered scroll mounted under glass, although beginning in the award’s second year, it took the form of a bronze plaque mounted on a wood base. The first recipient of the award was Donald A. Wollheim. The award was discounted following 1997. It was won by David Pringle in its final year.

Donald A. Wollheim is one of those people who is seminal to the creation of modern science fiction. From his early days as a fan in New York to his career as an author and eventually as an editor and publisher, he has touched every aspect of the field.

He was born on October 1, 1914 in New York and joined the International Stf Guild in 1934 and joined a variety of New York based clubs. He published several early fanzines and helped organize the 1936 trip by members of the NYB-ISA to Philadelphia to visit the Philly branch in what some have termed the first science fiction convention. The following year he helped found the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, which is still in existence in the 1938, he was one of the founding members of the Futurians, a science fiction club in New York that counted numerous future science fiction authors among its members.

After making his first sale to Wonder Stories in 1934, he learned that Hugo Gernsback not only hadn’t paid him, but hadn’t paid several other authors and Wollheim sued Gernsback for payment. Gernsback declared Wollheim to be a disruptive influence. Along with John Michel and Will Sykora, Gernsback expelled Wollheim from the Science Fiction League in September 1935.

Wollheim and several of the Futurians were barred from the first Worldcon in New York in 1939 with the group running the event concerned that the Futurians, especially Wollheim and his friend John Michel, would try to take over the event to espouse pro-Communist talking points at the convention.

In the early 1940s, Wollheim edited the magazines Stirring Science Stories and Cosmic Stories and in 1943 he was the editor of The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the first hardcover anthology from a major publisher. He went on the publish the first science fiction omnibus, The Viking Portable Novels of Science Fiction, and the first original anthology, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes. He worked as an editor at Avon Books until 1951 and in 1952 he left for Ace Books, which he helped establish as a genre publisher.

In the 1960s, he infamously made use of a loophole in copyright law to published an unauthorized edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Because Ace didn’t have to pay Tolkien royalties, they were able to undersell the official release of the books and Tolkien and the SFWA promoted a campaign for Americans to buy the official publications. Ace eventually pulled their copies from the shelves and paid Tolkien full royalties with the promise not to print the book again.

Wollheim left Ace Books in 1971 to established DAW, an imprint whose title came from his initials. Beginning with the publication of Andre Norton’s Spell of the Witch World, DAW claims to be the first publishing company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy. DAW not only published reprints and original novels, but also a variety of anthologies and also made an effort to publish works by foreign authors in translation.

He was named Worldcon Guest of Honor at Nolacon II in 1988 and he died two years later, on November 2, 1990. Throughout his life, Wollheim worked closely with his wife, Elsie Wollheim, who was a member of many of the same clubs as Donald, and who was co-founder of DAW Books. She inherited the company upon his death, and following her death left the company to their daughter, Betsy, who still runs it. Elsie was named a Worldcon Guest of Honor for L.A. Con III in 1996, but unfortunately died several months before the convention.

Donald Wollheim was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame posthumously in 2002 and in 2010, he was awarded the Solstice Award for his contributions to science fiction by SFWA.

I had the privilege of meeting Donald and Elsie Wollheim at the first science fiction convention I ever attended and they were both friendly and gracious to a young fan, giving me their time. Little could any of us have known that eventually their company would publish my first anthologies.

Steven H Silver is a sixteen-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for 8 years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. He began publishing short fiction in 2008 and his most recently published story is “Webinar: Web Sites” in The Tangled Web. His most recent anthology, Alternate Peace was published in June. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference 6 times, as well as serving as the Event Coordinator for SFWA. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Welcome to October! It’s Release Day for a trio of terrific books, and I couldn’t decide which one to feature, so I’m going to cover them all. You’re welcome.

Let’s get right to it. The first one is the sequel to Jessie Mihalik’s debut novel, the space opera-romance Polaris Rising, which we covered back in February. Aurora Blazing (Harper Voyager, 400 pages, $16.99 trade paperback/$11.99 digital, October 1, 2019) is the second novel in The Consortium Rebellion.

As the dutiful daughter of High House von Hasenberg, Bianca set aside her personal feelings and agreed to a political match arranged by her family, only to end up trapped in a loveless, miserable marriage. When her husband unexpectedly dies, Bianca vows never to wed again. Newly independent, she secretly uses her wealth and influence to save other women stuck in dire circumstances. Information is power and Bianca has a network of allies and spies that would be the envy of the ’verse — if anyone knew about it.

When her family’s House is mysteriously attacked, Bianca’s oldest brother, the heir to House von Hasenberg, disappears. Fearful for her brother’s life, the headstrong Bianca defies her father and leaves Earth to save him. Ian Bishop, the director of House von Hasenberg security — and Bianca’s first love — is ordered to find and retrieve the rebellious woman.

Ian is the last man Bianca wants to see. To evade capture, she leads him on a merry chase across the universe. But when their paths finally collide, she knows she must persuade him to help her. Bianca will do anything to save her sibling, even if it means spending time alone on a small ship with the handsome, infuriating man who once broke her heart.

As the search takes them deep into rival House Rockhurst territory, Bianca must decide if she can trust Ian with the one piece of information that could destroy her completely…

The third book in the series, Chaos Reigning, is tentatively scheduled for May 2020. Read the opening three chapters of the first volume here.

[Click the images for October-sized versions.]

Back covers for Aurora Blazing and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

Next up is the final novel in Theodora Goss’s smash hit trilogy The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club. The opening volume, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

The third book is The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (Gallery/Saga Press, 448 pages, $24.99 in hardcover/$7.99 digital, October 1, 2019).

Mary Jekyll and the Athena Club race to save Alice — and foil a plot to unseat the Queen, in the electrifying conclusion to the trilogy that began with the Nebula Award finalist and Locus Award winner The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter.

Life’s always an adventure for the Athena Club… especially when one of their own has been kidnapped! After their thrilling European escapades rescuing Lucina van Helsing, Mary Jekyll and her friends return home to discover that their friend and kitchen maid Alice has vanished — and so has Mary’s employer Sherlock Holmes!

As they race to find Alice and bring her home safely, they discover that Alice and Sherlock’s kidnapping are only one small part of a plot that threatens Queen Victoria, and the very future of the British Empire. Can Mary, Diana, Beatrice, Catherine, and Justine save their friends — and save England? Find out in the final installment of the fantastic and memorable Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series.

We covered the first two volumes, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, here.

Finally, let’s look at something a little different: a brand a new anthology featuring stories by Sarah Langan, Helen Marshall, Angela Slatter, Kat Howard, Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine, Amber Benson, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and many others. I’m always a sucker for spooky anthologies, and I was especially intrigued by this rave review at The Roarbots that appeared back in July:

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery (10/1) is an anthology featuring stories from some of the most famous names in fantasy and horror, edited by Christopher Holden and Rachel Autumn Deering. The theme? Why, witches, of course.

Some, like the witches in Angela Slatter’s “Widow’s Walk,” protect the young girls of the town in which they live, giving them hope when they would otherwise have none. Wendy, from Sarah Langan’s “The Night Nurse,” will give you what you think you want if you’re not careful. Swamp witch Audrey bakes her rage into her famous seven-layer bars in Hillary Monahan’s “Bless Your Heart.” The old woman in Tananarive Due’s “Last Stop on Route Nine” blames you for her pain, whether you caused it or not. And then there’s Theodora Goss’s Ermengarde who, I’m not going to lie, is my absolute favorite of the bunch. You’ll see why soon enough….

This collection is particularly well chosen for several reasons: the stories are from a variety of time periods (colonial American to modern), a variety of genres (fantasy to urban fantasy to historical fiction to horror), and written by authors with vastly different styles but arranged in such a way that the transitions aren’t jarring… Highly recommend.

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery (Titan Books, 384 pages, $14.95 in hardcover/$9.99 digital, October 1, 2019) looks like a great selection for anyone who wants to get a jump-start on Halloween. Here’s the description.

Brand-new stories of witches and witchcraft written by popular female fantasy authors, including Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine and Sherrilyn Kenyon writing in their own bestselling universes!

These are tales of witches, wickedness, evil and cunning. Stories of disruption and subversion by today’s women you should fear. Including Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine and Sherrilyn Kenyon writing in their own bestselling universes.

These witches might be monstrous, or they might be heroes, depending on their own definitions. Even the kind hostess with the candy cottage thought of herself as the hero of her own story. After all, a woman’s gotta eat…

EIGHTEEN TALES OF WITCHCRAFT FROM THE MISTRESSES OF MAGIC

ANIA AHLBORN
KELLEY ARMSTRONG
AMBER BENSON
CHESYA BURKE
RACHEL CAINE
KRISTIN DEARBORN
RACHEL AUTUMN DEERING
TANANARIVE DUE
THEODORA GOSS
KAT HOWARD
ALMA KATSU
SHERRILYN KENYON
SARAH LANGAN
HELEN MARSHALL
JENNIFER MCMAHON
HILLARY MONAHAN
MARY SANGIOVANNI
ANGELA SLATTER

BRING OUT YOUR DREAD

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

It’s October, and you know what that means. Spooky book season! Now, I like to read spooky books all year round, but there’s something about October that makes it almost mandatory.

This year I’m kicking it off with Soon, the debut novel from Lois Murphy, about the last six survivors in a very haunted town. There’s been plenty of good press about it, but I confess what sealed the deal for me was Joanne P’s Booklover review of the original Australian edition.

An almost deserted town in the middle of nowhere, Nebulah’s days of mining and farming prosperity – if they ever truly existed – are long gone…. One winter solstice the birds disappear. A strange, residual and mysterious mist arrives….

Partly inspired by the true story of Wittenoom, the ill-fated West Australian asbestos town, Soon is the story of the death of a haunted town, and the plight of the people who either won’t or simply can’t abandon all they have ever had. With finely wrought characters and brilliant storytelling, it is a taut and original novel, where the people we come to know and those who are drawn to the town’s intrigue must ultimately fight for survival…. An utterly gripping debut novel… Despite containing fantastical story elements, Soon feels uncommonly gritty and grounded. Murphy’s character development and evocation of both the natural environment and small town setting is first class — a reader cannot help but become invested in their plight.

The sense of foreboding is at times gut wrenching. Soon is an edge of your seat, page-turning read — the experience similar to the very best genre thrillers — yet it features some of the most artful prose and thought-provoking passages I have read this year.

Soon will be published by Titan Books on October 15, 2019. It is 336 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and science fiction here.

Anais Nin At The Grand Guignol
By Robert Levy
Lethe Press (170 pages, $13 in paperback, no digital edition?)

Read Robert Levy’s Anais Nin At The Grand Guignol from Lethe Press. Being a fan of Henry Miller and Anais Nin and the whole dynamic milieu of 1930’s Paris, when I saw this book I had to check it out and was not disappointed.

In the voice of Nin, it tells of her journey into the dark world of the Grand Guignol, a playhouse of horror themes and outre sketch drama where she finds a new passion beyond Miller and June and her husband. Someone thrilling and dangerous, Maxa, the most murdered woman in the world. To have Maxa she finds she must match wits against a monstrous creature of the night, Monsieur Guillard, in a surreal contest. The writing is really beautiful, from the descriptions of place, to the sex, to the macabre world of the bizarre theatre. A mysterious, whirling fantasy.

Levy really captures Nin’s writing voice and sensibility as well as her times. This is an instance of a writer doing more with less. A short novel that creates a complete reading experience. Check it out.

Tim Pratt’s Axiom series began with The Wrong Stars (2017). That was quickly followed by The Dreaming Stars (2018), and Angry Robot will release the highly anticipated third book, The Forbidden Stars, next week. The Axiom one of the more successful modern space opera series; and I think Sam Reader at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog nicely captured its appeal with his fine review of the opening volume.

The Wrong Stars... is a work every bit as vast as you expect from space operas, but with a character-focused touch that keeps the action feeling intimate.

On a routine mission, Captain Kalea “Callie” Machedo and the borderline-shady crew of the salvage vessel White Raven find a “Goldilocks ship” — an undisturbed generation ship from 500 years in Earth’s past. Looking for parts from this priceless relic of a bygone era to strip and sell for a profit, Callie stumbles upon two things: a perfectly preserved scientist still in suspended animation within a cryo-pod, and a strange wormhole-generating black box patched into the ship’s propulsion system. When the cryo-pod’s inhabitant, Doctor Elena Oh, wakes up, she warns the crew of immanent first contact with sapient life… only to be told that humanity actually made contact with a race of body-modifying octopus traders known as “Liars” three centuries earlier. But Elena’s descriptions don’t match that of the Liars, and when an indescrible something begins following the White Raven, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake — along with a single clue: the name “Axiom” — the crew realizes what Elena’s brought them might be something far older and and far more alien, something that has been waiting for the right time to wake up…

Through his wit, dialogue, and vast, varied cast, Tim Pratt has created a space opera for today — one filled with diverse characters and cultures that feel nuanced enough to be real — while still delivering the sense of wonder that made you love the genre in the first place.

Tim Pratt has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, and Mythopoeic Awards, and won the Hugo Award for his short story “Impossible Dreams.” His novels include The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and the Pathfinder Tales novels Liar’s Island and Liar’s Bargain. The Forbidden Stars will be published by Angry Robot on October 8, 2019. It is 400 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. See all our coverage of the best new SF and fantasy series here.

Every September for the last 20+ years, “The Season” has begun the same way – with a special sneak preview event at our local Chicagoland Six Flags amusement park called Fright Fest. Saying I look forward to this is a significant understatement. Like the whole kid calendar revolving around Christmas in A Christmas Story, the whole Goth Chick year revolves around Halloween, and Fright Fest has historically been the high-water mark that kicks off the festivities.

Though every year has not necessarily been created equal,  one can usually expect copious decorations, a large number of staff in very high quality costumes (the Edward Scissorhands of one past year is still one of the best I’ve seen), and multiple themed “zones” throughout the park such as an alien zone, a zombie zone, etc, where everything is kicked up a notch. Some years back, Six Flags made the patron-sensitive decision to split the park in half for the protection of younger visitors. Enter the gate and go right, the experience is of more the pumpkin and skeleton varieties; go left, and a very high-quality wolfman could chase you half a city block. In other words, the experience was definitely “adult.” In addition, there were 5 to 6 “haunted houses” each year, again, ranging in intensity. However, the “headliner” houses, of which there were usually two, were high-quality experiences with good special effects, great décor and plenty of actors delivering the scares.

Alas, that was previous years.

Though Fright Fest 2018 had shown a marked decline, I didn’t want to call it a trend after one season. However, this year clinched it and I could not be sadder.

Starting with the Christmas holiday of 2018, Six Flags parks nationwide started being open from Thanksgiving weekend to New Years. Now that might sound like a fine idea to those of you in warm weather areas. But here in Chicago where December temps can be single digits, we wondered who the heck would think it fun to ride the rollercoasters in sub-Artic wind chills? Yet upon entering the park for Fright Fest last year, it seemed as though either the budget for Halloween had been split with Christmas, management didn’t want to spend too much time flipping from Halloween décor to holiday décor, or both.

This year it was beyond obvious.

Upon entering the park, the Halloween decorations surrounding the man-made lake, which used to illicit “ooh’s” and “aah’s” from the patrons, barely go a “meh” in 2019. And so it went for the entire park. Halloween was barely there, yet buildings were already wrapped stem to stern with holiday lights. Yes, they were turned off. But in the face of the overall lack of anything that screamed “Fright Fest”, the jump on flipping the switch to Jolly Ol’ St. Nick seemed to add insult injury.

The 2019 event boasted six haunted houses which, as they have for the last several years, are an additional fee to enter. Of these, only 1, called 13^th Order lived up to the event’s past glory. The other five were sad, including the saddest called Manslaughter Manor which had only 2 actors we could count, and relied entirely on mid-level animatronics to do the rest. The Gates of Hell was the largest house and used to be the most elaborate, with a walk-through scare zone putting you on edge before you even got to the building. This year we walked unbothered all the way to the entrance where the chirpiest, happiest employee squealed, “Welcome to Hell!”

No, that wasn’t part of the schtick.

When Black Gate photog Chris Z. and I looked at each other, then back at her sporting matching, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me looks, the bouncy little girl looked crestfallen and said, “I suck at this don’t I?” To which we replied, “yes,” carried on trudging through what should have been a season-launching experience. Upon exiting, Chris said, “Somehow, I thought there’d be more people in Hell.”

And that, dear readers, sums up the entire experience.

If, you’re a rollercoaster fan, and get an extra thrill out of riding at night, then by all means check out your local Six Flags Fright Fest. There’s definitely something to be said about walking around in the crisp fall air and enjoying a park that to me is infinitely less fun in 100-degree heat and humidity. But if you’re looking for the original Fright Fest, the one that used to be “too intense for anyone under 13”, it appears to have yielded to elves and reindeer.

The Deathworld Trilogy, Science Fiction
Book Club edition (1974). Cover by Richard Corben

James Nicoll recently reviewed Harry Harrison’s The Deathworld Trilogy on his blog, saying “The Deathworld books haven’t aged badly. They were dire in the 1960s and they are still dire.”

I still have fond memories of the first book in this series (which may or may not be dispelled by a reread). For one thing, it really made a case against hyper-militarism and environmental exploitation. Because it’s Harrison we’re talking about, the case was not subtle, but I think it was effective.

The second novel is a self-righteous, tedious morality play about a self-righteous, tedious character who has the misfortune to partake in a different morality than his self-righteous, tedious creator. The third book is a step up from that, because anything would be. The laziness of the worldbuilding pained me even as a teenager: a cartoony version of Harold Lamb’s version of Mongols, inexplicably transplanted to another planet. On the other hand, I always enjoyed Harold Lamb’s books about Mongols, so…

The first two books in the trilogy are in the public domain, apparently, and available through Project Gutenberg (the second under its original title of The Ethical Engineer).

The third volume, Deathworld 3 (a.k.a. THE HORSE BARBARIANS, a.k.a. I CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO CHANGE THE WORKING TITLE) doesn’t seem to be up there. But all three installments, and the omnibus volume collecting them, were reprinted many times during the age of heroically large print runs. They can be snapped up pretty cheaply through used book services, like ABE Books.

For those who want to snap them up, I mean. I can’t positively recommend them, although the first one is probably still worth reading at least once.

Cover by Don Maitz

Cover by Enrich

Cover by Larry Schwinger

Taking another break from award winners, here’s a look at novels published in 1979 that did not win any awards.

C.J. Cherryh published Hestia, a stand-alone about an engineer, Sam Merrit, who travels to the title planet to build a damn to help the human colonists.  Upon arrival, Merrit realizes that the dam will not only prove to be the panacea that is sought, but would also destroy the local indigenous species. Cherryh uses the novel to explore personal and ecological responsibility and the sense of entitlement the colonists have.

Jerry Pournelle’s novel Janissearies is the first of the similarly titled trilogy, although it is also set in the wider world of his Co-Dominium universe that began with his novel King David’s Starship. The novel follows a group of American soldiers who have been rescued from an ambush in Africa and given the chance to put their talents to use in a medieval level society among the stars. Although Pournelle’s main character faced mutiny, he wins through in the end, establishing himself as the undisputed leader of the force.

Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s time travel novel that shuffles Dana, a twentieth century African-American author, between her own time and the antebellum South was published in 1979. The novel offers a look at the sort of compromises Dana must make to survive as a slave as be able to continue to exist in her own time. Butler offers a complex view of slavery and race relations in the novel, partly because of the way she has caused Dana’s own existence and fate to be entwined with that of Rufus, the plantation owner.

Cover by Guy LaSasso

Cover by Rowena Morrill

Cover by Michael Mariano

Robert Lynn Asprin, published two novel sin 1979.  The first, and better received, was The Bug Wars, set in the distant future. The Tzen are are war with various insectoid species and Asprin’s novel follows these alien races as they try to destroy each other and find the need to adapt their tactics based on the biological tendencies of the different races they come across. The book has the distinction of being humanless in its characters. The second volume Asprin published was Tambu, the story a piratical and tyrannical dictator who has decided it is time to share the story of his rise to power with a reporter, allowing Asprin to play with the unreliable narrator.

Malafrena is the second volume in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Orsinian tales. It is a true second world story, set in a world much like our own, but different. The novel lacks any supernatural or magical elements, focusing instead on the politics and romantic lives of his characters in a period which equates to the second half of the 1820s of our own world.

Cover by Darrell K. Sweet

Cover by Gustav Moreau

Cover by Doug Beekman

Phyllis Eisenstein’s Sorcerer’s Son begins the story of the demon Smada Rezhyk and his son, Cray.  The novel is a story of discovery for Cray, who must not only find his own way in the world, first as a knight and later as a potential sorcerer, but also for him to discover the identity of his father. The novel was nominated for the British Fantasy Award.  Eisenstein published a sequel, The Crystal Palace, in 1988 and although she has written a third volume in the trilogy, it has not yet been published.

Michael Moorcock, who had long been known in the field for his stories of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, and Jerry Cornelius, among others, offered The Golden Barge. Originally written when he was a teenager, with a short story version published in 1965, the novel tells the story of Jephraim Tallow, a man who awakens to find himself lacking a navel. In order to find out what happened, Tallow becomes obsessed with catching the Golden Barge of the title. He is sure the barge holds the secrets he needs to discover, even if he doesn’t know what those secrets are. The importance of the story is less about Tallow’s eventual discovery and more about the journey and his need to learn more.

Tim Powers would publish The Drawing of the Dark in 1979, a novel set in sixteenth century Europe on the eve of a Turkish siege of Vienna. As with many of Powers’ novels, The Drawing of the Dark draws on a variety of mythological and supernatural elements to build a rich narrative, in this case introducing the Arthurian mythos and a magical beer.

Cover by Ned Glattauer

Cover by Joel Iskowitz

Cover by Margo Herr

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s contribution to speculative fiction in 1979 consisted of the novels The Palace and Blood Games, the second and third novel in the Chronicles of the Count of Saint-Germain she had begun in 1978 with the publication of Hotel Transylvania.  While the first novel introduced her immortal vampire protagonist in eighteenth century Paris, the next two books showed him at different times of his existence, with The Palace sending Saint-Germain back to Renaissance Italy and Blood Games seeing him even earlier in his lifespan, during Nero’s reign in Rome. This novel would also introduce the character of Olivia, who Yarbro would eventually follow in her own series of novels.

Although Gary K. Wolf is best known for his novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and the resulting film, in 1979, his novel The Resurrectionist appeared.  This novel postulated that people could travel through space by being electronically disassembled and the put back together at their destination.  The Resurrectionist of the title, Saul Lukas, is called upon to rescue people who are not able to be reconstituted at their destination. Lukas’s job is made more difficult by the complete loss of the woman he is trying to track down and the refusal of the powers that be to take any action that could help him.

Cover by Rowena Morrill

Cover by Bob Larkin

Cover by Bob Larkin

andrew j. offutt published the first volume of his War of the Gods on Earth trilogy, The Iron Lords. The novel details the adventures of Jarik following the destruction of his village when he is eight. offutt’s world is not a pleasant one, with continuous raids, rape, battles, and violence. Eventually, in his quest to gain vengeance, Jarik pulls a sword from a meteorite and meets the Iron Lords, beings from another planet who seek to help Jarik gain his revenge as well as use him for their own purposes. The novel is very definitely the first volume of a series.

offutt also published a Conan novel, The Sword of Skelos in 1979, and he wasn’t the only one to play in Howard’s world. Karl Edward Wagner’s contribution to Conan adventures was The Road of Kings. The Sword of Skelos was the second book published (but the third chronologically) of a Conan trilogy by offutt.  The Road of Kings looks at Conan’s days as a buccaneer and his rebellion against the tyrannical king of  Zingara.

Cover by Wayne Barlowe

Cover by Dean Ellis

And finally, in 1978, Alan Dean Foster helped stoke the desire for content in the Star Wars universe during the hiatus between the release of the original film and the forthcoming The Empire Strikes Back, which wouldn’t be released until 1980.  In 1979, Brian Daley published the first two novels which looked at Han Solo’s backstory, Han Solo at Star’s End and Han Solo’s Revenge, with a final volume scheduled for release in 1980. After the final book was published, no additional original Star Wars novels would appear until the Lando Calrissian trilogy was published at the time of the release of Return of the Jedi.

Steven H Silver is a sixteen-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for 8 years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. He began publishing short fiction in 2008 and his most recently published story is “Webinar: Web Sites” in The Tangled Web. His most recent anthology, Alternate Peace was published in June. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference 6 times, as well as serving as the Event Coordinator for SFWA. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Rod Serling is famously the creator and voice for The Twilight Zone, but as I recently discovered in a new graphic novel by Koren Shadmi, Serling was an influential creator at the dawn of the television age. Courtesy of Humanoids Press, I got an advanced copy of Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, a graphic novel biography of Rod Serling. The publisher description reads:

We recognize him as our sharply dressed, cigarette-smoking tour guide of The Twilight Zone, but the entertainment business once regarded him as the “Angry Young Man” of Television. Before he became the revered master of science fiction, Rod Serling was a just a writer who had to fight to make his voice heard. He vehemently challenged the networks and viewership alike to expand their minds and standards — rejecting notions of censorship, racism and war. But it wasn’t until he began to write about real-world enemies in the guise of aliens and monsters that people lent their ears. In doing so, he pushed the television industry to the edge of glory, and himself to the edge of sanity. Rod operated in a dimension beyond that of contemporary society, making him both a revolutionary and an outsider.

I’ve got some exclusive excerpt pages to show you below, and some examples of the depiction of Serling’s military time.

{Click the images for Twilight-sized versions.]

Koren Shadmi is the Brooklyn-based illustrator and cartoonist behind Twilight Man. He’s created half-a-dozen acclaimed graphic novels, including Rise of The Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and The Creation of D&D. I got a chance to interview Koren.

First of all, thanks for making this graphic novel, Koren. I really enjoyed it. The black and white visuals, the period environments, the quirky expressions that I remember from Serling’s original Twilight Zone run all felt very authentic. And the spooky opening on the timeless flight gave the whole story a feeling of impending disaster.

Thank you, Derek! I really put in my best effort on this book to try and have it as loyal to the spirit of Serling himself and his work.

I was surprised that Serling had been considered a sought-after artistic writer. I had no idea he’d done so many works of serious drama. Was this a surprise to you too? If not, what did surprise you in researching for this biography?

It was a surprise. I was not aware of how important he was during the early days of television; he was really one of the most respected television writers of the era and had an almost overnight success story. Serling, along with writers like Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayefsky, tried to bring a literary quality to the works that they were writing for television. Serling wrote his teleplays as if they were a quality dramas set for the Broadway stage.

You were quoted as saying: “In my late twenties, when I was first exposed to the original Twilight Zone, I felt a strong connection to the themes and visuals.” Could you talk about the themes and visuals that resonated with you? Was it the darkness or the social commentary or the brevity and simplicity of the art at that time, or something else?

There’s a lot of elements I connected with. The visuals, for one: these stark lonely images steeped in atmosphere. If you look at episodes like ‘Time Enough At Last’ – this view of the world after an atomic apocalypse, it’s pretty simple but so effective. There’s also something about the black and white film stock that gives the show an additional glow. The story lines are set in the science fiction realm but deal with actual human emotions and problems. There’s a lot of anxiety, fear, and horror.

It felt to me like your pages communicated a deep affection for a creator and artist who died long before you were born. I felt some of his on-screen charm in the pages. What was it about his life—as a soldier, as a sufferer of PTSD, as a creator both successful and conflicted—that made you connect so strongly with Serling?

It seems to me that Serling was a very warm and personable guy, if you met him, but dealt with a lot of inner demons due to his PTSD from war. So he’s a very conflicted and contradictory figure. Again, I didn’t meet him or know him, so I’m just deducing from what I read, but he seemed to have a lot of inner conflicts—for instance, being this young hotshot writer who was blazingly successful but also felt very insecure about his work and always had a chip on his shoulder for not being ‘a real writer.’ I think he always had to defend the medium of television as worthy and respectable, and it made him unsure of himself.

Serling’s military service, takes up a quarter of the graphic novel. That’s a lot of real estate in a story, and this invites the reader to ask ‘what if?’ questions. How much of what came later was driven by those three years in the army? If Serling had never served, would there have been the death-daring test parachutist? Was the darkness in Serling and his stories born in the Pacific Campaign, or did he bring it to that conflict where it became magnified?

I don’t think that there would have been a Twilight Zone without Serling’s military service; I think it changed him and made him look at the world in a different way. A lot of the time, people coming back from ware are so changed that they feel as if nobody can understand them, nobody other than other veterans, that is. And I think this sense of alienation and the fragility of human life is prominent in a lot of Serling’s work.

Twilight Man leaves a strong impression with the reader. What enduring piece of Serling will be sticking with you?

I think my favourite works of his are still some episodes of The Twilight Zone, such as ‘Eye of The Beholder’ or ‘The Hitchhiker.’ I think his early teleplays are great, but they do not survive as well, mostly since they were shot live and the quality is so eroded. I think there’s a reason why The Twilight Zone endures.

Thanks so much for the chance to chat, Koren!

It was a pleasure, thank you.

Twilight Man is a 168-page softcover book and will be published on October 8, 2019. I really recommend it if you have any interest in science fiction or television history or graphic novels with real-life settings. And we are getting to gift-giving time. Books are an easy idea for someone on your list.

Derek Künsken writes science fiction and fantasy in Gatineau, Québec. His first novel, The Quantum Magician was nominated for the Aurora, the Locus and the Chinese Nebula Awards. Its sequel, The Quantum Garden, will be released on the 15th of October. He tweets from @derekkunsken.

Cover art by Dominic Harman

I was impressed with David Boop’s 2017 anthology Straight Outta Tombstone, one of the better Weird Western volumes of the last few years. So I was excited to see the sequel, Straight Outta Deadwood, arrive this week from Bean. Boop gives us a taste of what to expect in his Foreword, “Histories Mysteries.”

My directive to all the authors in these anthologies [was] to give me the Old West the way it really was, where applicable. I wanted the history within to be accurate, the voices authentic… But I also asked them to give me, and you the readers, the world we wished to see: dragons flying overhead, or the ability to drink with dwarves, or hear how grandpappy fought off zombies in Deadwood…

For those of you who read read Straight Outta Tombstone, this second anthology is my Empire Strikes Back. It’s darker, and include a couple pieces that left me shaken afterward… Don’t worry if you get scared easily, though. I have broken the narrative up with humor, victories over evil, and gunfights.

Lots of gunfights.

There’s been a distinct lack of decent Weird Western recently, and Straight Outta Deadwood addresses that nicely. It contains brand new short fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem, Charlaine Harris, Stephen Graham Jones, Lacy Hensley, Jane Lindskold, Cliff Winnig, D.J. Butler, and many others. Here’s the complete table of contents.

[Click the images for Western-sized versions.]

Foreword by David Boop
“Cookie” by Shane Lacy Hensley
“A Talk With My Mother” by Charlaine Harris
“The Greatest Horse Thief in History” by D.J. Butler
“The Doctor and the Spectre” by Mike Resnick
“Doth Make Thee Mad” by Jane Lindskold
“Sunlight and Silver” by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
“Pinkerton’s Prey” by Frog and Esther Jones
“The Relay Station at Wrigley’s Pass” by Derrick Ferguson
“Not Fade Away” by Cliff Winnig
“The Spinners” by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
“The Stoker and the Plague Doctor” by Alex Acks
“Bigger than Life” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“Dreamcatcher” by Marsheila Rockwell
“El Jefe de la Comancheria” by Mario Acevedo
“The Petrified Man” by Betsy Dornbusch
“Stands Twice and the Magpie Man” by Stephen Graham Jones
“Blood Lust and Gold Dust” by Travis Heermann
About the Contributors

Straight Outta Deadwood was published by Baen on October 1, 2019. It is 265 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Dominic Harman. Read the Foreword and first two stories at the Baen website.

Baen lists a third book in the series, Straight Outta Dodge City, as Forthcoming, probably next year.

See all our recent Weird Western coverage here.

Cults of Prax, first printing 1979. Cover art by Anders Swenson

The RuneQuest supplement Cults of Prax was published by Chaosium forty years ago this year.

RPGNet describes Cults of Prax as the first-ever roleplaying game ‘splatbook’ (a ‘splatbook’ being a non-core sourcebook for an RPG that provides additional rules and material that can be used with the main system) — but its importance and influence goes far beyond that distinction. In a 2010 retrospective review Grognardia said Cults of Prax is

A true classic of the early days of the [tabletop roleplaying] hobby. …quite rightly considered one of the best treatments of religion in a fantasy RPG ever written and it’s certainly one of the most inspirational.

Written by gaming legends Steve Perrin, co-author of the RuneQuest RPG rules, and the late Greg Stafford, creator of the fantasy setting Glorantha, Cults of Prax’s ground-breaking presentation of gods and how they interact with the world through those who worship them still makes it one of the most influential and important works ever released for the RuneQuest RPG, and indeed for tabletop roleplaying games in general.

[Click the images for Glorantha-sized versions.]

Cults of Prax, second printing 1980. Cover art by William Church

In Glorantha, the setting world for RuneQuest, the gods are real, and magic works because relations between the spiritual and physical plane are immediate and concrete. Cults of Prax describes fifteen Gloranthan gods and their cults. RuneQuest player characters can interact with these cults or even join them, progressing through the ranks of lay member, initiate, rune priest/priestess, and eventually, with luck and their god’s blessing, rune lord/lady. The cults depicted range from primitive ancestor worship, to tribal deities worshipped by nomad barbarians, through to intricate civilized religions with specialised gods of war, trade, knowledge, and healing. The book also includes three non-human religions, and a guidelines chapter for designing new RuneQuest cults of your own.

Another innovative feature of Cults of Prax is the excerpts from The Travels of Biturian Varosh running through the text. This narrative, featuring a wandering merchant trader encountering worshippers of each of the fifteen cults in the book, helps bring the Gloranthan setting alive, and offers readers imaginative springboards for RuneQuest roleplaying encounters and adventures.

The Invader Deities chapter of Cults of Prax (1979), with The Travels of Biturian Varosh sidebar

By contrast, Grognardia notes that the Dungeons & Dragons supplement Deities and Demigods, which was released about the same time,

managed to reduce real world religious/mythological figures to mere game constructs; Cults of Prax does the opposite, elevating game constructs to something approaching credible, if clearly fantastical, belief systems.

Cults of Prax was re-released in PDF as part of the RuneQuest Classics line in early 2017. Reviewers and RuneQuest fans continue to mark its importance to the roleplaying genre.

Reviews from R’lyeh‘s own retrospective review (August 2019) says Cults of Prax is

Arguably the most important supplement ever for both Glorantha and RuneQuest (because it) brought both function and form to faith, and in doing so, it made faith both playable and something that you wanted to play.

More from Invader Deities (Cults of Prax, 1979)

Reviews from R’lyeh also notes what reviewers at the time of Cults of Prax’s original release (1979) thought of it:

“I cannot rate this book too highly, it makes an already excellent, imaginative, and highly playable FRP system into a masterpiece that richly deserves a place at the forefront of the hobby. 10/10.”—White Dwarf #23

“The best extant cosmology designed for use with any FRP that has been published.”—Different Worlds #7

“If you play RuneQuest, you want this book. If you are a serious Game Master in any fantasy system, you would do well to look it over… And remember: gods don’t have to be effective to be important. Belief is the thing, and the interactions of social groups and differing beliefs in Cults of Prax is good fantasy reading if you don’t game at all.”— Steve Jackson, Space Gamer #27.

Such opinions have withstood the test of time and an evolving generation of RPGs and their players.

‘The Praxians,’ interior art by Gene Day

The RPG historian Shannon Appelcline (Designers and Dragons) recently agreed that Cults of Prax was “a vastly innovative product, one of the best looks at religion ever in an RPG (still)”.

On the Glorantha Fans Facebook page, Cults of Prax was literally game-changing for one commenter, who said ““I read it for the first time, only having played AD&D, and had an ‘I didn’t think you could do that’ moment.” Andrew Logan Montgomery of the Exploring the Otherworlds of Fiction, Magic, and Gaming blog concurs, stating

Cults of Prax was extraordinary. It not only defined what Glorantha was, it demonstrated what was possible in gaming. It moved the bar from moving miniatures around a table and rolling dice to a shared novel. The depth. The erudition. Just stunning.

Barbarian Gods (Cults of Prax, 1979)

Another Facebook commenter remarked,

One look at the cover of the book [first printing] told me this game was different. This was game of negotiating cultures, communicating with strange strangers and contending with the unknown… The cover alone was enough to get me to agree to give RuneQuest a chance. Digging into the contents of Cults of Prax I knew I had made the right choice.

In a comprehensive video review (so comprehensive it’s in two parts: part one, part two) Bud’s RPG Review succinctly concludes “This is a book that should simply be treasured by gamers.”

Cults of Prax is available in PDF from Chaosium and from DriveThruRPG. It is easily compatible with the latest edition of RuneQuest: RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG). Chaosium is currently working on a new release for RQG entitled Gods of Glorantha, building from Greg Stafford’s original manuscripts compiled over forty years. This work will feature over 100 cults for RuneQuest presented in the time-honored Cults of Prax format.

RuneQuest: RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2019)

[Also check out Cults of Prax’s companion volume Cults of Terror (1981), which Ron Edwards of The Forge and Adept Play has said, “is a not merely a landmark in role-playing history, it’s a giant.” It too was rereleased in PDF for RuneQuest Classics and is available from Chaosium and DriveThruRPG.]

Introduction (Cults of Prax, 1979)

Michael O’Brien became vice president of Chaosium in August 2015. The 1992 RuneQuest-Glorantha release Sun County, which he wrote for Avalon Hill working with editor Ken “The Rune Czar” Rolston, kicked off the relatively brief but creatively fertile period which later became known as the “RQ Renaissance.” Although based in Australia, at the time O’Brien was associate editor of Tales of the Reaching Moon, the influential British fanzine that helped sustain Gloranthan fandom through the 1990s and early 2000s. His last article for Black Gate was Resurrecting RuneQuest: An Investigation by the Tales of the Reaching Moon Editorial Staff.

Ah, October. The month when I finally catch up on all the all the spooky reads I’ve been hoarding all year.

Back in July, Jessica Avery at Book Riot posted a fine survey of 30 Haunted House Books that will Give You the Creeps. Who wants to read haunted house novels in July? But now that the evenings are getting cold and leaves are starting to fall off the trees, a young man’s thoughts naturally turn to… creepy houses and buried family secrets. So I returned to Jessica’s piece, and it features some very intriguing titles indeed. Here’s the highlights.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc (FSG Originals, 288 pages, $15 paperback/$2.99 digital, August 1, 2017)

This addition to the list was recommended to me as being just absolutely read-through-your-fingers frightening. In one of those plots familiar to many haunted house books, Julie and James need to get out of the city and end up settling in a house in the country. But what was supposed to be a fresh start for the troubled couple soon turns into a nightmare. As the house seems to misshape and decay before their eyes, Julie and James rush to discover its history before they follow suit.

[Click the images for October-sized images.]

The Women in the Walls by Amy Lukavics (Harlequin Teen, 272 pages, $18.99 hardcover/$9.99 paperback/$8.99 digital, September 27, 2016)

YA haunted house books have a real obsession with spooky Victorian houses. Not that I can blame them — as far as architectural choices go, Victorian is a doozy. It can either be your Grandma’s cozy house, or it can be a freaking suburban Crimson Peak. Lucy Acosta and her cousin Margaret grew up in what was, apparently, one of the latter. Her mother died when she was just a baby, then her aunt vanished while walking in the woods, and now Margaret is spending too much time in the attic. Where, she says, she can hear the whispers of her dead mother in the walls.

The Good House by Tananarive Due (Atria, 496 pages, $25 hardcover/$7.99 paperback/$15.99 digital, September 2, 2003)

Angela Toussaint has not been back to her grandmother’s house — the house the townspeople of Sacajawea, Washington, call the Good House — in two years. Not since her son Corey died. But she’s finally ready to return and discover the truth — about Corey’s death, about her Grandmother, and about the Good House.

In addition to those three, the article includes half a dozen books we’ve covered here over the past few years.

Here’s the links.

Nathan Ballingrud on Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
The Family Plot by Cherie Priest
The Graveyard Apartment, by Mariko Koike
The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Read the complete article at Book Riot.

Read all our recent Book coverage here.

And we’re back live here at A (Black) Gat in the Hand. And we went big, making our first foray into that venerable pulp genre, The Western. I lobbied author Duane Spurlock to join in during the column’s first run, and he decided it was easier to write a post than have me pestering him again. I discovered T.T. Flynn through his Dime Detective stories about racetrack bookie Joe Maddox. But Flynn would go on to a long, successful career writing Westerns. Read what Duane has to tell us!

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

When we discuss hard-boiled narrative, the default topic typically is crime fiction—usually the pulp-magazine-era tales from Black Mask and its contemporary competitors through the digest era, culminating in the pages of Manhunt and engendering the rise of the paperback original novel. Bob Byrne  has been admirably addressing the earlier realm of hard-boiled narrative in his Black Gat essays.

But hard-boiled writing encompasses more than the works of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and their followers. The western genre is a prime example.

These days, if someone mentions the hard-boiled western, what usually come to mind are the violent Spaghetti Western film genre and the resulting prodigious output from the Piccadilly Cowboys and The Man With No Name novels written by Joe Millard and others. Actually, the western and hard-boiled narrative have a long, intertwined history. It began at least with the novel that launched what we recognize as the literary western romance: the 1902 bestseller by Owen Wister, The Virginian, which includes the famous line, “When you call me that, SMILE!” If that’s not hard boiled, I’m not sure where we’ll go with this discussion.

(1902: Twenty years before Daly published ‘the first hard-boiled story,’ “The False Burton Combs” in Black Mask and before Hammett’s first stories, “Holiday” and “The Parthian Knot,” appeared in Pearson’s Magazine and The Smart Set; twenty-one years before Ernest Hemingway’s first short stories were published in Paris, “Three Stories and Ten Poems“)

Of course, the western and the crime story are closely related: since most involve robbers, rustlers, and murderers, we don’t really need John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique or Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation to make those connections. During the pulp era, many writers worked in both western and crime/mystery genres, as a number of contemporary authors continue to do – the late Ed Gorman, Loren Estleman, Bill Pronzini, Robert Randisi, and the late Bill Crider have all created excellent tales in both arenas). Among them was T.T. Flynn, whose writing career began in the 1920s.

I first encountered the work of Thomas Theodore Flynn, Jr. in Don Hutchison’s marvelously titled anthology, It’s Raining Corpses in Chinatown. That book included Flynn’s “The Jade Joss,” originally published in the November 15, 1933 issue of Dime Detective.

But thanks to Jon Tuska’s prodigious efforts through his Golden West Literary Agency to bring many, many pulp westerns back into print—via mass market publisher Leisure Books, large-print publisher Five Star, and others—I learned that Flynn was a prolific writer of western tales.

The first Flynn-specific collection of stories Tuska edited, Long Journey to Deep Canyon, offers a solid introduction to the writer’s work by including stories from 1932, 1935, 1949 and 1950—one might say those dates frame the golden age of the pulp magazine western. It also includes brief but nicely researched essays about Flynn’s life and work at the start of each tale.

T.T. Flynn was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1902. (What is it about this midwestern city that produces so many storytellers? Besides Flynn, there’s Steve Englehart, John Green, Joseph Hayes, John Hiatt, Darryl Pinckney, Booth Tarkington, and Kurt Vonnegut. That’s just Indy, and far from an exhaustive list. Lots more Hoosiers than I can name here have had careers in professional tale telling.) The FictionMags Index cites his first professional sale as “Pa Winn Tries Bunk” in the December 29, 1923, issue of Detective Story Magazine.

Many of his early stories were detective tales placed by Marguerite E. Harper, who was agent for another writer known for his hard-boiled westerns: Luke Short. Most of these tales found a home at Flynn’s (no relation) weekly detective magazine. Others appeared in Short Stories and Adventure, both of which had reputations for high editorial expectations. By the middle of the decade he was producing western stories.

Introducing “The Outlaw Breed” in Long Journey, Tuska defines the template for Flynn’s western heroes:

“The protagonist is seen to be a man forced into isolation by social and economic forces rampant within the community, often being made to appear an outlaw, but who is able by the end to win new stature through superior courage and moral fortitude.”

By squinting a little, you may also see the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe in that description. You can also see western characters created by some of Flynn’s peers, including Short and Peter Dawson.

Despite the literary flair in which Tuska seeks to dress Flynn’s work, it remains pulp fiction—popular entertainment—and therefore must offer at least some melodrama. For example, “The Pie River” (published as “The Pistol Prodigal” in the December 1937 issue of Western Trails and reprinted in Shadow of the Lariat [Promontory Press, 1995]) opens in medias res with one character cornered by a sheriff and his posse and the whole lot spouting the sort of bombastic threats and bluffs intended to pull in the reader immediately:

“Put a bullet in my belly!” Steve Cochrane taunted. “See what good it will do you!” Between his uplifted arms, Steve Cochrane eyed the men who had crowded into the half-ruined adobe hut.

“It’d give me pleasure!” Reeves, the sheriff, gritted.

A long-waisted cowman growled, “It’d probably save somebody a heap of trouble.”

“Put a bullet in my belly!” That’s just the sort of hard-boiled braggadocio we might expect to hear James Cagney blurt from a cinema screen. It’s the type of exchange a pulp fictioneer would use to hook an editor and, by extension, a reader—an important consideration if a writer is depending on story sales for his meals. Once we get past the theatrical scene-chewing of those opening retorts, Flynn employs a more controlled tone and gives us the characters’ backgrounds so the initial dialog seems less like merely hyperbolic bluster and more appropriate to the situation.

The words stay cool and the attitude is icy tough later when Steve asks a tavern owner about where he can find Smoky Davis. Smoky had earlier directed him to Brother Jack, whose words open this passage:

“Friend, you say, brother?”

Steve nodded.

“How long have you known him?”

“Long enough.”

“Long enough for what, brother?”

“Long enough to be looking for him,” said Steve calmly.

All this oblique tough-guy talk leads to Brother Jack pulling a derringer out of his long, thick beard and pointing it at Steve. This action may seem wildly unlikely, but it’s just the sort of thing a reader would expect to encounter in a Continental Op story.

Unlikely? Maybe. Haphazard? No. Flynn is certainly in control here. Although he relies on at least two overused plot devices, he manipulates the narrative thread in a masterful and surprising manner.

Steve Cochrane, like many western heroes before and after him, has returned to his hometown—the Pie River country—after many years to buy a ranch and settle down. As usually happens in these situations (in the western genre, anyway), he’s greeted in a hostile manner by the old folks at home—as demonstrated in the opening paragraphs quoted above. In this case, Steve’s been seen in the company of a stranger suspected of robbing the stage. The stranger is Smoky Davis.

After the initial brouhaha, Steve tracks down Davis, with whom he’d traveled to Pie River. The two men had made plans to buy a ranch as partners. Once Steve locates Smoky, the former inadvertently participates in a robbery by Smoky and a gang of thugs. The victim is a local merchant—one who recognizes Steve and who harbors a grudge from their childhood in Pie River.

So, Steve not only is suspected of associating with criminals, he’s also identified as a thief during a crime: another common coincidence in the pulp western.

Smoky admits to Steve he’s got a sordid past because he was raised by outlaws: as a very young child he was stolen from his parents by a beau spurned by his mother. Smoky has committed this Pie River robbery to pay off the man who knows his parents’ identities so Smoky can finally learn who they are—and who he is—so he can track them down.

Flynn reveals the identity of Smoky’s father before the end of the story. I won’t spoil the secret here, but by the time the revelation occurs, it shouldn’t be a surprise to the reader.

What is surprising during the course of the story is how Steve loses primacy in the story’s plot. Flynn elevates Smoky and his quest as the driving narrative, and the tale’s climax is the culmination of Smoky’s plot, not Steve’s. Steve Cochrane carries the denouement, but by that point the narrative belongs to Smoky. This is a subtle and masterful storytelling move by Flynn, and the reader may not be aware the shift occurred until after completing the story and putting it down.

It’s Flynn’s ability to manipulate clichés—the hostile reception to the returning prodigal; the innocent man mistaken for an outlaw; the drifter searching for his identity—so that he both satisfies readers’ expectations as he also bends plots and narrative in surprising ways that doubtless led editor Rogers Terrill to commission a story from Flynn for the premiere issue of Popular Publications’ Dime Western (December 1932) and later for the first issue of Star Western (October 1933).

Flynn would turn narrative tricks in many of his stories, making worn plots fresh and keeping his readers’ interests even when relying on old tropes. Flynn didn’t write a series character for his westerns, making the dilemmas and changes his protagonists faced more dramatic for his readers—a character who would show up in story after story was sure to have a good ending at the end of each tale. Not so for Flynn’s western characters.

That’s just the sort of thing to make people keep reading Flynn’s stories nearly a century after they first appeared.

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2019 Series

Back Deck Pulp Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Doc Savage
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hugh B. Cave’s Peter Kane
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Man Called Spade
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hard Boiled Holmes

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2018 Series

With a (Black) Gat: George Harmon Coxe
With a (Black) Gat: Raoul Whitfield
With a (Black) Gat: Some Hard Boiled Anthologies
With a (Black) Gat: Frederick Nebel’s Donahue
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Walsh
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – January, 1935
A (Black) Gat in the hand: Norbert Davis’ Ben Shaley
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: D.L. Champion’s Rex Sackler
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Dime Detective – August, 1939
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #1
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Day Keene
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – October, 1933
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #2
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Black Mask – Spring, 2017
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Frank Schildiner’s ‘Max Allen Collins & The Hard Boiled Hero’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Campbell Gault
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Parker’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Maynard’s ‘The Yellow Peril’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Andrew P Salmon’s ‘Frederick C. Davis’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Rory Gallagher’s ‘Continental Op’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #3
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #4
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #5
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw on Writing
A (Black) Gat in Hand: Back Deck Pulp #6
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Black Mask Dinner

Duane Spurlock comes from a long line of long-winded storytellers and near-sighted doodlers. He reads and critiques in a variety of genres. I met Duane at a PulpFest and went to one of his readings. Quite simply, he’s a storyteller. He does his Westerns blogging at Spur & Lock Mercantile. Pulp stuff can be found at PulpRack. And some old posts are still up at InterroBang.

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ was a regular Monday morning hardboiled pulp column from May through December, 2018 and was brought back in the summer of 2019.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate  from March, 2014 through March, 2017 (still making an occasional return appearance!).

He organized ‘Hither Came Conan,’ as well as Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series.

He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’) and blogs about Holmes and other mystery matters at Almost Holmes.

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Parts III, IV,  V and VI.

And he contributed to The New Adventures of Solar Pons.

At Wiscon in 2017 I was lucky enough to be in the audience when Guest of Honor (and Black Gate blogger emeritus) Amal El-Mohtar and author Max Gladstone conducted a joint reading of a project they’d been working on together. Here’s how I described it in my convention report for Black Gate.

For the second half of her reading, Amal invited Max Gladstone to the stage to perform a joint reading of their collaborative tale. It’s an epistolary Spy vs. Spy novella, set in a universe where time is a braid, and two timelines exist simultaneously. One where consciousness is embedded, one where it is more abstract. (Think of them as a technologically advanced timeline, and a more natural world.) Both timelines are unstable. There’s a time war between the two realities, and two opposing agents, Red and Blue. At the end of a successful and bloody opp, Red finds a letter left for her by her enemy that reads “Burn before reading. ” She knows it’s a trap, but it’s also a thrown gauntlet, and she cannot resist. Soon she’s leaving her own notes in response.

What starts as inquisitive taunts at mysterious opponents gradually become much sharper, funnier and more poignant as the two take their game — and their taunts — to higher and higher levels. All the while hiding their correspondence from their superiors, and gradually learning at least grudging respect for each other. Once again, the audience got only a tantalizing snippet of a wider story, but it was a fascinating one.

The story is tentatively titled “These Violent Delights.” It does not yet have a publisher.

“These Violent Delights” eventually became the collaborative novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, published by Saga Press in July of this year. It has been widely praised; Martha Wells calls it “rich and strange, a romantic tour through all of time and the multiverse,” and Publishers Weekly says it’s “Exquisitely crafted… Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure… dazzling.”

But I think my favorite review comes from our own Matthew David Surridge, writing at Splice Today. Matthew is insightful and illuminating as always, calling the novel “mind-blowing in the best science-fictional tradition.” Here’s the highlights.

The book’s a novella-length work alternating narrative snippets written in high, ecstatic language with self-consciously clever, literate letters the two main characters write to each other. They’re women from two different futures, Red from a technological utopia and Blue from a bioengineered paradise, and each are agents of those futures who manipulate the past to try to make sure their timeline is the world that ends up existing.

The book starts with Red undertaking a mission, succeeding, and finding a letter from Blue taunting her. Then we follow Blue on a mission, where she finds a letter of response from Red. This goes on, as the two of them develop a professional respect, learn about each other, and fall in love. It’s a forbidden love, though, setting up a climax as schemes within schemes play out to bring a properly romantic ending.

The book’s a success because the authors’ sensibilities mesh tightly. The structure’s solid and inventive, while the letters not only provide insight into character but also move the story forward… Perhaps most importantly, the style works. Imagery and rhythm are thrilling. Metaphors and similes are concrete, tactile. The book’s alive to symbol: a book about losing a war begins in the aftermath of a vast battle. A Romeo-and-Juliet story of time-crossed lovers sees one of the leads take poison in an apothecary’s shop in Elizabethan England. Literate, imaginative, the book’s mind-blowing in the best science-fictional tradition, conjuring up evocative yet terse word-pictures of pilgrims in a bone labyrinth, of galaxies tangled into a single garden, of Caesar’s assassination.

Read Matthew’s complete review here.

This Is How You Lose the Time War was published by Gallery / Saga Press on July 16, 2019. It is 198 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover is uncredited.

See all our coverage of the best new Science Fiction and Fantasy here.