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And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

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Chesbro Horseman EdenI haven’t heard much about George C. Chesbro lately, and I don’t think it’s entirely because he died in 2008. Chesbro was one of those writers who are somehow just a little bit too extreme – in one way or another – to become widely popular. The people who like Chesbro’s stuff really like it, and the ones who don’t, are often left a little perplexed.

Take his most well-known, and certainly his most popular character. Robert Frederickson is a dwarf, with a genius-level IQ, a black belt in Karate, and a PhD in criminology. He’s also a retired circus headliner who went by the name “Mongo the Magnificent.” He got bored just being a college professor, so he became a licensed private investigator. Somehow, the cases he gets all seem to skew into the weird end of the spectrum. Go figure.

So, what was too much for you? The dwarf? The IQ? The PhD? The PI license? If your reaction to Mongo’s description is “oh come on! Really?” you might want to look at some of Chesbro’s other work. But if your reaction is more like mine was back in the day, “oh, this I gotta see,” then you might really enjoy a walk down Mongo’s dark streets. This is hard-boiled, even noir crime fiction the like of which you’ve never seen.

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Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

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However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
It's like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock
It’s like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock

HP Lovecraft is a bit like Bill Haley; he arguably created his own genre, but few people now consume his work for simple pleasure.

Just as modern people typically discover Rock and Roll through [your favourite band here], they come to the Cthulhu Mythos through Charles Stross’s Laundry Files(*), through the madness of the Cthulhu Fluxx cardgame, or through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu.

Kids…? Well my daughter (8) has a plush Cthulhu who spends most of his time in the naughty corner for trying to eat the faces of the other toys.

Nobody, typically, just happens to pick up an HP Lovecraft book. If they do, they probably bounce. Let’s just say that speculative fiction has produced better stylists and that “of his time” is proving to be less and less able to explain away his racism.

However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre. He pretty much nailed Cosmic Horror, and though we have chipped off racist carbuncles, all the tropes still bear his mason’s mark.

This means that Lovecraft’s Mythos serves the the same function in the Geek community as the Classical world served amongst educated Victorians. They would remark on somebody being “Hector-like”, we joke that our  pasta bake “turned into a Shoggoth”.

This creates the interesting problem that the our shared subculture leans heavily on a set of texts that are increasingly unreadable for both literary and ethical reasons!

The answer, of course, is to retell the stories in other media, which is where books like Charles Cutting’s graphic novel Kadath come in.

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Logical Swords & Sorcery: The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague de Camp

Logical Swords & Sorcery: The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague de Camp

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oie_1461552JKlZM7ZLLyon Sprague de Camp’s first published story was “The Isolinguals” in 1937. During the 1930s and 40s he became a significant author, writing dozens of stories and numerous novels. His time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939) is considered a classic and is still read today. Alongside such genre standard bearers as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, he is considered one of the authors responsible for bringing greater sophistication to science fiction. He was the fourth Grand Master as chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1979, and in 1984 he was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. His 1996 autobiography, Time and Chance, won a Hugo Award. In his lifetime he was well-regarded and successful.

To call de Camp a polarizing figure is an understatement. His control over Robert E. Howard’s Conan character for so many years, his ham-fisted editing of Howard’s stories, his ruthless strangling of any effort to get pure, unadulterated Conan into print, raised the ire of readers. For an incredibly detailed history of de Camp’s relationship with REH’s work and legacy, I highly recommend tracking down Morgan Holmes’ 16-part series, “The de Camp Controversy.”

De Camp first encountered the character of Conan when his friend Fletcher Pratt tossed him a copy of Conan the Conqueror. According to Lin Carter, de Camp “yielded helplessly to Howard’s gusto and driving narrative energies.” In 1951 de Camp decided to try his own hand at Howardian swords & sorcery and wrote The Tritonian Ring. He sold it to the clunkily-titled magazine Two Complete Science-Adventure Books. 

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Nine – “The Golden Flask”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Nine – “The Golden Flask”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on June 15, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for reprinting these early articles so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for nearly 6 years and 270 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

golden flaskRomer_-_Mystery“The Golden Flask” was the eighth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu. First published in The Story-Teller in May 1913, it later comprised Chapters 21-23 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for North American publication). Rohmer added brief linking material to the start of this episode for its book publication in an effort to tie the story closer together with its immediate predecessor. “The Golden Flask” is unique in not being centered upon Dr. Petrie’s infatuation with Karamaneh, but rather upon our heroes’ obsession with bringing Dr. Fu-Manchu to justice.

The story harks back to “The Zayat Kiss” in being set in motion with Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie correctly identifying Henry Stradwick, Lord Southery as the next target of assassination, but being too late to prevent his death. Lord Southery’s physician, Sir Frank Narcombe believes the peer to have expired from heart failure. Oddly, Smith states that neither he nor Petrie represents the official police. A reason for this blatant deception is never given and must be concluded as an error on Rohmer’s part. Reference is made to both Smith and Petrie possessing a supernatural ability to detect Fu-Manchu’s presence at the scene of Lord Southery’s death despite the absence of any clues pointing to foul play. When Petrie describes Smith as looking like “a man consumed by a burning fever,” the reader is completely willing to suspend disbelief and go along with Rohmer’s frenzied paranoia. It is the same mania that captivated Petrie (and, by extension, the reader) at the start of “The Zayat Kiss.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mysteries at Hallmark

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mysteries at Hallmark

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My wife and I enjoy watching murder mystery movies on Hallmark. More accurately, the Hallmark Movies and Mystery Channel (HMMC). Many of them had previously run on the Hallmark Channel that most folks are more familiar with. My previous cable provider didn’t provide HMMC at the tier I purchased, and many of my friends don’t have it either. It’s out there, but it’s not a low-tier feature in many systems.

Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of viewing for mystery fans. They air reruns of shows such as Hart to Hart, Matlock, Diagnosis Murder, Murder She Wrote and Perry Mason. And a staple of the schedule is Columbo. I haven’t seen every episode, but I’ve seen many of them several times and I never get tired of watching Peter Falk do his thing. “Uh, say, just one more thing…”

I also like a couple of old Hallmark franchises that have come to rest at HMMC.

Most folks knew Kellie Martin first as cute little Beckie (Becca) Thatcher in Life Goes On (a poignant, well done series) and later on as nurse Lucy Knight in ER. But from 2003 through 2007, she made eleven Mystery Woman movies for Hallmark. She played bookstore owner Samantha Kinsey, who constantly found herself involved in murders (that’s going to be a common theme in this post).

HMMC_KEllieMartin

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Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, Part One

Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, Part One

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MOKF15Special Mavel Edition is a little remembered comics reprint title of the early 1970s. Its fifteenth and penultimate issue dated December 1973 featured the debut of a new series, Master of Kung Fu. Marvel’s timing was perfect as Bruce Lee was now a major star at the U.S. box office and David Carradine’s Kung Fu series was a critical and ratings success on the small screen.

Marvel had optioned the rights to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu characters several years before when Pyramid paperback reprints of the 13 Rohmer novels were selling strong thanks to the popularity of the Christopher Lee film series. Marvel already had their own Fu Manchu clones in the form of the Yellow Claw and the Mandarin, but Master of Kung Fu gave them the opportunity to build a contemporary martial arts title out of a sequel to Rohmer’s highly influential thriller series.

Conceived by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, the decision to incorporate Sax Rohmer’s characters was at the insistence of Marvel editor Roy Thomas. Englehart enlisted the aid of Robert E. Briney, publisher and editor of The Rohmer Review fanzine to ensure the continuity was consistent with Rohmer’s long-running literary series.

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Raising Your Young Geek

Raising Your Young Geek

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Some of my earliest memories are of this movie. I had to have been five when I saw it for the first time. The most recent viewing was last month. It's on heavy rotation around here.
Some of my earliest memories are of watching The Last Unicorn. I had to have been five when I saw it for the first time. The most recent viewing was last month. It’s on heavy rotation around here.

A few weeks ago, I was playing with my daughter, who is on the brink of turning four.

“Come here you little demon,” I said.

“I’m not a demon! You’re a demon!” she shrieked before pulling an imaginary sword and shouting “WINDSCAR!!!”

Yup. I got full on Inuyasha-ed by a four year old pixie child.

Raising children as a Geek means forging into unknown territory, at least for me. I’m a natural born geek myself, but I’m one of the few in my family. My older siblings introduced me to Star Wars, and discovered Trek thanks to friends at school. I found my own way into SFF fiction along the way, with help from teachers and other friends.

So figuring out raising kids and passing along the love of these things is a new field for both my husband and I. We’re a multi-fandom household: we love both Star Wars and Star Trek (and Star Gate, for that matter) and we have watched the original Star Wars trilogy with my older daughter, who finishes Kindergarten this week.

We’ve argued playfully over whether or not we will introduce the prequel trilogy… ever. She’s a mature six, so she watches (slightly curated) episodes of Star Gate: SG-1 with her Dad. We watched Avatar: The Last Airbender at an early age, and are now working our way through Inuyasha and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

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Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden by Jack Vance

Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden by Jack Vance

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oie_6184539ElxhnW3oLines from the song “Comedy Tonight” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum sprung to mind numerous times this past week while I was reading Jack Vance’s Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden (1983). While definitely not a comedy, it is by turns familiar and peculiar, convulsive and repulsive, as well as dramatic and frenetic. And sometimes, very funny. It is also one of the most inventive, strange, and bewitching books I have had the joy to read.

His first collection, the fantasy classic The Dying Earth (which you can read about in John O’Neill’s post here), helped make Vance’s early reputation as a writer of lapidarian prose, cynical wit, and above all as an inventor of incredibly original cultures, worlds, and characters. For the next three decades of his career he seemed to eschew straight fantasy, and most of his published work was science-fiction and mysteries. In 1983, though, he released a lengthy work of fantasy, Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden (L:SG). It rapidly shifts from studies of realpolitik, to fey whimsy, to dark violence that might make George R.R. Martin blush, yet it’s never jarring but completely complementary and intoxicating.

Over the following six years he added two sequels, The Green Pearl (1985), and Madouc (1989). With the latter, Vance beat out Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers, and Jonathan Carroll, among others, to win the 1990 World Fantasy Best Novel Award.

In European legend, both the lands of Lyonesse and Hy Brasil, as well as the city of Ys, sank beneath the sea. In Vance’s novel they are found among the “Elder Isles, now sunk beneath the Atlantic, [which] in olden times were located across the Cantabrian Gulf (now the Bay of Biscay) from Old Gaul.”

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The Magic of Hobbyland

The Magic of Hobbyland

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HobbylandMy first addiction was model trains, HO gauge engines and layouts that I was forever redesigning. Because I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the need for new boxcars and Plasticville edifices led me without fail to a mid-sized indie shop in the Graceland Shopping Center called Hobbyland.

What I didn’t know until the summer between sixth and seventh grades was that Hobbyland had also begun to carry, mixed in with the how-to guides on paper airplanes and WW II tank models, peculiar tomes that hinted at inexplicable mysteries: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry.

To enter Hobbyland in those early years of my next addiction was to experience, in its most literal form, the marvelous. Forget about the trains, planes, and automobiles. The real heartbeat of the place turned out to be the display-rack bookshelves, gray-painted, not numerous.

You remember. You recall how those early D&D books were so peculiar, so thrown-together, more like pamphlets and broadsides than the sort of book that sat on your parents’ shelves at home. Greyhawk, etc., would have sat well with quackery advertising (phrenology, anyone?) or the meditations of theosophists or Doctor Dee.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The MX Anthologies – All the Holmes You Need

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The MX Anthologies – All the Holmes You Need

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MXSeries_4
Hot off the presses!

David Marcum and I email each other. A lot! It is sort of a modern version of the HP Lovecraft – Robert E. Howard letter swapping. Without the gravitas. And the weirdness. And the literary importance. And the…oh, never mind. One Thursday afternoon in January of 2015, he sent me an email about a dream that he had had the previous night.

The dream (and the email) was about putting together a multi-author anthology of traditional Sherlock Holmes stories. As David typed, “There would be no weird Alternate Universe or present-day stuff, no Holmes-is-the-Ripper, nothing where Watson is at Holmes’s funeral or vice-versa. Etc. Essentially nothing that shockingly contradicts what is in the Canon.”

Earlier that morning, he had emailed Steve Emecz, his publisher at MX Books, about the idea. From that dream was born the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. Except more authors signed on and it grew to two books: then to three. Then came another volume in 2016. And a fifth, containing only Christmas stories, and a sixth, are on their way! In fact, I should be finishing my Christmas tale right now, not writing this post.

The four volumes have contained ten introductions/forewords/essays, five poems and over eighty new stories. That’s EIGHTY Holmes short stories (including a couple of plays) making their first book appearances in this series. I read Holmes stories at a pretty heavy pace and I’m still working my way through these volumes.

The first three books came out as a trilogy, split into time periods (1881-1889, 1890-1895 and 1896-1929). Volume IV followed as the ‘2016 Annual’ and it is expected that there will be at least one new collection yearly into the foreseeable future.

And every single author participating has donated their royalties to the restoration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home, Undershaw, which, when completed, will be a part of Stepping Stones, a school for children with learning disabilities. As my sister Carolyn is severely mentally retarded, I can appreciate the generosity of every one of my fellow authors. Actions like this matter.

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