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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think (August 2023)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think (August 2023)

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“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)

Ten Things I Think I Think has become an occasional feature in my column here. I’m always up to my elbows in various reading, writing, gaming, TV/streaming, radio plays, and audiobooks.

So it’s probably no surprise I like the idea of picking one of those areas, and sharing my sorta-random thoughts on things. Similar to my What I’ve Been Watching/Reading posts. Because I like to use my column here at Black Gate to share things I like with folks, I’m usually pretty positive. But in talking about ten different topics, I’m bound to hit on some things I’m not as crazy about. So be it.

I wrapped up our Talking Tolkien series with a Tolkien-centric version a few weeks ago. It was fun. So, I figured why not do one for A (Black) Gat in the Hand as we get up to full steam.

Not making the list are recent items such as I re-watched a couple episodes of Powers Boothe’s Philip Marlowe series. It’s still really good. I also watched a few of Stacy Keach’s second-run as Mike Hammer. Those shows are my favorite version of Hammer, but  one or two at a time is enough. They seem a little cheesy – they didn’t age particularly well. But still fun to watch. Keach is my picture of Hammer.

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Reedsy: From the Perspective of an Incorrigible Pantser

Reedsy: From the Perspective of an Incorrigible Pantser

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Good Evenaftermorn, Readers!

Those following along on my own personal blog know that I am waist-deep into a work in progress that I’ve titled The New Haven Incident. It’s a very silly premise – what if a zombie-style plague created hyper-aggressive fairy-types instead of the walking dead? – but I’m loving the characters trapped in this silly hellscape and I’m having an absolute blast writing it. Ordinarily, I don’t really use any tools to write save for a word processor. This time, however, I opted to give one of the many programmes a go to see if it would help my workflow at all. What a better WIP to try it with than something I’m going to offer free on my blog as a serial? So, after a little bit of research, which includes the phrase ‘free’ because I’m a writer and have no money, I settled on Reedsy.com.

Here’s what I think of it thus far.

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A (Black) Gat in Hand – Hammett & Zigzags of Treachery (My Intro)

A (Black) Gat in Hand – Hammett & Zigzags of Treachery (My Intro)

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“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)

I went to Pittsburgh’s Pulp Fest 2023, weekend before last. It was a fun time, with lots of cool chatting. I’ve got some pics and I’ll try to do a post next week. Steeger Books awlays rolls out their Summer releases at Pulp Fest. Volume Two of Rex Sackler (D. L. Champion) is out. I wrote about Sackler here – those stories are SO much fun! And the first Bill Lennox (W. T. Ballard) book is out. Lennox was one of my first essays for this series, and I’m a huge fan.

I’m biased, but I was most excited about the first volume of The Continental Op. I wrote the intro for Zigzags of Treachery, and I’m kicking off the new run with it. If you like it, maybe check out the book. The Continental Op is one of the best private eyes in the genre.

It’s got a terrific cover from Henry C. Murphy. Murphy – who died of cancer at only age 45 – drew the well-known image of Sam Spade used for the first installment of The Maltese Falcon. So, here’s my intro. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Black Mask. Dashiell Hammett. Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw. Those three names are inextricably linked together as the bedrock of the hardboiled school of mystery fiction. The October 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask included “Arson Plus,” the first story featuring a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.

Earlier that May, Carroll John Daly’s Three Gun Terry Mack had become the first hardboiled dick, and he was followed a month later by Race Williams. The immensely popular Williams was the prototypical gun-slinging Western cowboy who solved every problem with hot lead, but now wearing a suit and transplanted to the urban setting of city streets. Written in heavy-handed, over-the-top prose, Williams relied on guns and massive amounts of testosterone, leaving the city littered with corpses.

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Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

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It’s time to wrap up Talking Tolkien. And I thought a Tolkien-themed version of Ten Things I Think I Think would be a fun way to do it. So away we go…

READ THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN

I read this last year, and I intend to write an essay on it, but just haven’t fit it in yet. This is a good book. And you can really see the influence it had on Tolkien. It’s as depressing as a Jim Thompson novel, but still well worth reading. I highly recommend it for fans of The Silmarillion.

After finishing this, I tried to read The Story of Kullervo, but it didn’t really work for me. It’s not by Christopher Tolkien, and the way it was laid out, and read, felt different from Sigurd, Gawain, etc. I plan on powering through it, as it was also influential on Tolkien. But I’m not recommending that one, yet. Definitely check out Sigurd.

I WANT A ‘TALES OF MIDDLE EARTH’

I’m not a fan of how the rights holder of Robert E. Howard’s works is handling new fiction. At all. Not just the barren output – but the whole approach (which has been mostly talk so far).

I’d love to see a collection of short stories based on Tolkien elements. Ideally done by people qualified to write in Tolkien’s style (folks who wrote like Dennis L. McKiernan, Andre Norton, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Brooks – not just big-names to put on the cover).

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Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

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St. Martin’s Press – 1st , 1983

IN A DISTANT AND SECONDHAND SET OF DIMENSIONS, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…

See…

Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests,  garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.

So begins The Colour of Magic (1983), the first volume of the eventually forty-one-book-long Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I was lent this book (along with another Pratchett book, Strata (1981), which I’ve still never read — or returned, possibly) back in 1985 when it first hit US shores. He said it was funny and it was.

I hadn’t laughed much during earlier run-ins with fantasy and sci-fi comedies, save for Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Too often, puns were what passed for wit and the satire was shallow. Returning to Colour for the first time in many years, I’m impressed with how sharp Pratchett’s eye was when it came to picking his genre targets and just how good his prose was. His writing would become more complex, deeper, and much darker over the decades, but already, it’s witty and effervescent. In an age of such po-faced seriousness, we could use more of it.

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No Story is Without Value

No Story is Without Value

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Image from Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay

Good… whatever time of day or night you are reading this!

They say those who do not read live but one life. Those who read live thousands.

Reading is one of life’s few, small pleasures. It can also be incredibly frustrating, particularly if you want to share your excitement for any particular tale with the world.

It seems that I am once again seeing discourse floating around the interwebs about books and genres and weird superiority rankings. It’s tired and tiresome, and I can’t believe we are having this discussion again. Really internet? Really?!

Luckily, this time around, it’s nowhere near as vitriolic as the argument has been previously (that I’ve seen thus far), but it seems there there are some really pretentious knobs out there eager to try and elevate themselves by disparaging what others enjoy reading. I just don’t understand that mentality at all.

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Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

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Today in Talking Tolkien, it’s a long-term project I work on every so often. The story of the Nauglamir (The Necklace of the Dwarves) may well be my favorite story in all of The Legendarium. It was the subject of my very first Tolkien essay.

Last year, I read The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. I really liked that book. I also read part of The Story of Kullervo, though the layout and non-Tolkien commentary didn’t work nearly as well for me (it was not a Christopher Tolkien effort). Tolkien was an expert in this area. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit came from the old Noridc legends.

If your knowledge of Norse mythology comes from Bulfinch’s – or Marvel comic books – you’re going to find these are VERY different. But I liked reading the old sagas (and no wonder The Silmarillion is so depressing – those old Nordic sagas make Platoon look like a light-hearted romp).

And the Sigurd book got me a bit inspired.

I sketched out the entire history of the Silmaril which was fashioned into Nauglamir, and began creating an epic poem about it (NOT an ‘Epithon,’ for you Nero Wolfe fans out there…). I’m not into metering, so it doesn’t qualify for some definition of verse or form. But it still reads like a poem to me.

It’s 90 lines so far, with a lot more to go. The scope of the Nauglamir Silmaril is truly amazing, and fraught with tragedy. I’ll add more the next time I go into Tolkien mode. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this (except for a Solar Pons poem I wrote, summarizing “The Unique Dickensians”).

I can put together a haiku on the fly:

Source of joy and woe
Light of Yavanna shining
Pride of the Noldor

This, however, is well outside of my writing zone. But it’s fun.

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A Genealogical Look at Parke Godwin

A Genealogical Look at Parke Godwin

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Parke Godwin
Parke Godwin

Recently, we marked the tenth anniversary of the death of author Parke Godwin. As it happens, I started looking into Godwin’s background and it led me down a rabbit hole that goes back 333 years, to the birth of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather. It turns out Godwin came from a rather illustrious family that included state assemblymen, generals, editors, hoteliers, and industrialists, some of whom were associated with significant American figures including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

Before we look at his ancestors, let’s take a quick look at Parke Godwin. Godwin won the World Fantasy Award in 1982 for his novella “The Fire When It Comes,” which also earned him his only Hugo and Nebula Award nominations. He would later earn a World Fantasy Award nomination for a collection of the same title. His novel Firelord, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the short-lived coveted Balrog Award, losing to Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer and Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Wounded Land.

I imagine many people discovered Godwin’s writing with the publication of his satirical duology Waiting for the Galactic and The Snake Oil Wars, both of which were reprinted by the Science Fiction Book Club. He also wrote a two volume Robin Hood sequence, novels tackling Beowulf, St Patrick, and Harold of England.

But I promised a look at his ancestors, so we set the WABAC machine for 1720, when a thirty-year-old carpenter named Abraham Godwin arrived in New York from Hereford, England. Godwin worked as a carpenter for the Dey Company, where his son would also work before setting out from New York. Abraham died in 1770 in Totowa, New Jersey.

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Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

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We kicked off Talking Tolkien with Joe Bonadonna, and he’s back! After looking at religious themes in The Lord of the Rings the first time around, it’s philosophical ones in The Silmarillion. Joe does the heavy lifting – I’m just a pretty face. As with his first essay, he wades into pretty deep waters. Joe has guested for my ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ Pulp series, and I’m thrilled he wanted to Talk Tolkien. He even recruited two of our contributors. Read on, and thanks, Joe!

First, I want to reiterate that I am most definitely not an expert on Tolkien’s writings and his history of Middle-earth. Naturally, I’ve read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as Smith of Wooton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Children of Hurin. But I haven’t read anything else Tolkien wrote. Thus, I’ll only be scratching the surface here.

My sources used in research, from which I quoted passages, are: Ruth S. Noel’s The Mythology of Middle-Earth, Robert Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-Earth, William Ready’s Understanding Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien: The Complete Biography, and the Tolkien Gateway website, as well as The Hobbit, the appendices in The Return of the King, and The Silmarillion itself. Please note: although the titles of Kocher’s, Noel’s and Foster’s books use a capital E for “earth,” I will use Middle-earth as Tolkien himself did. All that being said, I just wanted to clear the air so you good folks who are reading this will know that I am by far no scholar or expert on all things Tolkien. I’m just here to share an old college essay with you.

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