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Category: Vintage Treasures

GreyDogTales on Equation Thrillers

GreyDogTales on Equation Thrillers

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Stories in the Dark-small Dracula's Brood-small Bone to His Bone-small

Yesterday my friend Neil Baker, publisher at April Moon Books, introduced me to blogger John Linwood Grant, who blogs at GreyDogTales. I wandered over to his corner of the internet, and was delighted to find a fascinating discussion of the Equation Chillers, a line of British horror anthologies I’d never heard of.

Right, let’s go back a few years. Nearly three decades, in fact. One of our finds of the late eighties was the short-lived Equation Chillers series. Sadly, only eight books were ever produced directly under the imprint. We have battered copies of all of them which we bought at the time, thank goodness.

They were, in a way, the precursor of the Wordsworth Editions, where lost, rare or unusual stories of the supernatural suddenly became available at an affordable price. Equation revived a whole haunted house full of Victorian and Edwardian short stories, and it’s worth noting all eight volumes here, with the occasional comment from us.

Anything in the spirit of the delightful Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural (or, as we prefer to call them, TOMAToS) has my immediate attention. Check out John’s full article — with plenty of marvelous cover scans — here. And it looks like I’ll be spending some quality time at his website.

Vintage Treasures: The Elsewhere Anthologies, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold

Vintage Treasures: The Elsewhere Anthologies, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold

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Elsewhere Volume 1-small Elsewhere Volume 2-small Elsewhere Volume 3-small

Terri Windling is a superstar in the field of fantasy. She’s been awarded the World Fantasy Award nine times, and she’s also won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the 2010 SFWA Solstice Award. As an editor at Ace she discovered and promoted first novels by Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and many other important authors; with Ellen Datlow she co-edited 16 volumes of the seminal Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror from 1986–2003. She’s also an author in her own right, with several highly regarded works to her credit, including the Mythopoeic Award-winning novel The Wood Wife, and a number of children’s books, such as The Raven Queen and The Winter Child.

But believe it or not, she got her start in this industry as an artist. I didn’t discover that until I interviewed Ellen Kushner for my Tale of Two Covers article on her Basilisk anthology earlier this month. Here’s Ellen:

It’s an anthology I’m still really proud of. It’s also how I met Terri Windling, who did the interior illustrations (which much more accurately represent the aesthetic of the stories). She’d just come to town, and was showing her art portfolio around. Jim [Baen] thought I’d like her work, and that he wouldn’t have to pay her much… Terri, of course, essentially took over my job as fantasy expert for Jim a few months after I left Ace.

Ellen reached out to Terri as we were fact checking the article, and in the process Terri gave me the fascinating back story on how she began her career as one of the most respected and admired editors in the field with the Elsewhere series of anthologies, the first of which won the World Fantasy Award. Here’s what she said.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu-Manchu, Part Five – “The Green Mist”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu-Manchu, Part Five – “The Green Mist”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on April 25, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 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.

CollMistinsidious5“The Green Mist” was the fourth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in January 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 10-12 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu [initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication]. When Rohmer incorporated the story into the novel, he added linking material intended to make the book appear timely and relevant. However, the true-life Yellow Peril news items that Rohmer has Petrie recount from actual British papers of the day strike a discordant note nearly a century on.

Freed from the exotic trappings of weird fiction, the straight journalism of the era seems dated, naïve, and offensive to modern sensibilities. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Sax Rohmer’s fiction and may also be experienced in the unenlightened views on display in the earliest of Herge’s Adventures of Tintin. Making matters worse is the current vogue for political correctness that believes in burying the past rather than learning from it. The combination of these factors stands as the most challenging obstacle facing mainstream publishers in the 21st Century marketplace.

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Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein

Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein

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Sorcerer's Son Phyllis Eisenstein-small Sorcerer's Son Phyllis Eisenstein-back-small

I ran into my friend Phyllis Eisenstein at the Windy City Pulp & Paper Show here in Chicago over the weekend, and the first thing she said to me was, “I’m retired!”

This is exciting news. Phyllis has been nurturing several writing projects for the past few years, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for them — and it’s great to hear that she’ll finally have more time to devote to them. Though I forgot to ask if it means we’ll finally get the long-promised third volume in her Book of Elementals fantasy series, which began with Sorcerer’s Son in 1979, and continued with The Crystal Palace (1988). The third volume, The City in Stone, was actually completed a decade ago, but was left without a publisher after the sudden collapse of Meisha Merlin in 2007. The first two volumes are now long out of print.

Phyllis’ other novels include Shadow of Earth (1979), In the Hands of Glory (1981), and the Tales of Alaric the Minstrel (two novels, Born to Exile (1978) and In the Red Lord’s Reach (1989), plus various short stories). Her work has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but these days of course she’s most famous for being the person who convinced George R.R. Martin to put dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Four – “Redmoat”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Four – “Redmoat”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on April 4, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 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.

Romer_-_MysteryOrbanRedmoat“Redmoat” was the third installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial Fu-Manchu, first published in The Story-Teller in December 1912. The story would later comprise Chapters 7-9 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication) in 1913. “Redmoat” is significant for delving into the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising. As we discussed in Part Three, this conflict leant credence to the Yellow Peril fiction that had been steadily gaining in popularity over the preceding fifty years. More importantly for our purpose, the Boxer Uprising provided a motive for Dr. Fu-Manchu’s actions.

There are two principal supporting players to the story who are worthy of greater consideration. The first is the Reverend J. D. Eltham. Reverend Eltham had earned a name for himself during his missionary days in China as “Parson Dan.” Nayland Smith tells Dr. Petrie that Eltham “held off two hundred Boxers at a hospital in Nan-Yang with only a garrison of a dozen cripples and a German doctor for support.” The heroic clergyman’s evangelical zeal had resulted, according to Smith, in the Boxer Uprising. While ascribing the blame for that conflict on a single missionary is more than a bit implausible, it is interesting that Rohmer, an Edwardian author, took a critical view of the British Empire and recognized that intolerance to Chinese culture not only hindered the goal of religious conversion, but sparked China’s decision to drive the foreigners out of their country by whatever means necessary. It is also interesting to note that as Fu-Manchu is the personification of the Yellow Peril, so Parson Dan is the personification of colonial intolerance at its worst.

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The Exhumation of Myra Maynard

The Exhumation of Myra Maynard

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mysteries-of-myra-book-225x320myra1Most people have never heard of The Mysteries of Myra, much less seen the surviving footage. This 1916 silent serial was produced by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and directed by The Wharton Brothers for The Whartons Studio in Ithaca, New York. As late as the early talkie era, New York was still a rival for Hollywood with Paramount Pictures based on the East Coast until the early 1930s. The Mysteries of Myra was intended to carry on the tradition of The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, it was the work of the same screenwriter of those two lucrative serials, Charles Goddard, but The Mysteries of Myra was very different from any serial before or since in terms of structure and content.

Charles Goddard’s 15 chapter screenplay was developed from an original story treatment by real life occult detective, Hereward Carrington. Dr. Carrington was a member of the infamous Society for Psychical Research and a colleague of Harry Houdini. While a skeptic who exposed many false claims of psychic phenomena and hauntings, Dr. Carrington was also a believer in demonic possession, the afterlife, and other preternatural occurrences. The hero of the piece, Dr. Payson Alden, occult detective is clearly based on Hereward Carrington. The Mysteries of Myra is concerned with Dr. Alden’s efforts to save heiress Myra Maynard from the occult society, The Black Order and to win her heart from her contemptible fiancé , Arthur Varney, who is the right hand man of The Grand Master of The Black Order.

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The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

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MacDonald Gold Watch1John D. MacDonald is one of my favourite crime writers, and he’s probably best known for his Travis McGee series, starting with The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) and ending with The Lonely Silver Rain (1985). Others, such as Glen Cook,  have used this device after him, but I’m fairly certain that MacDonald’s the first person who identified individual books in his series by giving each one a title colour.

While John D. is well worth looking into for any of his genre or non-genre novels, I’d like to draw your attention in particular to his only SF contribution, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.

In this story a mild-mannered young man, Kirby Winter, inherits from his uncle a watch that will stop time for everyone except the person holding it. Of course Uncle Omar used the watch to make himself rich, but he also did a lot of good. He tried to keep as low a profile as possible, but unscrupulous types figured out he had something that gave him a edge in the money world, and now they’re after Kirby to get whatever it is for themselves. That’s the essential problem and conflict of the novel, and with the help of Bonnie Lee Beaumont, a young woman who happens to be a good deal quicker off the mark and savvy about the world than Kirby is, the problem gets solved.

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Vintage Treasures: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe

Vintage Treasures: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe

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Inter Ice Age 4-small Inter Ice Age 4-back-small

The recent success of foreign SF writers in translation in the US — including Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Hex), among others — seems like a modern phenomenon. But truthfully, our genre has been open to talented writers from around the world for decades. As far back as the days of Jules Verne, Americans have been warmly receptive to foreign SF writers, and over the decades that’s included authors like Stanislaw Lem (Solaris), Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities), Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths), Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic), Pierre Boulle (The Planet of the Apes) and Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher).

Japanese writer Kōbō Abe (the pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, who died in 1993) isn’t as well remembered here as some others, but he had a considerable impact in Japan. In 1951 he received Japan’s most important literary award, the Akutagawa, for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma, and in 1960 his novel The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize. His 1959 novel Inter Ice Age 4 imagines a world slowly being submerged by melting polar ice, and the desperate race to genetically modify children so they can survive the coming underwater age — and the strange prophetic computer that attempts to guide mankind into a very uncertain future.

Inter Ice Age 4 was written in 1959, and published in paperback in the US by Berkely in March 1972. It is 223 pages, priced at 95 cents. The cover is by Richard Powers. I acquired the unread copy above for about 60 cents last month, as part of a collection of 42 vintage SF paperbacks on eBay I bought for $27. Click the images for bigger versions.

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

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To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-small To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-back-small

When I was a wee lad discovering science fiction for the first time, I eagerly read and enjoyed all the most famous SF series. Dune, Foundation, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber — and Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won the 1972 Hugo Award, and it’s not hard to see why. The premise, that every human who ever lived wakes up one morning on the shores of a great river, was thoroughly original, and Farmer built on it brilliantly, crafting a science fiction novel peopled with famous historical figures, including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hermann Göring, a fictionalized version of Farmer himself (“Peter Jairus Frigate”), and especially the famed explorer Richard Francis Burton, who sets out to solve the mystery of this strange world.

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Vintage Trash: I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA by Ted Mark

Vintage Trash: I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA by Ted Mark

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i-was-a-teeny-bopper-for-the-cia-movie-poster-9999-1020429335Many, many years ago I worked at a used bookstore called Bookmans in Tucson. Everybody from Arizona knows Bookmans. They have several stores around the state and they’re all as big as supermarkets, filled with used books, music, and games. Most books are half cover price, and employees got a 50% discount. Sometimes the manager would be like, “You did a good job today, Sean, take a book.”

I realized that I would never get another opportunity like that in my life and took full advantage. My library exploded with books on every topic imaginable. I also learned the joy of collecting vintage paperbacks, with the added joy of getting them for next to nothing.

So when I came across Ted Mark’s I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA I just had to get it. I’d never heard of the title or author before (I wasn’t about to forget that title!) and figured this would be something I’d never see again. I was right, I’ve never seen that book again, and now, 20 years later, I finally got around to reading it.

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