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Blogging Sax Rohmer… in the Beginning, Part One

Blogging Sax Rohmer… in the Beginning, Part One

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illo-Sax Rohmerrohmer2“The Mysterious Mummy” marked Sax Rohmer’s first appearance in print. Only 20 years old at the time, Rohmer was then writing under the byline of A. Sarsfield Ward. Born Arthur Henry Ward, Sarsfield was a surname of historical repute from his mother’s side of the family, which he adopted at the start of his writing career.

A preview of the story was featured in the November 19, 1903 issue of Pearson’s Weekly, with the full story printed in the November 24 issue. “The Mysterious Mummy” languished in obscurity until it was reprinted by Peter Haining in the 1986 anthology, Ray Bradbury Introduces Tales of Dungeons and Dragons. Haining also included the story in the 1988 anthology, The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse. Rohmer scholar Gene Christie selected the story for inclusion in the first volume of Black Dog Books’ Sax Rohmer Library, The Green Spider and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense, published in 2011.

The most interesting feature about this first foray into fiction is that it is not at all a living mummy story, but rather a straight heist caper. Rohmer later disingenuously claimed that a copycat theft was attempted in France and the thief was arrested with a copy of Pearson’s Weekly on his person, featuring the story which he claimed was so good he had to risk trying it in real life. Rohmer, of course, was a terribly unreliable interview subject. While it is possible the press were more gullible a century ago, it is more likely they viewed his tall tales as good copy.

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A Date with the Scorpion: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Seven: Human Targets

A Date with the Scorpion: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Seven: Human Targets

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human targets lobby cardOkay boys and girls, settle down. Before watching newsreel footage of Winston Churchill walking through the ruins of London or thrilling to the terrifying spectacle of Lon Chaney Jr. changing into a human Scottish Terrier in The Wolf Man, let’s Join Billy, Betty, the Scorpion, and the rest for this week’s chapter of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, “Human Targets.”

We begin with two terse title cards that will bring everyone up to date. “The Scorpion — Tricks Bentley and Fisher into revealing the hiding place of their lenses.” “Captain Marvel — Saves Bentley’s lens and hurries to Fisher’s estate.” Now speak the wizard’s name and let his arcane arts give you powers so great that you need never fear for your lunch money again!

In a flashback to last week’s episode, we see Captain Marvel arrive at Fisher’s “estate” (to me it just looks like a big house that needs painting and must be hard to heat) and break down the door as the Scorpion hides behind the drapes. When he grabs the lens, the World’s Mightiest Mortal is knocked out by Fisher’s electrical protection apparatus. He drops to the floor, joining the unconscious Whitey and the dead Fisher.

The Scorpion pries the lens out of Captain Marvel’s hand and hightails it out of there. (Only the most cynical child would say that the fabulous artifact of the lost Scorpion Dynasty looks like a painted wooden dowel with shiny stickers stuck on each end.)

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True North

True North

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cns77The hobby of tabletop roleplaying games was born in the American Midwest, but very quickly spread beyond the wargames clubs of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Forty years after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, RPGs are played and enjoyed throughout the world. Many countries outside the United States can rightly boast of their own roleplaying games and designers, some of which, such as Britain’s Warhammer games, have arguably proved as influential as D&D. Since today is Canada Day, I thought it fitting to post a short tribute to two Canadian roleplaying game designers whose work, while perhaps not as widely known as that of Arneson and Gygax, is nevertheless worthy of note, particularly by those of us who have come to appreciate and indeed prefer what has come to be called “old school” gaming.

As everyone interested in such things knows by now, Dungeons & Dragons first appeared in 1974. The originality of its concept inspired others to create similar games of their own, the first being Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls, published in 1975. Many more followed, including Chivalry & Sorcery, written by two wargamers at the University of Alberta, Edward E. Simbalist and Wilfried K. Backhaus. C&S was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977 and owes its existence to some questions Simbalist and Backhaus asked after playing D&D, as they explain at the start of the rulebook:

Chivalry & Sorcery began innocently enough with a discussion about the vacuum that our characters seemed to be living in between dungeon and wilderness campaigns. In the Fantasy Wargames Society of the University of Alberta a degree of dissatisfaction emerged over the limited goals that were available to our characters. The solution was to develop an all-encompassing campaign game in which dungeon and wilderness adventures were just a small part of the action.

Initially called Chevalier, Simbalist admitted in an interview that Chivalry & Sorcery was “a D&D clone in some respects.” The pair even intended to pitch the game to TSR for publication, but chose instead to work with FGU. Chevalier “contain[ed] all of the seeds that would soon spring forth as Chivalry & Sorcery,” which Simbalist believed was “a dramatic departure from the slash and hack approach to RPG that existed in those early days.”

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Changa’s Safari: Volume 2 by Milton Davis

Changa’s Safari: Volume 2 by Milton Davis

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oie_122213ZGX0sjXjI read fantasy — and swords & sorcery in particular — because it’s fun. Like most middle-class Americans I lead a very safe life, which I’m very happy about, but from which I sometimes like to take a break. Occasionally I need to hear the whoosh of a sword just missing Conan’s head, to peer down into the dark alleys of Tai-tastigon from the rooftops of strange gods’ temples, to smell the fires of Granbretan’s vile sorceries. Sometimes I need to get out of my content, comfortable place and journey to places unknown and fantastic.

Milton Davis, sword & soul maven, delivers exactly that kind of trip in Changa’s Safari: Volume 2 (2012). The story of swashbuckling merchant Changa Diop traveling the 14th century Indian Ocean, it continues the adventures of Changa’s Safari: Volume 1 (2010), which was reviewed by Charles “Imaro” Saunders on Black Gate several years ago.

Once a prince of the Bakongo, Changa was sold into slavery when his father was killed by the sorceror Usenge. He was rescued from the slave-fighting pits of Mogadishu by a kindly merchant. His rescuer, Belay, taught him how to be a trader and eventually made him his heir.

Vol. 1 tells of the arrival of a great Chinese fleet off the East Africa coast and Changa’s journey alongside it back to China with his own fleet. There he confronts — boldly and with plenty of sword flourishing and magic — all manner of things you’d hope to meet in this kind of story: evil demigoddesses, pirates, conniving courtiers, and a Mongol horde. You know, the good stuff.

Volume 2 picks up a short time after Changa and his ships have left China for home. Home is Sofala, once a prosperous port in present-day Mozambique. It’s a long way from the Straits of Malacca (where the book opens with a tremendous multi-ship battle against Sangir pirates) to Sofala, which leaves a lot of room for adventure.

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Blogging Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, Part Three – The Black Gang

Blogging Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, Part Three – The Black Gang

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2940011937965_p0_v1_s260x420BD02-Cover-01The most striking feature of the second Bulldog Drummond thriller by Sapper is the near complete removal of humor from the proceedings compared with the frequent light touch demonstrated with the initial book in the series. There is also precious little mention of the First World War, which was such an important factor in the first book, as the focus here is much more on the reaction against the Russian Revolution and the fear of a similar Communist uprising occurring in Britain during the early 1920s. Once more the influence of Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men series is strongly felt, particularly in the first half of the book, where the Black Gang are featured anonymously with no mention of their true identities.

Many critics label this second entry in the long-running series as fascist. I suppose that is an understandable reaction to a vigilante storyline in which it is suggested Britain would benefit from modifying freedom of speech to deny protection to political radicals. The Black Gang is very much a Machiavellian work, but one which seeks to restore order at its conclusion by having Hugh Drummond agree to dismantle the Black Gang and let the law sit in judgment over criminals going forward. Of course with such a finale as this, one wonders why Sapper bothered to take the proceedings to such an extreme in the first place.

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Vintage Treasures: Stephen E. Fabian’s Ladies & Legends

Vintage Treasures: Stephen E. Fabian’s Ladies & Legends

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Stephen Fabian Ladies and Legends-thumbI brought home two boxes of treasures from the 2014 Windy City Pulp & Paper show in April. I’ve been very happy with my various finds, which included a rich assortment of eye-catching pulps, vintage paperbacks, classic anthologies, and hard-to-find fanzines and magazines. I’ve covered some of the more interesting items here in the past few months.

But I’ve saved the best for the last: a luscious collection of black and white artwork from one of my all-time favorite artists, Stephen E. Fabian.

A few years ago, Scott Taylor asked me to provide my list of nominees for his Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years and I had Fabian right near the top, along with Wally Wood and Al Williamson. (None of those three made the list. Go figure.)

Stephen Fabian is one of the great craftsmen in all of fantasy. It’s not merely his command of the medium and his consummate technical skill… his art is genuinely beautiful (a characteristic I frequently find lacking with some of his contemporaries). Fabian has an unerring eye for composition, perfectly positioning his knights, mermaids, and grave robbers among moonlit ruins, floating fairy castles, and more imaginative settings.

He’s equally at home with humor, action, and horror, and all are on display in Stephen E. Fabian’s Ladies & Legends. He’s frequently at his best with pen and ink drawings, as he is here. This is a gorgeous book and, like the best fantasy artwork, it will set your imagination soaring.

Warning — some adult content ahead.

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Dodging Molten Rock and High Voltage: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Six: Lens of Death

Dodging Molten Rock and High Voltage: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Six: Lens of Death

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lens of death lobby card-smallCongratulations on squeezing a dime out of your notoriously stingy dad, and successfully ditching your twerpy kid brother on the way to the show. You’ve proven your worthiness and can now lean back and enjoy today’s chapter of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, “Lens of Death.” (You can’t put your feet up, not just because you’d get in trouble with the ushers, but because the floor is so sticky you’d leave your shoes behind if you tried.)

By this point, mid-way through the serial, the filmmakers know that attention spans are waning, so we’re down to a mere two title cards to catch up those who dozed through last week’s episode (which we covered here). “The Scorpion – Forces Owens to lead Billy Batson into the Harrison mine tunnel.” “Captain Marvel – Unmasks the Scorpion and finds a loud speaker concealed in a dummy.” Now say the magic name and gain the fabulous power of forgetting all the chores that are waiting for you at home!

A flashback to last week’s searing cliffhanger shows an increasingly agitated Captain Marvel trying to find a way out of the Harrison mine as the Scorpion and his stooges turn the power of the lenses on the entrance, melting the rock and sending a river of steaming lava gushing through the tunnels. Trapped, the World’s Mightiest Mortal backs against a wall, a look of dismay on his face. (Our hero certainly can’t be frightened – he just knows that it’ll be a big pain getting that tight-fisted old Shazam to pop for the bill if this costume needs to be dry-cleaned.)

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Dark of the Moon by P. C. Hodgell

Dark of the Moon by P. C. Hodgell

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“Just once, why can’t we have a simple crisis?”

Jame from Dark of the Moon

oie_21182141KKAZmv94P. C. Hodgell’s Dark of the Moon (1985), a swift-paced dual narrative of twins Jame and Tori Knorth, is the sequel to her awesomely-amazing-why-haven’t-you-read-it-yet first novel, God Stalk (see my Black Gate review here). Jame, heroine of the first book, is racing into the west to find her brother while Tori, High Lord of the Kencyrath, is racing south to bring his army to bear on a threat that could destroy the world.

Hodgell wrote God Stalk as an introduction for her heroine Jame and to be sure she could write a full-length novel. To ease readers into the complex and madly elaborate world of Rathilien, she set it in the deliberately Leiberesque city of Tai-Tastigon. Like Leiber’s S&S, Hodgell’s moves easily from the grim to the funny and back without dissonance in an intimately scaled, fantastical urban playground.

But Hodgell had already planned a story of vaster scope about Jame and the Kencyrath which is only hinted at in God Stalk. The Kencyrath were bound to their god in order to fight Perimal Darkness, the embodiment of evil and chaos, and had been waging that battle for millennia. The war and the consequential flight of the Kencyrath to the world of Rathilien is always lurking beneath the surface of the story, but it’s never the driving force, the focus being on Jame’s adventures and efforts to understand the true nature of the world’s gods.

With Dark of the Moon, Hodgell and Jame leap out of the familiar shallows of Tai-Tastigon and its plethora of cults, sects, and secret societies, into the depths of full-blown epic fantasy. The ages-long struggle against Perimal Darkness moves to center stage and Jame emerges as possibly the most important figure in the war.

I’ve read that some fans of God Stalk were put off by the epic scale of Jame’s new adventure. I admit that in 1985, when I first read DotM, I was a little disappointed when I realized that Tai-tastigon was fading behind her, but within a few pages Hodgell had me hooked. High in a snowy mountain pass, Jame and her companions are confronted by something like a nasty pack of wolverines, a shapechanging enemy out of legend, and wonderfully miscast magic. This book charges into motion and never lets up. This is my fifth or sixth reread of this book and it thrills every time.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Nero Wolfe

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Nero Wolfe

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Wolfe_Drawing1In 1926, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned his last Holmes tale, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman. Rex Stout, a fan of those tales, would shortly create a detective who would not only evoke memories of Holmes, but who would cast his own (gargantuan) shadow: Nero Wolfe. The seventy-four stories, written over forty-one years, would be collectively known as the Corpus, akin to the Sherlockian Canon.

Nero Wolfe lives in a New York City brownstone with Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. This boys’ club (Wolfe makes Holmes look like a romantic) is a self-contained unit, with Wolfe and Archie solving crimes, Fritz cooking and taking care of the household chores, and Horstmann assisting Wolfe with his hobby, the cultivation of orchids in a rooftop greenhouse.

Archie often comments on the beauty of the orchids, which is a far cry from the thoughts of General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: “Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe, I guess.

Because the characters do not age, the stories all have a comfortable familiarity about them. Also, they are set contemporary to their writing, so while in a Holmes tale, it is ‘always 1895’, the Wolfe stories feel much more like modern mysteries, even though some are over seventy-five years old.

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Vintage Treasures: Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager

Vintage Treasures: Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager

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Master of Hawks Linda Bushyager-smallThursday’s article on Theodore Sturgeon’s The Stars Are the Styx reminded me of other Dell paperbacks we used to read, collect, and pass around enthusiastically in 1979. Perhaps the most popular was Linda E. Bushyager’s Master of Hawks.

Linda Bushyager is forgotten today. She wrote only two novels, Master of Hawks and its loose sequel, The Spellstone of Shaltus (May 1980), before vanishing, like J.D. Salinger. But she was far from forgotten among fantasy fans in the early 80s, who found her pair of novels set in the magical Eastern Kingdoms original and a lot of fun. Here’s the back cover blurb for Master of Hawks.

War of the Wizards

Backed by the power of the world’s mightiest sorcerers, the forces of the Empire marched on the Kingdom of York. But York had its own wizardry… including the telepathic gift of young Hawk, who could control every kind of bird — and more, see through their eyes.

The key to York’s survival was an alliance with the Sylvan — mysterious forest dwellers who mistrusted all humans — and to win their friendship, Hawk embarked on a quest deep into Empire territory, where only his mastery of his winged comrades could bring him through alive.

Linda E. Bushyager reappeared briefly in 2002, co-authoring the SF novel Pacifica with John Gregory Betancourt. She’s published nothing since.

Master of Hawks was published in July 1979 by Dell Publishing Co. It is 256 pages, originally priced at $1.95. The cover is by Maelo Cintron. It remained out of print for nearly 30 years, before being reprinted by Fantastic Books in trade paperback in April 2010. There is no digital edition.