Browsed by
Category: Vintage Treasures

Everything’s Coming up Aces: All the Covers of Galactic Derelict

Everything’s Coming up Aces: All the Covers of Galactic Derelict

Comments 4 comments
Galactic Derelict 1961-big Galactic Derelict 1971-small Galactic Derelict 1978-small

Click any of the images to see the complete wrap-around covers.

Last week I wrote a brief Vintage Treasures article about Andre Norton’s classic SF adventure novel Galactic Derelict. Here’s what I said about the book’s printing history:

Galactic Derelict was published in 1959 by the World Publishing Company and has been reprinted in eight different editions over the last half-century. It first appeared in paperback from Ace Books in 1961. It is 192 pages in paperback, priced at 35 cents. The cover is by Ed Emshwiller. If I have a few moments this weekend, I may assemble some of the other covers to display them here.

Well, on this leisurely Memorial Day weekend, I finally have a few minutes to pull together half a dozen covers from the book’s five decades in print, and here they are.

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Hammer Hound

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Hammer Hound

Comments 8 comments
CushingHoundPoster1
There are several good posters for this film.

Last week, we looked at Tom Baker’s relatively unknown Hound of the Baskervilles. As this post is being published on May 26, which is the birthday of a classic Holmes, we’ll look his version of The Hound. For on this date in 1913, Peter Cushing was born in Surrey.

Basil Rathbone’s contract expired in 1946 and, feeling imprisoned in the role of Sherlock Holmes, he refused to renew it. So great was his shadow that it would be thirteen years before another studio even attempted to make a Sherlock Holmes movie. Hammer Films is legendary in England for their run of horror films, starting in the fifties.

Those old Universal classics from America had never caught on across the pond. Hammer, however, made a series of successful horror films, frequently co-starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

In 1959, Hammer broke new ground with the first colorized version of The Hound. Not surprisingly, they turned to Cushing and Lee to carry the movie.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Vintage Treasures: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Comments 5 comments

Year's Best Horror Stories 13-smallI’m still working my way through the fabulous collection of pulps, digest magazines, and paperbacks I brought back from the Windy City Pulp & Paperback show in April.

I found the artifact at left mixed in with a delightful assortment of 80s horror paperbacks near the back of the Dealer’s Room. It’s the 13th volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, which Karl Edward Wagner took over from editor Gerald W. Page in 1980 with the eighth volume.

The Year’s Best Horror was a long-running paperback horror anthology published by DAW. Like Donald Wollheim’s World’s Best SF and Lin Carter and Arthur Saha’s Year’s Best Fantasy, both also from DAW, it was a staple on bookstore shelves through the late 70s and early 80s, and served as a terrific introduction to a wide range of new and established writers every year.

For young readers new to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, DAW’s annual Best collections were a terrific way to explore the field. They were ubiquitous, extremely well edited, and — best of all — marvelously inexpensive.

Wagner edited fifteen installments in the series, until he drank himself to death in 1994. The last one was volume XXII, and the series died with him.

If you want to collect DAW’s World’s Best SF and Year’s Best Fantasy, you’re on your own, relegated to tracking down tattered paperbacks in the collector’s market — and paying a pretty penny when you found them. Karl Edward Wagner Year’s Best Horror volumes, however, established an early and enviable reputation as a treasure trove of high-quality horror… so much so that Underwood Miller made the unprecedented decision in the early 90s to collect them  in hardcover omnibus editions, three per volume, under the title Horrorstory — and what gorgeously packed volumes they were.

…

Read More Read More

Galaxy, September 1972: A Retro Review

Galaxy, September 1972: A Retro Review

Comments 4 comments

Galaxy September 1972-smallI don’t usually look at magazines quite this recent in these reviews… though now that I think about this, this issue appeared well over 40 years ago! It’s a fairly significant issue in context, though coming from a period in Galaxy’s history usually disparaged.

This period was the editorship of Ejler Jakobsson, which extended from 1969 to 1974. He succeeded Frederik Pohl, and preceded Jim Baen, two extremely important figures in SF editing. Indeed, the only other editor of Galaxy before Pohl was H. L. Gold, yet another absolutely central SF editor. So Jakobsson was bound to have a hard time being compared to that crowd. A number of writers complained that Jakobsson was an editorial meddler (ironically, the same complaint was often made of Gold).

I confess I have never thought much of Jakobsson’s reign myself. I began reading Galaxy in October 1974, shortly after Baen took over. And I loved Baen’s Galaxy. The few issues of Jakobsson’s I’ve seen before this one have been rather dull.

I often have read words to the effect that he knew little or nothing about SF, but that’s not quite true. He was Finnish and emigrated to the US in 1926, aged 15. In the ’40s, he worked on the magazines Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and indeed edited the latter for a couple of years starting in 1949. But he had been out of the field since that time – so perhaps it was more accurate to say he knew little about then contemporary SF.

He did have a couple of important assistants: Judy-Lynn Benjamin was Managing Editor and Lester Del Rey was Features Editor. (Del Rey and Benjamin married later, of course, and co-founded the Del Rey Books imprint.)

…

Read More Read More

Meet You In The Bar

Meet You In The Bar

Comments 4 comments

talesLast week I introduced the topic of the bar story and I saw from the comments that I struck a popular chord.

As I mentioned, the bar story is an example of a framing device, a literary tool which enables a writer to link a series of stories, in this case by having them told by people who have gathered together in a bar. The question of whether the “club story” qualified as a “bar story” came up, and on thinking it over, I realized that it did. For purposes of tale-telling – to say nothing of drinking – one’s club is essentially the same as one’s local.

This week, I’d like to talk in a little more depth about the anthologies edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, Tales From The Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989).

As they tell us in the preface to Tales,  the editors were inspired to collect these stories by what they call “that magnificent old cliché with chairs” the spaceport bar – as depicted in the scene from Star Wars (Episode IV, for those of you who weren’t around at the time). The preface also gives us a more detailed history of the sub-genre of “bar story” than I gave you last week.

I think we can all agree, however, that the important contents here are the 22 stories, not the preface. Many, if not most, of the stories are examples of framework “bar stories”, like Larry Niven’s “The Green Marauder” from his Draco’s Tavern series, “Elephas Frumenti” from the Gavagan’s Bar series of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, “Strategy at the Billiards Club” from Lord Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkin series, or Spider Robinson’s “The Centipede’s Dilemna” from Callahan’s Bar.

…

Read More Read More

Hardboiled Pulp: More Than Just a Man’s World

Hardboiled Pulp: More Than Just a Man’s World

Comments 1 comment

nogoodfromacorpsecorpse 2The world of hardboiled pulp is certainly male-dominated, but there have been female authors who have given the masters of the sub-genre a run for their money. Leigh Brackett is certainly the best known female hardboiled writer, if only for her screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1945) for director Howard Hawks’s acclaimed film featuring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Brackett also adapted Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973) for director Robert Altman’s deconstruction of the genre with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. Less well-remembered is the hardboiled novel that won Brackett the chance to first adapt Chandler, No Good from a Corpse (1944).

From the outset, it is clear this is Chandler territory. Brackett’s tough guy private eye hero Ed Clive (named for Brackett’s husband and fellow pulp author, Edmond Hamilton) is very much in the Marlowe tradition and the Los Angeles setting only enhances the authentic feel. More than the trappings, it is the fact that Brackett writes convincingly as a man (particularly in her observations of women as objects of lust who are never to be entirely trusted) that is the most startling. One understands Howard Hawks’s surprise when he hired Brackett as a screenwriter on the strength of this book and found out she was a woman. Murder, blackmail, sultry singers, and beatings and shootings aplenty make No Good from a Corpse an unsung classic of pulp detective fiction.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead

New Treasures: Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead

Comments 18 comments

Voodoo Tales The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead-smallI continue to collect the Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural, which I’ve found to be an inexpensive way to gather a diverse range of early horror writers on a single bookshelf.

My latest acquisition was Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead, which I bought because it was huge (691 pages!), inexpensive ($3.90!), and ’cause it had voodoo in it (voodoo!). What can I tell you, it was a compelling combo.

I’ve never heard of Henry S. Whitehead, but apparently he was an early Weird Tales writer who had two Arhkam House collections. You’d think I’d be more on top of an author who had a pair of Arhkam House collections, but no. This genre keeps finding more ways to surprise me.

I’m guessing that Whitehead wrote mostly voodoo tales, but I won’t know for sure until I dig into the volume. Until then, I’m relying on the cover and the text on the back, and I’m definitely picking up a voodoo vibe.

“And behind him, like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, its red tongue lolling out of its gash of a mouth, its diminutive blubbery lips drawn back in a murderous snarl…”

Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world of voodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of the living are racked by the spirits of the dead. In this collection of rare and out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the great Guinea-Snake, the Sheen, the weredog whose very touch means certain death, the curious tale of the ‘magicked’ mirror, and fiendish manikins who make life a living hell. Included in this festival of shivering fear is the remarkable narrative ‘Williamson’ which every editor who read the story shied away from publishing.

With deceptive simplicity and chilling realism, Whitehead’s Voodoo Tales are amongst the most frightening ever written.

…

Read More Read More

Jews With Swords: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Jews With Swords: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Comments 6 comments

oie_19193039NDl2SGNtIn 2002, Michael Chabon edited a collection of retro-pulp stories titled McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, filled with stories by both literary writers and genre writers. I found it underwhelming. What grabbed me, though, was Chabon’s cri de couer for a return to plot in fiction. And in so doing he wanted writers to be able to use whatever genres they wanted to tell whatever stories they wanted, without fear of being dismissed as no longer writing “literature.”

While he had by then written the superhero-themed novel Kavalier and Klay and the baseball and Norse Mythos mashup Summerland, he was known primarily as an author of literary fiction. From that point on, he threw himself deep into the waters of plot and genre. Since then, he’s written a Sherlock Holmes novella, The Final Solution, the Nebula- and Hugo-winning alternate history novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and the screenplay for John Carter.

In 2007, as part of his exploration of plot and genre, he wrote Gentlemen of the Road, an unabashed, fun-for-the-sake-of-fun swashbuckler. Hewing to its old roots, it was initially serialized in the New York Times Magazine. His working title and, as he writes, “in my heart the true” one, was Jews With Swords.

While he hoped to invoke memories of Jewish troopers at Antietam or Inkerman, or warriors like Bar Kochba and Judah Maccabee, most people found it too incongruous. But that incongruity, between Jews with swords and the modern steroptype of Jews as decidedly un-adventurous, was something Chabon wanted to explore. He notes that from their very begininning, when Abraham was told by God “lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home,” Jews have been wanderers and “by definition, find adventure.” In his own words, he “attempted to…find some shadowy kingdom where a self-respecting Jewish adventurer would not be caught dead without his sword or his battle-ax.”

…

Read More Read More

One of the Best Serials Ever Made: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter One: Curse of the Scorpion

One of the Best Serials Ever Made: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter One: Curse of the Scorpion

Comments 9 comments

Adventures of Captain Marvel poster-smallPop quiz. Who was the first superhero to make it into film?

Yes — you in the back…what? Spawn?! Sit down! Okay… you there, in the Marvel Zombie tee-shirt… no, it was not Wolverine, though there may never be another superhero movie made without him. Yes, I see you… Superman? Good guess, but nope. Batman? Warmer, but still no.

The first superhero to make it into the movies was Captain Marvel (or as his four-color arch-nemesis, Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, contemptuously dubbed him, “That Big Red Cheese”), in the 1941 serial, The Adventures of Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel and his alter ego, young radio reporter Billy Batson, made their first appearance in Fawcett’s Whiz Comics #2, in February of 1940. The character, the creation of writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Beck, quickly became extremely popular, and for the remainder of the 1940’s, comics featuring him and the other members of the “Marvel Family” often outsold those featuring Superman.

National Periodical Publications (commonly known to comics fans as DC) tried to nip the rivalry in the bud by suing Captain Marvel out of existence in a legal wrangle that wouldn’t be decisively resolved until 1954. Well before that, though, Republic Pictures hopped on the bandwagon with The Adventures of Captain Marvel, a twelve-chapter serial that aficionados of the form regard as one of the best ever made.

The serial was directed by John English and William Whitney and written by the team of Ronald Davidson, Norman Hall, Arch Heath, Joseph Poland, and Sol Shor. They all keep the pot bubbling with action, peril, suspense, red herrings, and the crackling, popping energy that seems to be a unique feature of the best cliffhanger serials.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Two Decades of Interzone

Vintage Treasures: Two Decades of Interzone

Comments 0 Comment
Interzone 108-small Interzone 119-small Interzone 138-small

Interzone is the leading British science fiction magazine and has been for over 30 years. It was founded in 1982 and editor David Pringle remained at the helm for 193 issues, until he stepped down in 2004. Since then, it has been part of the TTA Press stable, with the capable Andy Cox as editor; their latest issue — Interzone 252, May–June 2014 — arrived earlier this month. In fact,the only thing not marvelous about Interzone is that it’s so hard to come by here in the US. Barnes & Noble imports issues every two months (although at the prohibitively high price tag of $11.95), but back issues are almost impossible to find. Even eBay isn’t much help.

Enter 2013 Windy City Pulp & Paper last month. I made some terrific purchases at the show, and I’ll be telling you about them over the next few weeks. But hands down, my best find of the weekend was a vast collection of fanzines and assorted 70s and 80s fantasy magazines in a $1 bin at the Adventure House booth — including 64 issues of Interzone, most of them unread. I ended up buying all of them… by far the largest collection of Interzone I’ve ever purchased. I bought about 30 recent issues from a UK seller a few years ago, but these were much older, and much less expensive: a beautiful assortment of issues between 75 and 191, with original fiction from Michael Bishop, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Moorcock, Tony Ballantyne, Paul Park, Thomas M. Disch, Eric Brown, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Geoff Ryman, Tanith Lee, Ian Watson, Richard Calder, and many, many others.

…

Read More Read More