Because One Frederick Faust Post Isn’t Enough: The Sacking of El Dorado
“So it will be when we are dead that perhaps our lives will stand for something.”
“A typewriter is almost like a human being to me.”
“Have recently sent thirty-eight poems to our leading magazines and received thirty-eight poems back from our leading magazines.”
“All that can save fiction is enormous verve, a real sweep, plus richness of character, blood that can be seen shining through.”
“Why is my verse so difficult, so dead, so dull to other people?”
—Frederick Faust, from various letters
I was surprised but pleased to see the positive reaction that my post about Frederick Faust, a.k.a. Max Brand, received last week. It was enough for me to want to spend an extra week on the author, specifically to take a closer look at an individual volume of his work. Faust has rarely received this sort of attention, as John C. Hocking pointed out in the comments last week, and so I’ll spend another Tuesday of your time talking about a man who was not only the most prolific of the pulpsters, but one of the most skilled and literary.
Last week Tor.com ran a terrific article by Michael Moorcock about the origins of his (recently reprinted) Hawkmoon stories. In ‘
The Sorcerer’s Guild 
I wanted to point all of you to the fine series of articles over on 
The Sorcerer’s Guild announced this week that John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” (from Black Gate 13) has been nominated for the Harper’s Pen Award (formerly the Ham-Sized Fist Award).
Most pulp writers of the 1930s were itching to break into the hardcover book market. Since reprints of pulp stories in book form were rare at the time, these writers did not expect that their work for the newsstands would survive past an issue’s sell-date. They felt comfortable re-working and expanding on them to create novels. Raymond Chandler famously called his process of novelizing his already published work as “cannibalizing.” He welded together different short stories, often keeping large sections of text intact with only slight alterations. Other authors took ideas that they liked, or else felt they could do more justice to in the novel format, and enlarged them into books without text carry-over. Robert E. Howard used “The Scarlet Citadel” as a guide for The Hour of the Dragon. And Cornell Woolrich turned many of his short stories into novels. “Face Work” became The Black Angel. “Call Me Patrice” became I Married a Dead Man. “The Street of Jungle Death” became Black Alibi. And “Speak to Me of Death” became Woolrich’s most depressing novel (which is really saying something), Night Has a Thousand Eyes.