As I recall, I began playing Dungeons and Dragons at the very end of 1st Edition. Most of my early memories are of playing AD&D and that’s still my favorite Role Playing Game (RPG) system. My buddy Chris and I used to ride our bikes to Hobbyland and he would get a shiny new TSR module, while I grabbed a color-bled, paper-bound supplement from Judges Guild. I had read Moorcock and Lieber by then (though I didn’t get to Tolkien…
(Second in a series of posts about the nine-volume Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library) A couple of weeks ago, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes looked at Vincent Starrett’s two entries in Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library series. Another author provided two entries for the series: James Edward Holroyd. Holroyd helped establish the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1951, the original London Sherlock Holmes Society having been disbanded some years earlier. He was also the first editor of the…
Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage. And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation. The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be. Dent cranked out 159…
Otto Penzler is a larger than life name in the mystery field. He is the man behind New York City’s ‘Mysterious Bookstore’ as well as the Mysterious Press (Nero Wolfe’s current imprint!). He’s a true mystery maven. You can read about his recent The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories here. From 1993 through 1995, under the Otto Penzler Books imprint, he reissued nine hard-to-find works of Sherlockiana. The Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library consists of the following books, originally published between…
TSR’s Dungeon! came out in 1975, just one year after Gary Gygax revolutionized gaming with Dungeons and Dragons. The ground-breaking board game is still an excellent introduction to fantasy gaming over forty years later. The board represents a dungeon, divided into six areas (representing levels) of varying difficulty, differentiated by color. There are monster and treasure cards for level and the harder the level, the tougher the monsters and of course, the greater the treasures. The character classes have been changed over…
I’m fortunate in that my boss here at Black Gate lets me wander afield from Sherlock Holmes and mystery-related topics. Now, I think I’ve managed to nominally stay within the milieu of Black Gate, though my Humphrey Bogart – George Raft post might have stretched things a bit (I’ve got a reasonable argument ready!). So, for example, I haven’t written anything (yet…) about my hero, Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. Today I’m going to stretch the rubber band a ways….
In Brooklyn during World War II, a pair of black widows were luring men to their deaths. They preyed upon older, lonely men without family or close friends. With a “Room for rent” sign hanging in the front window of their idyllic-looking home, they fed arsenic-laced wine to their victims. A male relative who lived with them buried the bodies in the basement, with no one the wiser. The women were in fact little old ladies: think Aunt Bee as…
Back in November of 2011, AMC debuted a gritty new western, Hell on Wheels. Anson Mount played Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier out for revenge against the Union soldiers who had killed his wife and son and burned his farm. His pursuit takes him to the camp of the Union Pacific Railroad, which is headed across the central plains under the leadership of Thomas Durrant (Colm Meany: O’Brien of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame). While the series starts…
It’s no surprise, given the title of this column, that I’ve written more Sherlock Holmes-related posts than about any other topic. What is surprising to me, given that I know myself fairly well, is that I’ve only done one post about John D. MacDonald. You can read some stuff I’ve written about him over on my own blog, Almost Holmes, here and here and here. But perhaps because I haven’t been able to delve deeply enough into re-reading and analysis,…
One of the things I enjoy about being a Sherlockian (no, I don’t mean a fan of the BBC television show) is the way ‘one thing leads into another’ and you can explore all kinds of avenues and lanes, wandering here and there, encountering interesting stuff. That was a long sentence! I was fortunate enough to be included in the upcoming MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part V. In the early part of my story, The Case…