Rick Lai and the Secret Histories of Pulp Fiction

Rick Lai and the Secret Histories of Pulp Fiction

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shadows01-01sisters01Pulp historian Rick Lai is perhaps best known for his definitive chronologies of Doc Savage and The Shadow published by Altus Press. The comprehensive nature of these works has inspired more than one reader to wish Lai had dedicated his career to producing similar volumes for all other pulp series. While that particular wish may not be possible to accommodate, he has devoted much of his time and energy for the past quarter century authoring speculative articles on works of imaginative fiction. Some of his literary investigations fall within the Wold Newton framework established by Philip Jose Farmer, while others do not. Much like a dedicated theosophist indifferent to sectarianism, Lai seeks the truth regardless of where the path leads.

Altus Press subsequently published two volumes collecting all of Rick’s articles under the titles Daring Adventurers and Criminal Masterminds. The former features articles concerning the classic pulp hero, The Avenger; as well as more obscure characters created by Talbot Mundy and Robert E. Howard; and multiple articles concerning such well-loved characters as Peter the Brazen, Raffles, Professor Challenger, Arsene Lupin, and Jules de Grandin. The second volume shifts the focus to the villains readers loved to hate such as Fu Manchu and various Yellow Peril clones including Hanoi Shan and Sumuru; Jules Verne’s seminal super criminals, Captain Nemo and Robur the Conqueror; Guy Boothby’s highly obscure Dr. Nikola; Bulldog Drummond’s arch-nemesis, Carl Peterson; and the most famous criminal mastermind of all, Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Goth Chick News – NYT Best Seller Dark Places in Post Production

Goth Chick News – NYT Best Seller Dark Places in Post Production

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image006This time next year, fellow Chicagoan Gillian Flynn is going to have one heck of a fall season with two of her best-selling novels headed for the big screen.

David Fincher’s high-profile thriller Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, releases October 3, 2014 but this week it was announced that Flynn’s earlier cult thriller Dark Places is nearly in the can, with Frenchman Gilles Paquet-Brenner behind the camera and Charlize Theron in front of it.

Dark Places is set to hit theaters September 1, 2014.

Dark Places was published in 2009 and at the time was listed on the New York Times Best Seller List for hardcover fiction for two consecutive weeks. The book was also shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and won the Dark Scribe Magazine Black Quill Award for Dark Genre Novel of the Year.

Flynn’s more recent novel, Gone Girl, spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction best-seller list of The New York Times, and has sold more than two million copies in print and digital formats.

In addition to Oscar-winner actress Charlize Theron, Dark Places will also star Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies), Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie), Corey Stoll (House of Cards) and Emmy Award nominated actresses Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and Drea de Matteo (Sons of Anarchy).

The plot sees the seven year-old Libby Day witness the murder of her family, seemingly the work of a Satanic cult, and testify against her own brother (Stoll) as the murderer.

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Magic: Let’s Ditch Clarke’s 3rd Law!

Magic: Let’s Ditch Clarke’s 3rd Law!

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357px-Circe_Offering_the_Cup_to_Odysseus
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” No it’s not.

People love to cite Clarke’s 3rd Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

No it’s not.

Grand old man that he was (and it’s true that his Pompeii-like as-he-left it home is fascinating if you can bribe your way in), we should put this law to bed.

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The Series Series: Tales from Rugosa Coven by, Um, Me

The Series Series: Tales from Rugosa Coven by, Um, Me

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While we wait for my current publisher to send me the new cover art, here’s my last publisher’s art for a novella in the Rugosa Coven Series.

A tight deadline for turning around my galley proofs meant I had to choose: either skip my regular blogging gig here, or blog about the only book I’ve had time to look at for the past two weeks: my own. I can’t very well review a book I wrote–not just because of the temptation to brag about it, but also because the nitpicky galley proof process is forcing me to second-guess every word of it, at a point in the production process in which only a few of those words can be changed. Should you buy my book? If anyone had asked me last night while I was doing battle for the last time with a paragraph that has been driving me crazy for the past seven years, I honestly don’t know what I’d have said. John O’Neill assures me that Black Gate‘s readers will be interested in my own experience writing a fantasy series and preparing it for publication, so here goes.

Once upon a time, there was a call for short story submissions from a horror magazine. The editors were looking for very short works of psychological horror on the theme of “the life interrupted.” I tend to write long, and I’d never written horror before (and since the story that came to me grew up to be a comedy, I still haven’t), so I thought I’d challenge myself by trying to write something for the call. I wanted to start with a character whose life, pre-interruption, was already unusual. My protagonist arrived in my head by way of this personal ad on the fictitious dating website PaganSingles.com:

Divorced Wiccan female, 32, seeks realistic rebound guy. Petite and trim brunette. Enjoys the ocean, 19th century novels, long Sunday mornings with the New York Times. Atlantis cranks need not apply.

What would be the most horrifying interruption possible in the life of a skeptical post-modern Neo-Pagan who prides herself on not being a New Ager? Discovering that the New Agers were right about something, anything, and why not Atlantis?

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New Treasures: The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

New Treasures: The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

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The Tilting House-smallI love kid’s books. It was kid’s books like Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators and The Case of the Marble Monster that first taught me to love reading, and I’ve never really lost my appreciation for straight-up adventure tales, or a good spooky mystery.

So I still buy them from time to time. And overall, the same story elements appeal to me today that did in 1974, when I was 10 years old:  treasure maps, strange inventions, haunted houses, and rats with hidden agendas. All the building blocks of drama, really.

Which explains why Tom Llewellyn’s The Tilting House appealed to me the moment I laid eyes on it, and left me unable to put it down until I had purchased it:

Talking rats. Growth potions. Buried treasure.

Brothers Josh and Aaron Peshik are about to discover that their new home with the tilting floors hides many mysteries. When the boys and their neighbor Lola discover the hidden diary of F.T. Tilton, the brilliant but deranged inventor who built the house, they learn a dark secret that may mean disaster for the Peshik family. Can the kids solve the riddles of the tilting house before time runs out?

Mad science, mischief, and mishaps combine in the suspenseful and imaginative tale of The Tilting House.

The Tilting House was Tom Llewellyn’s first novel; he followed it with A Matter of Life and Seth: Life is a battle. High School is Murder in 2013.

The Tilting House was published by Trigygle Press, a division of Random House, in April 2011. It is 152 pages, priced at $15.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. It is illustrated by Sarah Watts, who also did the colorful cover.

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats

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WritingBefore I was published, I read a lot of articles and books about writing, hoping to improve my craft. As I progressed, it became more difficult to find sage advice, because so much was slanted toward the novice writer just starting their first steps on the path. What I’d like to do today is pass along some tips for the intermediate writers out there — those who have been honing their work for a couple years with the goal of getting published.

One of the biggest hurdles I faced when coming up was in my head. When I first started, I wrote in my spare time. Just whenever I felt the urge, and not with any consistency. Even when I decided during my college years to switch my major to English with the goal of becoming a career novelist, I was still treating it like a hobby. I think I was more intrigued by the idea of being a writer than the reality, which sounded like a lot of work.

Taking that next step toward being a “professional” writer meant changing my habits, and my state of mind.

1. Write every day

Everyone has school or a job, family obligations, friendships that require nurturing, and so on. But putting your butt in the chair and writing for a specific amount of time every day builds a habit, and that habit will see you through some tough spots down the road. You won’t always feel like being creative, but you still need to put in the time. Think of it as an investment in your career. You have to put in the work, day after day, for months and years on end. Treat writing like a profession, and others will start to see you as a professional.

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Vintage Treasures: Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger

Vintage Treasures: Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger

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Prince of Foxes-smallIf you’ve been reading my Vintage Treasures posts for any length of time, you’re probably aware I have a weakness for buying small collections. Especially vintage paperback collections.

There are a few ways to find interesting lots on online auctions sites like eBay, but I’ve had the most success recently searching for Bantam Giants, a line which repackaged a lot of popular historical adventure fiction in paperback with terrific covers — and without chopping it up first to fit the smaller format, a common practice in the early days of paperbacks.

Bantam Giants are a great way to learn about new writers (okay, old writers, but new to me), and they’re ridiculously cheap. They sold — by the tens of thousands — on newsstands for 35 cents in the early 1950s. Generally speaking, copies in fine condition are still fairly common, and don’t cost much more than that now.

Last year I talked about discovering the works of Lawrence Schoonover, especially his 13th Century adventure novels The Golden Exile and The Burnished Blade. Tucked into the same collection that contained those volumes was a gorgeous book titled The King’s Cavalier, by someone named Samuel Shellabarger.

My guides through the world of 40s and 50s historical adventures, the Honorable Howard Andrew Jones and John C. Hocking, have been telling me about Shellabarger for years. So I was delighted to find another of his novels in the latest collection of Permabooks and Bantam Giants I acquired last month: Prince of Foxes, a tale of adventure and intrigue in Renaissance Italy.

It follows the exploits of Andrea Orsini, a talented and resourceful peasant who rises through the ranks to become a political agent for the sinister Cesare Borgia. It was filmed in 1949, with Orson Welles as Borgia and Tyrone Power as Orsini.

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Ancient Worlds: I Have Heard the Sirens Singing Each to Each…

Ancient Worlds: I Have Heard the Sirens Singing Each to Each…

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"Just a little peril! I can handle it!" "No, sir, it's too perilous!"
“Just a little peril! I can handle it!”
“No, sir, it’s too perilous!”

So Odysseus is still trying to find his way home, and if it feels like we’ve been talking about this trip forever, imagine how he felt.

In order to get home, Circe tells Odysseus he will have to sail past the Sirens. Homer tells us these are beautiful sea goddesses who lure men to shipwreck on the rocks around their island. How? With their singing.

In order to make certain this doesn’t happen to his own men, Odysseus orders them to stuff their ears with wax so that they can’t hear the Sirens’ song. But he is unable to pass up the opportunity to hear them himself. Instead, he leaves his ears open but has his men lash him to the mast so that he cannot redirect the ship or jump overboard.

Modern interpretations of the Sirens have taken several different angles to explain their power, usually with two variations. Either their voices themselves have magic powers that lure people in, or the seduction is taken far more literally.

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Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

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oie_11233710dfgxIM2cClark Ashton Smith, one third of the Weird Tales triumvirate along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, has been a favorite of mine ever since I bought a copy of the Lin Carter-edited collection Hyperborea. I was thirteen or fourteen and Smith’s archly told stories of the titular prehistoric land and its impending doom before an encroaching wall of ice, stunned me. I was long familiar with Lovecraft’s purple prose, yet nothing had really prepared me for Smith’s cynical, lush, and utterly weird writing. The stories were stunning and I was a fan.

I was pretty excited when John R. Fultz announced that he had a story in soon-to-be-published Deepest, Darkest Eden,  a collection of new stories edited by Cody Goodfellow and set in Smith’s Hyperborea. As soon as I finished reading Fultz’ post (and letting my brain drink in the gloriously pulpy cover by Mark E. Rogers) I headed over to publisher Miskatonic River Press’ site and ordered my copy. I couldn’t wait to get the return to Clark Ashton Smith’s decadent, dying land into my hands.

For me, stories set in someone else’s created world, or using their characters, need to center on what makes the original special. They don’t need to replicate it exactly, and with Clark Ashton Smith’s idiosyncratic prose it would be a mistake to try, but they should aim for similar artistic goals. Ryan Harvey, in his long article about Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle, concluded that it’s an “unusual medley of elements, with Lovecraftian themes rubbing against satiric jabs, elevated mocking language, black jokes, and a sense of a slow, chilly annihilation that cannot be escaped”. That gives any author setting out to play in Smith’s imaginary Hyperborea a wide array of ideas to pursue.

Many of the stories in Deepest, Darkest, Eden — and there are eighteen plus two poems — are very successful at meeting my test for success. Several of the authors have clearly subsumed the alternately funny and despairing world view of Smith and mixed it with their own talents to create worthwhile additions to the Hyperborean Cycle.

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Neoclassical Adventure

Neoclassical Adventure

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afgIf you’ve been following the online discussion of tabletop roleplaying games (especially fantasy roleplaying games) over the last few years, odds are good you’ve heard of the “Old School Renaissance.” For that matter, if you’ve been following the RPG coverage here at Black Gate, you’ve probably already noticed this term being used in numerous blog entries before this one. As folks online are wont to do, some will quibble and kvetch about the precise meaning of the OSR (as it’s come to be known; it even has a logo!), but, at its most basic, the Old School Renaissance is a renewed appreciation for the RPGs of the 1970s and ’80s, as well as a renewed interest in playing these classic games.

Gamers being what they are (and always have been), it wasn’t long after the OSR picked up steam that people wanted to start producing new material for their favorite RPGs, a desire facilitated by the Open Gaming License and System Reference Document that Wizards of the Coast released at the same time as the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000. Together, they made it possible to create and sell “clones” (or “retro-clones”) of popular roleplaying games from the past, games that are in many cases are long out of print or locked away in the IP vaults of a corporation. Want to write an adventure for your beloved 1981 edition of D&D? Labyrinth Lord lets you do that. Want to publish a new campaign setting for AD&D? OSRIC gives you the tools for just that. There are also clones for games like RuneQuest, Gamma World, Chill, and many more, not to mention many older games that have come back into print as a result of the renewed interest the OSR has generated in them. Whatever your favorite game of the past, odds are good that you’ll be satisfied.

There’s another category of old school RPGs, however. They’re not clones, since they aren’t modern-day restatements of older rules sets, but they do take clear inspiration from their predecessors of yore. They are, for lack of a better term, neoclassical roleplaying games.

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