Blog Archives
sYou may have seen the movie Cinderalla Man. It was very enjoyable, Russell Crowe giving his usual high standard of acting. Renee Zellweger returned to the Depression as the wife of fighter James Braddock. I was going through The Last Celt and noted that Robert E. Howard had one story in an issue of Dime […]
The Big Five publishers won’t give us old school sword & sorcery but that is not stopping the small press. David J. West has been scratching the itch by producing blood & thunder sword & sorcery. I looked at Whispers of the Goddess a couple years back. This time I look at The Usurper under […]
DMR Books’ Renegade Swords series of anthologies have collected flotsam and jetsam within the sword & sorcery genre with a new book each of the past three years. I have covered the first and second volumes. The newest is volume III. Format is trade paperback, 191 pages, cover by Brian LeBlanc. Contents: Adrian Cole […]
I divide sword & sorcery characters into two archetypes: the Achilles archetype and the Odysseus archetype. Conan is of the Achilles faction. Clark Ashton Smith had the first Odyssesus archetype with Satampra Zeiros. Harry Otto Fischer created Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber would expand on the two character and the first to get […]
I have been slowly working my through the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. I picked up a stack of Signet/New American Library editions from the sixties at a library book sale a few years back. Spy fiction is not one of my preferred genres though I do read a few. James Bond was one […]
The classic mass market paperback era featured successors to the high production pulp magazine writers: Ben Haas, Ralph Hayes, Peter McCurtin, James Reasoner, Robert Randisi, and Len Levinson. These guys could produce four or more paperbacks a year. I remember reading that Zebra Books was interested in Karl Edward Wagner’s “Adrian Becker” character as a […]
Leslie Turner White (1903-1967) started out writing for the pulp fiction magazines in 1930. He wrote mostly for the detective pulps in the 1930s, appeared in Argosy, Adventure, Short Stories, and Blue Book in the 1940s. He did manage to place a few stories in the slick magazines Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Country […]
The Matter of Britain is a genre that straddles fantasy and historical adventure. I generally don’t read the more fantastic Arthurian novels but cannot resist a story of post-Roman Britain conflict between Romano-Britons and Saxons. John Gloag’s Artorius Rex is the latest of the historical Arthurian novels I have read. Gloag (1896-1981) wrote on industrial […]
This week’s historical novel is unique. Ronald Bassett’s The Carthaginian (1963) was his first novel. I have the 1966 Pan paperback edition. The Carthaginian takes place during the Third Punic War. It starts with Carthaginian hostage, Diaz sent as a rower on a slave galley. Action takes right off with that most glorious of […]
The Lost Eagles by Ralph Graves was a pleasant surprise for a novel by a writer I never heard of before. I have been on an historical novel binge the past month. My personal belief is a good historical is harder to write than a fantasy. There are constraints built in the historical that don’t […]
Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992) is best remembered as a young adult writer. Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Roger Lancelyn Green, and Geoffrey Trease were all part of the same era bringing past historical periods to life for young readers. Sutcliff is best remembered for The Eagle of the Ninth, The Lantern Bearers, and her historical Arthurian Sword at […]
E. C. Tubb’s “Dumarest of Terra” ran for thirty-three novels from 1967 through 1997. Ace Books published the first eight novels. Donald A. Wollheim took the series with him to DAW Books from 1973 through 1985. Wollheim’s daughter, Betsy, appeared to have purged a lot of her father’s favorites in the mid-1980s when she took […]