Blog Archives
sA fairly new small press publication is Savage Realms. It is a magazine with an ambitious monthly schedule. Their website states: “Savage Realms Monthly is a new sword and sorcery magazine for fans of R.E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, and Michael Moorcock, featuring heroic tales of savage barbarians, evil wizards, and beautiful maidens. We aim […]
The Return of Sgt. Hawk by Patrick Clay was originally published by Leisure Books in 1980. It has been just been reissued by Rough Edges Press. The novel starts soon after a landing in the Philippines by Hawk’s Marine regiment. They are a lone Marine regiment amide army troops on the island of Lamare. My […]
The summer of new fiction continues. This time is The Sword of Otrim by Lyndon Perry. I was alerted to this novel by the author who belongs to a sword & sorcery group I have on one of the social media platforms. I ordered it some months back and it made its way to the […]
Tales From the Magician’s Skull is one of the top magazines if not the top magazine for sword & sorcery short fiction the past few years. Issue #5 continues a continuity of contents and presentation present from the first issue. San Julian returns as the cover artist for this issue. Dimensions are 8.5 x 11 […]
The Norse sagas have inspired imitations in English since William Morris translated The Volsung Saga in 1870. Hjalmar Bjornson’s “The Maiden Mengloth” (1926) and Richard F. Searight’s “The Cavern of the Dragon” (1936) are examples of saga imitation. Edward Lucas White (1866-1934) is a writer remembered for some classic weird stories: “Lukundoo,” “Song of the […]
You 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 […]