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sRobert E. Howard’s Prehistoric Beasts: The “Red Nails” Dragon
Sunday , 1, September 2024 Pulp 1 CommentRobert E. Howard’s greatest use of a prehistoric beast was the “dragon” used in the first third of the novella “Red Nails.” First, Howard’s description: Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like […]
A little reading of Robert E. Howard will give you the idea he did not like snakes. Giant snakes show up in three of the Conan stories and in one of the James Allison stories. That is not counting snakes of the supernatural type in “The Cobra in the Dream” and “The Dream Snake.” Snakes […]
Last year, I wrote a post on the Fedogan & Bremer collection Frost by Donald Wandrei. That book collected the first eight stories with the plan for a second volume. Fedogan & Bremer went on hiatus with the second volume in limbo. Enter Haffner Press. Haffner Press has a history of publishing massive collections of […]
Robert Kenneth Jones’ The Shudder Pulps is possibly the first history of a pulp magazine genre. The book was first published as a hardback by Fax Collector’s Editions in 1975 (with cool Mike Kaluta cover). A trade paperback edition from New American Library followed in 1978. The weird menace pulps lasted about eight years from […]
Chandler H. Whipple (1905-1977) was a pulp writer who started in the westerns pulps in 1932, mostly under the name “Robert Enders Allen.” He co-wrote “Boot Hill Payoff” with Robert E. Howard for Western Aces, Oct. 1935. Howard’s agent, Otis Adelbert Kline had arranged to have Howard rewrite a story unsold by Whipple. Whipple wrote […]
Years ago, I read Ron Goulart’s The Dime Detectives, a history of the detective fiction pulps. I learned some things including the author Merle Constiner. Goulart had this about the “Luther McGavrock” series: “For Black Mask Constiner wrote of Luther McGavrock, a private eye who was headquartered in Memphis and worked on strange and wondrous […]
7th Century Britain is not your normal setting for an historical novel. A. B. Higginson’s Wulfhere is the only one I can think of. Wulfhere was a five part serial in the pulp magazine Adventure in mid-1920. Higginson was a Canadian with a military background. Wulfhere was his only published work. Sort of like Arthur […]
Charles Hoffman has been one of the most perceptive writers on Robert E. Howard’s fiction. His “Conan the Existentialist” has been reprinted three times after its original appearance in Amra #61 in 1974. He has had non-fiction pieces in The Dark Man, Crypt of Cthulhu, Spectrum, The Cimmerian, and The Robert E. Howard Reader. He […]
Before Louis L’Amour became the biggest selling paperback writer of westerns, he divided his time in the pulp mgazines between westerns, adventure, and crime fiction. This may be a surprise to some of you but he had a respectable run in the detective pulps in the 1940s. The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour: Crime […]
One of my pulp magazine guilty pleasures are the back stories in issues of Jungle Stories. Jungle Stories was a hero pulp featuring Ki-Gor from 1938 to 1954. It was a quarterly magazine from Fiction House with a lead novella featuring Ki-Gor as written by “John Peter Drummond.” Some of those are well worth reading […]
Donald Wandrei (1908-1987) is one of my favorite pulp magazine writers of fiction. He was a member of the Lovecraft Circle, wrote for Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, and co-founded the publisher Arkham House with August Derleth. He had started out writing weird poetry and had moved into writing prose. His weird and science fiction […]