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Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005) was a prolific English writer who mainly wrote more action oriented fantastic fiction. He may be best remembered for the 37 volumes in the Dray Prescot/Kregen/Antares/Scorpio sword & planet series. He wrote some historical series with Vikings, Saxons vs. Normans, a couple Roman, sailing ship era, and a WW2 series (Sea Wolf). […]

Leisure Books became the prime publisher of sword & sorcery paperbacks in the mid-1970s as Paperback Library was bought out by Warner and Lancer Books went bankrupt. Some of the players at Lancer went on to found Zebra Books that also became a major publisher of sword & sorcery. Leisure reprinted two of Gardner Fox’s […]

Sword & sorcery is the man’s fiction side of fantasy. It is no surprise to see writers known for westerns or men’s adventure wade into the sub-genre in the great days of paperback publishing. There were cases of western fiction writers producing historical novels about barbarians (Philip Ketchum, T. V. Olsen, Gordon D. Shirreffs). One […]

(Samuel) David Mason (1924-1974) was not a likely contender for producing a paperback barbarian series. He had a handful of stories in the late 50s for Infinity and Science Fiction Adventures. Gardner Fox had produced fiction in the 1940s (and comic strips) with elements of sword & sorcery. John Jakes’ Brak was in the digest […]

Gardner F. Fox (1911-1986) was a writer whose history that went back to the pulp magazines in the 1940s. He started in comic books in 1937, had his first pulp magazine story in Weird Tales in 1944. He had three stories in Weird Tales, ten in Planet Stories, one in Amazing Stories. Some of his […]

The first new barbarian fantasy hero of the 1960s was John Jakes’ Brak. John Jakes (1932-2023) got his start in the science fiction pulp magazines in 1950. He was in lower tier titles including Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Planet Stories, Imagination, If etc. He branched out into western fiction and crime fiction magazines through the […]