Crime Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): The Snake, published in 1964, is the eighth of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. It is a kind of sequel to The Girl Hunters and you absolutely have to read The Girl Hunters before reading The Snake. Some further explanation is however required. Between 1947 and 1952 Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels which were huge bestsellers.

Cold Steel (Athlon Outdoors): Blade Show 2023 is in the books, and it was another incredible event. Over 1,000 booths with thousands of outstanding knives. Not to mention great gear and even some firearms (knife people like to bring the heat too). During the three-day event, I scoured the show floor for the best EDC knives for 2023, and here is what I found.

D&D (Black Gate): As we approach the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, I recalled and located Dungeon Magazine #112, published by Paizo, which was released for the 30th anniversary of D&D. This issue featured a retread of the classic AD&D World of Greyhawk adventure module, Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure, by Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax. It was updated by Erik Mona and company for the (then current) third edition of D&D and retitled Maure Castle.

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” was first published in Weird Tales, October 1931. It was retitled “The Blonde Goddess of Bal-Sagoth” for publication in The Avon Fantasy Reader #12, 1950. Editor Donald A. Wollheim followed the standard practice back then of editing Robert E. Howard’s work as the editor saw fit.

Pulp (Black Gate): Recently, friend and fellow researcher Evan Lewis posted on Facebook the text of a story that first appeared in the October 19, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly entitled “The Diamond Wager.“ This was featured in a blogpost he originally posted in June, 2013.

The story ran under the byline of Samuel Dashiell. According to Evan, it is widely believed to be the work of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, and constitutes Hammett’s only contribution to Detective Fiction Weekly.

Comic Books (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The 1980s have arrived and things continue to change. Science Fiction now dominates most of the content in the Warren magazines. It gets really hard sometimes to know if I should or should not include a story. (I have erred on the liberal side.) Strips like “The Last Labor of Hercules” have obvious SF elements like aliens, while others like “Cagim” are Science Fantasy retellings of King Arthur. These are my picks. Feel free to disagree.

History (Paperback Warrior): When I was a kid, a film my father seemed to always have on was The Devil’s Brigade. It was originally released in 1968, but played consistently on cable television in the 1980s. The movie starred William Holden, Cliff Robertson, and Andrew Prine as rugged Canadian-American commandos ascending a “mile-high” fortress occupied by the Nazis during WW2. 

Cinema (Art of the Movies): I watched the original Star Wars trilogy over and over trying to recapture the same feeling, and when I got a bit older I found a natural successor in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

D&D (Grognardia): My friends and I would often argue with one another about the way that some obscure word used in Dungeons & Dragons was pronounced, like dais or grimoire or guisarme (not to mention made-up words of the sort that appeared in the Monster Manual). This would inevitably lead us to a dictionary to determine the truth of the matter, assuming that the word wasn’t too obscure to be found there.

Military (Special Ops Magazine): Discover the Roshel Senator APC, a versatile and highly maneuverable armored personnel carrier designed to meet the diverse needs of law enforcement, offering exceptional comfort, robust ballistic protection, and advanced smart capabilities.

Magazines (Sword and Sorcery Reviews): Tales From the Magician’s Skull produced its tenth issue in March, offering a great mix of stories that all meet editor Howard Andrew Jones’ definition of sword and sorcery, which manages to be both rigorous and generous at the same time. Fully ten stories are included in the magazine’s 80 pages, with the many illustrations fitting the “old school gaming” aesthetic prevalent in all of publisher Goodman Games’ products.

Publishing (DMR Books): In this article will I be interviewing “Alex” P. Alexander of Cirsova magazine. En passant, ye may recall how Alex and I together chatted similarly afore in an earlier discussion; up on the Castalia House blog, one can find it in the article “Guest Post: Interview with Alex of Cirsova Magazine,” though do bear in mind said conversation focuses, however, more on music and music scenes. Well, without further ado, on y va, for we shall commence tout de suite.

Tolkien (Alas Not Me): I’ve recently been working on an article in which I argue that Tolkien’s famous letter 131, so often cited and quoted, actually plays a large role in shaping the subsequent course of his writings on Middle-earth. For in this letter he is attempting to persuade Milton Waldman and Collins publishing to bring out The Lord of the Rings and ‘The Silmarillion’ together, and in order to do so he has to step back himself and come up with an explanation of how it all fits together, from the Ainulindalë to the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel.

Review (Sword and Sorcery Reviews): Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #56 offers up three stories, two poems, a comic (!), and a couple of bits of interesting news. “Red-Autumn Seeks His Father,” by the increasingly prolific Jonathan Olfert, sees the titular protagonist seeking some sort of communion with his long-dead father, a craftsman murdered by the king whose barrow he’d helped build.

Tolkien (The Cimmerian): In my first post concerning Húrin, the mightiest mortal warrior of Middle-earth’s First Age, I looked at what befell him before he was released from his imprisonment in Angband. All of that was a prelude to the collection of writings that Tolkien entitled, “The Wanderings of Húrin,” which can be found in The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion.

Review (DMR Books): I must claim woeful ignorance about the magazine Broadswords and Blasters. In fact, I did not know of its existence until this anthology came out. The magazine has currently run twelve issues with Futures That Never Were being listed as number thirteen. Will the series continue beyond that? I’m sure sales and reviews of this anthology will determine that question.

Authors (Frontier Partisans): I was working at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters back in 1994. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (ATPH) had been published in 1992, marking what in most careers would be considered a breakthrough novel. And it was that, in a sense. Winning the National Book Award certainly put McCarthy’s name out in front of a broader public than he’d ever touched. The novel was more accessible than his Southern novels or his bloody masterwork Blood Meridian.  People bought it. A lot of people. I don’t know if they read it, but they bought it.

Art (Rough Edges): THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENSis the latest fantastic art book from the editing combo of Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, joined this time by crime fiction expert J. Kingston Pierce. This book really got its start from a series of interviews with Lesser conducted by Pierce.