Blog Archives
sDashiell Hammett’s character, the Continental Op was one of the first hard-boiled detectives in the pulp magazines and one of the greatest. He appeared in 28 stories (mainly of them novelettes and novellas) and two novels. All but one story was in Black Mask magazine from 1923 through 1930. I find the Continental Op stories […]
Sensor Sweep: Spears of Clontarf, Mech, Max Brand, Melee, Dresden Files
Monday , 3, June 2019 Sensor Sweep 7 CommentsRobert E. Howard (Jeffro Johnson): This is a great story, a fascinating piece. In the first place, it shows us up close the sort of peoples, Christian and pagan, that produced the bedrock of the myth and legends that would define our base concepts of fantasy and heroism. But it also presents the notion that […]
Sensor Sweep: Fake Movie Wisdom, Dashiell Hammett, Louis L’amour, Dragoncon
Monday , 17, September 2018 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsPulps (Pulp Flakes): When Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927 the publishers rushed into print with tales of flying adventures. Jack Kelly, publisher of Fiction House which included such pulps as Lariat, Action Stories and Northwest Stories, launched Air Stories and Wings in such a hurry that he wired me to write a novelet […]
Sensor Sweep: Creeps by Night, Grip, Gatekeeping, The Royal Netherlands Indies Army
Monday , 9, July 2018 Sensor Sweep 4 CommentsBooks (Don Herron): You may not know, but way back in 1931, the up-and-coming Wisconsin writer August Derleth teamed up with the newly famous detective novelist Dashiell Hammett to edit a collection of supernatural horror fiction titled Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills. Over the next forty years, Derleth would become one of the most […]
Between Sherlock Holmes and Marlowe: Nero Wolfe
Saturday , 25, November 2017 Authors, Before the Big Three, Fiction 13 CommentsIt’s easy to forget nowadays, given the legion of predictable, played-out, repetitive, and boring works, but the mystery genre is relatively young. The earliest notable entries were several Poe short stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin (1841-1844), Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), and Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The Dupin stories were the earliest and most influential, […]