A novel I pulled out to reread is Don Tracy’s The Black Amulet. I read this decades ago and remembered liking it at the time. The novel is set in a barbaric period and I thought of another “Paperback Barbarian” entry.

Don(ald Fiske) Tracy (1905-1976) was an American fiction writer who wrote for slick magazines, pulp magazines, and paperbacks. He started with the prestigious Saturday Evening Post in 1939. He also had some sories in Collier’s and MacLean‘s. Most of his fiction were in the sports fiction and detective pulp magazines. He did have a few stories in Thilling Wonder Stories. He wrote some historicals set in the American colonial period. He also wrote the novelization of the movie Sign of the Pagan under the “Roger Fuller” byline.

Another novel, The Scrolls of Lysis, set in 3^rd Century B.C. Greece came out in 1962. The Black Amulet is from June 1968 from Pocket Books. The book is 188 pages, so work count is around 75,000 words. This is set in mid 6^th Century (A.D) Alba, what is now Scotland. Allic, son of King Brude of the Picts leads a small group of elite warriors to protect the borders of “Pictland.” They wipe out a group of Vikings and his brother takes a red-haired Irish wench as his.

There is worry that King Brude’s brother, the exiled Umma wil return to take the kingship. There is a lot of soap opera intrigue between Allic’s brother Jorel and the Irish slave girl Bridda. St. Columba has arrived from Ireland spreading Christianity among the Picts

The novel has a climactic fight with Humma the One-Eyed and a resolution of problems that Bridda has brought.

This is a strange historical novel. Generally the Picts are the subject of fantasy. Tracy seems to have partially researched the period. He uses some Gaelic terms such as “Taniste.” Then he had the historical groaner of having the Picts worship Thunor and Wodan. The Vikings wear horned helmets. The novel falls back into boiler plate medieval with Allic at a stronghold that is pretty much a castle with moat and drawbridge. There is just a hint of the supernatural in the novel including the amulet that Allic wears. I don’t know if Tracy was trying to straddle the historical and sword & sorcery genres.

I used to rank this novel quite highly among historicals but it has slipped in my evaluation. I noticed historical mistakes in Sign of the Pagan and The Scrolls of Lysis. I am beginning to think that if one searchs out old historicals, stick with the U.K authors including Rosemary Sutcliff, George Shipway, and Henry Treece. You don’t see the historical mistakes the way I have recently with Gardner Fox and Don Tracy. I am of the opinion there were two differrent historical markets. The pulpier paperback originals by Gardner Fox, Noel Gerson, Richard O’Connor and the more upscale novels by Thomas B. Costain, Frank Slaughter, and Lawrence Schoonover.