It looks like everyone’s favorite Ilyassai warrior has found his way onto Facebook.  Charles Saunders’ epic hero now has his own fan club page where you can keep up with his latest adventures and those of his creator.

Here is a recent update from Charles from the Facebook page on all the great fantasy fiction he is currently working on:

Next up in my publishing pipeline is Dossouye II, the sequel to the Dossouye volume that came out in 2008. That book was a compilation of previously published stories about the Black Amazon. Dossouye II is a brand new novel.

After Dossouye II comes Imaro V. This volume can be considered a book-length epilogue to Imaro IV

Next in line is The Warrior’s Way, a collection of the Imaro short stories that were not incorporated into the novels. Seven of the ten stories in this book were previously published in the 1970s and 1980s; three are brand-new, written during the time period of 2007-2008.

Also, I recently completed another Imaro story for the Sword and Soul anthology I’m putting together with Milton Davis.

Farther down the pipeline is Nyumbani Tales, a collection of short stories that do not have either Imaro or Dossouye as lead characters. However, one story features Imaro’s mother, Katisa, and two are about Imaro’s sidekick, Pomphis.

So be assured there will be more Saunders fiction coming out over the next couple of years.

PulpFest 2010 is only a week away and some last minute updates have been posted in the Latest News section of their website.

The schedule is almost complete – one of the “New Fictioneers” readers canceled, but a replacement for the slot is in the works.

Also The Pulpster, the official PulpFest program, is finished and ready to go. This is the 19^th edition of the publication and the first to have a color cover.

One of the main focal points of PulpFest 2010 will be the 90^th anniversary of the legendary Black Mask magazine, which was launched in April 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.

The best way to stay informed about PulpFest is to subscribe to their updates. Just fill in the blanks in the email list section of the home page, answer the confirmation email and you can stay in the loop on all things related to the convention.

So, if you are in the Columbus, Ohio area or can get there, you don’t want to miss PulpFest 2010.  And you won’t be alone – each year there is a sizable contingent of Robert E. Howard fans who attend — no doubt on the prowl for copies of Weird Tales and other pulps with Howard content.

Finally, an added incentive to attend will be Don Herron. The Godfather of Howard Scholarship will be there with high hopes of snagging this year’s Munsey Award.

This has to be my all time favorite pulp magazine title. It was a one shot by Clayton in 1930. Actually bed-sheet size instead of the usual 7 x 10 inch. It contains one long story by Lemuel de Bra and an article on the Secret Service.  The issue was reprinted later the same year as the redundantly titled Secrets of the Secret Service. I prefer the original title.

Mention the name Frederick Faust to a casual reader of pulp era fiction, you might get a blank look. Mention Max Brand and you will get recognition. Frederick Faust (1892-1944) was one of the kings of the pulps.  Faust was yet another discovery by Robert Davis who edited the Munsey magazine, All-Story. Davis helped discover Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Ray Cummings etc and one of those seminal editors who help create an era. Faust started under his own name in 1917 but switched to using pseudonyms for his pulp fiction while saving his name for his poetry. Faust would write poetry part of the day and then grind out pages of pulp magazine fare which paid the bills. As Max Brand, he is best remembered today for a huge amount of western fiction he produced. He also produced spy stories, boxing, 18th Century swashbucklers, Renaissance Italy, dog stories, aviation stories etc. Faust produced a small number of fantastic stories and one lost race novel (“The Smoking Land”).

If one wanted to sample Faust, we don’t have to put together a hypothetical anthology. One already exists- The Collected Stories of Max Brand (Bison Books, 1994). Included are a spy story, one of the Tizzo stories, a Dr. Kildare story, some poetry, and of course westerns. Not a bad primer at all.

Faust’s writing style can be described as both smooth and poetic. He was not hard-boiled in his prose. His westerns are mythic westerns with no particular set time and place but a hazy Old West that probably never existed. There you will find reworkings of old Greek myths with a western setting. There is often a hint of the supernatural in his stories. Once you start reading him, you can see why he was so popular.

Faust moved from the pulps to the slick magazines in his last years. He became a correspondent in WWII. Faust died in 1944 in Italy during the offensive to break the stalemate at Monte Cassino and Anzio. Supposedly, he told the medics to get the other wounded out first during which he bled to death. So Faust gained his place in Valhalla.

One Faust reprint project I would like to see is getting all of his swashbucklers into book form. If Dorchester Publishing who continues to publish lots of “Max Brand” with their Leisure imprint ever decides to expand their adventure line beyond Gabriel Hunt books, Faust would be a great starting point.

It is Thorsday, so time to put up a magazine with horned helmets on the cover.  This issue of Adventure is from August, 1943. The cover is for “The Forge of Olvir Bigmouth” by DeWitt Newbury. Newbury specialized in Viking stories in the 1940s and  was in magazines such as Adventure, Argosy, Thrilling Adventures, and Bluebook. As far as I know, none of Newbury’s Viking stories have been reprinted from the pulp magazines. This particular story is about Northmen vs. Wends.  Adventure at this time had a lot of WWII fiction but there were still some historical swashbucklers showing up. Lamb, Mundy, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur & Farnham Bishop were gone but there were some newer writers filling the pages. Georges Surdez, the king of French Foreign Legion stories was still in Adventure on a very regular basis at this time.  The era after editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman stepped down is sometimes given short shrift.  Adventure was not the same magazine it had been 20 years earlier but it was still interesting.  The fiction in Adventure from this period was much faster moving that what you would find in the early 1920s when Robert E. Howard was reading it. In an alternate universe, you have R.E.H in Adventure at this time with covers like this. You will notice his friend, E. Hoffmann Price was in this issue.

I am always on the quest for a pulp magazine with a good machine gun cover. It is doubly delightful in that this issue of Smashing Novels also included Robert E. Howard’s “Vultures of Whapeton.”

In addition to various barbarians, cavaliers, pirates, knights, and Vikings sword slinging in the pulp magazines, you occasionally get a jungle lord. The feral white man raised in the jungle story in the pulps is a figurative fictional bastard child. It starts out as The Jungle Book but generally quickly moves into “The Man Who Would Be King.”  Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes spawned more than a few imitators.  Burroughs himself used the story of Tarzan’s upbringing in the first novel. The Return of Tarzan to me is one of the most interesting as you get Tarzan in Paris interacting with civilization, then in North Africa with a tribe of bedouin, fighting Arab slavers with the Waziri tribesmen, and finally an episode at the lost city of Opar. I love the concept of Opar, a lost city of a past civilization hidden deep in the wilds of Africa. Unfortunately, Tarzan turned into a series of novels of what lost city does he find this time? I always thought the idea of a wild man dealing with encroaching civilization had lots of potential. Imagine the Tarzan series taking a different path with him dealing with the Congo Free State atrocities, colonial exploitation, tribal feuds, etc. Subsequent imitators followed suit with the wild man in lost city most of the time. One exception that I really enjoyed is C. T. Stoneham’s novel, The Lion’s Way.

One attempt to create a Tarzan imitation was the character of Ka-Zar. Raised in the Belgian Congo by lions after a plane crashes,  David Rand becomes Ka-Zar. Being raised in the wild, David Rand/Ka-Zar is stronger, swifter, and in general physically superior to other men. The Ka-Zar novels were attributed to Bob Byrd who may or may not have been a pseudonym.

The first magazine issue for Ka-Zar was October 1936.  “King of Fang and Claw” was the origin story for Ka-Zar.  “Roar of the Jungle” in the second issue for January 1937 has Ka-Zar’s first encounters with people from the outside world. The third and last novel–”The Lost Empire” has Ka-Zar entering lost race territory. An avalanche throws Ka-Zar and his lion brother Zar into a tunnel which leads into an isolated valley that contains a colony of ancient Egypt ruled by a descendant of the Ptolomies, Queen Tamiris.  Ka-Zar gets himself involved in intrigue of a power struggle between the evil priest Zut and Queen Tamiris. Before you know, there is a slave uprising led by Zut against the Egyptians. Ka-Zar picks up the sword and does his part at the ramparts. The writing isn’t bad in the Ka-Zar stories, they avoid some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ weaknesses in his later years. If you have read half a dozen Tarzan books, everything in the Ka-Zar stories are old hat. Still, once in a while you get the hankering for a wild white man in the jungle story.  Our man from Cross Plains figured a better way. Why not just set the story in ancient times where you can have all sorts of ancient cultures and use a northern barbarian instead of a jungle lord?

You can get all three Ka-Zar novels in an omnibus from Altus Press. Odyssey Publications did facsimile reprint of the first issue in reduced size back in the 1970s and recently Adventure House did a pulp replica of the third and last issue. Manvis Publications was part of the company that would become Marvel Comics. Ka-Zar became a comic book character in 1939 with an adaptation of “King of Fang and Claw.” The adventures continued for a few years. Ka-Zar was resurrected in the 1960s and moved to a thermally warmed valley in Antarctica filled with dinosaurs. David Rand became Kevin Plunder and Zar the lion became Zabu the saber toothed tiger.

Murray Leinster was a pseudonym for William F. Jenkins (1896-1975). He started out writing vignettes for The Smart Set in 1917 and moved from there to stories with fantastic elements. He was one of the great writers for the Munsey magazines during the era of the “scientific romance” when you had Burroughs, Merritt, Brand, Rousseau, Stilson, etc.  A writing career of unusual duration as kept active into the early 1970s!

Leinster’s prose is not fancy but it achieves the purpose. I have found his fiction to hold up very well. Harry Bates, first editor of Astounding Stories said “Thank God for Murray Leinster.” Leinster was the one writer of science fiction who could bring the pulp adventure ethic to the field that epitomized Clayton Magazines.  He was actually a very good writer of space opera though you generally don’t see his name associated with that sub-genre.

Something to keep in mind- Murray Leinster’s output included just about all genres. While remembered as a science fiction writer today, his adventure, westerns, mysteries, and even love stories combined total more than the science fiction. If you were to edit a book entitled The Book of Murray Leinster, I would start with the original version of “The Mad Planet” that originally

appeared in Argosy. Laid in the far future where insects have grown to gigantic proportions and mankind is reduced so small bands of hunted fugitives. It holds up to this day. Robert E. Howard might have read the sequel, “The Red Dust” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 2, 1921). Leinster had an adventure series featuring “Malay Collins” from the pages of Short Stories. One of those stories could be used along with some other adventure yarns. A mystery story such as “Gangwar!” from Clues, a western such as “Gunfighter” (All-American Fiction) are representatives of those genres. “Sideways in Time” (Astounding Stories) has been oft reprinted but I like it. It was not so much an alternate history story but a time contininuity disturbance.  He also wrote several future war stories such as “Politics,” “Morale,” “Invasion” etc. Leinster was concerned by the lack of U.S. military preparedness in the 1930s and put those concerns on paper. I would like to say that “Swords and Mongols” from Golden Fleece would be a keeper but it reads like third rate pastiche Harold Lamb. There might be some other good historicals by Leinster out there.  Baen Books has been putting out some collections of Leinster’s science fiction. You can read the fix-up novel of “The Mad Planet” where it is moved from the far future to another planet.

Leinster had this to say about Robert E. Howard:

“He had a stellar talent. I not only lost a contemporary in the death of Robert E. Howard. The world lost a writer of extraordinary gifts.”

In my book, Murray Leinster was pretty cool. Gotta love a writer who smokes a pipe.

Crusader fiction is a niche subcategory of the broader historical adventure genre. There was not a lot of it but you did have Harold Lamb, Robert E. Howard, Arthur D. Howden-Smith, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur and Farnham Bishop, F. V. W. Mason, and Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson all writing it.

Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (1890-1968) is best remembered as the founder of D.C. Comics. He was also a prominent writer of adventure fiction for pulp magazines.  A WWI veteran with what appears a horse cavalry background, he appeared all of a sudden in the pages of Adventure in 1927. He wrotes stories of Vikings, Crusaders, Cossacks, the Italian Renaissance, and the U.S. Army cavalry.

One series he had featured Alan de Beaufort, a Crusader who ends up riding with Genghis Khan’s Mongols just like Harold Lamb’s Hugh of Taranto.

The first Alan de Beaufort story is “Lances of Tartary” from the pages of All-Fiction, March 1931 issue.  The follow-up story, “Hooves of the Tatar Horde” followed in the same magazine July 1931. All-Fiction died as a magazine not long after. The series carried on in the pages of Thrilling Adventures in “The Scourge of Islam” (Oct. 1932). There is a another Crusader story “Conrad the Cruel” (Thrilling Adventures, June 1933) that might be part of the series.  Wheeler-Nicholson has a fairly fast writing style and is good with the action, not as good as Robert E. Howard but who is?

He later revisted the Crusader in Mongol service with the story “Alamut” (Short Stories, Dec. 25 1947) wherein the Assassins  get their comeuppance.

Wheeler-Nicholson’s descendants have an interest in him as they have a website and even a Facebook page. They ought to cull together some of the more blood and thunder pulp stories and put together a Lulu book. It might be of interest to Robert E. Howard fans and fans of a good historical yarn in general.

Hugh Cave had about 800 stories in the pulps. He continued in the slick magazines after the death of the pulps. Hugh was a pulp generalist having stories in categories such as adventure, weird, spicy, weird menace, detective, and western. He is well remembered for his horror and weird menace stories due to the Carcosa collection Murgunstrumm and the Fedogan & Bremer collection The Corpse Maker. Hugh wrote some fine weird stories. “Cult of the White Ape” (Weird Tales, Feb. 1933) is a favorite of mine.

If you would have asked a pulp reader around 1934, he probably would have described Hugh Cave as an adventure writer. He was a regular in Short Stories, Far East Adventures, and Thrilling Adventures. Titles such as “Hamadryad,” “Lair of the Pythons,” and “Crocodile” certainly give an adventure feel.

Westerns make up a small percentage of the total but Hugh was good enough to break into Western Story Magazine. He also had nine stories in Black Mask, including one sold during the Cap Shaw years.

One of the solitary oddities is “The Desert Host” from Magic Carpet Magazine. It features his barbarian hero, Selaron and adventure in ancient Babylon. Hugh told me that he admired Robert E. Howard’s “muscular style” of writing. He later dedicated the story to me when Black Dog Books reprinted it as a chapbook. “The Desert Host” would make for a good anchor story for The Book of Hugh Cave.  Throw in some Borneo jungle adventure, a weird menace, maybe a western, a hard-boiled detective story, a spicy mystery story and before you know it, you have 250 pages. A cover with jungle adventure would be appropriate.

If you read Karl Edward Wagner’s Bran Mak Morn pastiche, Legion From the Shadows and then read Cave’s “Murgunstrumm,” you will notice similarity.

Pulp Con 1995: Hugh Cave and Morgan Holmes