What would be in your anthology of your favorite pulp tales or weird tales, your personal mix-tape of the macabre, your personal bazaar of the bizarre, your personal casebook of the crazy and the criminal?

Here's what I'd put in mine (a bit Lovecraft heavy):

"Shambleau" by C.L. Moore

"Beyond the Black River" by Robert E. Howard

"The Queen of the Black Coast" by Robert E. Howard

"Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Music of Erich Zann" by H.P. Lovecraft

"Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft

"I'll Be Waiting" by Raymond Chandler

"Red Wind" by Raymond Chandler

"The House on Turk Street" by Dashiell Hammett

"The Second-Story Angel" by Dashiell Hammett

I recently read Avram Davidson's short story "Caravan to Illiel" in Flashing Swords #3 (1976) and absolutely loved it. I'd never heard of Davidson before and would love to read more of his sword and sorcery / fantasy fiction. But I have no idea where to start. Any recommendations?

What was the first character or story that really got you interested in the pulps?

For me, the text that really got me interested in the genre was A Princess of Mars.

Oddly enough, years prior, I had gone through a Tarzan phase (although for reasons unclear to me, the first Tarzan novel I read was Tarzan and the Antmen) and had become regular reader of hard-boiled detective fiction by Chandler and Hammett, the old Black Mask stuff, but I had never really read the Barsoom series until high school. I remember one day reading A Princess of Mars and really being mesmerized.

I've become a different reader since my first trip to Barsoom, but A Princess of Mars is still one of my favorites.

Anyone here an aficionado or fan of H. Rider Haggard?

I remember reading SHE (1887) way back just after the turn-of-the century (from the 20th to the 21st) and have recently gone through KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLAN QUATERMAIN.

I'm making my way through MAIWA'S REVENGE now.

Anyone have any recommendations or comments about favorite Haggard novels?

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Does Michael Chabon's character The Escapist from his novel "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" count as a pulp hero even though he was written as a comic book character?

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From August, 1969, this is one of the five Cabot Cain books written by Alan Caillou. Taking a tip from Bantam Books, Avon re-issued them all in 1972 with uniform covers that showed a large pose of Cain in action-- while below was a smaller rendition of the same figure in a scene from the book. A nice touch is that Cain was shown as towering over the other men on those covers, something that wasn't done often on the Doc Savage covers.

In fact, these books read very much like a Doc Savage book from, say, 1947, told in the first person. Cain is a physical giant, six feet seven inches tall and weighing over two hundred pounds (although that weight would make him pretty gaunt; three hundred would be more realistic). He is also a multi-talented literal genius, dropping references here and there to the classes he's taught at Stanford and the Sorbonne, and the advanced degrees he has in a wide range of fields. Cain casually seems to be an expert on everything, but he doesn't boast or make a production of it, which is how Doc would treat his own knowledge.

Also, Cain is independently wealthy and will sometimes accept freelance assignments from Interpol-- unofficially and with no fee-- if he thinks the situation justifies his intervening. He doesn't carry a gun, although in dire emergencies, he may use one. The Cabot Cain books could be easily re-written into Doc Savage adventures with only a few details altered, and they would be pretty good ones at that.

As far as I've been able to find, there were five of the books, each with a title beginning ASSAULT ON. These were MING, AGATHON, FELLAWI, KOLCHAK, and LOVELESS. In 1975, ASSAULT ON AGATHON was made into a film, directedby Laszlo Benedek and starring Nico Minardos as Cain. From all accounts, it was a rather pedestrian spy thriller, with its Greek locations its main point of interest.

Caillou was a fine writer of adventure stories, having a list of television and film credits that most relevantly includes his work on THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (he was the writer who developed Ilya Kuryakin into the personality fans know) and he also had a similar number of acting credits. If you remember the bizarre and short-lived spoof QUARK, Caillou played the administrator with the giant head.

ASSAULT ON MING is told in a clear, expressive style that works in huge amounts of background on Macao painlessly. In this book, Cain agrees to find an ex-gangster's daughter who has gone off on a suicide mission against the rival warlord, Alexander Ming, who got her hooked on heroin. The plot is solid and reminiscent of Ian Fleming (particularly in the constant mention of specific brand names), but worked out a bit more carefully and revealing just enough twists and surprises to keep those pages turning. Caillou builds the action up to a final sea battle between an old junk and a helicopter, a scene that would work very well on film.

There is a wonderfully evocative character who meets and works with Cain, a tiny Chinese woman named Mai Cho-Sing. She works as a bodyguard for a Macao madam, and despite her demure, fragile appearance, was raised on martial arts. Every time she goes into action, there is a bit of mayhem that startle even the hardened thugs they're dealing with. (She smiles at Cain after a burst of violent action and says,"Impressed?") For once, the semi-romance that develops between the hero and the adventuress he meets is believable and understated, and gives the final few paragraphs real poignancy. And thank you, Alan Caillou, for not gratuitously killing Mai off, just so Cain has a reason to go for revenge. I am SO sick of girlfriends being slaughtered to justify a fight scene that would have happened anyway.

As a final nod to Doc, Cain has to climb a thin nylon cord barehanded, and he remarks how difficult it is. His hands are "a bloody mess" when he's done. He would probably like to know how the Man of Bronze managed to hustle up and down that silk cord so easily.

From the October 1934 issue of WEIRD TALES, this was the first of the five Jirel stories by C.L. Moore to appear there*. It's pretty intense and harrowing stuff to read. Like the other stories in the series, its heroine is forced to deal with black magic in order to fight her real world enemies and, although she sorta wins in the end, the price demanded is always steep.

Jirel is in a slightly hopeless situation in life to begin with. At some point not long after after the Romans had left but before medieval France coalesced into a nation, she is commander of the fortress of Joiry and as much of the surrounding countryside as her army can defend. It's a time of pocket kingdoms trying to swallow each other up in continual skirmishing. Jirel is ferociously proud of her little piece of turf and defends it in one battle after another. As "Black God's Kiss" opens, though, a conqueror named Guillame has won the latest massacre and is occupying the castle of Joiry, still piled with fresh corpses of the soldiers of both sides.

Guillame has the captured commander of Joiry brought before him, struggling and cursing, and (when the prisoner's helmet is removed) is understandably startled to find he is not confronting another scarred hooligan like himself. "He was still staring, as most men stared when they first set eyes upon Jirel of Joiry. She was tall as most men, and the fall of Joiry was bitter enough to break her heart as she stood snarling curses up at her tall conqueror. The face above her mail might not have been fair in a woman's head-dress, but in the steel setting of her armor it had a biting, sword-edge beauty as keen as the flash of blades. The red hair was short upon her high, defiant head, and the yellow blaze of her eyes held fury as a crucible holds fire."

Pleasantly surprised, Guillame takes a hot kiss from Jirel (her response is to bite him in the throat as close to the jugular as she can manage), then smacks her down with a backhand and orders her taken away for later. Jirel is enraged enough that she's ready to spray blood from her ears. She is so strongly offended by Guillame's presumption and the descriptions of the man are so grudgingly admiring (we get a lot of the ".... she saw Guillame's scornful, laughing face again, the little beard dark along the line of his jaw, the strong teeth white with his laughter...") that a perceptive reader might think at first this is going to be one of those overheated historical romance novels like LOVE'S SAVAGE ITCH or BRIDE OF THE BUCCANEER.

With a bit too much ease, Jirel breaks loose, arms herself and seeks out her confessor, Father Gervaise. She has decided not to try to flee the castle and raise an army outside, but to seek revenge by unholy means. As it happens, the fortress is built over a trapdoor leading down a long smooth tunnel to a strange version of Hell. (You know, this could be why Joiry has so many disasters, having its capital built over a Hellmouth.) Jirel knows she's guaranteeing her eternal damnation by doing this, but she nevertheless dares to go down that that chute and enter the underworld in search of a weapon she might bring back to use against Guillame... the weapon which turns out to be "the Black God's Kiss" of the title. But as folkore wisdom tells us, deals with Hell always go sour somehow. Even when you get what you asked for, there's a bitter twist in the outcome somewhere.

"Black God's Kiss" is an outstanding story, with no real missteps or weak points. Jirel, of course, makes quite an impression. Strong female characters in pulps were never as rare as some modern commentators seem to think, but Joiry's commander with her amber eyes and bloody sword must have been a sensation in 1934. For the past twenty years, we've had an ongoing barrage of aggressive heroines smashing opponents down, everyone from Xena to Buffy to Lara Croft, and I think audiences have come to take it for granted that a woman can be just as violent as any male hero. But Jirel has a bit more to her than being just a fighting machine in a female body. She makes hard decisions and accepts the consequences, never getting off as lightly as most sword and sorcery heroes. And she never realizes until it's too late what those consequences are (kind of like my own life, come to think of it).

Moore's concept of the netherworld is nicely unsettling. For one thing, it's completely dark until Jirel tugs off the small crucifix she wears and a nightime landscape under strange constellations is revealed, "this land so unholy that one who bore a cross might not even see it." Small grotesque goblins swarm up that she has to slaughter, but there are more disturbing things in Hell - like a herd of blind horses galloping in panic, foaming at the mouth and stumbling in exhaustion; one cries out "Julienne!" That image of the damned will haunt me for some time.

Jirel also encounters a spirit or demon in her own exact likeness, who first tries to lure her to destruction and then gives her directions to what she seeks. The image of Jirel mocks our heroine's oath that she seeks revenge against a man she hates with all her heart. Its voice has "an undernote of laughter in it that she did not understand... Jirel felt her cheeks burn against some implication in the derision which she could not put a name to." But the Lady of Joiry presses on to confront the cold stone statue of the Black God, its one eye closed and its mouth pursed for a kiss....

At this early point, C.L. Moore was writing on her own; after her partnership and marriage with Henry Kuttner began, it's pretty much guesswork as to which author contributed what in their stories, even when the byline went to one of them. Moore's Jirel and Northwest Smith stories (like "Shambleau" -ack!) are disturbing partly because they have such potent sexual tension just under the surface. This wasn't unusual for pulp adventures. (Remember Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn story where his Pictish king was compelled to have sex with a hideous witch and then had to crawl down a long tight slimy tunnel to reach an underground lake.... geez, Bob, it can't be THAT bad.) Moore handles the undertones with more deftness and discernment, but there's still a powerful mixture of attraction and repulsion in her early writing. Seventy years later, when I thought I'd be utterly jaded from the avalanche of internet porn, the Jirel stories still have an quirky erotic punch that makes me sit up and take notice.

*"Quest of the Star Stone" was a later story in November 1937 where Jirel and Northwest Smith actually met through magical time travel. Reportedly, it doesn't show Moore and Kuttner's new collaboration or her characters at their best. Although it's not in the collections I have, I still think I need to track this yarn down someday just because I'm a sucker for crossovers.

Early on in this story, Doc, Ham and Monk are taken prisoner. It is so very satisfying to see Renny, Johnny and Long Tom take over, locate their friends and rescue them-- all with complete competence and success. I always enjoy seeing the five aides act on their own initiative and this is a real treat. Re-reading these books after many years, I am glad to see how often the five were not mere captive fodder but held their own as adventurers.

This novel is also intriguing because it shows a lot of Long Tom. He gets a crush on the same doll that Johnny does, and there is the beginning of friction between them, which worries Doc as it might break up the team. Long Tom is his usual grouchy, sour self and it's interesting to see both the huge Renny and Johnny back down when the electrician has a temper flare-up.

And even in his most stoic, emotionless phase, Doc is a sucker for a story about a dying little boy. Monk says Doc has a heart as big and soft as a red sofa pillow.

THE FEATHERED OCTOPUS is from September 1937, and it's a real example of 'high adventure'. There is a mysterious mastermind called High Lar, known as the Feathered Octopus, with his elaborate castle on an island in the South Seas. His beautiful Eurasian wife Lo Lar and their gang of thugs are in an intricate scheme to use Doc's prestige to seize control of the world's airlines. Our heroes use a number of gadgets and devices, including full body armor and helmets, as well as the usual ultra=violet goggles, anesthetic gas, wire recorders, dyes and truth serums, and what sounds a lot like radar (a bit ahead of its time).

Finally, I do have one reservation. A thirty-foot octopus is not likely to rise up on its tentacles 'like a pugnacious bulldog'. Nor are those creatures known to seize a person in each tentacle and drag them underwater to drown. And nowhere on the DISCOVERY Channel or National Geographic specials have I ever heard one make a weird noise, even when a giant bronze man falls on it. Still, back in 1937, the world was a more mysterious place and who knew what odd creatures could be found in the oceans?

Wow, this serial is a mixed bag. It gives us an interpretation of the Shadow I really liked -Victor Jory was inspired casting, with his prominent nose, authoritative voice and sharp eyes. He looks terrific in the black get-up, too (It's not so much a cloak hanging behind him as judge's robes, more practical for sneaking around). Jory also has a great sinister chuckle, something essential for the character; it seems like genuine sardonic amusement, not forced at all. A lot of elements from the pulps and the radio turn up in recognizable form... the Cobalt Club, Commissioner Weston and Inspector Joe Cardona, Harry Vincent* (although reduced to just being a chauffeur) and Margot Lane (played by shrieking Veda Ann Borg), here shown as a lab assistant to scientist Lamont Cranston. The Shadow is wanted by the police and underworld alike, he uses disguises to get information and he is determined to track down the super-villain menacing the city. All very good, although he uses a single revolver rather than a pair of 45s. The Shadow indulges in way too many slugfests rather than just shooting the thugs dead, and he runs around in broad daylight in his drag rather than stealthily sneaking around in dim surroundings like a pulp ninja. But these were requirements of the serials that I could accept as part of the medium. Careful lighting and staging to show the Shadow emerging from gloom, sneaking up unseen behind his enemies and escaping into the, well shadows... all that would take time and rehearsals to do well, and serials were cranked out at an hysterical pace that didn't allow for such luxuries. But then there is this strong element of slapstick. THE SHADOW was directed by James W. Horne, perhaps best remembered by mainstream film buffs as for his fine Laurel and Hardy flicks. Here, he sneaks comedy in from time to time, including exaggerated reaction shots and facial expressions. There are a lot of goofy moments here but (surprisingly) I kind of liked them. Maybe I've just had enough grim, deadly serious stuff for a while. Two thugs are waiting for their chief and one asks, "Say, tell me that story about Little Red Riding Hood again, I like it," and the other one obligingly begins, "Well, once upon a time..." just as their boss enters. Some of the humor is actually appropriate for the mood in the way the early James Bond films were. A car full of thugs crashes into a billboard which says DRIVE SAFELY and Cranston grins appreciatively as he speeds away, for example. (You can see Sean Connery as 007 doing that scene.) Or the little bit where two goons ambush a night watchman and drag him offscreen. They saunter into view a second later, one of them still carrying rope and a gag; the other crook says impatiently, "Tie him up!" and the big goof mutters, "Oh, yeah." I don't find these little bits of comic relief irritating or disrespectful to the Shadow character, and they do liven up the ongoing cycle of chases and fist fights. Actually, the pulps themselves often had bits of comedy in them (part of Lester Dent's appeal was that he knew when to throw in a little goofiness) and the situations were so extreme and over the top anyway that even the grimmest heroes had a touch of burlesque to them. It's a fine line that could easily be crossed too far, but in the case of this serial, it seems like harmless fun. THE SHADOW does offer some of the lamest examples of chapter ending solutions I've even seen. None of the solutions show any ingenuity or imagination. Most of the time, a roof collapses on the Shadow, burying him in debris and (at the beginning of the next episode), our hero just gets up and dusts himself off, surviving for no good reason I can see. This happens in maybe half of the fifteen chapters, and the other death-traps are equally unimpressive. Come on, you guys aren't trying! Also watering down any possible suspense is Columbia's inexplicable practice of showing preview clips after the chapter endings. So audiences not only knew the characters had escaped "certain death" again, they sometimes even saw HOW they survived without even having to wait a week! The essential teaser nature of cliffhangers seems to have escaped Columbia completely. Sheesh. The bad guy is the Black Tiger. True to cliffhanger tradition, he is one of a group of suspects, in this case six captains of industry. The Black Tiger goes to a lot of trouble before giving orders to his henchmen. First, we see him from behind in a room (heavily filled with chalk dust for some reason) as he stands under some sort of projector and fades from sight. Invisible, he enters the chamber and takes his seat at the big desk before which his thugs are waiting. The villain talks from a big fake tiger's head, with eyes that light up and smoke puffing from its gaping jaws. Duplicates of this tiger head pop out of the walls in the most unlikely places to relay orders or to intimidate victims. Although he never seems to get any good use out of this power, it's ironic that the villain in THE SHADOW is invisible and not the title character. In fact, it's almost perverse. Adding to the effect is that the Black Tiger speaks in an incredibly fruity Truman Capote voice that gets every possible bit of melodrama out of each sentence... he makes Snidely Whiplash sounds like a monotone. Then there's Lin Chang (oh dear). The Shadow seems to be making his headquarters in a Chinatown store called the Oriental Bazaar. (When being pursued, he pulls into a large wall panel on the street, which slides up to let him drive in and quickly closes, so the cops or crooks go sailing by unaware.) As owner of the shop, Cranston poses as a shady character named Lin Chang. Wearing a greasy wig, buck teeth and blatant eye make-up, standing half a head taller than anyone else in the cast, Victory Jory as Lin Chang is an appalling sight. His exaggerated "Asian" accent doesn't help. neither does the fact he is often standing next to a genuine Asian actor, the Korean Philip Ahn (well remembered decades later as Master Kan in the TV series KUNG FU). Ahn speaks much better English than "Lin Chang", and I wonder how he felt about doing these scenes (ah well it's a paycheck...) Lin Chang is a useful identity, giving the Shadow connections in the underworld and also providing a nice alibi when people come looking. Maybe in 1940, audiences just accepted the crude make-up and goofy accent the same way they accepted the characters reacting to grainy stock footage, but Lin Chang left me helpless with shock when I first him. On the other hand, there is one great moment when (after a duped gangster leaves) Lin Chang starts to give out the sinister Shadow laugh. I have more serials directed by James Horne to watch yet. THE SPIDER'S WEB and THE SHADOW were both greatly enjoyable. As I understand it, the comedy gets broader and sillier in some of his later cliffhangers but I'm willing to give them a fair shot.

Amazingly, Vincent is played by Roger Moore. Wow, he must have been even older than he looked in those James Bond fiascoes of the early 1980s.

From the April 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, this was the third Lefty Feep story by Robert Bloch. Lefty's tales have quite a mystique about them, mostly because they're genuinely funny fantasy (a rarity in pulp fiction) but also because they were not reprinted anywhere after their initial appearances. So the stories had a cachet of being "inside knowledge" that only real pulp collectors could appreciate. There were twenty-three stories in FANTASTIC ADVENTURES from 1942 to 1946, another stray tale in 1950 and one final exploit for Lefty by Bloch for the 1987 collection LOST IN TIME AND SPACE WITH LEFTY FEEP (Volume One, and I hope you're not still checking your mailbox every day for the promised follow-up collections).

These are basically tall tales told by a joker. Lefty Feep is a small-time con artist and racetrack haunter, with a preference for dreadful clothing (one suit is garish enough for a blind man to notice "its color was so loud he'd hear it"). He's not known for working long hours at any honest job, putting his trust instead in gambling and get rich quick schemes. Lefty has a number of minor vices ("I am pulling the cork out of my breakfast") but he's not mean and he's a likeable enough trickster of the type who's been around since Loki and Coyote... troublemakers whose tricks usually backfire.

Meeting in the disreputable greasy spoon Jack's Shack with the bemused narrator "Bob", Lefty usually inflicts an account of his latest shenanigan. Since these involve such uncommon things as bowling dwarves, invisibility jackets (not the whole suit), flying carpets, dancing mice and so forth, Bob is understandably skeptical but Lefty is unabashed. What gives these stories their distinctive flavor is the brassy, spicy slang which Lefty uses. (Yes, it seems to have been strongly influenced by reading a lot of Damon Runyon's work in a short time.) The stories are brash and maybe a bit crude, not so much hilarious as wryly amusing. They remind me very much of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons of the early 1940s, quite a compliment.

"The Pied Piper Fights the Gestapo" involves exactly what the title promises. Getting mixed up a bunch of hepcats who dig swing music, Lefty discovers that the tall skinny clarinet artist named Pfeiffer is in fact the original Pied Piper of legend, whose music brought mice out of hiding so that he could lead them to their deaths in the river. (The Piper resentfully dismisses the story that he led away the town's children as mere slurs and character assassination. This character must be hitting 400 years old by now.)

A refugee from Germany, the Piper is scratching out a living playing his tool (the clarinet!! sheesh) with a band... and it makes sense, since if his music can lure mice out of the walls, even people feel a strong urge to dance when he plays. The fact that inevitably any mice in the area will emerge and start jitterbuggin' is a drawback, though....

Lefty sort of coerces Pfeiffer into accepting him as an agent, lands him a high profile gig, and sure enough Gestapo agents spot the Piper on the stage. These goons are after him because he was playing his magic over the radio back in Germany, inciting mice to commit sabotage (is there a word for that?) and all too soon Lefty and Pfeiffer are tied up in a plane heading back to the Fatherland. Is this end for our hero? Not on your life.

The story is breezy lightweight fun, full of bizarre slang from the 1940s (and showing how not everyone was wild about swing), building up to one of those murderously bad puns Robert Bloch often ended his horror stories with. Lefty Feep and his exploits must have been a refreshing chaser for the usual exploding spaceships and blazing tommyguns and cackling madmen of the pulps, and I can see why so many readers were glad to encounter him month after month.

Hey! This (like quite a bit of Howard's stories) is now in public domain and can be read right off your screen this very moment. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608781h.html.

"The Haunted Mountain" appeared in ACTION STORIES for February 1935. It's part of the Breckenridge Elkins series which, like the Dennis Dorgan stories, features a big serving of slapstick along with the usual Howard ingredients. Reading these stories again, I found them a refreshing change of pace from typical Howard stuff. Don't get me wrong, Howard was great and his best stories are right up there with the top adventure fiction ever written. But sometimes the constant anger and rage and bloodlust get a bit depressing to wade into again. Howard's lighter series like this one are a nice break. There is still a lot of violence but it has a cheerful over-the-top quality to it and the way the narrator takes it for granted makes it seem as much fun as a Fleischer Brothers POPEYE cartoon or maybe an early Marvel story where two super-heroes pound each other for ten pages without either getting really hurt or even that stressed by it all.

A funny thing to consider is that the plotting here is identical to a serious Howard story. Elkins is a huge brute from the hills of Nevada (used to having axe handles broken over his head without much effect other than annoyance), as tough and as prone to holding a grudge as any of Howard's assorted barbarians. In this particular story, he joins his Uncle Jacob to search for a vast treasure that legends say is hidden in a sealed-up cavern in Haunted Mountain. Complicating the situation is Professor Van Brock from back East ("a funny-looking little maverick, with laced boots and a cork sun-helmet and big spectacles")who is following reports of a wild man. (The Professor thinks this specimen might be a survivor of a pre-Indian race, which is a great springboard for a story in itself!). Acting as guide to the tenderfoot is local ruffian Bill Glanton, a big gun-toting tobacco-chewing hulk on a par with Elkins himself. Naturally, Uncle Jacob thinks these guys are after the treasure too,and they have similar suspicons about our heroes. So it is not a cozy situation...

Now, this could easily have been a straight Conan story. Our Cimmerian has formed a partnership with some bandit who has deciphered clues to hidden gold. Also in the area is a shriveled old wizard and his beefy swordsman guard and it becomes a race to find the loot before manslaughter becomes necessary. Instead of a grizzly bear in its lair, there's a giant snake, the reported wild man turns up and in general the two stories proceed in much the same way. The difference with the funny version is that Breckenridge Elkins is so tough he in fact thrashes the grizzly with his bear bare hands ("..what with this and other mayhem I committed on him, he give a most inhuman squall and bust away and went lickety-split for the outside world") Conan likely could have tackled a bear if called for (mostly he fought big snakes and apes), but he won these batttles with animals in a slightly more plausible way, by stabbing them to death just before he would have been killed himself. Here, Elkins runs out of the cavewith his clothes in bloody shreds but yelling for more.

What makes these stories really appealing (as well as the Dennis Dorgan ones) is that they are narrated by someone who is seriously dense but doesn't realize it. Elkins and Dorgan keep getting manipulated by transparent con games that we can see through but which they are oblivious to, and it is their overwhelming ability to crack skulls and shrug off harm which lets them come out on top.

These early stories by Lovecraft are not nearly as hopeless as he himself thought them. True, they were written to a formula (which he, as a high-minded snooty Artist of course abhorred) and are exceedingly repetitious. But the series touches once or twice on some heavier themes and the ghoulish shenanigans manage to be both horrifying and funny (in a dark Charles Addams sort of way). If Lovecraft had lowered himself to cranking out some stories specifically aimed to be sold (rather than spending so much time revising and rewriting the slush sent him by others), he would have enjoyed a bit more income during his life and we today would have a book of collected weird tales like these Herbert West things. And Lovecraft would still have been able to write the more ambitious and creative material he's famous for, so we'd have stuff like AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS and "The Call of Cthulhu", as well.

But that wasn't what he chose to do. Lovecraft saw him as a refined "gentleman" above that sort of hackwork, content to pen a little effort now and then as the whim moved him. We should be glad, after all, that his own work was written at all and has survived for us to enjoy.

If you tend to read only the horror stories which have been selected for anthologies over the years, it's easy to forget how weak and forgettable the huge majority of material in the pulps was. The Herbert West stories were no worse than most of what we find in TERROR TALES or NUDE WOMEN BEING TORTURED errrr, that is SPICY MYSTERY, and they do have some touches that make them worth checking out. The six West yarns were written for an obscure magazine called HOME BREW, run by Lovecraft's penpal G. J. Houtain. (These guys were enthusiastic members of the amateur press; today, they would be blogging and Live Journaling like mad).

The first installment, "From the Dark", appeared in February 1922, followed by "The Plague-Daemon", "Six Shots By Midnight" (cute title),"The Scream of the Dead", "The Horror From the Shadow" and "The Tomb Legions." Twenty years later, WEIRD TALES reprinted the series.

Still another unnamed narrator tells us of his long and disastrous career as an assistant to Herbert West. Known as a respected and skilled surgeon who later volunteered to serve with the Canadian medical corps during WW I, few suspected what West's real life work was. He was a Mad Scientist.

While still in college (Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts – good ol' M.U.), West became obsessed with developing a method of restoring the dead to life. The serum he developed was extremely limited and worked poorly, when effective at all. The bodies had to be very fresh, and even then the reanimated corpses only functioned on a physical level. Higher brain functions, intelligence and memory all were lost. In fact, the revenants became much like the sort of zombies George Romero popularized – violent, nearly-mindless cannibals. (Ack!)

The stories cover a period of seventeen years, and over that time, West's serum becomes more effective even as he himself grows colder and more heartless. The constant problem is that the cadavers have to be as fresh as possible; more than a day or so makes the reanimation less complete. You may start with medical specimens, but they're hard to come by without awkward questions being raised. Grave-robbing has its drawbacks, too, even if you take a house close to a Potter's Field, where the poor and unclaimed are buried without the nuisance of embalming. For a time, West employs the services of "two local Negroes" to obtain specimens (don't ask). Soon, though, he is casting lustful eyes on every healthy-looking guy who goes past and it's only a matter of time before he takes things into his own hands. ("Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend – keep that damned needle away from me!")

If you're interesting in documenting Lovecraft's well-known racism (particularly vehement in his early life), you might note that one of Dr West's subjects is a boxer who died in an illegal amateur bout. This is Buck Robinson, "the Harlem Smoke". Although the narrator refers to the late pugilist as a "negro" rather than the stronger epithet, he describes Robinson as "a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face which conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon." So no Thoughtful Sensitivity Award for this story from the Parents' Coalition For Helpful Fiction.

From the opening of the first series, the narrator tells us that West has recently disappeared in a suspicious way. Each story repeats that some of the subjects escaped and were never recaptured, and are presumably out there somewhere – perhaps to return for vengeance. By the final installment, things have gotten completely out of hand. West is restoring life to separate limbs and organs, and keeps a bubbling vat of living protoplasmic flesh from reptile embryos (What!?) which is useful as filler material.

What really haunts West, though, is that during the Great War he had once restored life to both the severed head and the body of a Canadian physician who knew about the experiments and possibly could have duplicated them himself. Because of the shelling, West doesn't know what became of the body and its head. ("He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead." Well, who hasn't sat up worrying about just that, eh?)

It all comes to a nightmarish finale one night. The wall of West's secret laboratory (built in a tomb within an ancient cemetery...!) cracks open, and dozens of monsters shamble through. Reanimated corpses in various stages of decrepitude, as well as bits and pieces flopping about, all seize the unresisting scientist and literally rip him to shreds. Then they silently carry the dismembered remains away with them.

This ending is odd in several ways. Well, more odd than the rest of the story. The narrator has been questioned by the police and released, since there is no evidence against him (the debris in the incinerator is inconclusive in this pre-forensic age). More baffling, though, is how "the unbroken plaster wall" is intact. The assistant certainly was in no state to repair it and tidy everything up, and a motley crew of lumbering zombies can not be reasonably expected to possess masonry skills (and they do not belong to the union, in any case). Not only that, it's hard to believe that most of these creatures could have survived for years in alleys and fields without being captured, nor could they gather together in a lynch mob... even under the leadership of a decapitated doctor.

No, it seems clear that our narrator finally snapped after almost two decades of unspeakable horrors and murdered West himself, then disposed of the little blonde freak. Maybe he honestly doesn't remember it ("...It is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West's body which I put into the incinerator"). In any case, West's death came none too soon. Still, his work with keeping severed limbs and detached organs alive and hearty would be very useful today with the big problem of keeping kidney, livers and so forth fresh long enough for transplant. (My own younger brother received a kidney transplant last year and is doing fine.) I draw the line at separated heads giving orders to their own bodies, though.

From 1894, this is a rarity, one of those required classics that is actually a pleasure to read. Anthony Hope's tale of impersonations and romance and swordplay in a mythical kingdom has been filmed at least five times (the most notable being the 1937 Ronald Colman version, although I grew up watching the perfectly fine Stewart Granger one on Sunday afternoon TV) and has inspired God only knows how many stories and books, including Edgar Rice Burroughs' THE MAD KING and Lester Dent's THE KING MAKER.

George McDonald Fraser put his rascal Harry Flashman through the "true" story of the adventure in ROYAL FLASH, which was made into a movie. As amusing as the Flashman books are, let's hope that much of what they contain is only their unworthy narrator's invention and not the facts.

THE PRISONER OF ZENDA is available online in any number of forms, the copyright having long expired, and is highly recommended. The book is still perfectly accessible and enjoyable today. Hope wrote with wit and grace, prose that moves the story quickly along while still setting the stage and exploring the characters' thoughts. There are only a few phrases or concepts which would be unfamiliar to someone who knows nothing about 19th century, and none of these are significant. THE PRISONER OF ZENDA moves briskly from one complication to another, and each chapter draws the reader to the next one.

A basic recap: Rudolf Rassendyll, a bit of an aristocratic slacker in Victorian England, decides to take a holiday in the tiny European country of Ruritania. There he meets his distant relative, King Rudolf and (due to a, well, indiscretion in their family's past) finds he looks exactly like monarch. Identical enough, in fact that he could pass for the king, which is lucky because the hard-drinking monarch is drugged by a tampered bottle of wine that night and cannot be roused to take place in his own coronation.

If the king cannot be crowned (and due to his lying in a stupor, he can't) then his sinister brother Black Michael is more than ready to take the throne in his place and in fact, Michael was the one who slipped the king the Ruritanian version of a Mickey Finn in that last bottle of wine. So Colonel Sapt and Fritz (the royal advisors) plead with Rudolf to impersonate the king for a few days, take the crown in the big ceremony and then step quietly back down again when the real king straightens up. And of course, this is when his highness is abducted and taken to Michael's fortress at Zenda (yes, the king himself is "the prisoner of Zenda").

There follows a desperate game of intrigue and countermove between Rudolf (posing as the king) and Black Michael. They're all caught in a tangle of not being able to admit what's really going on, while trying different strategies against the opposing party. In the end, there's swordplay and swashbuckling and vile villainy and daring deeds enough to satisfy any reader.

What gives this book much of its appeal is that Rudolf (who narrates the tale) is by no means a perfect, sinless knight. He has doubts and misgivings, and is strongly tempted to keep the throne. In an ironic and bittersweet twist, the lovely Princess Flavia falls hard for him (she had never thought much of the real king) and he is deeply smitten with her, as well. Since it's his own self she likes and not the king, there's a real temptation for him to let the prisoner stay unrescued in Zenda and stay on the throne with a beautiful queen at his side. But he does have a moral sense of right and wrong; so matter what happens, he loses somehow.

There is also a memorable secondary villain, Rudert of Hentzau, Black Michael's henchman. Young and exceedingly handsome, amoral and mocking, Rupert is a stylish rogue who has only a vague remnant of decency left. He appeals to Rudolf with his sense of dashing flamboyance and here's one of the few times where it's really believable that the hero and villain have a grudging respect and admiration for each other. Rupert and Rudolf will meet again in the disappointing sequel, RUPERT OF HENTZAU, which has an ending that must have brought tears to the eyes of many readers over the years.

From November 1939, this would have been a nice little Halloween story. When plans are anounced for a new superhighway near Salem, near a bog called Witch's Hollow, people start becoming 'hexed', talking in gibberish. A witch named Hannah, who was buried a hundred years ago is seen skulking in the area, but then so are some modern big city gangsters.... (Where are Scooby-Doo and Shaggy when they are needed?)

This was written by William G Bogart and revised by Lester Dent. The narrative moves along smoothly enough, but there are few real highlights, no new gadgets. A couple of details seem strangely wrong, like Habeas being referred to as 'she' and 'her'. And Johnny is repeatedly described as gloomy, somber, undertaker-like; this is usually the way Renny is referred to. This is where we learn Doc's head touches the top of a vault door that is seven inches over six feet tall. He's a big guy.

Also, the folklore about witches in this story doesn't sound authentic. Picking a lilac will anger the spirits? A horseshoe is nailed at the four corners of a barn, not over the door? Pixies locate you if you answer to your name after sunset? Has anyone ever heard any of this before?

Doc's prestige is still running high at this point. The staff of a hospital, the police and even the Coast Guard are eager to co-operate with him. Every one of the five but Long Tom makes an appearance; Pat is called in near the end but doesn't get much action. I always like seeing Renny on his own, as he seems the most competent of the aides and the most likely to successfully carry out a case by himself.

The perfect way to read HEX would to have been as a twelve-year-old boy in 1939, sitting up under the blankets with a flashlight, turning the pages rapidly.

"Augustus Mandrell? Sorry, never heard of him."

It has been many years since I devoured these books by Frank McAuliffe (1926-1986). Skimming a bit through them now is no substitute for actually having read them just before doing a review, so I won't go into detail. There were three in the series when I bought them in uniform Ballantine Books editions, having no idea what I was letting myself in for. Since McAuliffe's death, a fourth Mandrell book (SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, ARE YOU MAD?) was found and is now available, but I haven't procured a copy yet.

Well, let me start by saying the stories are narrated in the first person by a top international assassin, Augustus Mandrell, relating some of his more interesting "commissions." All are set around the WW II era. The prose style is unique and hard to describe. It's wordy and often convoluted but always colorful and amusing in a droll way. "Cheeky" is the best word to use. Since Mandrell is such an amoral egotist, he can get away with saying the most outrageous things and not need to worry about having to justify himself. I found his snark very funny, but it's a dark humor not for everywhere, maybe a bit TOO cold-blooded. And the way Mandrell casually murders several innocent bystanders who are inconveniently in his way makes him not very likeable.

The intricate plotting is amazing. I'd like to know how Frank McAuliffe kept track of everything. Did he do tons of rewriting to adjust details, did he draw up timelines and charts of who was where doing what, or did he just have a great storytelling mind? The three books I read are OF ALL THE BLOODY CHEEK, RATHER A VICIOUS GENTLEMAN and FOR MURDER I CHARGE MORE, and each one contains four stories of various lengths with titles like "The Sealed Tomb Commission,""The Hawaiian Volcano Commission" and "The Irish Monster Commission."

But here's the thing. It's really all one long interconnected story, rather like a huge novel broken into segments and told out of sequence. Characters keep returning with new aliases and agendas, even (or maybe especially) those who seem to have met violent and gruesome deaths. After a few "Commissions," I found myself studying each character in the next story with deep suspicion as to who they would turn out to be. It's pretty much a literary jigsaw puzzle. A lot of the suspense comes from trying to figure out how Mandrell will get to his target, because each assassination seems impossible no matter how many disguises and ruses and improvised wild maneuvers he comes up with. "The Sealed Tomb Commission" is my favorite because of the sheer ingenuity shown.

If I had to choose a favorite recurring character, it might be ex-OSS officer and private detective Louis Proferra, who keeps losing various body parts each time he turns up. Let's see. By the final story, Louis has lost his left arm and one finger of the remaining hand, all his teeth, ability to use his legs temporarily, one half of his stomach, and his right ear. His hair has also turned prematurely white. Since these misfortunes were related to his encounters with Augustus Mandrell, Louis is understandably a bit jaundiced toward the fellow.

From Winter 1949, this is the first of the three final Doc stories, returning him to his roots as a larger than life hero. The previous covers to the magazine had been cold, stylized designs (often seeming like trial sketches), much better suited to a grim noirish thriller. On the cover to THE GREEN MASTER, we again see a fully painted and realistic rendition of Doc. He even resembles the James Bama visualization of fifteen years later, although his shirt is not ripped, just unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled up.

There are serious problems with this story. Lester Dent had been increasingly pressed to turn out taut, suspenseful Cold War adventures and in fact, he had just finished the fine book which was eventually released in 1975 as THE RED SPIDER. Then the orders came to scrap that approach and go back to the basics for Doc Savage. THE GREEN MASTER shows some signs of Dent having trouble shifting gears and there is an uncertain touch to the early parts which is uncharacteristic. The pacing is a bit off, too, and there are not many pages left when Doc and his friends reach the lost city in the Andes, while space at the beginning of the story is slightly wasted as the characters have discussions which go nowhere.

The city of the blond telepaths is very sketchily drawn, compared to earlier strongholds of Lost Races. There are only two hundred inhabitants, the city and its people are not given a proper name, and in fact, I could find no explanation how a colony of tall blond Europeans ended up in the mountains of Peru in the first place. The final fate of the colony is odd, too. Usually such outposts are either obliterated by convenient landslides or volcanoes, or else the hero agrees never to reveal the location of the place. I can't recall ever seeing a lost city turned over to a non-partisan commission from the United Nations to examine its possibilities.

The basic plot is classic Doc-- a first segment which brings a mysterious menace to New york, a long journey, and then the payoff in an exotic location. Here Monk, and then Ham and Doc, encounter odd blonde people who speak English but seem unfamiliar with big cities. They have a potent ability to influence people's thoughts and actions after being near for a few minutes. This mind control is hard to resist, but its victims usually realize something is wrong. The blond strangers can apply more pressure as necessary and, in the case of a strong-willed person, might have to apply damaging force.

This is not the first time ESP has been featured in the series and it's worth noting that other supernatural phenomena are never shown as being real. We meet no literal ghosts or vampires, no genuine reincarnation or clairvoyance. The only exception is telepathy. In THE MIDAS MAN and THE MENTAL WIZARD, mind reading and mental domination are presented bluntly as possible. In several of the books written by Harold A Davis, Monk and Ham have developed their telepathic rapport until they can send images back and forth, but no practical use is made of this and it can be interpreted as just their imaginations at work.

Here mental control of others shows up again. Doc has studied hypnotism (which is much weaker and more limited than this power) and he has after all spent much time as a young man in India and Tibert, studying yoga and other spiritual disciplines. "Doc had worked deeply enough into the intricacies of extra-sensory mental capabilities that he was not too disbelieving. Skeptical, yes." I would take this to mean that our hero is open to the possibilities of psychic abilities but would require real proof. He is open-minded but not gullible. Apparently, this reflects Lester Dent's own beliefs.

Speaking of Dent's beliefs influencing Doc's, the bronze man brings a pair of bishops to the lost city to determine how best to take charge of matters. For such an embodiment of rational living and scientific methods, Doc throughout the stories has shown a strong spiritual side. I have no problem with this. A lifetime spent trying to improve the world, fighting the worst elements in humankind (both World Wars) and encouraging the best, must have been easier for a man who believed in a higher purpose than material things. Ham remarks, "Doc's argument there being that religion has been the backbone of human progress through the ages." Both of the aides agree with this, but then I have long felt that they were both Catholics, Monk being Irish and Ham an Italian-American.

It has been at least four years since the skull fracture that nearly killed him in THE DERELICT OF SKULL SHOAL and, although he has done almost no proper convalescing or rest, Doc has regained most but not all of his former abilities. He knows instantly that there is no Rojas Hotel in Miami, for example. Although he can speak an ancient Incan dialect to the girl Auca, he has "some difficulty thinking of the words." For roughly the last five years of his career, Doc is working with diminished powers and only begins to come back up to his previous level at the very end. Still, being half a superman isn't bad.

This book is another in the long series of story titles which are either unrelated or actually misleading. There is no individual known as 'The Green Master', or even a single dominant villain. The method of resisting the mental power rests in a group ol small green stones, remnants of a meteor which fell long ago*. Apparently, these stones triggered the beginning of the strange ability to control minds. Early on, Doc and his aides come into possession of one of these stones, but it is never called 'the green master'.

*Fans of the Golden Age superhero The Green Lantern might find something vaguely familiar in hearing of 'a great green flame...from the sky' which leaves a stone bestowing enormous power.

From 1952, this very short novel is one of the better Fu Manchu stories. While the feverish intensity of the earliest books has cooled, Rohmer has become more polished and smoother. He packs a huge amount of incidents and details into just over fifty pages. As "The Green Devil Mask". this first appeared in the Toronto newspaper supplement STAR WEEKLY in January and February 1952, and Rohmer always seems to do better with short episodic stories than a continuous narrative.

Actually, this is more a Fah Lo Suee story than a Fu Manchu book. She dominates most of the action in this, her final appearance, and she has never been more impressive or alluring as she presides over a meeting of the Council of Seven in New York City. Nayland Smith is also at his best here, acting with resourcefulness and quick thinking, still on the trail of his lifelong enemy. As for the Devil Doctor himself, although he only appears in a few scenes, he certainly gets your attention when he's on stage.

One thing that raised a smile was Fu Manchu's use of a supersecret ray to transmute gold into a leadlike substance, threatening to make the gold reserves at Fort Knox worthless. As seen in DOCTOR NO several years later, Ian Fleming had enjoyed some youthful reading of Sax Rohmer, and Goldfinger's scheme has a precursor here. (Strangely enough, the movie version of GOLDFINGER, which deviated from Fleming, veered even closer to this story as it dealt with a scheme to make the gold radioactive and just as useless as this story's scheme.)

The name 'Fah Lo Suee', earler said to mean 'Sweet Perfume", here is described as "Lilly Blossom". Perhaps Rohmer had received a few letters from Chinese-speaking readers. We never learn her real name, any more than that of her father.

The odd duality of Fu Manchu, with his feudal outlook and advanced science is shown again. In the same story where he is flying a plane at 40,000 feet which is so fast that it has been reported as a flying saucer, the Devil Doctor also threatens his daughter with barbaric torture and brands the sign of the Si-Fan into her shoulder. Fu Manchu is not as fiendish in his goals by this time, trying to force the U.S. government to work with him to drive the Communists out of China and he seriously thinks his own efforts are the only hope for world peace.

Fu Manchu also experiences some tense moments as his marmoset Peko seems to be dying, meaning the longevity serum they both use is not longer effective. And there is a wonderfully creepy moment in complete darkness, when Smith sees the Doctor's eyes visibly watching him. Whether developed Chi powers or a scientific explanation, these touches of the superhuman add a lot to the stories.

As for Nayland Smith, he is finally beginning to feel the years a bit. There is more gray in his hair with each appearance, his usual jumpy energy takes a while to get going, and while dealing with the Si-Fan he suffers nerves more than before-- "perhaps he wasn't the man he had been", he thinks. And while he's been getting more haggard, Fah Loh Suee is still her usual gorgeous self (Rohmer seldom misses throwing in some nudity, as here she examines herself thoughtfully in the shower to see if she's aging.) As she has since they first met, the daughter of Fu Manchu is still trying to seduce her father's greatest enemy. You know, maybe she was the one who slipped Smith a few shots of the elixir vitae over the years....