Pulp Gallery: ADVENTURE

1935

1939

1925

1935

1943

STEEGER BOOKS/ALTUS PRESS SALE - Last Call!

Yeah, it's do-or-die time the Steeger Sale. Get your orders in by midnight! Publisher Matt Moring introduced 34 new books just for this event (boy, does he have eyestrain!) and below are some I can particularly recommend. See them all - and his hundreds of other great books at https://steegerbooks.com/

Need I say more?

Been itching for this to begin for a LONG time!

Great stories, with an Intro by me.

From the creator of Hashknife Hartley & Sleepy Stevens.

Have you read his Cellini Smith series?

The Master of Men strikes again.

The adventures of a hardboiled cab driver.

From the Tros of Samothrace guy.

Flynn was one of Cap Shaw's Black Mask Boys.

From the creator of Thibaut Corday.

A cool wannabe Kimosabe, with an Intro by James Reasoner.

Black Dog Gallery: The TALBOT MUNDY Library

Paperback Gallery: TROS OF SAMOTHRACE (1967)

TALBOT MUNDY 4-Pack: A Holiday Special from Black Dog Books

Talbot Mundy's pulp stories (mostly from Adventure magazine) are as fresh and sharp today as they were a hundred years ago. He's better known for his novels, of course, and I like those just fine, but I enjoy the short stories even more. This is great stuff! (My review of In A Righteous Cause is HERE.)

For a limited time, Black Dog is offering these four collections - an $83 value - for a measly sixty bucks. Order info HERE.

For the dope on more great books, and more Package Specials, click HERE.

Forgotten Books: Jimgrim and Allah's Peace by Talbot Mundy

"If T.E. Lawrence had chosen to continue as a British officer in the Near East," says the dust jacket copy, "he would have been involved in this kind of adventure. For here, as only Talbot Mundy can tell it, is the exciting story of post war Palestine, with its race hatreds, its writhing mobs, and its political plots and counterplots."

And yeah, that's a pretty fair description of what this book is about. James Grim is American officer who rode with Lawrence of Arabia in helping the Arabs throw off the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, then stuck around to deal with the mess after the British and French reneged on their promises to establish an Arab state. 

This novel, introducing Mundy's long-running character Jimgrim, is like three books in one. Two of those are adventure stories. They originally appeared in Adventure magazine in 1921 as "The Adventure at El-Kerak" and "Under the Dome of the Rock."  But best of all, the novel offers an insider's view of 1920 Jerusalem and a fascinating look at early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the first story, Jimgrim faces an Arab uprising that threatens to oust the British from Palestine, while in the second he uncovers an Arab plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock and blame it on Zionists, bringing about a worldwide jihad. 

Mundy's prose, though now over ninety years old, is still remarkably fresh. That guy really knew how to turn a phrase, and his introduction to Jerusalem gave me plenty of smiles:

El Kudz, as Arabs call Jerusalem, is, from a certain distance, as they also call it, shellabi kabir.  Extremely beautiful.  Beautiful upon a mountain.  El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people.  Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naively confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic.  Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern.  Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace.  Full to the brim with the malice of certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save our souls from hell and fill some fellow’s purse.  The jails are full.

“Look for a man named Grim,” said my employer.  “James Schuyler Grim, American, aged thirty-four or so.  I’ve heard he knows the ropes.”

The ropes, when I was in Jerusalem before the war, were principally used for hanging people at the Jaffa Gate, after they had been well beaten on the soles of their feet to compel them to tell where their money was hidden.  The Turks entirely understood the arts of suppression and extortion, which they defined as government.  The British, on the other hand, subject their normal human impulse to be greedy, and their educated craving to be gentlemanly white man’s burden-bearers, to a process of compromise.  Perhaps that isn’t government.  But it works.  They even carry compromise to the point of not hanging even their critics if they can possibly avoid doing it.  They had not yet, but they were about to receive a brand-new mandate from a brand-new League of Nations, awkwardly qualified by Mr. Balfour’s post-Armistice promise to the Zionists to give the country to the Jews, and by a war-time promise, in which the French had joined, to create an Arab kingdom for the Arabs.

So there was lots of compromising being done, and hell to pay, with no one paying, except, of course, the guests in the hotels, at New York prices.

Jimgrim and Allah's Peace is available free in a variety of ebook formats at various places on the web.

Your free ticket to more Forgotten Books will be available Friday a.m. at pattinase.

Forgotten Books: KING - OF THE KHYBER RIFLES by Talbot Mundy

I’m on my way to becoming a BIG Talbot Mundy fan.

My first close encounter came in In a Righteous Cause, the first of several volumes in Black Dog Books’ Talbot Mundy Library. (That’s reviewed HERE, and available HERE.) That book prompted me to read Tros and Helene, the first two volumes in the Tros of Samothrace saga (Tros reviewed HERE).

And now I’m moving into the Mundy motherload, his series of adventure novels set in India and Afghanistan. King - Of the Khyber Rifles (1916) was Mundy’s second novel, and still his most famous, probably due in part to the 1953 movie version starring Tyrone Power.

If you’re a Robert E. Howard fan, this is familiar territory. These novels provided much of the inspiration for the adventures of Francis Xavier Gordon and his lookalikes, as well as Conan stories like “People of the Black Circle,” that find him among the tribes of the Hills. To me, it’s also familiar thanks to later Mundy-influenced works, like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the first three (chronologically) Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell.

The amazing thing about Mundy is that his first-person prose is fresh enough to have been written last week, instead of 95 years ago. This book introduces us to British Captain Athelstan King, sent into the Hills of Afghanistan to prevent a jihad that would boot the English out of India. His mission is to find the near-mythical she-devil/goddess named Yasmini and convince her that her best interests lie in cooperating with the British raj.

The first half of the book showcases King’s wit and personality as he moves ever deeper into the Hills in search of Yasmini, and I enjoyed every word. At roughly the mid-point we finally meet Yasmini and she takes center stage, shifting the story into a mode that reads more like fantasy than historical fiction. That would be okay, except that King has now gone undercover as an Indian doctor, and is so submerged in his role that his personality disappears.

Still, this is great adventure, and I’m eager to read more of Mundy’s interconnected India novels, that will soon introduce another King-like character, Jimgrim.

The 1978 Donald Grant edition features all the original artwork from the Everybody’s Magazine serial and the first hardcover edition by John Clement Coll. The result is a beautiful book, with many full page and two-page illustrations and at least one spot illo on every two-page spread. If you’ve seen the spectacular Grant edition of Howard’s Sowers of the Thunder, illustrated by Roy Krenkel, you have a good idea of what this looks like.

Read! Look! Enjoy!

More Forgotten Books at pattinase!

In a Righteous Cause: Tales of Adventure by Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy, like his contemporary Harold Lamb, is one of those magic names out of pulp history. Most folks have heard of him, and may have a vague notion he once wrote adventure stories, but relatively few today have read his work.

Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books is doing his part to change all that.  In a Righteous Cause is the first published volume in the Talbot Mundy Library, a series that will eventually comprise at least eight volumes.

This book brings us seven stories (some of novelette length) and three articles, all of which appeared in Adventure during 1913.

I didn’t know what to expect from this collection, but I’d been reading - and enjoying - the Harold Lamb book Wolf of the Steppes containing stories from the same mag and similar time frame, and figured it was time to give Mundy a try.

And damn - I'm glad I did. Talbot Mundy is one kick-ass storyteller. I was enthralled with every piece in this book. And the more I read, the more I found myself slowing down to savor the prose.

It’s tempting to call these stories historical adventure, but the truth is that most of them were contemporary fiction at the time they were written, roughly 100 years ago. The one sure exception takes place fifty years earlier, during the British occupation of India.

The rest involve British soldiers in various settings of war and peace. Sometimes they’re in camp, sometimes on the battlefield, but every one of them comes alive, jumps off the page and hauls you back into his world.

The long novelette “For the Salt He Had Eaten” recounts the heroism and great determination of an old Rajput warrior during the Sepoy Rebellion.  “Private Murdock’s G.C.M” (Good Conduct Medal) is a slapstick romance. “An Arabian Night” begins as a comedy, with two seamen determined to sample the forbidden delights of a harem, and becomes a battle with slavers on the Persian Gulf.

In “The Tempering of Harry Blunt” we meet a young officer who must find his steel battling Afghans before he finds the guts to propose the woman he loves. “Three Helios” is a tale of courage and sacrifice in South Africa, during one of the Boer wars. “At Maneuvers” gives us two soldiers who go to outrageous lengths to avoid participating in pointless maneuvers, but show their true metal when the chips are down. And in the title story, the “righteous cause” is  a wacky, violent, and ingenious scheme to save a innocent British maiden from engaging in holy matrimony with a greedy and roundly-despised canteen sergeant.

What surprised me, in all these tales, was the depth of Mundy’s wit and skill of his storycraft.  The two combined to deliver endings that left me smiling and eager to read the next story.

And to my further surprise, I enjoyed the non-fiction pieces too. One of these tells the incredible tale of William Walker, an American filibuster who stole Lower California from Mexico and declared himself president of the independent nation of Sonora, then led a mercenary army to Nicaragua, making himself president of that country as well. He was finally executed in 1860 in a failed attempt to take over Honduras. Seems strange I have to read a hundred year old article by Mundy to learn of this guy’s amazing exploits.

Below is a sample of Mundy’s prose, in this case the introduction to the title tale. “Nil Desperandums” is the nickname of a British regiment, Oozepore is a city in India, and "Thomas Atkins" is a generic name meant to represent the average British soldier, sort of like G.I. Joe or Johnny Reb.

(click to enlarge)

For ordering info, click HERE.
And check out yesterday's review of TROS (of Samothrace)

Forgotten Books: TROS by Talbot Mundy

I bought this book back in the 70s while in the grip of Robert E Howard Mania, but never got around to reading it. Talbot Mundy, you see, was one of Howard’s favorite writers, and one of the mainstays of the magazine he most admired - Adventure.

I wanted to see where Howard got his inspiration, and how he developed that powerful, rhythmic style that kept me (and so many others) coming back for more. But somehow the book remained uncracked.

So why read it now? Two reasons. One, my tastes have changed. I’m now much more interested in historical adventure than in sword and sorcery.  And two, I read a collection called In A Righteous Cause, the first published volume of Black Dog Books’ Talbot Mundy Library.

In a Righteous Cause showed me what Howard discovered so long ago, that Mundy is a master storyteller with an infectious style.  I’ll have a full review of that book tomorrow, but today I want to talk about Tros.

This work has a complicated publishing history. It appeared first in Adventure in 1925-6 in nine long installments. The saga was published in hardcover in 1934, and came to a whopping 949 pages. Avon made it more manageable in 1967, cutting the book into four volumes, of which Tros is the first. Zebra took it on in the 70s, in the wake of the Howard boom, but generally botched it, and their editions (issued under different titles) are best avoided. The best deal going today (unless you choose to read the free version online) is probably the one-volume trade paperback published by Black Mask press in 2008.

As I've so far read only this first Avon volume, I know only one quarter of the story. Here’s the quick version: The action takes place somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 BC. Julius Caesar (the villain of the piece) has conquered Gaul and set his sights on the land of the Britons. Having recently captured Tros and his father (a Prince of Samothrace and master of the Inner Secrets of the druids), Caesar attempts to force them to aid in the invasion. Tros and his pop, of course, have different ideas, and instead help the Britons foil Caesar’s plans.

The story is rich and colorful, and includes a fascinating visit to the city of Lunden, where the great hall of a blue-painted guy named Caswallon (the nearest thing they have to a king) occupies the future site of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Here’s our first look at Caesar:

He was hardly thirty-five, but he looked very bald and very old, because the barber was not through with him and he had not yet bound on the wreath he usually wore. His cheeks looked hollow, as if the molars were missing, and the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth twitched slightly, as if he were not perfectly at ease.

Nevertheless, he was alert and handsome from self-consciousness of power and intelligence. He sat bolt upright like a solder; his smile was suave, and his eyes were as bold and calculating as a Forum money-lender’s. Handsome, very handsome in cold and studied way, he seemed to know exactly how he looked - dishonest, intellectual, extravagant, a liar, capable of any cruelty and almost any generosity at other men’s expense; above all, mischievous and vicious, pouched below the eyes and lecherously lipped, but handsome - not a doubt of it.

Tros himself is of Conan-like proportions, if not bigger, and displays considerably more intellect. He resists the advances of wily women, avoids strong drink, and does not believe in killing. All this puts a cramp in his fun, to be sure, but makes him a more complex and layered character. Tros is also an initiate in the mysteries of the druids, which I assume play a greater part in the rest of the story.

Bottom line: I’m hooked, and will be pushing on to complete the saga. There are also two sequels, of sorts. Queen Cleopatra (1929) features Tros as a secondary character and in The Purple Pirate (1935) he serves as admiral of Cleopatra’s fleet. I have a lot of good reading ahead of me.

The full-length epic Tros of Samothrace is available as a free ebook from Project Gutenberg of Australia. Click HERE to open. 

Today: More Forgotten Books at pattinase
Tomorrow: In a Righteous Cause