Archives: Heroic Fiction

Used Westerns

Used WesternsUsed to, I had no idea what authors to look for in the western sections at a used book store. These days, I have a much better idea, but the sections are SUBSTANTIALLY smaller than what they used to be. There are fewer people reading westerns, and those used books that are left tend to be pretty beat up.

But I found some treasure. First, two more Marvin Albert novels, which you can see in the lower left of this picture. Second, a slew of Fawcett Gold Medal books by authors I don’t know. Any older Gold Medals, though were probably edited well and will at least be good. Maybe they’ll be great. If you enlarge the picture, you’ll see that some &*&%^! wrote X-P over the front and sides of a number of the books. Nice going, dipwad. Way to ruin a book forever.

Novel Writing and Pulp

ki-gor 3Hocking sent me a link to a site the other day that might be of interest to a lot of my regular visitors — although as I live in a cave, it may be that you’ve already found it yourself. Anyway, PulpRev had an interesting article on writing a novel, quickly, and it had a lot of salient points, most of which I practice myself.

I’ve poked around the rest of the site some and found it of interest. Certainly I’m in sympathy with a lot of their philosophy, as anyone who’s been reading my posts about my lack of pleasure with padded modern books, or my increasing interest in hardboiled detective and western novels. It’s always nice to find like minded scribes gathering ’round the camp fire, as Adventure fans know.

L’Amourapalooza

Lamour

My wife’s Aunt Judy, fellow bibliophile, gifted me with her entire L’amour collection. Thanks, Judy!!!

You can see it there in stacks and stacks of  its glory. In all my years I’ve read but ONE L’Amour. You folks out there have any suggestions on where I should start?

One Sword for Love

one sword for loveI finished another Gardner Fox historical earlier this week, and it was a cracking good one. Any of you who love a good Harold Lamb swashbuckler would have seen some familiar features, enough that I couldn’t help thinking that Fox must have read some Lamb. That’s fairly likely, actually, given that Lamb was one of the most popular writers in one of the two magazines best known for historical fiction (Adventure and Argosy — Lamb wrote primarily for Adventure).

As a matter of fact, the whole thing read rather like an R-rated version of a Harold Lamb Crusader story. So you get the gritty, tough, man-at-arms, but you also get some far racier moments that happen on-screen. That sword he’s holding, by the way… you don’t get much of that, because our protagonist’s preferred weapon is a spiked ball on the end of a chain with which he’s frighteningly proficient.

You’ll note that there’s a lovely blonde woman on the cover, and you don’t get much of THAT, either, because the romantic lead is a Persian Princess.

Reviewing

gardner fox bastard orleansI finished Gardner Fox’s The Bastard of Orleans the other day. It sure started strong, and in the first 40-60 pages I thought I might be reading another one as strong as The Borgia Blade. It turns out that despite surface similarities (great action scenes and some old-style “spice”) that it was designed with different effects in mind.

As I contemplated this review I remembered to consider what I always wish other reviewers would do and thought about the novel on its own terms. I believe this book was intended to achieve a different effect than the one I enjoyed more. It was a historical intended to have great action scenes and titillating sex scenes, or scenes with sexy descriptions of women. Fox delivered these things very well, and if that’s what you went in looking for, you’d be very happy.

Pacing and Drafting

gardner fox bastard orleansFollowing up on my post about the strengths of hardboiled fiction I come to the strengths of some of these old historicals. I’m about halfway through Gardner Fox’s The Bastard of Orleans. Maybe the characterization isn’t anything for the ages, but man, am I being swept along by the pace and the surprising turns. Scenes of great color and action, lots of momentum, and plenty of lovely ladies. By page 40 more stuff had already happened than what often happens in a hundred pages or more of modern fantasy stuff. Will I love it as much as I loved The Borgia Blade? I’ll know by the end. Right  now I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

I had it in mind as I was thinking about pacing. I’m always thinking about pacing, but I’ve found myself contemplating it even more in the last few weeks. I’m wrestling with the middle section of my novel and wondering why it’s not fast enough to please me.

I think one of the problems we’ve gotten into is, as I mentioned, a market demand for big fat novels. I tried to buck that trend but the market didn’t like it, so now I’m trying to write novels that, if not fat, are still longer. But I’m also trying to give them the only kind of pacing I can tolerate.

Gardner Fox Swashbucklers

gardner fox bastard orleansBack in 2015 I was pretty thrilled by Gardner Fox’s old historical The Borgia Blade. You can find that review here. I was quite pleased by that one, and a little surprised, as I had abandoned his Kothar sword-and-sorcery stories after several heroic efforts on my part. The Borgia Blade was in a whole different category, as you can see from my review.

I’ve since read another by him still far better than Kothar, but not in the same class as The Borgia Blade, which was so good I’ve continued to search for more gold in his body of work, aided by a list from my friend Morgan Holmes (sword-and-sorcery scholar extraordinaire) that had a whole slew of Fox’s historicals under his own name as well as those written under pseudonyms.

First up (just as soon as I finish some other books) is The Bastard of Orleans. After that will come another Gold Medal paperback, perhaps Terror Over London. I’ve never shared the fascination with Jack the Ripper that many people have, but Chris Hocking tells me that this book is supposed to have a good reputation.

Private Eye

victory's knifeHere at Jones central things have been on the quiet side lately, which is nice. I’m working away on the revision of the second novel of my new series, although revision is a stretch for some portions when a lot of the middle is going to be drafted from scratch.

When not drafting, or still hacking away at the honey-do list, I’ve been reading a lot more, and returned to some of the noir volumes on my shelf. I just polished off Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint and ended up wishing I’d read it a lot sooner, and have been slowly working my way through some great stories in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, which I’m told by those in the know is a landmark collection. Certainly I’ve enjoyed everything in it, and a lot of it I’ve loved. Finding a lot of new (to me) writers in it I mean to explore.

I’ve also been reading my old friend Joe McCullough’s collection of swashbuckling fantasy fiction, Victory’s Knife,  in preparation for writing a proper review. I hope to have something up about that in a few weeks, and Chris Hocking and I are talking about reviving our Hardboiled Monday series. I want to at least talk about the aforementioned anthology and Wade Miller and some other hardboiled detective writers who need more love.

But for now I need to get back to writing.

Thinking of Poul

The-Golden-Slave-Poul-Anderson-smallI was exchanging notes with Scott Lynch about a grand short story he’s got coming out soon, and he happened to mention how much he’s been enjoying some Poul Anderson. And that got me thinking just how much I sometimes like Anderson’s work. I’ve never listed him as a favorite author, but he’s written a number of books on my “keeper” list. There’s The Broken Sword, or course, a great take on some of the same mythic material that inspired Tolkien. Ryan Harvey did a great job discussing the text back in 2007 at Black Gate.

More recently Gabe Dybing covered another of my favorite Anderson novels, The Golden Slave at Black Gate (along with The High Crusade, one I haven’t read).

It wasn’t too long ago that works like these were hidden secrets. Sure, they’re not widely known anymore, but it seems like word is out about the good ones. And I’m pretty sure that they’re still fairly cheap to lay hands on if you go through a used book search site like Addall. It would be pretty swell if someone would collect Anderson’s best historicals in an omnibus. Not me, though. I have enough on my plate as it is…

 

 

Belated Birthday

solomon-kane3Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly.

Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”