Paperback Flashback: Thief of Llarn

Having recently revisited Gardner Fox's Sword & Planet novel Warrior of Llarn, 1966's Thief of Llarn. Poor Alan Morgan can't relax into married life with the beautiful princess Tuarra of Karthol because the thieves' guild of Llarn is stealing all the ultra-rare, precious stones called verdals. One of which happens to be in Tuarra's wedding ring.

On their way to consult with some scientists in another city-state, Morgan and his wife are waylaided by an immortal, psychic entity, who also is very much concerned about the verdal thefts. He forces Morgan to go undercover for him under threat of death rather than, you know, just teaming up. As the legendary thief, Uthian the Unmatched, Alan Morgan must steal a verdal from a remote, ancient city, then infiltrate the thieves' guild to find out who has commissioned these crimes and why. As is typical with this sort of thing, it is a leader with designs on conquest and a super-weapon.

This sequel is, I think, better than the first. Where Warrior of Llarn, while colorful, followed the predictable points in the Sword & Planet Hero's Journey, this one is freed from those restrictions. There are couple of interesting perils and new cultures and the character of super-thief Uthian the Unmatched brings a bit of Sword & Sorcery verve to things, even if he's only Alan Morgan playing a role. The Tower of Ten Thousand Deaths was neat as was the variegated force field that protected the verdal Morgan had to steal. He seemed like something that might have appeared in Fox's Adam Strange.

Paperback Flashback: Planet of Peril

Continuing with some Sword & Planet reading, I decided to check out one of ERB's earliest imitators: Otis Adelbert Kline. Kline was an editor and literary agent predominantly, but he wrote a number of adventure stories in a Burroughsian vein in the 30s and 40s. The Planet of Peril, serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1929, is his first planetary romance, and the first of a trilogy about Robert Grandon of Terra on the planet Venus.

Overall, the beats of the story are various much in the mold of A Princess of Mars. Grandon arrives on Venus (Zarovia) by telepathic transmission, gets in some danger, meets a friend, meets a girl, then has numerous perilous episodes before he and girl can be united marriage. And of course, Grandon ascends to a place of rulership. 

Kline's prose is probably as good as Burroughs' and his adventuresome perils are as imaginative as the typical Burroughs work (if maybe not quite as good as ERB's best): there jungle beasts, intelligent, giant ants, and lecherous potentates. The pace is quick and punctuated with serialized adventure fiction cliffhangers. Kline seems to have put just as much thought into his Venusian neologisms and invent biosphere.

The differences between The Planet of Peril and the Barsoom stories are interesting. John Carter's combat prowess is explained by his status as a sort of eternal "fighting man." Grandon, by contrast, is just a bored rich guy. On the other hand, Grandon's transport to Venus is given more of a story justification (if a pseudoscientific one) rather than just happening. Also, unlike the Barsoomians, Kline's Venusians can and do employ armor when it would benefit them to do so. Vernia has the interesting wrinkle of being more of an antagonist than Dejah Thoris, but on the other hand, Kline doesn't sell her allure with near the facility that Burroughs does his Martian princess.

Overall, if you like Burroughs' planet romance fiction, you'll probably like Kline's.

Paperback Flashback: Warrior of Llarn

I'm rereading a pulp novel from the 1964 I read a few years ago (well, technically I'm listening to it as a audiobook this time).

Gardner Fox isn't exactly known for his great contributions to literature, though he made substantial contributions to Golden and Silver Age DC Comics. According to Wikipedia, he's co-creator Barbara Gordon, the original Flash, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Doctor Fate, Zatanna and the original Sandman, and he's estimated to have written more than 4,000 comics stories. He also wrote a number of stories for pulp magazine in their heyday, and I feel like his work is always competent, and often above average for their output.

Warrior of Llarn is a Sword & Planet yarn in the vein of Burroughs' Mars and an original paperback, not a fix-up of his older pulp work. Earthman Alan Morgan gets transport to a distant world by means as yet mysterious. He saves a princess and gets involved with a war between two civilizations. The level of technology of the world is a bit higher than Barsoom, and Fox provides a Dune-esque (a year before Dune) explanation for why people with energy weapons might still use swords. Like Fox's earlier Adam Strange stories for DC, the planet has suffered a nuclear war in the past, which is the cause of its strange creatures and current lower level of civilization. Fox's story is old fashion, even quaint in many ways, but he's accomplished at delivering the goods. Whatever the books faults, it's not boring.

Fox wrote a sequel, Thief of Llarn, which, if memory serves, is a bit better than the first.

The Spider: Corpse Cargo (1933)

Volume 3, Issue 2 of The Spider magazine (July 1934) is as clear an indication as any that Norvell Page (writing as Grant Stockbridge) is not going to pull any punches with his Spider yarns. His first Spider outing saw kids dying from the bubonic plague unleashed by the villain. In this one, we're only a few pages in when a young member of a club of wannabe Baker Street Irregulars, "The Spider Fan Club," is tortured to death by a gang of modern-day pirates using a knife charged with electricity.

This is part of a larger plot where the gang, led by the beautiful villainess who calls herself Captain Kidd, is using a pulpy invention to electrify rails so that that glow with almost magical "green fire" and electrocute all the passengers of trains so their corpses can be robbed without any witnesses. The trains are sent rolling on to their destinations with no one living on board.

It's a hell of a lurid set-up, and Page is up to the challenge of delivering on it. The pirates set some pretty good death traps for the Spider to have to escape from. There's also a bit of a mystery regarding a kidnapped inventors missing granddaughter that isn't a big point but has a nice little payoff. 

The only thing missing, maybe, is any hint of femme fatale regarding Captain Kidd. The righteous and driven Spider finds her utterly loathsome (and with her disregard for human life, who can blame him!), and though Page says she is attractive, he doesn't give her the sort of loving description a Robert Howard would have.

Get The Spider: The Corpse Cargo here. Tim Truman did a loose adaptation of this story in comics format in the 1990s.

The Fargo Series by John Benteen

Over the summer, I decided to check out the men's adventure paperback series Fargo by John Benteen after discovering it was cheap on Kindle. I became aware of the series thanks to the upcoming graphic novel adaptation, Fargo: Hell on Wheels, by Howard Chaykin.

Amazon bills the series as a Westerns, and I suppose some of them are, in the same way The Professionals (1966) or Fist Full of Dynamite (aka Duck You Sucker) (1972) or other adventure films in Western locales are considered Westerns. They take place in the early 20th Century (1912-1915 in the ones I've read so far) and involve imagery and action out of Westerns (tough men in wild country on horseback with guns), but they involve a range of locales more again to traditional adventure pulp. They range to the jungles of the Philippines and Panama, as well as the more traditional Mexican desert or Yukon.

I've read reviews that refer to Fargo as sort of a "Western Conan." I can see what they mean in that Fargo is tough as hell, irresistible to women (apparently due to sheer manliness, as he is described as unhandsome and hardly has a scintillating personality), and good at most everything in his warrior and outdoorsman purview. However, Benteen's attention to detail regarding gear and preparation for obstacles his hero faces, and his penchant for pitting Fargo against enemies that appear to be a match for him, serve to make the series feel more grounded and realistic. Only slightly pulpy instead of completely so.

Benteen's prose is lean in the mid-Century way, not pulp purple. His action and dialog are punchy and mostly effective but without any lyricism or descriptive vistas despite their natural locales. Unfortunately but predictably given their genre and when they were written, they carry a strong streak of misogyny, some of the volumes more than others. There is also some cultural and racial insensitivity lurking in there too, but in the volumes I have read the narrative is generally sympathetic to both Native Americans and Latinos, though Fargo does exhibit some ill-feeling toward the Moro, who he fought in the Philippines.

They're all quick reads (under 200 pages) and fast-paced. So far I've read:

• Fargo (vol 1): Set in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution, Fargo is hired to rescue an engineer (and his mine's haul of silver) from deep inside that war torn and escape bandits with revolutionary pretensions.
• Panama Gold (vol 2): A prequel set in 1912. Fargo is asked by Teddy Roosevelt himself to investigate and thwart an attempt to foreign powers to use a mercenary army to sabotage the nearly completed Panama Canal.
• Alaska Steel (vol 3) In 1914, Fargo is hired by a movie starlet to find her wayward husband so he can claim his oil money inheritance. The problem is, he has disappeared in the Yukon where he was seeking his fortune as a prospector.
• Apache Raiders (vol 4) Fargo is back in Mexico in 1915, smuggling guns for Pancho Villa. He encounters a "lost" tribe of Apaches (a group that never got sent off to Florida) whose leader is planning a general Indian uprising.
• Massacre River (vol 5) Perhaps the pulpiest of the stories I have read, Fargo is in the Philippines on a job to escort the daughter of a Chinese businessman to her arranged marriage. If Filipino insurgents weren't enough trouble, there is a family of wealthy, Confederate Lost Cause holdouts, looking to create a new empire and kicking the U.S. out of the islands.

The Spider: Wings of the Black Death (1933)

Issue 3 of The Spider magazine (December 1933) is the debut of the writer most associated with the series, Norvell Page, writing under the house name Grant Stockbridge. This wasn't his first sell, but it was definitely his big break in the pulps, though he'll go on to other pulp work including creating the historical Sword & Sorcery character Hurricane John.

If Doc Savage kind of has the sensibility of an 80s action cartoon, Page's Spider novels are perhaps most like the 30s version of the lurid, bloody excess of late 80s-early 90s comics. His debut story, Wings of the Back Death, features New York City being held hostage by a madman threatening to unleash the bubonic plague unless he's paid off. Infectious disease is a big concern in these stories (the first systemic antibiotic had only been introduced in 1932); there's another Spider novel titled "The Cholera King." 

Anyway, the first onscreen death of via the plague is a over the top scene where the children of a wealthy woman have been threatened and the Spider has seen that a police cordon is set up around the house. But the wily Black Death infects a cute puppy and sends it into the backyard! The children are playing with it under the eyes of the policeman as Spider runs toward them shouting "shoot the dog! shoot the dog!" He snatches up the little boy and does the puppy-killing himself. 

Cut to the little boy dying horribly, spitting up blood, while the doctor and the Spider look on grimly and the kid's mother pounds on the door sobbing because they won't let her in!

Despite that, this one is actually a bit subdued compared to the high body counts and grisly deaths of later Page Spider novels.

In his analysis of the formulae or subgenres of the Mystery genre, Hoppenstand points out that the detective-avenger protagonist tends to pursue conservative ends, and their foes are often demonized anti-status quo forces. Here though, I think an alternative reading is possible. The Black Death is in his civilian identity a banker. He first blackmails not the city but wealthy individuals and all the graphic scenes of people dying of the plague involve the wealthier segments of society. It's true that the Spider's alter ego is a wealthy man, but he spends most of the novel being pursued by the Establishment as the police try to kill him even though he's out to save the city. It's true that in the end, it's revealed that the Black Death works for the advantage of some foreign power, but we are never told which and that's only revealed in one line of dialogue near the end. Wings of the Black Death seems to offer the vicarious thrill of getting to see the wealthy stripped of their privilege and dying of disease, and the spreader of the pestilence is an agent of the financial industry. A very topical foe for the Great Depression!

Page's story really moves. There is a lot of action, though also some movie serial-esque cliffhanger repetitiveness. There is, of course, some pulp clunkiness to the prose--none of the poetry here of a Clark Ashton Smith or even a Robert E. Howard--but I find it superior to say Lester Dent's work on Doc Savage.

What do you think about Superhero Fiction?

Do you read books about superheroes?

I'm not talking about novelizations of Kingdom Come or The Dark Knight Returns, or collections of commentaries about comics, but actual prose books featuring original superheroes written by non-comic book writers.

Of late, as I have been helping my wife complete work on her first book (which is now available via Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon), I have found myself delving into the world of self published novels which in turn has led me to discover a new wave of fiction featuring other peoples superheroes. (Some of which are pretty good, but more on that next week.)

I think there is a tendency among comic book readers to think of COMIC BOOKS to be the real source of super heroic stories and any BOOK featuring superheroes will be either too derivative or one dimensional to be given any serious thought. (At least that seems to be the impression I have gotten when discussing the topic with other comic book readers.)

What I think is a bit ironic about that notion is that in many ways, the reverse is true. First, many people feel the inspiration for modern heroes started with some of the early heroic fiction of the 1930's. Among the first and most cited is Phillip Wylie's Gladiator novel.



Gladiator presents the adventures of Hugo Danner, a man whose scientist father developed a serum that gave young Hugo the proportionate strength of a ant (sound familiar?), the ability to leap like a grasshopper, superhuman strength, speed and bulletproof skin.

Because of the era it was written, the story will probably be a bit off putting to modern comic fans, but has a lot of interesting ideas in it. In fact, while no direct evidence has ever been presented, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that this book was the inspiration for Superman.

A more famous inspiration for the superhero genre would have to be Doc Savage.



True, Doc didn't fire lasers from his eyes or have bulletproof skin, but it's easy to see how this man of tomorrow inspired the modern day hero, especially those of the Batman ilk.

Filled with some highly imaginative ideas, the Doc Savage series was quite popular during the 30's and 40's but sort of faded out during the 50's. In the 60's the series found a new market of readers when Bantam book reprinted the series with cover artwork by James Bama.

Of late, noted Doc historian and co-creator of The Destroyer series Will Murray has written new stories with Doc featuring concepts with more big-screen appeal like this one featuring Doc Savage on Skull Island

Within more recent history, George R.R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) edited a series of shared world anthologies featuring non-comic superheroes under the Wild Cards banner.



The Wild Cards series features a rather ingenious framework for a superhero world (heroes, villains and mutates are the rare survivors of a deadly alien virus) with such notable contributors as George R.R. Martin, Roger Zelazny, Lewis Shriner, Melinda Snodgrass, John Miller.

The first book starts in the 1940's and follows the world of heroes through the Red Scare 50's, Vietnam era 60's and 70's and ends in the modern era. Subsequent novels have all taken place in the modern era, with some spotlighting different areas of the globe.

Because of its modern take on the superhero genre against a historical backdrop, people have often compared Wild Cards to Watchmen (and while there are a number of shared ideas, but I think that is just zeitgeistian coincidence.) I tend to see Watchmen as a very deliberate story with many set goals while the Wild Card series is a more random exploration of the superhero genre with vetted science fiction writers extending Stan Lee's concept of real world superheroes to the next level.

The series started in 1985 and has continued over the years at different publishers and was even adapted into a graphic novel 4 issue prestige format limited series in the 90's on Marvel's Epic imprint which was later collected into a single book.*



The most current volume being Fort Freak which came out in 2011 As of 2011, there was talk that Universal Pictures would make a movie out of the series through their partnership with SyFy.

The most important thing about the Wild Cards series is that it successfully delivers on the promise of richer, deeper stories in a superhero setting. Writers are allowed to develop ideas with more complexity, verisimilitude, thematic depth and stylistic nuance than one would ever see in a comic from the big two.

Sadly, even though Wild Cards paved the way for a new era of Superhero fiction, no one seemed interested in traveling down that road.

Until recently. But that will be the subject of next weeks post. ;)

- Jim

*Thanks to Trey Causey for the correction on today's post. - JS