Buy Now!

This is a first edition hardback (the paperback is due out next year), and the cover price is $15.99. Amazon is also offering it at a discounted $12.47.

Considering that the hardback usually runs $11 to $16, and the paperback when it finally comes out will likely be a minimum of $8, this is a great opportunity to get the book for cheap.

For the uninitiated, Doc Wilde is my modern take on the great old adventure tales featuring characters like Indiana Jones, The Shadow, the Spider, and most importantly Doc Savage, with strong currents of H.P. Lovecraft’s eldritch horror swirled in.

It is published as a book for young teen readers, but like something like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Incredibles, is intended for both young and old.

Frogs of Doom is the first in a series; next will be Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull.

You can check out some reviews at http://www.docwilde.com/reviews/.

So. Yeah.

Then I disappeared. No more blog, no more music, no more Skullduggery. Definitely no staying current on email, either my personal account or through Facebook (which I haven’t looked at in months). Hardly any online activity at all.

What happened? I could say I bit off more than I could chew, but things being the way they’ve been, it’s probably more accurate to say I bit off more and I couldn’t chew at all. The past few months have been harrowing and stressful and lonely. So hey, good times.

I’m hopefully back for a while, and have things I want to talk about, and some things I really don’t. I’l be making a gradual assault on my email backlog, but if you’re in it, I can’t make any promises I’ll be able to reply. I will try to hit the important things, as out of date as they may be.

And here’s a Song of the Week, to reflect my broken brain and its place in the world…

With Sam Raimi working on The Shadow, it’s looking very promising for pulp adventure in the near future. Now all we need is a Bruce Timm adaptation of Doc Wilde and the world will truly be on the right track.

In related news, DC Comics just released the first issue of their First Wave series, in which they establish an alternate world, outside the normal DC universe, in which pulp heroes operate, and no one has super-powers. The greatest of the heroes in this world is, of course, Doc Savage.

The First Wave series actually began last year with the one-shot Batman/Doc Savage special I reviewed in November. I was underwhelmed, but still hopeful that the actual series would be good.

Well, I just read First Wave #1, and it’s awesome pulp and awesome comics. Brian Azzarello’s writing and treatment of these classic characters honors their roots while at the same time deepening their emotional lives and rooting them realistically into the world. And artist Rags Morales brings the cast to vivid life with a style that’s both realistic and somewhat cartoony, befitting the pulp nature of the work. My only beef with the book is that Doc Savage’s hair color and complexion are still off, though not as badly as they were in the Batman team-up book.

Great stuff.

I am happy to say it brings back an element sadly missing in recent movies, gratuitous nudity. Sexy women would “happen” to be topless in the 1970s movies for no better reason than that everyone agreed, including themselves, that their breasts were a genuine pleasure to regard — the most beautiful naturally occurring shapes in nature, I believe. Now we see breasts only in serious films, for expressing reasons. There’s been such a comeback for the strategically positioned bed sheet, you’d think we were back in the 1950s.

Preach it, Brother Roger.

Drogarth.

The name alone conjures dark images of spilling blood, of blackest magiks, of lawlessness and chaos. Throughout the kingdom children hear stories of this evil city and are told they must never go there — and they wish with all their hearts that one day they will. For children are the custodians of wishes, of dreams; they know in their hearts, in their souls, that only in the darkest of pits can the brightest adventures be found…

Years and years ago, when I had a bit more spring in my step and fewer callouses on my heart, I got out of a misguided stint in the U.S. Army and plopped down at a cheap portable typewriter to begin living the life I always intended to live, that of a dashing and prolific novelist.

I was living on savings, shacking up in Kassel, West Germany (there was still an East Germany then) with a wonderful girlfriend named Rike (whom I’d met the very day I’d arrived at my Army post), who was deep in her own university studies while I took the time to write.

It was a happy year. It was the most productive year of my life, too.

First, I wrote a short fantasy adventure novel called The Road to Adventure. It was sort of stock fantasy — knights and elves and hot pagan priestesses — mixed with sheer swashbuckling and quite a bit of eldritch horror. Took me just over a month to write, and I got it in the mail and started the next project.

The Road to Adventure damn near got published too. A senior editor at one of the big science fiction/fantasy publishers took a liking to it and went to bat for it with the editorial board. See, getting a book published isn’t just a matter of getting a “yes,” it’s a matter of getting a series of “yeses,” and if you get a “no” in that series, you’re screwed. According to the editor, I had the majority of folks wanting the book, but got two key noes; I was screwed. But hey, pretty good for the first shot.

Of course, that resolution took a while, during which I wrote my second book. This took a lot longer than a month. Whereas I’d written Road with a detailed outline, I started this one with a setting, a couple of character ideas, and the notion that I was gonna write a “hardboiled fantasy,” mixing standard sword and sorcery tropes with gritty crime fiction. And I had the title:

Skullduggery. A Tale of Thieves.

I dove in with reckless confidence, writing five pages a day, then rewriting the previous day’s output, and the book grew and grew. The setting became a real place in my mind, gaining complexity and mass. The cast grew almost out of control, until the book became a weave of subplots crossing and clashing. And things happened. Damn did things happen. Small, personal, violent things. Big, dark, scary things. Portentous things with repercussions beyond the everyday reality of that world.

The novel became a big treasure chest I kept throwing cool stuff in. Thieves. Gypsies. Ninjas. Musketeers. Highwaymen. Madmen. Pirates. Treachery. Monsters…

By the time I typed “END,” the book was roughly 600 pages long. And as I geared up to revise it, I got a call from that editor in New York, who’d already delivered the bad news about Road’s non-publication a while back, but had liked my writing so much she wanted to know what I had in the works. I told her, and she had me send a copy of the first draft.

Well. She liked the writing. But she didn’t like the book, and had another editor read it for a second opinion, and that editor hadn’t cared for it either.

Or, more precisely, they didn’t think it was publishable. For one thing, it was pretty fucking big for a first novel; it costs more money to print a thick book, and they couldn’t be sure about making production costs back on a big book by an unknown.

The other thing was, they thought it was too profane and violent for a mainstream fantasy book. I thought I was bringing in something vibrant and raw from crime fiction; they thought I was gonna scare all the questing unicorn readers out there. Mind you, this was the mid-eighties, and since then, the fantasy genre has changed quite a bit (though not, entirely, for the better), and content like mine isn’t so outre’ any more.

I disagreed with them, and while I respected their opinions (and recognized their bottom line issues with publishing such a big book), I also thought they were being sort of condescending to their readers by trying to protect them from such a harsh fantasy world.

But…this woman loved my writing, and had been my main cheerleader at the one publisher who had shown solid interest in Road to Adventure. Getting shot down by her, at that stage, before I was even really getting a grip on the first revision, was crushing. I’d seen her as my shot at glory, once the book was truly ready, and now the shot seemed stillborn.

I floundered. I set it aside, always meaning to go back and bash it into some highly wonderful shape that would overcome all of a publisher’s objections, but I never did. But I still remembered living that book as I wrote it, and while it was a very big book for a fledgling author, it really did have a lot of cool stuff in it.

Now, realistically, with the Doc Wilde series and other projects, I have too much on my agenda to think I’m going to get around to revising it after all this time. But I figured I’d put it up here in weekly chunks for the interested. It’s rough, and the product of a much younger me, but you might just enjoy it. And if not, whaddayawantfernuthin? Rubber biscuit?

Anyway, I hope you like it.

Go HERE to discover Drogarth, the City of Thieves.

Johnny Depp features. But then, it’s a Burton piece.

It’s here. I’d have embedded it, but it won’t. So.

As a Chan fan from years before most people in this country ever heard of him, I agree 100%.

Jackie with Michelle Yeoh, who still retains full mega awesome to this day.

This is a song that I’ve listened to hundreds of times over the years and it has never lost its power to move me. Aside from the elegant softness of the music and the gentle beauty of Miller’s voice, the song is like a shelter from the cold, a loving touch on a lonely night.

I suffer from depression, and just listening to Miller sing this song adds a bit of hope to my time in the abyss. This winter has been a time of crushing solitude and torpor for me (it’s become apparent that my depression is very cyclical, and the colder months damn near crack my bones spiritually), and I’m only just starting not only to see sunlight again, but to care whether I see it or not.

Julie Miller’s song helps me feel like perhaps there’s still someplace I’m headed besides base survival.

Lyrics after the break:

You’ve been taken by the wind
You have known the kiss of sorrow
Doors that would not take you in
Outcast and a stranger

You have come by way of sorrow
You have come by way of tears
But you’ll reach your destiny
Meant to find you all these years
Meant to find you all these years

You have drunk a bitter wine
With none to be your comfort
You who once were left behind
Will be welcome at love’s table

You have come by way of sorrow
You have come by way of tears
But you’ll reach your destiny
Meant to find you all these years
Meant to find you all these years

All the nights that joy has slept
Will awake to days of laughter
Gone the tears that you have wept
You’ll dance in freedom ever after

You have come by way of sorrow
You have come by way of tears
But you’ll reach your destiny
Meant to find you all these years
Meant to find you all these years

Everyone always just referred to him by his last name, in classic tough guy style, and my dad was definitely a tough guy. Yet he was no thug, no bully, but a protector of those that needed protecting. A warrior, as defined by ninja Shihan Jack Hoban is “a man of action, guided by reason, and motivated by love,” and that was my father through and through.

My last name is Byrd. But that wasn’t my father’s last name. His was Spenser. And if you needed help, he was for hire.

Spenser wasn’t my real father, alas. He wasn’t even actually real. He was a character in thirty-nine novels by Boston novelist Robert B. Parker, who died of a heart attack while writing the morning of January 18th, 2010. He was 77.

So why do I claim Spenser as my dad?

One of the most important things my actual father ever said to me was, “You’re a turd, a little turd, this big.” Then he rolled the tips of his thumb and index finger together the way a five year old might make a booger disappear.

So, as you might imagine, I sort of had to look elsewhere for any positive sort of mentoring.

Being a reader helped me see out of the dark pit that was my childhood world, and in books (and movies) I found that mentoring. I knew I didn’t want to grow up to be like my father, but what did I want to grow up to be like?

Robin Hood. Conan. Doc Savage. Indiana Jones. Batman. The Gray Mouser. Like many folks I saw in such characters things to aspire to, things I hoped to be. And I needed that positive modeling possibly a lot more than most.

In my early twenties, I read the book Looking For Rachel Wallace, and my life was literally changed. It was a taut, smart, enjoyable read, yes, but beyond that, Spenser resonated with me in a way no character ever had. He was big and strong and smart like most private detectives (at least in fiction), but there was far more to the guy than just bullets and beer.

Spenser could knock some mook’s teeth out, wryly quote Yeats, then head home to cook a tasty meal. He was bound to his own solid and largely inflexible code of honor, but practical in dealing with problems, even when they proved challenging to his code (which was often). He was trying to be a perfect Spenser in a very imperfect world, but he knew the world was broken and he couldn’t fix it. But he also knew that the very effort to do what he could was elevating.

In the above mentioned book, Spenser is hired to bodyguard Rachel Wallace, a lesbian feminist author who’s getting death threats from the sort of folks who hate lesbian feminist authors. (You know the type, they’re still all over the place, sputtering hatred because that’s What Would Jesus Do). Rachel is on the abrasively militant side, and there is instant conflict between her and Spenser because he is a big man with big muscles, a gun, and a manly code of chivalry hired to protect her, a strong-willed and liberated woman.

“You don’t like me.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t,” she said.

“It’s irrelevant,” I said.

“You don’t like me, and you don’t like what I stand for.”

“What is it you stand for?” I said.

“The right of every woman to be what she will be. To shape her life in conformity to her own impulse, not to bend her will to the whims of men.”

I said, “Wow.”

“Do you realize I bear my father’s name?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I had no choice,” she said. “It was assigned me.”

“That’s true of me, too,” I said.

She looked at me.

“It was assigned me. Spenser. I had no choice. I couldn’t say I’d rather be named Spade. Samuel Spade. That would have been a terrific name, but no. I had to get a name like an English poet. You know what Spenser wrote?”

“The Faerie Queen?”

“Yeah. So what are you bitching about?”…

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because I’m a woman and was given a man’s name.”

“Whatever name would have been given without your consent. Your mother’s, your father’s, and if you’d taken your mother’s name, wouldn’t that merely have been your grandfather’s?”

Spenser was also an ever-entertaining smartass, which is one of my favorite character traits.

Spenser was the perfect literary mentor for me. He exemplified many of the traits and values I intrinsically possess, but he took them to a more realized level, and he codified them, made them a personal system. In reading the books, and looking at things through his eyes, I found a roadmap to living as I actually wanted to, but hadn’t really parsed yet.

In other words, I had notions, but no philosophy. Spenser, and of course the man who created him, helped me nail down the patterns of my own worldview.

This wasn’t entirely beneficial. One of Spenser’s strongest traits is an adamant romanticism born out of the classical troubadour spirit of romantic love. Once he has given his heart, as he does to his beloved Susan Silverman, that’s all folks, it’s given forever. Even if the love is not returned. Even if the beloved is gone from his life. I love you because of who you are, not because of how you feel about me or treat me. I have decided that it is you I love, and I’ll stand by that decision.

Very appealing, and I still largely tend toward a very practical, grounded romanticism regarding love. I believe in poetry. I believe in two people treating love as a form of art, spinning relationship as a weave of meaning and actions in a knowing, non-sentimentalist way that may sometimes use the cliches of romantic fantasy but recognizing that that stuff is just spice, never to be mistaken for love itself.

But that whole “forever” issue…well, it worked for Parker. The love of his life was his wife Joan, and he was unwavering in that love. There were even a few years of turmoil, and she left him, but he stood fast and she returned, and it was to her that every one of his books was dedicated, and it was her who ultimately found him dead at his typewriter. He stood by his decision that he was hers, whether she was his or not, and it worked out.

Me, I embraced that notion, and I put a helluva lot of thought and feeling into it, and it led me to fully dedicate myself to someone, even after she was gone (back to her husband and three daughters), so much that her lingering occupancy in my heart crippled many another relationship I had for years thereafter. Then I let her go, and allowed myself to fall in love fully again, and that eternal beloved hit the road when my life hit a hard stretch, but fortunately I’d become more realistic in this love stuff by that point.

Then I gave up on romance and got married, but that’s another story.

So, the worldview Parker gave Spenser isn’t perfect, but then again he knew that, and even Spenser and his other heroes know that. (About the character Jennifer Grayle, the elevated beloved figure in Parker’s non-Spenser novel Love and Glory, Parker once said, “Jennifer’s too thin, too small, insufficiently interesting and she does not bear the weight of Boone’s obsession.”) But they keep trying to reach the unattainable, and in doing so, they hopefully elevate themselves, if only occasionally.

At the very least, I hope to do likewise.

I’m going to miss Robert Parker. I did get to hang out with him many years ago at a book signing, and had a great time, but then, we were both literate smartasses. That always helps.

And I’m going to miss my literary dad, Spenser, though I have several bookshelves of memories at hand (as well as an enjoyable, if very imperfect, TV show) I can thankfully revisit any time I want.

Like right now.

Robert B. Parker 1932-2010