Category Archives: Pulp

Pulp Reading Group (Mar 2009): Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser

Over on Goodreads (www.goodreads.com), I recently joined a great reading group called “Pulp Magazine Authors and Literature Fans.” The group discusses, as you might figure, pulp fiction, and every month chooses a book to read and talk about in the forum. Last month’s choice was Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which I didn’t have time to get to (but read many years back, and remember enjoying it).

This month, the choice is Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar, the only novel-length tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

lankhmar1
(That’s not the cover of The Swords of Lankhmar, but is the great Mike “Hellboy” Mignola’s cover to another collection of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories).

Fritz Leiber (along with Robert E. Howard and a few others) was instrumental in the actual creation of the fantasy genre known as “sword and sorcery.” Leiber, in fact, was the man who coined the term. His stories are sardonic and bawdy and full of wit, full of action and invention, comic and tragic, sometimes damn near Shakespearean…If your notion of heroic fantasy literature is based on the yards and yards of Tolkien ripoffs and D&D novels (themselves, ultimately, Tolkien ripoffs for the most part), Leiber will prove a true literary treat.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two of the greatest characters in fantasy, a pair of good-hearted rogues of flexible ethics and decidedly Dionysian morality, as adept with their wits as they are with their blades. Fafhrd is a towering red-bearded barbarian from frosty northern lands, the Mouser a slight trickster from the urban sprawl who dabbles a bit in the arcane (with often questionable results). They adventure through the world of Nehwon (read it backwards), which is full of corruption and vile magics and things to do. And the adventures are so well written, they tickle the mind:

…Then [Fafhrd] shrugged and said loudly, “What’s so special about these rats? Do they do tricks?”

“Aye,” Slinoor said distastefully. “They play at being men. They’ve been trained by Hisvet to dance to music, to drink from cups, hold tiny spears and swords, even fence. I’ve not seen it–nor would care to.”

The picture struck the Mouser’s fancy. He envisioned himself small as a rat, dueling with rats who wore lace at their throats and wrists, slipping through the mazy tunnels of their underground cities, becoming a great connoisseur of cheese and smoked meats, perchance wooing a slim rat-queen and being surprised by her rat-king husband and having to dagger-fight him in the dark. Then he noted one of the white rats looking at him intently through the silver bars with a cold inhuman blue eye and suddenly his idea didn’t seem amusing at all…

Simply put, there is no finer writer than Leiber in fantasy, and he’s a damn sight better than most in any genre:

The Demoiselle Hisvet stood as tall as the Mouser, but judging by her face, wrists, and ankles was considerably slenderer. Her face was delicate and taper-chinned with small mouth and pouty upper lip that lifted just enough to show a double dash of pearly tooth. Her complexion was creamy pale except for two spots of color high on her cheeks. Her straight fine hair, which grew low on her forehead, was pure white touched with silver and all drawn back through a silver ring behind her neck, whence it hung unbraided like a unicorn’s tail. Her eyes had china whites but darkly pink irises around the large black pupils. Her body was enveloped and hidden by a loose robe of violet silk except when the wind briefly molded a flat curve of her girlish anatomy…

If you’re a completist, the first book in the series is Swords And Deviltry, but The Swords of Lankhmar is the only novel in the cycle, and there’s nothing particularly spoilery or incomprehensible about reading it without reading the other books. Hop over to Goodreads and join the group, join the discussion. Or just read Leiber on your own, as a gift to yourself.

New Doc Wilde Blog

The new Doc Wilde site is coming along nicely.

I just added a Doc Wilde blog (“The Blogs of Doom“) which will be more targeted in its focus than “Under An Outlaw Moon,”  which is my personal blog, so you never know what you’ll find here. While there will naturally be some cross0ver, the content there should mostly be original.

Also at the site are a Gallery of great Doc Wilde art by comics artist Gary Chaloner, a Reviews page for Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom, FREE Stuff including an excerpt from the book and a free short story, an Author’s Bio/FAQ, and a library of Suggested Reading.

Come on by and check it out. Don’t forget to sign the Guestbook.

Savage Tales

red_sonja_by_nebezial

Back in the day, I worked in the roleplaying game industry.

I’m not talking rpg video games, like World of Warcraft or Oblivion (more’s the pity, because the money would have been way better). No, I’m talking good old fashioned face-to-face, throwin’ dice, drinkin’ root beer and eatin’ Doritos roleplaying games. I got into them when I was a young teen, starting with the original Dungeons & Dragons and moving on to many others like Champions, Traveller, and Daredevils. In my twenties, here and there I’d manage to get some short-lived game together, a little James Bond or Ghostbusters here, a little Paranoia or Justice Inc there.

Then I happened across White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse one day (in which players assume the roles of lycanthropic ecoterrorists fighting demonic corporate forces to save the wilderness and the Earth itself). Werewolves have always been my favorite monster, I’m a devoted environmentalist, and the game is steeped in animistic spirituality which is my soul’s cup of tea…conceptually, it was a perfect storm for me. That led to scattered White Wolf gaming, which in time led to me actually working at the company. Which led to a bit of other rpg work, most notably for Feng Shui and its stillborn spinoff Pulp! (none of that work saw print, unfortunately, as Daedelus Games collapsed, though I did put some of it online…by the way, any Feng Shui players out there still have copies of my stuff? I lost it all in a hard drive crash).

These games get a bad rap from some people, and D & D is often cultural code for loser. But the fact of the matter is that many people who sneer at roleplayers spend their time watching crap like Desperate Housewives or American Idol, deadening their brains while the gamers hang out together and engage in an activity that has its roots in campfire storytelling and improv theater, an activity that’s inherently social and that exercises the mind.

But I digress. A few years ago, I managed to run a game for a group of friends who managed, more often than not, for a while, to actually get together regularly to play. The game was Shane Hensley’s great Savage Worlds. Ultimately, unfortunately, it’s really tough to keep a game going over time because people are, in groups, pretty unreliable, and entropy sets in till things just unravel.

One of the things I did, as things were unraveling, was to try to establish “pick up games” outside the continuing narrative of the main game, that we could play if someone in the group didn’t show up. That way, we’d still be playing something, the group would hold steady in its routine, and we could restart the main game “next” time…

For the pickup games, I decided to run short sword & sorcery adventures, focusing mainly on mood and action (as opposed to an involved narrative and character development), and in the spirit of Savage Worlds  I called them “Savage Tales.” And I wrote a short handbook describing the setting and telling the players how to design their characters for it.

Before the game evaporated for good, I think we actually played one such pickup game. Or maybe we just had an evening where we hung out and did the character creation. I can’t remember for sure. But I always liked the little handbook I put together, and the commentary within on the difference between epic fantasy (like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and sword & sorcery (like Robert E. Howard’s Conan or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser):

If everyone can’t make it, we go to Europia. There, things are gonna be less epic saga, more survival skirmish. Conan could become a king in Europia, but Tolkien’d have his pipe crushed under some furred boot and be set to work the rest of his short life digging stones from cold earth.

There are no hobbity folk in Europia because they were eaten by snake-men aeons ago. The elves are mysterious and dark, and if you see one, it usually changes your life forever. The dwarves may exist or not, but grandpa says they eat human flesh. And the closest thing to an orc you’ve ever seen is that big ugly fucker down the bar you saw sodomizing an unconscious guardsman the other night…

Here’s the booklet. You might get a kick out of it. If you’re a gamer, you might even find something useful in it. But here it is.

SAVAGE TALES

See Some Cool Doc Wilde Art!

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I’ve written previously about comic book wizard Gary Chaloner’s early involvement in coming up with possible artwork for the Doc Wilde series. He worked up some great designs that ultimately weren’t used (if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll see them in comic book or animated form one of these days), but definitely need to be seen.

I just added a “Gallery” page to the revamped Doc Wilde site, and it’s loaded with Gary’s sketches. Check it out:

www.DocWilde.com

Read An Excerpt From DOC WILDE & THE FROGS OF DOOM At The New Doc Wilde Site!!!

docwilde

For a while, I’ve been using a subpage of this blog as the official site for Doc Wilde, but I’ve now launched a more respectable site that has much more to offer, including a free excerpt from my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom.

Head over to www.DocWilde.com to join the adventure.

Another Rave Review For Doc Wilde!

My day is off to a great start: my son’s out of school because of snow, and my novel gets its second review, from novelist Alex Bledsoe at Guys Lit Wire:

Tim Byrd’s rollicking Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom is part Jonny Quest, part Doc Savage and all a massive hoot…it’s a balls-out adventure that, while light-hearted, never turns to self-referential mockery…

There’s lots more of the review here. Go see.

Doc Wilde Gets His First Actual Review In The Wild

Hiya.

For anyone who’s missed me the past week or more, it’s because I’m firmly embedded in the legalistic tar pit pooped out by the court system for those of us who get divorced. But I’m still breathing. Mostly.

On happier fronts, it seems the review copies of my first novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, have started to land out there in the Land of Critique. And Ron Fortier, himself an active pulp wordsmith and scholar, is first out of the gate with a review at his site Pulp Fiction Reviews:

The Wildes are old fashioned heroes in the best sense of the word and their adventure is sure to thrill pulp fans, both old and new…

Click here to read the full review. In the midst of this other business, it really made my day.

Wilde Flair for Facebook

flairAll you Flair fanatics on Facebook can now share official Doc Wilde™ Flair with your friends.

The pic above is just one of several available. Just do a search for “Doc Wilde” to find the others.

And don’t forget, you can also find the Wildes adventuring with many other heroes on the “A Pulp Hero to the Rescue” app!

Trust me, I’m a psychopath!

jekyll

I’m phasing out Comcast Cable (crappy HD, shitty DVR that’s years behind Tivo in reliability and functionality, and execrable customer service), which is unfortunately the only TV option provided by my apartment management, and one of the services that is replacing it is a renewed subscription to Netflix, because of its new streaming features. For $10 a month I can have one disk out at a time (and that disk will be Blu-Ray if the flick is available in that format) and unlimited real-time streaming of the movies they have available, of which there’s a surprising abundance (I have over three hundred listings in my personal “Watch Instantly” queue).

It’s really great, as I can choose something on the spot to give a try, without worrying about it tying up my physical rental for a few days of mailing back and forth, and if that choice sucks, I just stop watching and move on to something else. It also has allowed me to find some really great stuff I hadn’t been aware of, the latest being the BBC miniseries Jekyll.

Jekyll is FUN. Continue reading →

Read About The “Dead Folks”

deadfolks

This story was my first professional sale, and it has a weird history.

It was accepted twice, but never published until now. First Ed Hall, then the editor of a visionary magazine-on-tape called Verb, wanted it to be in Verb’s first issue. We even did some studio time, recording me reading the story, which was thirsty work.

Then I got word that my favorite magazine, Pulphouse, wanted the story. To put things in context, Pulphouse was very well known in genre circles, and very respected. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever read that I liked nearly every story they published. Not only that, but they wanted to put my story in a special Harlan Ellison issue, and the idea of sharing pages with Harlan was intoxicating.

So, with Ed’s cheerful understanding, I pulled the story from Verb. They went on to have Ha Jin, Robert Olen Butler, and James Dickey in their first issue. They got coverage on All Things Considered on NPR.

Meanwhile, Pulphouse folded just before the issue that was supposed to feature my story.

The most public exposure the story ever got was thanks to children’s author and master storyteller Carmen Deedy, who loved it enough to read it out loud at a gathering or two. Oh, and Anne Rivers Siddons read and adored it, and gave me lots of encouragement.

I always planned to look for a new home for the tale, but never got around to it. Now, for the recession-appropriate price of 99¢, you can download it to your magical computing box and read it to your heart’s content.

I’ve polished it very slightly,  mainly updating some cultural references, but it remains very much a product of the early eighties and a much younger writer. There’s some stuff in it about racists that seems kind of cartoonish these days (and I address that a bit in a new author’s note before the story). But mainly, it’s an odd bit of Southern magic realism owing more than a bit to Mark Twain and Stephen King.

Come on in, sit a while, and visit with the dead folks.

[UPDATE: As of March 30, 2011, “Dead Folks” is available at Amazon in Kindle format for 99¢ , and will soon be available at Barnes & Noble and other online vendors in other ebook formats.]

A Few Great Books

In my previous post, “Brains on Fire: On Kids and Reading,” I recommended an article by James Patterson on that very topic. At the end of that article, Patterson included a list of his favorite books for kids, and it inspired me to make my own list of recommendations. Continue reading →

Doc Wilde On The Interminable Ramble

I could have sworn I posted this news a while back, but apparently I only posted it to Facebook. So here it is, belated but still cool.

Writer Chris Roberson (who, among other achievements, has been a World Fantasy Award finalist four times) got wind of my book, and was kind enough to mention it on his blog:

Click to go to “You can file this under Things That Make Me Burn With Envy.”

Buy Doc Wilde Now!

Buy Doc Wilde Now!

A Smorgasbord of Adventure

For the first time in a long while, it’s easy to build a nice collection of classic pulp adventure fiction, and I’ve been doing just that. I started with the Doc Savage reprints put out monthly by Anthony Tollin, magazine-size volumes using gorgeously restored original art, each book collecting two of the long out-of-print novels, like:

“Resurrection Day” and “Repel”
“The Polar Treasure” and “Pirate of the Pacific”
“The Man of Bronze” and “The Land of Terror”

For the uninitiated, Doc Savage was second only to The Shadow in popularity during the pulp era, and served as a key inspiration to the creators of later characters ranging from Superman and Batman to James Bond and Buckaroo Banzai. He’s also the primary ancestor of my own hero, Doc Wilde. The Savage books were reprinted earlier by Bantam, starting in 1964, and I grew up reading them and wanted to give my son something to read that offered the same sort of adventure.

Tollin offers The Shadow in the same format, also monthly. Till this year, I’d read some Shadow comics and two novels, heard a radio play or two, and seen the film with Alec Baldwin (which is unfortunately campy, but possesses some genuine wit, some gorgeous visuals, and a perfectly cast hero). I was going to just get a Shadow volume here and there, being a lot less of a fan than I was of Doc Savage, but after reading a couple I subscribed to that whole series as well. The Shadow is a magnificent character, and the stories are intricate and action-packed. Here are some great examples:

“The Red Blot” and “The Voodoo Master”
“The Plot Master” and “Death Jewels”
“The Blue Sphinx” and “Jibaro Death”

I subscribed to one more series, The Spider. These reprints also come two to a volume, in nice magazine-sized editions using the original art, but are published quarterly instead of monthly, and by Girasol Collectables.  The Spider started as a Shadow rip-off, but evolved swiftly into something much more demented. The Spider tales are more violent, more epic in scale, and far weirder than usual, even for pulp. At the same time, The Spider is a more human and realistic hero than either of his more famous brethren, showing genuine emotion and even involved in a fully committed, intense, passionately romantic relationship.

Baen Books offers a great place to start with The Spider,  a couple of volumes of classic tales with beautiful artwork by Jim Steranko:

The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham
The Spider: City of Doom

Pulp adventure tales like this are great for us grown-ups who love Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, or James Bond, but they’re also great for young readers, especially boys. And if you start building your own shelf of pulp, don’t forget to put Doc Wilde into the mix. ;)

Anyone know more great pulp stuff that’s available?

Good Memories of 2008

Some things I enjoyed last year, in no particular order…

The Dark Knight. I could say, with great conviction, that this was the best movie of 2008, but I actually didn’t see anywhere close to all the movies released, so that’d be pretty presumptuous of me. It was definitely the best new film I saw, and the Batman movie I’ve wanted to see since my age was in single digits. Batman Begins was damn near perfect (Katie Holmes notwithstanding), and The Dark Knight took everything that worked in Begins and improved upon it. It’s not just a great superhero movie, it’s a damn good film, a high caliber crime thriller, beautifully made, masterfully written, full of great performances, politically topical, just amazing. And the Joker’s bit with a pencil is the best bit of sleight of hand I’ve seen in years.

For the record, I also loved Iron Man and Hellboy 2, and Bolt was wonderful.

Barack Obama. Morning in America, Superman leading the Justice League to victory against the Injustice League, a black man taking the highest office in the land, an antidote to the small-minded, soulless corruption of the past decade in American life. Here’s hoping he lives up to his promise.

Mad Men. TV by and for smart people. This show is ridiculously entertaining, and operates on so many levels that it actually triggers synaptic action in the brain, a rarity on television.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Joss Whedon adds another classic to his resume, and becomes an internet pioneer at the same time. Songs good enough I get them stuck in my head for days and don’t mind. Hilarious wit laced with deep darkness and pathos. The lovely Felicia Day. And Bad Horse, of course, of course.

Doc Wilde. I received the galleys (advance reading copies) of my book, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, and after years of dragging my ass on my dream, it felt great to be able to hold a novel I wrote in my hands, flip through its pages seeing all these paragraphs I crafted, and stare at the cover and see the faces of my characters as they will meet their audience in bookstores. Not to mention reading over and over the great blurbs from Daniel Pinkwater and Quentin Dodd. They like me! They really like me!

Um…excuse my Sally Field moment there.

3o Rock. And Tina Fey in general. I’d never watched this show, though I was interested, because I try to keep my TV viewing down, and often avoid shows I suspect I’ll love. I finally broke down and watched the pilot episode, which resulted in days of binge-watching my way through seasons one and two and three. I’m caught up, and eagerly awaiting the show’s return. This show’s funny as hell, Tina Fey’s a marvel, Alec Baldwin gets to showcase his incredible comic skills, and Tracy Morgan’s a delirious delight.

Facebook. I wasn’t interested in Facebook. I was very cynical about it, saw no use for it. But wiser folks encouraged me to use it at the very least as a tool to make myself available to people interested in my writing, so I signed on. That wasn’t that long ago, but I’m already in steady contact with people I lost over the years, people in the writing and publishing community to learn from, new friends, old enemies (amazing how time and a viable net interface can make old grudges seem beneath notice), and people with similar interests with whom to share ideas and discoveries…

Pulp fiction. I’ve been reading a lot of classic pulp, and thoroughly enjoying it. I have enough to say about this that I’ll be tackling it in another post.

Joss Whedon. In retrospect, I should have just put Dr Horrible here. Leave it to Joss to earn a category all his own on my list of joy. In addition to the musical magic of the Sing-Along Blog, Joss gave the world season 8 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic book form, continuing Buffy’s adventures with panache and wit and emotional depth (the issues are collected in paperback, starting with The Long Way Home).

Also in comics, Joss wrote 25 issues of Astonishing X-Men, with amazing art by John Cassaday, which have also been collected. I got the second hardback collection recently and literally had tears in my eyes when I finished.

And, of course, Joss’s earlier work continues to provide enjoyment. I got to watch both Buffy and Angel from start to finish with my son this year, which I’d looked forward to doing for years, and it was awesome. Which brings me to:

My son. Nathaniel has adapted to the sundering of his family and the resulting radical changes in his life with great cheer and flexibility, and I admire and respect him for that. He remains, as always, the brightest star in my firmament, the only unceasing source of joy and meaning in my life.

Doc Wilde Appears On “Adventures in Writing”

Far-more-prolific-than-me author Mel Odom has mentioned Doc Wilde on his blog, “Adventures In Writing:”

http://melodom.blogspot.com/2008/12/blog-post.html

I look forward to hearing Mel’s thoughts once he’s read the book.

Order Doc Wilde Now!

One of various “Big Days” in the life of a first time author has arrived. Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.

If you plan to order, and have yet to do so, please order through this link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399247831?ie=UTF8&tag=docwilonl-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0399247831

This is the same link that I now have on the http://www.DocWilde.com site (which the link in the right column goes to), so you can always get to it there if need be.

The reason for this is that I am now what you call an “Amazon Associate,” which means I get a bit of extra cash off any sales I refer their way through that link. Extra cash means more possibility of food and caffeine, which means a higher probability of future Doc Wilde books you can enjoy. ;)

Thank You

As my book, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, gets closer and closer to a public existence, I think this Thanksgiving is a prime time to give thanks to those who inspired me and those who have helped make the book a reality.

So here is the acknowledgments page, fresh from the book:

Writing this book has been the literary equivalent of cooking a batch of Stone Soup; I brought some rocks, but the meat and veggies and spice came from many sources.

For inspiration, I affectionately acknowledge the spinners of countless adventure stories I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid, folks like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Alexandre Dumas, Paul Dini, Karl Edward Wagner, Rafael Sabatini, Walter Gibson, Ray Harryhausen, Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, Norvell Page, Michael Chabon, and Robert B. Parker.

I owe a special debt to two writers from the pulp magazines of old, Lester Dent who, under the nom de plume “Kenneth Robeson,” brought the world the extravagant adventures of Doc Savage, the original superhero, and H.P. Lovecraft whose spooky stories warned of eldritch horrors lurking just outside our world waiting to devour it. Lovecraft’s work is always readily available, and as I write this, all the Doc Savage stories are finally being reprinted in beautiful editions by Anthony Tollin and Nostalgia Ventures (www.shadowsanctum.com).

For encouragement over the years, I’d like to thank the enchanting Carmen Agra Deedy, the sensational Shane Black, and especially my noble friend Ed Hall, who never falters.

Thanks to my wonderful agent, Laura Rennert, who daily dares the frightening jungles of publishing with greater fortitude than I’ll ever know.

A very big thank you to my editor Timothy Travaligni (and his right hand, Shauna Fay) for teaching me to use the scalpel and ignore the pain. Thank you for your patience; I’m a blockhead sometimes, and it can take me a while to realize when I’m wrong. This book is a much shinier diamond than it would have been without your help.

A very special thanks to comic book virtuoso Gary Chaloner, the first true friend of the Wildes. Gaz, you’ll always be welcome on our adventures as far as I’m concerned.

And the biggest thank you of all goes to my son, Nathaniel Byrd, who made me want to tell this tale in the first place.

Galley Slave

Over the weekend, I got in the galleys (aka ARCs, Advance Reading Copies) of my novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. Like much of the publication process, it’s a bittersweet experience. Continue reading →

Another Advance Doc Wilde Rave!

The second official endorsement of my novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, just arrived.

It’s from Quentin Dodd, author of The Princess of Neptune and Beatnik Rutabagas from Beyond the Stars:

Thank you for letting me read DOC WILDE AND THE FROGS OF DOOM. I should have had this done a week ago, but once I got about halfway through I started slowing down because I didn’t want it to end.

I really enjoyed this book. It was sharply-written, smart, and didn’t waste a word or a minute in getting to the action. Like its spiritual predecessors, the two-fisted adventure novels for boys and grown-up boys, this is a book to be read under the covers, with a flashlight, way past bedtime. It is old-school entertainment and proud of it.

By the time I got to page nine and [edited for slight spoilage], I knew I was onto something good. I think readers who have already discovered the man from Providence [that would be H.P. Lovecraft] and the Man of Bronze are in for an extra treat as well.

I certainly hope there are going to be sequels, and I can’t remember the last time I said that. Thanks again for giving me the chance to read it. I hope it does well.

Best,

Quentin

P.S. I have to admit, reading something like this brings out mixed emotions. On one hand, I was excited and inspired to read something so good. On the other, I was annoyed that I hadn’t written it myself.

I Been Blurbed

Just got news from my editor  that Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom officially has its first blurb:

“Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom is an adventure yarn in the old tradition.  It gets that reading is an intellectual activity, and that an adventure, to be really good, has to engage the reader’s brain.  I love a smart book!” —Daniel Pinkwater

If you don’t know Daniel Pinkwater, you should. He’s a marvelous, witty, and prolific writer, and a frequent commentator on NPR. I’m thrilled that he’s blurbing the Wildes.