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Author: William Patrick Maynard

Husband and Father. Authorized by Sax Rohmer's Literary Estate to continue the Fu Manchu thrillers. THE TERROR OF FU MANCHU was published by Black Coat Press in April 2009. THE DESTINY OF FU MANCHU followed in 2012. Contributed short stories to numerous anthologies including GASLIGHT GROTESQUE (EDGE Publishing, 2009), TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN: GRAND GUIGNOL (Black Coat Press, 2009), THE RUBY FILES (Airship 27, 2012), FURTHER ENCOUNTERS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Titan Books, 2014), THE MX BOOK OF NEW SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES (MX Books, 2015), TOWERS OF METROPOLIS (Airship 27, 2016), and THE MX BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES CHRISTMAS ADVENTURES (MX Books, 2016).
Celebrating the 220th Anniversary of the Wold Newton Event

Celebrating the 220th Anniversary of the Wold Newton Event

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Tarzan_bigdshal_cvr_finalI have never disguised the fact that my fiction as well as much of my reading selections have been influenced by Wold Newton scholars. Whether one enjoys delving into the deeper world of holistic literary theories or not, there is so much information to be mined and speculation to consider that one could spend a lifetime devouring all of it. One of the foremost Wold Newton scholars active today, Win Scott Eckert today launches a new website on this, the 220th anniversary of the Wold Newton Event. woldnewtonfamily.com was created to provide “accurate and factual information on the canonical works by Philip José Farmer and on deuterocanonical works authorized by Mr. Farmer or his Literary Estate.” The following article defining what exactly is a Wold Newton tale was co-authored by Mr. Eckert with his fellow distinguished scholar and continuation author, Christopher Paul Carey. Thank you to John O’Neill for kindly allowing me to reprint their work here in commemoration of this important day for Wold Newtonians.

A Wold Newton tale must involve a character whom Philip José Farmer identified as a member of the Wold Newton Family, and/or it must add to our knowledge of the secret history that Farmer uncovered, which has come to be known as the “Wold Newton Universe.” It can also be a crossover story, but that is not required.

In recent years, generic crossover stories have come to be mistakenly referred to as “Wold Newton” tales. A mere crossover is not enough. With this in mind, a primer on Farmer’s discoveries regarding the Wold Newton Family is in order.

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Kull and the Quest for Identity

Kull and the Quest for Identity

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Baen Kull Robert E Howard-smallkull-the-fabulous-warrior-king-198NOTE: The following article was first published on April 18, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” is a remarkable advancement upon “Exile of Atlantis” and the “Am-ra of the Ta’an” fragments. Howard’s first published story of what will later be known as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age leaves behind the derivative world of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches to mine new territory in terms of character and setting as well as genre.

Kull, the barbarian who has recently seized the crown and now must struggle to keep it, marks a significant break from both Howard and the fantasy genre’s past while continuing to build upon the age-old theme of the outsider as noble savage. Howard was hardly the first young man who felt a sense of kinship with such characters. It is not hard to imagine the aspiring young writer, alienated in Cross Plains, pouring his feelings into the exiled Atlantean who remains an outcast even after rising to the throne of Valusia.

The story opens with Kull making a proper royal entrance. Unsurprisingly, the barbarian king’s empathy rests not with Valusia’s finest archers and trumpeters, but with the mercenaries paid to act as foot soldiers – men who show the king little respect, but who demonstrate integrity for all their brash honesty. This sets the stage for the introduction of Brule, the noble Pict destined to become Kull’s loyal companion. While Brule enters the series as a figure of suspicion, Kull soon modifies his opinion of the man’s character. Brule, like Kull, is a man of integrity.

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The Other Sax Rohmer

The Other Sax Rohmer

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bianca HCbianca italiaI recently penned an article examining the possibility that four privately-printed titles by The Theosophical Society of London might have been the work of a young Sax Rohmer since he and the author of the four theosophical works were both born in the UK as Arthur Henry Ward in 1883. Rohmer shared a lifelong interest in theosophy and occasionally wrote non-fiction pieces on the topic and other occult interests. The current article is concerned with a second mystery writer with the name Sax Rohmer or, more correctly stated, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer.

Credited on the back of her lone novel as the daughter of Sax Rohmer, Elizabeth was in fact his wife. Born Rose Elizabeth Knox into a family of Music Hall entertainers, her brother Teddy was one of The Crazy Gang whose influence in British comedy ranged from The Goon Show to Monty Python. While never as prolific as her husband, Elizabeth penned at least two short stories, “Spikey” and ” ‘arker” under the name Lisbeth Knox in 1924 and 1932, respectively. Under the name Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, she scripted a number of radio and television scripts with her husband. Sadly, no copies of the programs survive and her short fiction remains obscure.

Elizabeth Sax Rohmer’s lone novel, Bianca in Black was published in 1958. At the time, her husband was battling poor health and involved in a protracted court case over his literary rights. Strapped for cash, Elizabeth went to work on a novel herself for Thomas Bouregy’s Mystery House imprint in the US and for Ryerson Press in Canada. A paperback edition by Airmont would follow four years later. Elizabeth acknowledged that her husband helped her with the story and writing of the book. While it is clearly his wife’s work primarily, Sax Rohmer’s hand is evident in certain aspects. The story itself has some slight echoes of his 1954 mystery, The Moon is Red.

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Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

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NOTE: The following article was first published on March 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

subterranean-kull-slipcasesubterranean-kull-limitedThe transformation of literary genres in the early twentieth century was marked by a series of intriguing parallels and recurrences. When Raymond Chandler, displaced as much in England as California, started down the mean streets of writing pulp fiction, he used an Erle Stanley Gardner story as his template. Chandler prepared a detailed synopsis of Gardner’s story and then re-wrote the story himself, comparing the results to the original.

Chandler’s first published pulp story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) introduced the prototype for the hardboiled private eye who emerged six years later in Chandler’s landmark first novel, The Big Sleep in the form of Philip Marlowe. Likewise Chandler’s literary heir, Ross Macdonald, displaced as much in Canada as California, would use The Big Sleep as the template for his own first novel, The Moving Target (1949) and, in the process, introduced Marlowe’s successor, Lew Archer who would arguably represent the hardboiled detective realized to its full potential.

When Robert E. Howard, an outcast in his native Cross Plains, started down the path that would eventually give the world the genre now known as Sword & Sorcery, he used Paul L. Anderson’s story, “En-ro of the Ta-an” as the template for his various “Am-ra of the Ta-an” story drafts. Anderson would likely be a completely forgotten literary figure but for the efforts of Howard scholar, Rusty Burke. Even without Anderson as a reference point, Howard’s first attempts at creating a noble savage are instantly familiar to the modern reader as being works that are highly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Pellucidar, and Caspak novels. Just as the seminal Black Mask writers took the western and successfully brought it to an urban setting creating modern detective fiction in the process, so Burroughs and those he influenced took Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales and laid the foundation for modern myth-making by cross-breeding jungle adventures with the lost worlds tales of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

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Approbation and Obloquies for the Lord of Strange Deaths

Approbation and Obloquies for the Lord of Strange Deaths

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LOSDWEBFuman_frontIt is not easy to be a fan of classic pulp fiction and a person of good conscience in the 21st Century. It is far easier to embrace steam punk and all that has followed in its wake which treats the past as if it had the mores and indeed the colloquialisms of the present. As it is, one never knows when the Thought Police, those self-appointed guardians of right thinking, will decide a Dashiell Hammett is no longer possessed of literary merit because he also threw around racial slurs that were common in his day and didn’t have the foresight to have an enlightened view of sexuality when it came to capturing the world he lived in and wrote about.

So what does this have to do with Sax Rohmer? Actually quite a lot. After a two year delay, Strange Attractor Press has finally published Lord of Strange Deaths, their impressive critical study of the man and his works. Such a tome was long overdue and very welcome indeed. Many of the individual essays are excellent and display the insight and level of research one expects from academics. Sadly, the book comes from the second decade of the current century which means one has to be reminded over and over that Sax Rohmer was a very bad person. He lived in colonial times and exploited the fears of the Boxer Uprising to create a criminal genius who heralded from China.

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Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 28, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Long EmbraceChandler catLiterary biographies can sometimes prove to be a peculiar form of torture. I suppose their purpose is to see if the reader is still capable of mustering the same affection for the author’s work after reveling in every personal flaw the biographer was able to uncover. Biographies are the ultimate way of evening the score with those whose talent we will never equal. They reassure us that the gifted individuals who gained immortality through their work were certainly no better and frequently even worse human beings than those of us who admire them. Thanks to literary biographies, many view the father of sword & sorcery as a clinically depressed mama’s boy angry at the world and the father of hardboiled fiction as…well, let’s face it… there was nothing you could ever say about Hammett he didn’t already tell you about himself. This article concerns itself with Judith Freeman’s biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace.

I would not say that the book is unworthy of attention. Judith Freeman is an exceptional writer. She traces Chandler’s footsteps (even though it has been more than half a century since his death) by visiting every place he lived, worked, and vacationed and describes what she finds in a voice that Chandler fans will frequently recognize. It is a voice that is as evocative of Chandler’s work as the book’s title. The trouble is that Freeman isn’t writing a new Philip Marlowe mystery so much as transposing herself in Chandler’s shoes as a fellow author and kindred spirit. As the book unravels, she comes to share Chandler’s devotion to his wife and muse of over thirty years. The result is a bit like watching Otto Preminger’s classic film noir, Laura (1944) in that The Long Embrace shifts its focus and unfolds into a growing love story between a living person and a dead woman the narrator never met. Some readers will find the result enchanting, others will just find it creepy.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

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Tom Stacey Wrathdaw_fu_manchuWhen Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney compiled a posthumous hardcover collection of the author’s rare and previously uncollected short fiction in the early 1970s, he included three short stories that were first published in This Week magazine in between Rohmer’s last two Fu Manchu novels. The stories were subsequently reprinted in sequence in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine between January and March 1966 where the latter two stories were retitled. The hardcover collection, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories was first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. The collection was subsequently reprinted in 2001 as part of Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.

“The Eyes of Fu Manchu” was serialized in two installments in This Week magazine on October 6 and 13, 1957. It first appeared in book form when Dr. Briney added it to the 1970 Ace paperback collection, The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories. The story opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith attending a lecture at the Sorbonne by an American scientist, Dr. Gregory Allen. Dr. Allen is a specialist in the possible chemical means of halting or even reversing the effects of aging. Sir Denis correctly believes Dr. Allen’s research will draw him to the attention of Dr. Fu Manchu. He makes plans to attend Dr. Allen’s upcoming lecture at King’s College in London with Dr. Petrie who is flying in from Cairo.

Rohmer mines one of his own life’s episodes when he encountered and began an extramarital affair with a young bohemian woman while on a voyage to Madeira. Here, Gregory Allen meets a young bohemian woman named Mignon while crossing the English Channel. Mignon is an artist and, upon learning Gregory abandoned his study of art for science, she makes some pointed remarks about his abandoning the bohemian life of freedom and truth for one of compromised values as part of the Establishment. Her words seem to sting Dr. Allen as much as her beauty and youth charm him just as Rohmer, the former bohemian turned established bestselling author and husband must have felt when he began his own affair with a younger free spirit on his voyage to Portugal years before.

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Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

First FalconFalcon pbkMuch of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Op of his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness – a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for his remaining 27 years.

Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charles of the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this dilemma was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part One

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part One

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Wrathdaw_fu_manchuThe Wrath of Fu Manchu was a 50-page short story serialized in five installments in The Toronto Star weekly supplement from January 26 to February 23, 1952 under the unlikely title Green Devil Mask. It was given its current title when Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney made it the centerpiece of a posthumous hardcover collection of previously uncollected short fiction, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. It was subsequently reprinted in Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5 in 2001. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.

The story was initially published only in Canada due to a copyright loophole. Rohmer had recently sold the option to the television rights to the Fu Manchu characters and was prohibited from publishing new works about the characters in Britain or the United States until the courts resolved a dispute over whether the literary rights transferred with the agreement. This situation persisted for the next five years until the literary rights were eventually restored to the author. The character was an easy money-maker for Rohmer at a time when his bank account was suffering. Rohmer’s desire to fly under the radar with the Canadian publication of the story likely accounts for his original decision to avoid using the name Fu Manchu in the title of the story.

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Peter Tremayne’s Dracula Lives Trilogy Revisited

Peter Tremayne’s Dracula Lives Trilogy Revisited

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 14, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Dracyla UnbrnNurceaIt has long been my contention that pulp fiction not discovered by age thirteen was beyond my ability to appreciate later in life. A certain amount of nostalgia seemed essential to enjoying such escapism once age and responsibility have got the better of you. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule in the rare instances where genuine literary talent is in evidence as is the case with the Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Given that I recently covered Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I decided to revisit Peter Tremayne’s three Dracula novels and one short story that I enjoyed so much as a teenager to see how they held up three decades on.

Peter Tremayne is best known today for his long-running Sister Fidelma mysteries. His medieval detective series is sort of a lightweight version of an Umberto Eco doorstop. Although Tremayne’s real world credentials are quite impressive as both an academic and scholar, his fiction is strictly populist in its appeal. Turn back the clock 40 years and one would find Peter Tremayne as a dedicated pulp pastiche writer trying his hand at extending the lifespan of H. Rider Haggard’s She, deliriously combining Shelley’s Frankenstein with Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, and delving deep into Stoker’s Dracula for a trilogy of loosely connected titles published by Bailey Brothers in the UK.

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