Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

Comments 1 comment
Margaret Irwin

Margaret Irwin was born on March 27, 1889 in Highgate Hill, London to Andrew Clarke and Anna Julia (nee Baker) Irwin. Her father was originally from Perth, Australia. After her mother’s death in 1899 and her father’s death in 1902, Irwin was sent to be raised by her uncle, Sidney T. Irwin, a classics professor at Clifton College in Bristol. She was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol and went on to study at Oxford, where she took a degree in English.  Her uncle died in 1911.

Irwin’s earliest novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, was published in 1913 and was followed by a couple more novels in the teens before she hit her stride in the 1920s. Her 1924 novel Still She Wished for Company was a fantasy novel in which an occultist drew the heroine into 1779. It was followed a year later by These Mortals about a woman raised in isolation in a magical palace. Although she continued to, occasionally write short fiction with fantastic elements, such as “Monsieur Seeks a Wife” and “The Curate and the Rake,” the majority of her writing was historical fiction, for which she became well known.

…

Read More Read More

The Literacy Crisis: Dialogue Skimming

The Literacy Crisis: Dialogue Skimming

Comments 7 comments
Here we go again

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I am back again with more internet drama that I believe is all interconnected and all very much related to the current literacy crisis we are suffering. This time, it’s all about skimming. Specially, the revelation that all these social media “readers” are actually just skipping to the dialogue and reading only that. Let’s dive into this little nugget, shall we?

…

Read More Read More

Weird Times 5: Food

Weird Times 5: Food

Comments 6 comments

A postcard showing an early-20th century Horne & Hardart automat
This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.

…

Read More Read More

Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

Comments 0 Comment
John Lymington

John Lymington was born on April 21, 1911 in London, England. His birth name was John Richard Newton Chance. His father was Dick Chance, who served as the managing editor of Amalgamated Press. Raised in London, he attended a private school and then went on to technical college with the intention of becoming a civil engineer or quantity surveyor (insert Ethel the Aardvark).  Instead, by 1932, he decided to work full time as a writer.

He learned to fly in 1928 and during World War II served as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, based out of the Cotswolds. He served there, overseeing training at three different airfields until 1943, when he was given indefinite leave and eventually invalided out of the service as a flight lieutenant. Around the time he was put on leave, he met Shirley Savill, who was serving as a WAAF section officer and the two married on July 22, 1943.  Following the war, they settled in Hampshire, where they had three sons. By 1956, they had moved to the Isle of Wight, where Lymington managed a pub.

…

Read More Read More

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 1

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 1

Comments 7 comments

Weird Tales, May 1923, front and back covers
The third issue of Weird Tales saw the magazine experiment with a significant change in presentation. The first two issues had been a standard pulp size, about 6 inches by 9; the May 1923 issue went to the bedsheet format, a bit more than 9 inches by 12, while cutting the number of pages from 192 to 120. Open the issue, or look through a pdf file, and further changes become apparent.

The layout’s gone to three columns of text instead of two. There are two reprints in the issue, one of them printed at a reduced type size, presumably to fit the space available. And the magazine boasts interior artwork for the first time, with nine stories getting uncredited illustrations; black-and-white line drawings, usually with heavy hatching and cross-hatching.

The artist was presumably this issue’s cover artist, William Heitman, who seems to have done all the interior artwork in Weird Tales’ first year. Heitman’s two-colour cover image is simple, bordering on crude, but conveys a mood. The blurb on the cover is for A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” though there’s nothing in the story like the picture, for reasons which we’ll come to later on in this post. The colour scheme of the cover’s similar to the last issue, with solid red and black, but the logo’s the third in three issues — though the magazine’s subhead, “The Unique Magazine,” has remained consistent.

…

Read More Read More

Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

Comments 1 comment
Charles Carroll Muñoz (a.k.a. T.P. Caravan)

T.P. Caravan was born Charles Carroll Muñoz on July 2, 1926 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were O.A. and Constance (née Stoutenburgh) Muñoz.

During World War II, Muñoz served in the United States Navy as an aerial gunner, flying in Avenger bombers. When the war was over, he remained in the U.S. Merchant Marines, serving as a radio officer on freighters, tankers, and passenger ships. He also served during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars on munitions ships.

He earned his Master’s degree from Columbia in 1953 with a thesis about the eighteen century English poet Edward Young. In 1952, while attending Columbia University, he began publishing science fiction under the Caravan name with the short story “Happy Solution,” which appeared in the January issue of Other Worlds. Several other science fiction stories followed over the next thirteen years, including seven sequels to “Happy Solution.”

…

Read More Read More

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Going The Distance with the Czar of Noir

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Going The Distance with the Czar of Noir

Comments 3 comments

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Eddie Muller is known as the Czar of Noir. He founded the Film Noir Foundation and he hosts Noir Alley, on Turner Classic Movies. He’s written a couple respected non-fiction books about Noir and cinema.

In 2002, Austin hosted the big mystery convention, Bouchercon. I was living there and stopped in for a day. I met Eddie, who hadn’t yet started appearing on TCM opposite Robert Osborne. He was there with his just published first novel, The Distance.

Eddie’s father was a popular, long-time sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner for over 40 years. He was known as ‘Mr Boxer.’ Eddie would also go to work in the newspaper business himself.

That background is all relevant, because for the book, Eddie drew heavily on his dad’s career, and his own life around the newspaper industry. The Distance features Mister Boxing, Billy Nichols, a local sports reporter who is a legitimate celebrity, working for William Randolph Heart’s The Examiner. Set around the post-WW II San Francisco boxing scene, the workings of the newspaper and the reporter’s life add great depth to the book.

…

Read More Read More

Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

Comments 1 comment
Carl Selwyn

Carl Selwyn Pugh, Jr. was born on December 12, 1918 on Roanoke Island, North Carolina to Carl Selwyn Pugh and Amelia (née Myatt). He was the first of two sons.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he edited the college humor magazine. After college, he moved to New York where he attempted to sell jokes to humor magazines, achieved a small amount of success, but not enough to sustain himself.

During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and after the war he worked as a scenario writer at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, writing military training films.

His science fiction, published using the name Carl Selwyn, appeared during and immediately after World War II, with his first story, “The Strange Death of Richard Sefton,” being published in the January 1940 issue of Amazing Stories. his next story, “Revolt on the Earth-Star” was his debut in Planet Stories, where most of his fiction appeared.

…

Read More Read More

Dark Muse News: Reviewing SOIL by James D. Mills

Dark Muse News: Reviewing SOIL by James D. Mills

Comments 1 comment
SOIL by James D. Mills (Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing, December 2026); cover art by Henrik Karippen

This Dark Muse News post reviews James D. Mills’ soon-to-be-released, stand-alone novel SOIL (coming to BackerKit October 29, 2026; freely available for digital viewing now on Arcanist Online).  Excerpts are shared to give you a feel for the style. This article also provides a tour guide for the other books in the Dusk and Dawn series.

Just this July, we covered James D. Mills’ crowdfunding Backerkit campaign Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine. Besides publishing, he writes a fair amount too. His SOIL is a folk-horror fantasy firmly rooted in the soil, or spirit, of the British Isles. Sword and Sorcery fans will enjoy the elements of melee action, direct encounters with strange gods, and exploration of mystic temples. The world and culture are fleshed out, and super-infused with intense child-bearing motifs (more on that below). With a cast of  6+ protagonists, the book is a solid, dark-fantasy epic. It is the second stand-alone entry in the Dusk and Dawn series.

…

Read More Read More

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bleak Noir – Jim Thompson

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bleak Noir – Jim Thompson

Comments 6 comments

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I have a shelf full of Jim Thompson books. For A (Black) Gat in the Hand, I decided to read a couple I had not got to yet. So, Wild Town was followed by A Swell Looking Babe. Then, Nothing More than Murder. And I mixed in The Grifters (which I have read, as well as seen the movie) into my audiobook listening.

While I’ve got a post dedicated to maybe his most unusual book – The Transgressors – in the works, I wanted to bring up one common aspect in his writing.

It can be difficult to sympathize with the main character, as they’re often not very nice people. That’s a post in itself. And those characters are often saturated with bleakness. I rarely read two Thompsons in a row. I need a palette cleanse after one. He’s good. But he’s about as joyful as Full Metal Jacket.

…

Read More Read More