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A Bloody Good Time for Young and Old: Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales

A Bloody Good Time for Young and Old: Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales

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These days, deciding what to get depressed about is like visiting a fabulous smorgasbord where the presentation is first-class and every delicious dish is cooked to perfection. Hmmm… what shall I have today? Let’s see… a generous spoonful of climate-change anxiety is guaranteed to make a good appetizer. Now let’s have some sides… umm… a little state of the economy worry is always tasty, and… where are they hiding it? Oh! There it is — it’s just not a meal without a steaming portion of AI apocalypticism. And now for the main course. Well, we all know that there’s nothing as filling as… er, let’s just stop there, shall we?

For myself, I tend to go in for the more exotic entrees. For instance, one of my favorites is a heaping plateful of “dammit, kids just don’t read comic books as much as they did when I was their age!” Though it might not be enough for a whole meal, it is something that I frequently find myself chewing on.

It’s true, too — in my role as a fourth-grade teacher, I spend every day in the company of elementary-age children, and I can attest that actual comic books play almost no role in their lives, certainly compared with the space those gaudy booklets took up in my life — and my bedroom closet — when I was a child.

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By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: Rogues in the House

By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: Rogues in the House

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We’re rolling through Cimmerian September here at Black Gate. Well, on Monday mornings we sure are! I was fortunate enough to be asked to do some Youtube panels for the Robert E. Howard Foundation folks this month. And we had a great time talking about the first Del Rey Conan volume – The Coming of Conan – in the first one.

I got to give my thoughts on “Rogues in the House,” which was my Hither Came Conan title. That had been a mid-level Conan story for me. But it moved up the ranks after I finished my essay project. So, with some tweaks, here’s my take on a pretty cool story. And HOW was this six years ago??

When I was pitching this series to folks, I was using the title, The Best of Conan. I didn’t come up with Hither Came Conan for about eight months, I think. Yeah, I know… The idea behind the series came from an essay in my first (and so far, only) Nero Wolfe Newsletter. The plan for 3 Good Reasons is to look at a story and list three reasons why it’s the ‘best’ Wolfe story. And I toss in one ‘bad’ reason why it’s not. And finish it off with some quotes.

So, I’m going to take a somewhat different tack from those who have come before me (I doubt I could have measured up, anyways) and pick out two elements that make this story one of Howard’s best accounts of the mighty-thewed Cimmerian. Then, throw a curveball from the Wolfe approach and highlight a few items worthy of note.

OUR STORY

Obviously, you need to read this story, but here’s a Cliff’s Notes version: Nabonidus, the Red Priest, is the real power in this unnamed Corinthian city. He gives a golden cask to Murilo, a young aristocrat. And inside the cask is a human ear (remind you of Sherlock Holmes? It should.). We learn a little later on that Murillo has been selling state secrets, and the ear is from a clerk he had dealings with. The jig is up!

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Back Into the AI Debate

Back Into the AI Debate

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Image courtesy of Pixabay, found under the “authentic only” search (not AI)

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

This post is going to be a little “old lady yells at clouds” today, so prepare!

With the news that Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude Chaptbot, was sued and settled for their large-scale theft of books in order to train its AI model, I have been reading a glut of articles both for and against the use of AI, specifically to write fiction novels. Naturally, not being AI (I swear!), I’m firmly against. The theft of creative works to train these programs, and the environmental damage required to get the up and keep them running aside (and those two reasons alone are strong enough, I feel, to abandon AI) I don’t think AI belongs in creative fields; some aids, perhaps, some tools, yes. But I don’t think creating AI that can “write” a novel is in any way valuable.

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By Crom, it’s Cimmerian September! (And all my REH essays, too)

By Crom, it’s Cimmerian September! (And all my REH essays, too)

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The seriously talented Jim Zub jumped on board last year

It’s Cimmerian September! Youtuber extraordinaire Michael K. Vaughn coined the term, in which he spends the month talking about my second favorite writer, Robert E. Howard (John D. MacDonald still holds the top spot). He’s going beyond Conan this year, and is starting out with my favorite Howard character, El Borak!

A month celebrating REH is the best thing I can think of. John Bullard of the Robert E. Howard Foundation invited me to join a panel with Michael, John Hocking, Mark Finn, Patrice Louinet, and my Hither Came Conan cohort, Jason Waltz. We recorded two long-winded but fun sessions, and I’ll share those links here when they’re online this month.

I mentioned here that I read the issues 1 through 115 of the Conan the Barbarian comic from Marvel. And with each issue, I read the accompanying chapter from Roy Thomas’ terrific three memoir series. I enjoyed it and will blog more about those comics.

I have also been reading some Savage Sword of Conan issues from the Marvel Omnibuses. And I am enjoying them in a different way. The black and white graphics are very different from the CtB color ones. I’m finding the adaptations of the REH stories are pretty faithful. I just finished up “The Treasure of Tranicos,” which was L. Sprague de Camp’s rewrite of Howard’s unpublished story, “The Black Stranger.”

“The Black Stranger” is in my Conan Top Five, and I enjoy de Camp’s version quite a bit. The Savage Sword version is a good read, covering two issues. The first one also has an informative history on the story, by Fred Blosser.

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What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

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What I’ve Been Listening To is back for another installment. Audiobooks are omnipresent in my life now. Work, home, car, walking, bedtime: I’m constantly listening to them. Often something I’ve listened to before, which lets my mind half-focus to no ill effect. But I’m still listening.

Some recent plays – all Audible, as I need to get Hoopla set up on my ‘new’ used phone. I have listened to five different Bruce Campbell projects recently, so that’s probably another post.

MIDDLEBRIDGE MYSTERIES

I wrote about Mistletoe Murders, which is an Audible original series. It’s like a Hallmark mystery movie. Emily Lane runs a Christmas-themed store, but she has a secret past. Of course, there’s a local cop boyfriend, with a daughter named Violet.

I like the series, and they turned it into a Hallmark TV series as well, though I’ve not seen that yet. It uses different actors, which I’m not too enthused about.

Well, Violet was trying to get into college at the end of season three, and she did. So, Anna Cathcart is back and starring in Violet’s freshman year in criminal justice studies. Her professor is played by Eric McCormack (Will and Grace). I was a big fan of his show Perception and he’s good as a supporting character here.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 3 (My intro)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 3 (My intro)

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“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)

Pulp Fest took place in Pittsburgh first week of the month. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. I really enjoy it. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the third year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume wrappd up his pre-Cap Shaw career. Here’s my  new intro. Looking forward to Volume IV. 

Welcome to Volume three of Steeger Books’ series on the Continental Op. Hammett had written fifteen Op stories of varying quality for Black Mask, and one rejection found its way into True Detective Mysteries (though they weren’t actually ‘true’).

He had followed hard on the heels of Caroll John Daly, whose Three-Gun Terry Mack appeared in May of 1923, and just two weeks and one issue later came the first Race Williams story, “Knights of the Open Palm.”

After one more Williams shoot-fest, Black Mask printed “Arson Plus,” and Dash Hammett began reshaping the fresh clay that was the new hardboiled school. The quality of Hammett’s work immediately surpassed that of Daly’s, though it was up-and-down. Hammett’s drinking, health issues, personal life, and problems with (his second) editor Phil Cody, made the Continental Op a bumpy ride.

Here we have the final five stories he wrote for Cody – before he quit Black Mask. Yep. Quit. Had Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw not been committed to bringing back Hammett, we would not have had Red Harvest, or The Maltese Falcon. Hammett was willing to quit the Pulps, rather than continue to labor under Cody’s financially-unrewarding yoke.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: T.T. Flynn’s PI-Like Horse Bookie, Mr. Maddox, Volume III

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: T.T. Flynn’s PI-Like Horse Bookie, Mr. Maddox, Volume III

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“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)

Pulp Fest took place this past weekend in Pittsburgh. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the third year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume wrapped up his pre-Cap Shaw career.

The talented Duane Spurlock wrote about T.T. Flynn’s Westerns a few Summers past. I’m a fan of those stories, and Duane did a better job covering them than I could have. I did write a Steeger Books intro for a Flynn book, though. Mr. Maddox is a bookie who makes the rounds of the horse racing circuit. And he finds dead bodies and crimes like Jessica Fletcher. I have the first two volumes of these novella length stories, and I wrote the intro for the third. So, here you go!

 

Thomas Theodore (better known as T. T.) Flynn Jr. began selling Westerns to the pulps early in 1932. Dime Western began its run, covering more than 250 issues over thirty years, with a T. T. Flynn story in the very first issue that December. Less than a year later, Star Western launched, with Flynn’s “Hell’s Half Acre” featured on the cover. He continued writing popular Westerns into the fifties, and he survived the demise of the Pulps by transitioning to Western paperbacks. His lone story to make The Saturday Evening Post became the popular James Stewart movie, The Man from Laramie.

But before roaming the pages of the Old West, Flynn was an accomplished mystery and hardboiled pulpster. The venerable Flynn’s (no relation), which ran for over 600 issues under multiple names, was less than a year old when his second story appeared in August of 1925. Three consecutive issues in December of that year included Flynn’s stories.

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What I’ve Been Watching: August 2025

What I’ve Been Watching: August 2025

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“Hey!” (you say to yourself). “I wonder what Bob has been watching? It’s been since May. Well, dear reader, I can’t leave you unfocused on our Monday work day, so let’s take a look, shall we? And – Gasp! – it’s all current stuff. How about that? And this is all spoiler free.

BALLARD

Michael Connelly writes the Bosch books, which spawned a terrific, gritty, seven season streaming series. HIGHLY recommended watch. Bosch an LAPD homicide detective, underwent a career change, which is the subject of the succeeding series, Bosch: Legacy. That lasted three seasons. All of this stuff has been taken from the novels. In the final episode of Legacy, an LAPD detective named Renee Ballard (also from a Connelly book series) plays a central part. And that’s because she’s the star of her own new series on Prime.

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A (Qualified) Vindication of Lin Carter’s Fiction: Kesrick

A (Qualified) Vindication of Lin Carter’s Fiction: Kesrick

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Care to join me in a Pavlovian conditioned reflex experiment? Good. I’m going to ring a bell and we will observe your response. Ready?

Lin Carter. (That was the bell.)

Hmmm… exactly as I expected. At the mention of the name of the late fantasy editor, anthologist, and author, you immediately whispered, muttered, or shouted some variation of the formula, “His great knowledge and advocacy of classic fantasy, especially through his groundbreaking editorship of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series from 1969-75, means that every lover of fantasy owes him an immense debt, but his own fiction, primarily pastiches of Robert E. Howard and (especially) Edgar Rice Burroughs, is plodding and rote and not worth reading.”

Good boy! A tasty dog treat for you!

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The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

The Lure of the Basilisk – 80’s Fantasy with a Cool Cover

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Dus_BasiliskI was recently talking online about how in the eighties and nineties we bought fantasy books because we liked the cover. And the pic I included was The Lure of the Basilisk, which kicked off the adventures of Garth the Overman. It’s been ten years since I wrote about that, back in the days of The Public life of Sherlock Holmes. So here’s a revisit of to a pretty cool fantasy series that you should check out, if you never have. 

The eighties was full of epic fantasy series’ by the likes of David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks and Katherine Kurtz, to name a few. While many remain giants in the history of the genre, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote a largely forgotten series: The Lords of Dus.

Watt-Evans has written quite a bit of fantasy, science fiction and horror and is probably best known for his Ethshar series. Ethshar was created as a role-playing game world and he ended up writing many novels and short stories using the setting. The Misenchanted Sword is my favorite Ethshar novel.

Watt-Evans had flunked out of Princeton’s architectural school and had to wait a year before he could re-apply. He had heard (the possibly apocryphal story) that Larry Niven started his career by deciding to write for one year and if he sold something, continue on: if he didn’t, he’d give it up. Watt-Evans decided to do the same and wrote a slew of short stories, selling one.

He did go back to school, but he wrote a novel (The Cyborg and the Sorcerer) on a summer break and after two years of college, gave it up to make a living with the typewriter (as a writer, not a typewriter salesman).

Influenced by Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter’s anthologies (Flashing Swords, anyone?), he was ready to spin a fantasy saga featuring a non-human (but less effete than a Melnibonian) hero. Thus, the race of overmen.

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