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A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

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Murder Must Advertise (Pocket Books, 1940)

Mr. Tallboy’s eyes, roving negligently round, had fallen on Bredon’s index-card… Neatly printed on the card stood one word.

DEATH

In Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers takes murder mysteries in another new direction: not, this time, exploring an established subgenre, but hybridizing the mystery genre with what we would now call workplace drama, or sometimes workplace comedy. The setting is Pym’s Publicity, a successful advertising firm. Many incidents turn on problems in carrying out the work, friendships and tensions between staff members, and relationships with clients.

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Not This Again

Not This Again

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This swallow needs the world to know her thoughts. It’s me. I am the swallow.

Good afterevenmore, Readers!

First, my apologies for getting this to you late, instead of my usual morning post (also, please spare a thought for the editor, whose forbearance is bordering on legendary. Give him some kudos in the comments). I was away on holidays all last week and couldn’t get my usual writing in.

I wasn’t completely out of the world while on holidays. I did occasionally check social media… which might have been a mistake, because an old, old argument has begun once again. This isn’t one where I can understand both sides. This is one where I am firmly on one side, for very obvious reasons. There are several points to this argument, all of which stem from the same kind of thought process, and all of which I find exhausting.

But what argument, you ask? (I’m assuming) Ah! But the age old argument of the cost of stories.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Front Porch Pulp & Frank Kane

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Front Porch Pulp & Frank Kane

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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)

So, as I type this, I am 99% moved from my apartment of the past six years, into the small house I bought a couple weeks ago (well, along with the bank…), which I happily call my writer’s bungalow. It has a small loft. I put in my desk (a cafeteria table) and as many bookshelves as I could fit in it. This is truly my happy place.

I started packing up my books in May. I’ve been crazy stressed between house hunting, house closing, and work. And packing. And I have felt oddly bereft, with my books in boxes. Unanchored. For someone who went through a divorce and moved out of his house in 2020 (like that wasn’t a hard enough year by itself!), this was unsettling. I couldn’t look over and see shelves of books. I couldn’t grab one for a Black Gate post.

I have over 2,000 physical books, and I moved all of them with my car, in about 55-60 boxes – yeah, that took a LOT of trips! I’m filling up my  bookcases, gradually. Things like installing a washer and dryer, finding my socket set (I swear, that thing vanished), and an inconveniently timed out-of-town work trip, have taken precedence.

But my new house is slowly filling with my fiction and non-fiction collections. And THAT is helping me feel settled again. But in addition to the loft, there’s another terrific writing aspect to my bungalow. A (Black) Gat in the Hand fans (and long-time FB followers) may remember my former house had a terrific back deck, which led to Back Deck Pulp.

My apartment had a nice little concrete slab, facing a lot of trees, and thus was born the infrequent Back Porch Pulp.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

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Richard Stark’s Parker by Darwyn Cooke

Last time we discussed the character of Parker, Donald E. Westlake’s master thief and heist planner.

This time, we’ll look at why we’re talking about Parker at all, here in the hallowed spaces of this fine magazine.

Parker might seem like an odd fit. Allow me, however, to draw some parallels that will help to illustrate how and why the master criminal Parker fits in with classic sword and sorcery characters like Conan the Barbarian. For these two gentlemen have far more in common than one might guess.

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The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Four: The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Four: The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Queen of Air and Darkness

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The High Crusade (Berkley Medallion, March 1978). Cover artist unknown

Two other good novels by Anderson are The High Crusade (SF), a humorous look at 14th Century humans getting loose in the universe with a captured spaceship, and Three Hearts and Three Lions (Fantasy), which follows a modern (1950s) Earthman who is cast onto a parallel Earth where fantasy and magic are real.

The High Crusade (Doubleday  1960) was first published in three parts in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, July – September 1960. It starts when an alien spaceship lands in England in 1345 just as an English army is being formed to fight in France. The ship belongs to the Wersgorix, who have conquered many planets. This time their plans go awry and the English capture the ship. And now they’re about to take the war to the aliens. My copy is Berkley, 1978, with the cover artist uncredited (see above).

Three Hearts and Three Lions would be categorized as “High Fantasy” and was first published serially in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was published in book form in 1961. My copy is Berkley, 1978 with a cover by Wayne Barlowe (see below, midway down).

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The Real Superheroes of the Comics

The Real Superheroes of the Comics

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USS Stevens March 1943

If I say “comic book superhero” who do you think of? Superman? Iron Man? Batman? Wonder Woman? Spider-Man? Captain Marvel? (The real one please, and don’t give me any of this “Shazam” crap.) Those and many others are all perfectly legitimate choices, of course, only they’re not really heroes — super or otherwise — are they? They’re adolescent daydreams, and no matter how dark or gritty they have gotten in the years since their shiny Golden or Silver Age peaks, they’re still characters with “secret identities” running around in silly costumes doing things that no actual person could ever do — or probably would even want to. (In the words of the immortal Will Eisner, “I never understood why the hell anyone would run around fighting crime.”)

That’s not a knock on the members of the Justice League or the Avengers, and when I was a kid, I loved superhero comics; in fact, I still do, but then I love all kinds of comic books — science fiction, humor, horror, romance (Patsy Walker, anyone?) — back in the day, I read them all.

One of my favorite genres was war. Now, with all due apologies to Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandoes, I was a DC guy, which meant that during my Silver and Bronze Age heyday, I was reading stories that were somewhat more realistic than what Marvel was offering at that time, even taking the Haunted Tank and Dinosaur Island into account. (“Comic book realism” is a tricky term, as we all know.)

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A Heaven of Action: Mistress of Mistresses by E.R. Eddison

A Heaven of Action: Mistress of Mistresses by E.R. Eddison

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Mistress of Mistresses (Ballantine Books, August 1967). Cover by Barbara Remington

I heard her say, faint as the breath of nightflowers under the stars,

“The fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is it true, will you think, which poets tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed: of them that were great upon earth and did great deeds while they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories of earth, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?”

 Very shortly after the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings made it a best seller, Ballantine Books began treating publishing other paperback fantasy novels, turning fantasy into a genre. Some of these were by contemporary authors, such as Joy Chant, Katherine Kurtz, or Evangeline Walton; but many more were older works being brought back into print. Among these older works was E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses, first published in 1935.

Eddison had begun writing fantasy in 1922 with The Worm Ourobouros, which Ballantine also republished, a little earlier. In fact they treated them as two volumes of a series. There is indeed a minor linkage between them: The Worm Ourobouros begins by introducing a viewpoint character named Lessingham, who has a dream in which his consciousness is transported to Mercury and witnesses the events of the novel proper, though he doesn’t take part in them and soon enough is no longer mentioned even as a witness.

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The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Three: The Broken Sword, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, and Conan

The Epic Science Fiction & Fantasy of Poul Anderson, Part Three: The Broken Sword, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, and Conan

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The Broken Sword (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #24, January 1971). Cover by George Barr

Read Part One and Part Two of this article here at Black Gate.

The Broken Sword is arguably the best book Anderson ever wrote, and it was the “first” novel length fantasy he published. It mixes High Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery. The High Fantasy comes because of its setting in the land of Faerie, which is part of our world but invisible to most humans, and the fact that most major characters are elves and trolls. However, there is also a lot of the good bloody action that characterizes S&S.

The Broken Sword is set in the Ninth century A.D., in Alfred the Great’s time (849-899). It was published in 1954 and revised in 1971. The story is of Skafloc, a human child stolen and raised by elves, and of Valgard, the half-elf/half-troll who replaces Skafloc as a changeling. It also involves Skafloc’s sister, who unknowingly falls in love with Skafloc, which, of course, ends in tragedy.

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A Taste of British Dark Fiction: The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories by RB Russell

A Taste of British Dark Fiction: The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories by RB Russell

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The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories by RB Russell (Tartarus Press, May 15, 2026). Cover by R.B. Russell

Co-owner of the distinguished British publishing house Tartarus Press, editor, author and music composer RB Russell has collected in one hefty volume most of his short stories. The book includes tales of very different type and content, which have in common one feature: good quality.

Commenting upon every single story would be tedious and in a way, useless. Thus, I will mention only the stories that I’ve especially liked and which, to me, make the book absolutely worth reading.

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The Limits of Vision: Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth

The Limits of Vision: Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth

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When I began reading science fiction in the early 70’s, a handful of writers stood taller than any others, at least judging by the bookshelves at the thrift store around the corner from my middle school, where I spent my lunch money every day on used sf paperbacks. In those days the Kings of the Hill were Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury… and Arthur C. Clarke.

I read very little Clarke in those years, though; for me, Heinlein stood higher than anyone else, with Bradbury and Asimov right behind. Clarke was far in the rear; aside from a few short stories, the only thing of his that I read back in the day was Childhood’s End.

For the past decade or so, though, I’ve been correcting that failure by reading the Clarke novels that I neglected all those years ago, and I’ve greatly enjoyed them. Most recently I read one of his later works, Imperial Earth. I found it a problematic book, and it left me with more mixed feelings than I usually have after finishing a Clarke opus.

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