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David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

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For the Witch of the Mists by David C. Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, January 1978) and The Witch of the Indies by David C. Smith (Zebra, June 1977). Covers by Doug Beekman and Stephen Fabian

I consider David C. Smith (1952) a friend. We’ve never met face to face but we’ve corresponded and have spoken on the phone. As with writers such as Karl Edward Wagner and Andy Offutt, I first became aware of David as an author through a connection to Robert E. Howard.

While in REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I routinely did reviews of Howard pastiches. And so I came upon The Witch of the Indies (Zebra, 1977, cover by Stephen Fabian). Shortly after I picked up For the Witch of the Mists by Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, 1978, Cover by Doug Beekman).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

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Payback (Paramount Pictures, February 5, 1999

In the first two installments of this series, we looked at the master criminal known as Parker, and at his creator, Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used when writing spare and stark but hard-hitting prose.

Now let’s look at some of the many attempts to bring Parker to a wider audience.

The novels are extremely popular with a segment of the population, and so studios and directors have come calling from time to time, with attempts to adapt the character and his stories to film.

But they never quite get Parker right.

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A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

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It all started because I wanted to draw a kid bowling with corpses

Mike Mignola

Maybe it was John Fultz who mentioned them on Facebook. He’s always mentioning things that lead me to acquiring more books. Maybe it came to me in a dream. I’m not really sure. Either way, I discovered that Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator ®, had drawn and written (colored exquisitely by Dave Stewart) two collections of dark fantasy stories; Bowling With Corpses (2025), and Uri Tupka and the Gods (2026). I bought them almost at once.

Bowling With Corpses is a collection of stories, some fairytale-inspired and some detailing the setting’s complex cosmogony, opens with the following dedication:

For all those who transported me to lands unknown way back when — Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Leiber, Moorcock, Lee and Kirby. And so many others. I realized now this book was inevitable.

From the first page all those influences are apparent, though I think Dunsany’s dreamlike stories such as those I reviewed from At the Edge of the World. Some follow fairytale logic, and others, dream logic. Mignola’s dark and shadow-filled art brings them to life, or death, as the case might be. In the later years of Hellboy, Mignola’s art took on a very stylized look. His work here has stepped back from that towards the more detailed style of his older work. In the afterword, Mignola describes himself as semi-retired until he realized:

“The hell with this. I love drawing comics so I’ll just keep drawing comics.”

 

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The Necessity of Memory: Fahrenheit 451

The Necessity of Memory: Fahrenheit 451

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Ballantine 1953, Joseph Mugnaini

 

As 2025 ended, I thought about the reading I would do in the new year ahead and decided that in 2026, I would place an emphasis on rereading. In fact, I vowed that I wouldn’t read a new book without first rereading an old one. A week before New Year’s I jotted down likely titles for this project, and one of the first I thought of is a book I last read a lifetime ago, in 1974 or 75, when I was in high school — Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Back then, I didn’t much like it.

This time, I set aside my half-century old initial reaction and approached the book with an open mind. So, how was it a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century? I still wouldn’t call it an entirely successful book, but at least now I’m better equipped to understand what Bradbury was doing and can more justly assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses.

You’re probably familiar with the novel’s premise, which is one of the most famous in science fiction. Sometime in the near future (the book was published in 1953, so we’re probably well past whatever date Bradbury had in mind), in an unnamed city, Guy Montag lives in his comfortable, suburban, technologically up-to-date house with his wife Millie. Millie spends most of her time… watching isn’t quite the right word… submitting, maybe, to the immersive, individually tailored programs that flash from three of their four living room walls, which can morph into gigantic television screens. Guy mostly just watches Millie; for some reason, the shows don’t entertain him. They just make him uneasy.

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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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