A (Black) Gat in the Hand: 7 Upcoming Attractions

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: 7 Upcoming Attractions

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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)

My life gets crazy busy in July, and stays busy to Christmas, when I get a break. It’s a task to get my planned weekly column done. Which can shift the ‘current one’ into ‘in progress’ status. Which is the case this week. So, here’s a look at some of the stuff I hope to cover in the current incarnation of A (Black) Gat in the Hand.

DAY KEENE

Last week I posted (finally) the Jo Gar essay which I started in 2018. Nice to check that off the list. The current ‘in progress’ essay is on a Day Keene story from the September, 1949 issue of New Detective. I’ve already written one post on Keene here. I think he is an under-appreciated hard boiled writer. That issue also has a story by Frederic Brown. And one by my all-time favorite writer, John D. MacDonald. So, maybe I’ll mine that one for more material. The fact you’re reading this post right now, means I still haven’t finished my Keene essay.

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The Scottish Play: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

The Scottish Play: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!

Macbeth, ACT I, SCENE III

Looking back on my second time around here at Black Gate, I saw that each for the first two summers I’d undertaken the enjoyable, if somewhat pointless task, of writing about a Shakespeare play (for what can I possibly bring to such an effort). First, there was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then The Tempest. I skipped last summer because a sense of inadequacy for the task had me struggling to finish my piece about T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (pt. 1, pt. 2).

Having already missed last month’s installment of my column due to an ongoing run-in with a  5 mm kidney stone, I decided getting back to Shakespeare might be just the thing to get me moving. But what to read? I’ve only read fourteen of his thirty-nine plays, so I don’t know which of them have fantastical elements. And, then, it smacked me on the head, Macbeth. Not only is it my favorite of the plays I’ve read, but it’s suffused with magic, all black and malign. Then, there are all the movie versions, including a recent one starring Denzel Washington and France McDormand. So, let me begin. …

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4 Anthology Now Available

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4 Anthology Now Available

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The Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 4 (June 6, 2024). Cover Art by Karolína Wellartová

After gathering the cold fire and the breath of virtuous fish we were finally able to forge mithril and orichalchum into a fine mesh, through which we strained the very aether of imagination and distilled it into Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4.  From issues #25 to #32 we bring you:

Sixteen stories
Ten poems
Twenty-seven illustrations; and
An essay on the Sword and Sorcery genre by Howard Andrew Jones

It was a labor of love and with copies sent to the contributors and the Kickstarter backers, we are ready to unveil it to the world! Order copies directly from Amazon.

In other news, we are open for fiction and poetry submissions for the month of July, so if you got it, send it!

Adrian Simmons is an editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, check out their Best-of Volume 3  Best-of Volume 4, or support them on Patreon!

A to Z Reviews: “Signs and Symbols,” by Vladimir Nabokov

A to Z Reviews: “Signs and Symbols,” by Vladimir Nabokov

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A to Z ReviewsVladimir Nabokov originally published “Signs and Symbols” in the New Yorker on May 15, 1948, although the editor, Katharine White, switched the order of the title to “Symbols and Signs.” Nabakov changed it back for subsequent publication, as well as reverting other changes White had made to the story. In 2020, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer included the story in their massive anthology The Big Book of Modern Fantasy.

A couple is trying to do their parental duty by visiting their son for his birthday. Despite loving their son, the fact that he suffers from referential mania and lives in an asylum makes them vaguely uncomfortable in visiting him as they are never quite sure what to expect, whether he’s having a good or bad day, and how well he will interact with the real world.

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Goth Chick News: Lego Jaws? Just Take My Money Now

Goth Chick News: Lego Jaws? Just Take My Money Now

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The original design submitted by Diving Faces (aka Jonny Campbell)

During 2020 when I was looking to fill quite a lot of downtime, I discovered the Lego Ideas website. Though I have never been a Lego builder or collector, I am still endlessly fascinated by the incredible creations true aficionados come up with. At Lego Ideas, hardcore Lego builders create and showcase unique designs. There are regular “challenges” creators can enter, but the big prize goes to those ideas submitted to the new products challenge. In the end, the creation in that category, with the most community votes, becomes a new Lego set produced for sale.

In May 2022, a Lego master builder going by the handle “Diving Faces” submitted a build depicting the final scene in the movie Jaws. In that scene it’s the shark against the three heroes, Quint (Robert Shaw), Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), in Quint’s boat the Orca. “Diving Faces,” recently unmasked as Lego-master Jonny Campbell, created a 14-inch-high replica of the boat, as well as the iconic shark, all with Legos.

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We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, May 7, 2024)

Perhaps second only to space travel, science fiction is obsessed with time travel and in particular the paradox that if we go back to the past, how do we affect the future; can we inadvertently or purposely alter our “present”? Sometimes the answer is that your somehow being in the past is essential to determining your present (e.g., Kindred by Octavia Butler where the protagonist travels back to antebellum South to ensure an ancestor stays alive). Other times the innocent butterfly effect (e.g., Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) has disastrous consequences; even attempting something seemingly good, such as thwarting a presidential assassination, proves catastrophic (e.g., Stephen King’s 1/22/63 ). Then there’s the question of how visitors from the future to our present seek to change future events (e.g., the Terminator movie franchise).

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a canonical SF work because it offers a technology, rather than magical intervention, that enables time travel (hence the title). In addition to its social criticism, The Time Machine is a quintessential adventure tale. The hero enters a strange land populated by equally strange different beings nonetheless still sort of like us, whose use of advanced technology causes disaster. The hero manages escape, but then mysteriously disappears, perhaps in search of something better than what awaits back home.

Which brings us to Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, in which she reverse-engineers a number of these time travel and adventure tropes.

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Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media,
June 25, 2024). Cover uncredited

Some months back, I was toiling away in the vast Indiana compound of Black Gate, when I received a text from publisher John O’Neill, who had just finished reading my new novel, Vinyl Wonderland. He told me how much he enjoyed it –– don’t take my word for it, ask him –– and then he told me how sorry he was.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well,” said John, “if you had to live through even half of what your main character went through, then you’ve had one hell of a rough ride.”

I thought about what John had said as I made my nightly rounds of the massive server farm that houses all of Black Gate’s backlogged posts (including over one hundred of mine). Eventually, I crawled off to bed, feeling hopeful that the local kobolds wouldn’t stage another uprising until next month, so that I could get a good night’s rest.

The morning brought clarity, as it often does, and I sat up in bed like a shot. “A liar,” I declared, quoting Quintilian, “should have a good memory!”

Fiction is a lie, after all, spun from gossamer truths, and therefore I, as a writer of fiction, must be a liar. It follows that to succeed in my craft, I must cultivate an excellent memory. Logic (and Quintilian) demand it.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Manila – Jo Gar

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Manila – Jo Gar

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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)

Several hardboiled books were not actually novels at the start. They were multi-part serials in the Pulp magazines of the day. Perhaps the most famous of these is Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which ran for five installments from September 1929 through January of 1930. Likewise, Ned Beaumont’s four-part adventure became The Glass Key. The same happened with The Continental Op. And it wasn’t just Hammett. Paul Cain’s The Fast One is arguably the finest hardboiled novel ever – and it was a serial.

Raoul Whitfield’s The Laughing Death enthralled readers for nine issues in a row. A five-issue story became Green Ice; and Ben Jardinn spent three issues working on a murder in Death in a Bowl. The author of several novels for juvenile boys, Whitfield actually wrote another hardboiled novella, except it wasn’t collected and issued separately, so it’s not regarded as a book. And this was the only serial featuring his wonderful island detective, Jo Gar.

WARNING – THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!
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Remembering Carl Jacobi

Remembering Carl Jacobi

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Revelations in Black by Carl Jacobi (Jove/HBJ, January 1979). Cover uncredited

D.H. Olson delivered this eulogy for Carl Jacobi on Friday, August 29, 1997 at Lakewood Chapel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was included in Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi, published by Centipede Press in May 2014. Our deepest thanks to D.H. Olson for permission to reprint it here, and special thanks to Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for providing the text.

When R. Dixon Smith asked me to speak here today, I was honored, but also somewhat taken aback. There are others, after all, who have known Carl Jacobi both better, and longer, than I. Still, when one is asked to do honor to a man whom one has admired for years, one can hardly say no.

First, to the “facts” as they may be found in the public record.

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A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

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The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, February 1973). Cover uncredited

This is another in my series of looks at fairly obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s. In this case, I rescued a book that I had bought used decades ago from the chaos of my bookshelves. Most of the other writers I’ve discussed so far have been somewhat forgotten (or were never really known at all) but L. Sprague de Camp is an SFWA Grand Master, and a writer I and many others remember with great affection.

De Camp (1907-2000) began publishing SF in 1937 with “The Isolingual,” and was from the beginning a popular and prolific writer. He wrote both Fantasy and Science Fiction, though by the end of his long career the bulk of his work was Fantasy. His preferred mode was lightly cynical humor — this imbued his SF such as the Viagens Interplanetarias series, and his Fantasy beginning with his Incomplete Enchanter stories written with Fletcher Pratt.

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