Available from Wildside Press, this is a reprint of a novel that originally appeared as a four-part serial in THE THRILL BOOK in July and August of 1919. As I’ve said on other occasions, Bedford-Jones is one of my favorite pulp authors. This is one of his sea-going yarns, about a couple of financially strapped Irishmen, former aviator Gerald Desmond and consumptive fiddler Michael Terence O’Sullivan, who wind up being shanghaied onto a ship where all sorts of deviltry and double-crossing is going on. Between mutiny, opium smugglers, a hurricane, a couple of shipwrecks, two beautiful women in danger, and adventures on a deserted island, the pace never lets up for very long. Bedford-Jones keeps the story galloping along in his usual clean, spare prose (anybody who claims that all pulp fiction was overwritten must have never read Bedford-Jones) and throws in several surprising plot twists along the way. While THE OPIUM SHIP probably doesn’t belong in the top rank of Bedford-Jones’s work, it’s very entertaining and well worth reading.
1 comment:
"all pulp fiction was overwritten"
???? Pulp writers were not Walter Scotts and Balazs. Almost without exceptionn, pulp fiction was grossly underwritten. Most of such today reads like outlines or note-groupings for stories.
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