Friday, June 19, 2009

One More Reason I Love the Internet

I got a call this afternoon from a small press publisher who's interested in reprinting some of the work of one of my favorite pulp authors, Donald Barr Chidsey. It seems this fellow had read something I wrote on-line about Chidsey and thought I might be able to give him some information he's been looking for. As it happens, I was able to tell him what he needed to know, and we had a nice long conversation about pulps, mysteries, Westerns, and the current state of the publishing business. Probably wouldn't have happened, though, if he hadn't run across my comments about Chidsey. (By the way, "Battleship on a Mountain" is a heck of a story.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff, James. Do you know if the Argosy Weekly pix in your blog post went on to become the same Argosy men's magazine I remember from the sixties (or was it the seventies)?

Ed Lynskey

James Reasoner said...

Ed,

Yeah, the Sixties version of Argosy evolved from the pulp. Argosy was originally owned by Frank Munsey, the creator of the pulps, and was an all-fiction magazine. It was sold to Popular Publications in the early Forties and by the mid-Forties had started running some non-fiction along with the fiction. It stayed that way through the Fifties and in the Sixties became a mostly non-fiction men's magazine. Those were the first issues of Argosy I bought, because they still ran mystery novellas and some serialized mystery and espionage novels, like Kingsley Amis's James Bond novel COLONEL SUN.