A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Ship of Shadows - H. Bedford-Jones

THE SHIP OF SHADOWS is a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint of a vintage pulp adventure yarn by H. Bedford-Jones. This one was originally published as a complete novel in the February 1920 issue of BLUE BOOK, one of the classiest of the pulps.

Eric Venable is a minister who finds himself beset by tragedy and winds up a drug addict. That’s not a spoiler, because it’s the situation as the story opens. Venable loses his church and sinks far into the depths of degradation, only to wind up being shanghaied onto a tramp steamer bound for China. That proves to be his salvation, of course, because he’s forced to get over his opium habit and the hard work as part of the ship’s black gang builds up his body and returns his strength to him.

That’s still just prologue to the main story, which finds Venable and the ship’s engineer who has befriended him signing on as part of the crew on a mysterious ship sailing from China back to America. What Venable and his friend Garrity don’t know until it’s too late is that the ship’s passengers are all Russians, a volatile mixture of aristocrats and Bolsheviks. Each group wants to kill the other and wind up with their hands on a fortune in gems and religious artifacts which were smuggled out of Russia by a group of nobles on the run from the Reds. And there’s intrigue going on among the groups, too, as double-crosses abound.

Throw in storms at sea, a few gun battles, knife-wielding Chinamen, some far-fetched coincidences, and a little romance and you’ve got a fine example of a blood-and-thunder adventure yarn. Being decidedly old-fashioned (it was written nearly ninety years ago) [105 years ago now] and somewhat politically incorrect, it won’t be to everyone’s taste these days, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2008. I love those Black Dog Books chapbooks Tom Roberts published, own most of them, and have read many of them. Great stuff all around. I don't believe this one is available directly from the publisher anymore, but affordable used copies can be found on-line. I still highly recommend it for any fans of pulp adventure yarns.)

Review: Safari to the Lost Ages - William P. McGivern

After reading William P. McGivern’s grim and gritty crime novel SHIELD FOR MURDER a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to try one of his science fiction stories. “Safari to the Lost Ages”, a novella that appeared originally in the July 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, seemed like a good bet. It’s about a trip 30,000 years into the past, and I like a good time travel yarn now and then.

The first thing to know about this story is that there’s almost no science to it, not even any handwavium to explain how time travel exists. It just does, that’s all, and it’s so commonplace that there are companies rich people hire to take them into the past as a vacation. One such company is run by two-fisted adventurer Barry Rudd and his assistant, the burly McGregor.

Barry and McGregor are hired by beautiful Linda Carstairs to find her father, a scientist who went 30,000 years into the past but never returned to the present. Linda insists on going along on the expedition, of course, and so does her fiancé. Barry doesn’t like this, but Linda is paying for the trip, so he reluctantly agrees to her presence.

Well, naturally, things go wrong. After an encounter with a dinosaur, Barry is captured by some beautiful winged bird-girls and winds up the prisoner of some cavemen who have a village inside an extinct volcano. McGregor and the others are also taken prisoner by the cavemen. (Yes, this is one of those stories where cavemen and dinosaurs exist at the same time.) We get human sacrifice, desperate battles, treachery, noble gestures, and nick-of-time escapes. All the stuff of classic pulp adventure yarns, in other words.

And a pulp adventure yarn is really all this is, despite the minor science fiction trappings. It might as well have taken place in the Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about, where there’s a lost race around every corner. Of course, that’s fine with me. I read to be entertained, so the only question is whether or not “Safari to the Lost Ages” is entertaining.

Let me put it this way: If I had read this when I was ten years old, I would have thought it was one of the greatest stories ever written. As it is, reading it at a considerably older age, I still galloped right through it and had a very good time reading it. This is Front Porch stuff for sure. McGivern’s prose is colorful, breakneck fast, and heavy on the adverbs (I love adverbs, even though I know I’m supposed to hate them in this day and age). Barry Rudd is a stalwart hero, the villains are suitably despicable, the bird-girls are an intriguing concept I wish he had done more with, and the whole thing just raced by. If I had read this story without a by-line on it, I never would have guessed it was written by the same guy who did the bleak, low-key SHIELD FOR MURDER.

From what I’ve written about it, you ought to be able to tell whether you’re the sort of reader who would enjoy “Safari to the Lost Ages” or think it’s the stupidest thing ever. So proceed accordingly. The novella is included in THE FIRST WILLIAM P. McGIVERN SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK, which is available as an e-book on Amazon. I definitely plan to read more of McGivern’s science fiction and fantasy. By the way, McGivern also wrote the story under the house-name P.F. Costello that's featured on the cover of that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, and it's included in THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK.