Forgotten Books: The Eagles #5: Sea of Swords - Andrew Quiller (Kenneth Bulmer)

 

The series that was published as THE GLADIATOR in the United States (by Pinnacle) and as THE EAGLES in the United Kingdom (by Mayflower Granada) comes to end with this fifth volume, SEA OF SWORDS, which was never reprinted in the U.S. As a result, copies can be a little scarce and pricey, but I came across an affordable copy on-line and had it on hand before I started reading the series. Three authors alternated on these historical adventure novels: Laurence James, Kenneth Bulmer, and Angus Wells. When the fifth one rolled around, it was Bulmer’s turn in the rotation, after he previously wrote #2.

The protagonist of this series is Marcus Britannicus, a half-Roman, half-British nobleman and soldier who also fights in the arena as a gladiator, and when he’s not doing that, carries out secret missions for the emperor. Each book opens with Marcus battling in the arena and then flashes back to the main story, which is some exploit he had in the past. In the case of SEA OF SWORDS, the mission on which he’s sent takes him to the Carpathian Mountains (yes, those Carpathian Mountains . . . the ones in, you know, Transylvania) to rescue a beautiful princess from a crazed warlord who likes to . . . wait for it . . . impale his enemies. I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but honestly, after a long set-up that has very little to do with the rest of the book, it’s blatantly obvious what Bulmer is going for here. The question is, how well does he carry it out?

I’d say the results are mixed. In most of his work, Bulmer does a couple of things that bother me. He overloads his plots with so many characters that it’s difficult to keep track of who’s who. He also throws in so much technical jargon and minutiae about whatever he’s writing about, whether it’s the Roman military, sailing, or what have you, that the reader constantly has to stop and try to figure out things from context. I don’t like info-dumps any more than the average reader, but at times Bulmer’s prose is so obscure it’s almost like a foreign language.

However, at the same time, he’s very good at depicting his protagonists, his action scenes are great most of the time, and he comes up with some interesting plots. His books generally move along pretty well, and that’s the case with SEA OF SWORDS. Despite being a pretty brutal guy sometimes (he lives in a brutal world, after all), Marcus is a likable protagonist with his own code of honor. It’s always a pleasure watching him triumph over the bad guys.

On the other hand, the main story in this book is a little jumpy at times, skipping stuff that probably could have done to greater effect if so many pages hadn’t been spent on the framing sequence. But the biggest problem in SEA OF SWORDS is that Marcus’s vengeance quest, which formed the spine of the series in the previous four books, was wrapped up satisfactorily in #4, Laurence James’s BLOOD ON THE SAND. As a result, SEA OF SWORDS comes across as sort of an afterthought, as if somebody said, “Hey, we’ve got one more book in the contract. What do we do now?” Occasionally, it reads like Bulmer is trying to set up some other storyline that could continue, but nothing comes of it. Indeed, the whole thing comes to a rather bittersweet conclusion with this paragraph:

“Names rang in his head, names from the past, names for the future. Yes, there remained much to be done, many battles to be fought by the Fox in this grandiose world-shaking Empire of Rome.”

Nope, no more battles for Marcus Brittanicus, also known by his gladiator name Vulpus the Fox. Which is really kind of sad, because despite my reservations about this fifth book, I enjoyed the series overall and consider it well worth reading. It’s bloody and crude and lurid but also fast-paced and exciting. Completists will want to read this fifth volume, too, but just the four volumes reprinted by Pinnacle will suffice for most readers, I think. I have all the entries in another British historical adventure series called WOLFSHEAD that was also written by Laurence James and Kenneth Bulmer, and I hope to start reading those soon.

Forgotten Books: The Land of Mist (The Gladiator #2) - Andrew Quiller (Kenneth Bulmer)

The Gladiator series continues with Kenneth Bulmer penning this entry. Laurence James wrote the first one, which I read and posted about a while back. As THE LAND OF MIST opens, our protagonist, half-Roman, half-Briton Marcus Julius Britannicus, has become a charioteer as well as a gladiator, and after an opening chapter in which he participates in an action-packed chariot race at the Circus Maximus, the story flashes back to Marcus’s days as a soldier in the Roman legions.

He’s sent to Britain, his mother’s homeland, to help subdue a rebellion there, and at the same time, he’s on a quest of his own to locate and kill several Roman officers responsible for an atrocity that touched Marcus personally. This storyline plays out on a rather episodic basis, although not as much as the first book did. There are bloody battles galore, a little romance, and a touch of angst here and there, as Bulmer spins his usual fast-paced yarn packed with historical detail.

In fact, I’ve read enough of Bulmer’s novels by now to realize that can be a bit of a shortcoming in his work. He uses a lot of jargon and obscure details without ever explaining them, so that the reader runs the risk of becoming mired down in all that. Also, there are a ton of characters in a Bulmer novel, and they tend to run together, especially when they have long Roman names such as in this book.

Despite all that, however, the pace and action and well-done protagonists always make me get caught up in a Bulmer novel, and THE LAND OF MIST is no exception. The second half is especially good and really had me turning the pages toward the end to find out what was going to happen. I don’t think this one is quite as good as Laurence James’s opening volume in the series, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Some things in the on-going plotline are left unresolved, and I wonder if they’ll be picked up in the next book, which was written by Angus Wells under the Andrew Quiller house-name. I suspect I’ll find out soon.

One side note: This series was published originally in England under the overall title The Eagles, which is really much more fitting than The Gladiator, since (so far, at least) the stories have been much more concerned with Marcus’s experiences as a soldier, rather than a gladiator. But I guess when the books were reprinted in the U.S. by Pinnacle, someone there decided that American readers wouldn’t know what The Eagles referred to and changed the title to something more recognizable. Under either title, so far it’s a pretty entertaining series.

Forgotten Books: Captain Shark #2: Jaws of Death - Richard Silver (Kenneth Bulmer)

The second Captain Shark novel, JAWS OF DEATH, begins mere seconds after the previous novel, BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . ., ends. (See last week’s Forgotten Books post for the story on that one.) This makes me even more convinced that author Kenneth Bulmer, who wrote these books under the pseudonym Richard Silver, intended for the story to be told in one long novel.

The cliffhanger from the previous book is resolved quickly, and then Captain Shark sets out on a new adventure, a quest for Morgan’s Gold, the treasure that famous pirate Henry Morgan was after when he sacked Panama, but then the loot mysteriously disappeared. What’s a pirate yarn without a treasure map, and to get his hands on it, Shark has to resort to disguise as he penetrates into the very heart of his mortal enemy’s stronghold.

It’s all very dashing and swashbuckling and romantic (of course there’s a beautiful countess at said stronghold), and just as you’d expect, the action winds up on the deserted island where the treasure is buried, with Shark and his crew in a desperate race against the Spanish to reach the treasure and recover it first. There’s no cliffhanger this time, but once the action is over, one of the buccaneers declares, “Cap’n Shark will return!” Alas, he doesn’t. That’s the end of this short-lived series.

However, the two books taken together make for an exciting, if somewhat rambling, tale. Bulmer has a sure hand with the action scenes, Captain Shark is a likable protagonist (and for a bunch of bloody-handed pirates, his crew is pretty sympathetic, too), the villains are properly despicable, and some welcome touches of humor crop up here and there. These novels are also as violent and lurid as you’d expect from books written for the men’s adventure market in the mid-Seventies, which, of course, doesn’t bother me a bit. I have quite a few historical novels by Kenneth Bulmer on hand and look forward to reading them.

Forgotten Books: Captain Shark #1: By Pirate's Blood . . ., Richard Silver (Kenneth Bulmer)

British author Kenneth Bulmer is best remembered for his scores of fantasy and science fiction novels, but like a good freelancer, he wrote a little bit of everything and was especially good at historical and nautical fiction. Those two genres are combined in the Captain Shark novels, a two-book series of paperback originals Bulmer wrote for Pinnacle Books in 1975. Both books are available as e-books from Thunderchild Publishing.

It seems unlikely that the protagonist of these books, Captain Sebastian Shark, was born with that name, but that’s the only way he’s ever referred to in BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . ., the first volume. Shark is the captain of the sloop Draco, and he’s not so much a pirate as he is the mortal enemy of the Spanish, out for revenge on them more than loot. He does, however, have the usual motley, colorful crew of buccaneers sailing with him.

Bulmer barely touches on a fairly extensive back-story in which Shark is captured by Barbary Corsairs as a young man and learns swordplay from another captive, a Spaniard (the only Spaniard Shark likes) and medicine from an Arab. (Wasn't Captain Blood actually a medical doctor? It’s been close to fifty years since I read Sabatini’s novel.) Eventually escaping from the Corsairs, Shark winds up in the Caribbean, throws in with Henry Morgan, takes part in the sacking of Panama, and finally becomes the captain of his own ship and crew. Because many of his friends have suffered at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, Shark declares an unofficial war on them.

And that’s where BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . . begins. It’s a rather episodic tale in which Shark and his men clash with other pirates, capture a Spanish ship, and take a beautiful young Spanish noblewoman prisoner. Shark and the girl even wind up marooned on a deserted island, but things don’t play out the way you might expect. And before you know it, he’s a prisoner in a castle on a Spanish-held island, and then who should show up but the beautiful Captain Elizabeth Wren, a female pirate who is Shark’s former lover, sometimes ally, and sometimes enemy. The action hardly ever slows down, and Bulmer really packs this yarn full of twists and turns and then . . . it’s over.

Yep, BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . . ends in a semi-cliffhanger, and this really leads me to believe that Bulmer wrote this story as one long novel that Pinnacle split in two for publication. In those days, short books were in fashion, and Pinnacle published a lot of ’em in the men’s adventure genre, which includes swashbucklers like this.

I really enjoyed this book. Bulmer had a good touch with his characters and wrote some really good action scenes. I’m a landlubber, through and through, but I was able to follow the sea battles just fine. I would have been really annoyed, though, when I got to the end and found that the story just stops . . . if I didn’t have the second and final book, JAWS OF DEATH, queued up on my Kindle ready to read.

And that’s what I’ll be posting about next Friday.

Forgotten Books: Fox #1 The Press Gang - Adam Hardy (Kenneth Bulmer)

I’ve never been a big fan of naval historical fiction. I’ve read some of the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester and the occasional stand-alone. I’ve even written some fairly extensive naval sequences in various historical novels, but it took a lot of research because I’m not a sailor. I am a paperback junkie, however, so when I was in Half Price Books recently and saw that they had all eleven books in the Fox series, published by Pinnacle in the mid-Seventies, for a very reasonable price . . . Well, you know what I did. I bought them. I used to own this series but never got around to reading any of the books.

Now I’ve read the first one, THE PRESS GANG, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. George Abercrombie Fox is not your typical clean-cut naval adventure hero. A product of London’s slums, he started out as a powder monkey when he was just a boy and has risen in the ranks until he’s the second lieutenant on the British frigate Tigress in 1800, fighting the French. Fox is a morally conflicted anti-hero, capable of brutality and violence but still possessing a certain amount of sympathy for the men who serve below-decks in the British navy. He also has an odd physical quirk: in moments of high stress, he goes blind in one eye.

The plot of this novel meanders along. The Tigress gets in battles with French ships, and then lands an English spy on the coast of France in the dark of night, and then Fox has to help put down a mutiny . . . but then part of the way through, the story takes a twist I hadn’t expected and the pace picks up. The action scenes are well-done, although some of them include so much sailing jargon that they’re almost gibberish to me. There’s plenty of cutlass-swinging and decks awash with blood when the action takes place in closer quarters, though. The main appeal is the character of George Abercrombie Fox, who somehow comes across as likable despite his often unsympathetic actions. He’s hell on wheels in a fight, that’s for sure.

The author, Adam Hardy, was really veteran British paperbacker Kenneth Bulmer, who is best known for his numerous science fiction novels dating back to the early Fifties. He wrote many historical novels as well, under various pseudonyms. His career was roughly contemporary with those of the Piccadilly Cowboys, a group of British authors who wrote scores of Western novels during the Sixties and Seventies, and Bulmer, in fact, wrote one Western, an entry in the Jubal Cade series under the house-name Charles R. Pike. Fox reminds me very much of the anti-heroes so common in the British Westerns, the same sort of variation on the typical naval adventure hero that, say, Edge was on the traditional Western hero. I wouldn’t say that THE PRESS GANG is for everybody, but I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I have the rest of the books in the series. I may even read them. (One historical note: the Fox series was published originally by New English Library, and there are fourteen volumes as published by NEL. Pinnacle Books published only eleven of them in the U.S. As to whether I’ll seek out the books published only in England . . . well, I’ll have to wait until I’ve read the others and see how well I like them, I guess.)