Review: Buccaneer Blood - H. Bedford-Jones

I was in the mood to read something by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones, and this excellent volume from Altus Press happened to be handy. BUCCANEER BLOOD collects five novelettes and novellas originally published in ARGOSY about Denis Burke, an 18th Century Irish mercenary, soldier of fortune, and pirate.

The first story, “Escape!”, appeared in the November 7, 1931 issue of ARGOSY. It’s 1703, and Denis Burke is serving in the army of French king Louis XIV along with some other Irish mercenaries. A falling out with the king and some other members of the royal court means Burke has to go on the run to save his life. His efforts to get out of France comprise the whole plot of this story, which includes plenty of swordplay, daring schemes, and banter, all of which plays out in Bedford-Jones’ usual clean, fast-moving prose. Does Burke get away? Well, there wouldn’t be any more stories in the series if he didn’t, would there?

Burke returns in “Luck of the Sea Burkes”, a novella that appeared as a two-part serial in the January 9 and January 16, 1932 issues of ARGOSY. He’s made it to the Spanish Main, along with a crew comprised mostly of Irish mercenaries who fled France with him. Once they reach the Caribbean, they become pirates, capture a Spanish ship, and are captured in turn by an evil Spanish aristocrat with a secret. Burke makes a daring escape, rescues a beautiful señorita, pulls off an audacious masquerade, and triumphs in the end, but in a way that leaves the door open for future adventures. This one is almost non-stop action, and of course, Bedford-Jones does it well.

By the time of “Spanish Gold”, a novelette from the March 19, 1932 issue of ARGOSY, Denis Burke is well established as a buccaneer, operating under the piratical alias Captain Mayo (he’s from County Mayo in Ireland, you see). When he gets a lead on a sunken Spanish ship full of treasure, he intends to retrieve it with his crew, but before the quest even gets underway, he’s kidnapped by a couple of rival pirate captains who hate him. Will Burke prove clever enough to escape them and grab the loot for himself? Bedford-Jones introduces a female pirate in this one, and she’s a great supporting character.

“Buccaneer Blood”, the title story of this collection, comes from the September 10, 1932 issue of ARGOSY. In this one, Burke’s masquerade as Captain Mayo is exposed, so he has to adopt a new identity to escape being caught and hanged by the French. In the process, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Spanish señorita, and once again, his fate comes down to his skill with a sword as he has to battle five opponents at once.

The final story in this volume is “Spanish Blood is Proud Blood” from the March 25, 1933 issue of ARGOSY. Burke and his señorita are on their way to be married, but before they can reach their destination, a hurricane blows their ship all the way to the coast of Central America. There they find more danger, as well as more treasure. This novelette is a fitting end to this series of yarns, which form a somewhat cohesive story. Cohesive enough, anyway, that I’m a little surprised Bedford-Jones never cobbled it together into a fix-up novel.

According to the Fictionmags Index, Bedford-Jones wrote other Denis Burke stories that were published in THE POPULAR MAGAZINE before these, and more published afterward in SHORT STORIES. Not having read them, I don’t know how they’re related, nor do I know right offhand if they’ve ever been reprinted. But I do know BUCCANEER BLOOD is a fine collection, and if you’re a Bedford-Jones fan or just enjoy pirate yarns in general, I give it a high recommendation. It's available in e-book and paperback editions from Amazon.

Review: The Pirate and the Lady - Leslie Turner White

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a good, old-fashioned, swashbuckling historical adventure novel. THE PIRATE AND THE LADY by Leslie Turner White, published as a paperback original by Ace Books in 1961, seemed like it might be just what I was looking for. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by an artist named Chuck Smith, whose work I’m not familiar with.

The book opens in Cornwall, where the protagonist, a ship’s captain known as Black Anthony Bartholomew, works for the local magistrate, who also happens to be the kingpin of the smuggling ring that’s operating in the area. Tony is also the lover of the magistrate’s insatiable young wife, and that’s what ultimately leads to him being charged unjustly with murder and forced to flee to the colonies. During that voyage, he meets and falls in love with the daughter of an English nobleman who’s being sent to the Caribbean to put a stop to the piracy plaguing the area. The nobleman’s plan includes issuing letters of marque to British sailors so they can hunt down the French and Spanish pirates. This seems like a perfect job for Tony.

Unfortunately, he gets sidetracked to a plantation in Virginia owned by the brother of his former lover back in England. She’s there, too, and expects that she and Tony will take up right where they left off. Tony wants to get to the Caribbean, though, and be reunited with the fair Kathleen, and this leads to no end of trouble.

All this set-up actually takes up too much space in the book, but once Tony finally makes it to the Spanish Main, there’s buccaneering action a-plenty. Capture, escape, sea battles, daring plans, swordfights, even a great sidekick named Half-Arsed Jones. White, whose writing career started in the pulps, seems torn between spinning a breakneck yarn and writing a more sedate, respectable historical novel, albeit one with some spicy plot twists. It’s a combination that works more often than it doesn’t, thankfully.

Although THE PIRATE AND THE LADY looks almost like a romance, there’s actually not much domestic drama in it, mostly in the opening and then very late in the book. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit. It’s short, colorful, and reads quickly. The author, as Leslie T. White, wrote quite a few detective and adventure stories for the pulps before becoming a bestselling novelist as Leslie Turner White. The line “First Book Publication” on the cover of this one might be an indication that it’s an expanded serial or novella from the pulps, but if that’s the case, I couldn’t pin down the source. I think it’s just as likely that White wrote it as an original and then maybe sold it to Ace when it failed to sell to a hardback publisher. Either way, it’s a good yarn and well worth reading if you enjoy vintage historical adventures.

Forgotten Books: El Cazador - Chuck Dixon and Steve Epting

I always enjoy a good pirate yarn, and here’s one I completely missed. EL CAZADOR was a six-issue comic book written by Chuck Dixon with art by Steve Epting, published by CrossGen Comics. It came out in 2003 and 2004, when I was reading hardly any comics at all, so I wasn’t even aware of its existence until recently. Thankfully, all six issues were reprinted in a trade paperback collection, because it’s a really good tale.

As pirate stories often do, this one opens with a battle at sea, as the pirate ship captained by the villainous Blackjack Tom captures a Spanish vessel, kills the crew, and takes a couple of aristocratic passengers to hold for ransom. But unknown to the pirates, one of the passengers has managed to hide from them, a young woman named Cinzia Elena Marie Esperanza Diego-Luis Hidalgo. She does more than just hide, though. When Blackjack Tom leaves a skeleton crew on the Spanish ship to sail it into port, Cinzia (who was taught to use a sword by her father) kills the man in charge, takes over the ship, convinces the crew to swear loyalty to her, and sets off after Blackjack Tom to get vengeance and free the prisoners, who are her mother and younger brother. She renames the ship El Cazador (which means “The Hunter”) and instead of using her long real name, the crew dubs her Lady Sin.

The rest of the story involves the pursuit of Blackjack Tom, a mutiny, clashes with other pirates, etc. And what’s frustrating is that because of the bankruptcy and collapse of CrossGen Comics, the tale never reaches an ending. “To Be Continued”, it says on the final page, but unfortunately, it never was.

What we have, though, is wonderful stuff, with a fine, hardboiled, and historically accurate script by Dixon, one of the all-time great comics scripters, complemented by excellent art from Steve Epting, one of the best modern-day comics artists. It’s a shame the story was never finished, but what’s there can be read with great enjoyment by comics fans, pirate fans, and really, anybody who likes top-notch historical fiction. EL CAZADOR gets a high recommendation from me.

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: Pirates' Gold - H. Bedford-Jones

This novel by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones, appeared complete in the December 20, 1922 issue of the iconic pulp magazine ADVENTURE, and it certainly is an adventure tale in the classic sense. Ever since TREASURE ISLAND, writers have been spinning yarns about desperate people going after buried gold, and that's what Bedford-Jones does here. The story opens in London in the early 1700s, where narrator George Roberts, a sailor from the colony of Virginia, is looking for a ship to sign on with. He winds up taking a position as first mate on the King Sagamore, under the command of an old friend, Captain Ned Low. There are some pretty shady rumors about Low's past, but Roberts doesn't put much stock in them. Turns out he probably should have.

Because the ship has barely left port before there's a murder, and a beautiful young woman shows up on board, and everybody in the crew seems to have some secret or another, usually sinister, and there's more going on than a simple search for buried treasure, including a years-long quest for bloody vengeance.

Everything clips along at a fast pace, in Bedford-Jones' terse prose (terse compared to a lot of pulp writers who got paid by the word, anyway), and there are several nifty twists along the way. PIRATES' GOLD is definitely a little old-fashioned in some respects, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it a great deal. It was reprinted a number of years ago by Wildside Press in a trade paperback edition that's still available, and there's an e-book edition as well. If you like traditional historical adventure tales, it's a mighty good one.