Forgotten Books: Vandals of the Void - Jack Vance

When I was a kid I loved the science fiction novels published by the John C. Winston Company, many of which were available on the bookmobile that came out to my little hometown every Saturday from the public library in the county seat. How could I not love them? I mean, look at that classic endpaper painting by Alex Schomburg! I read all of them I could get my hands on, beginning with, as I recall, THE YEAR THE STARDUST FELL by Raymond F. Jones. Although my first one could have been the iconic DANGER: DINOSAURS! by Richard Marsten, who was Evan Hunter, of course. I can't remember for sure.

But one I'm certain I never read was VANDALS OF THE VOID by Jack Vance, and since this is Jack Vance Week on Forgotten Books, why not? Well, for one thing, copies of the original edition can be found easily on-line, but they ain't cheap. As in a couple of hundred bucks not cheap. Luckily, there's a Kindle edition which is very inexpensive considering the alternative. It doesn't have those great endpapers, of course, but I was able to read the book itself.

The protagonist of VANDALS OF THE VOID is Dick Murdock, the teenage son of an astronomer. Despite being of Terran heritage, Dick was born and raised on Venus. He gets to leave the planet for the first time when he goes to visit his father at an observatory on Earth's Moon. On the way he sees a disabled spaceship with everyone on board dead and hears about a dreaded space pirate known as the Basilisk who is thought to be to blame for the atrocity. Once he gets to the Moon he meets an old prospector who claims that the remnants of a race of lunar natives still live in caves deep under the surface. That's more than enough to draw me in, but there are more plot twists still to come, as a murder takes place and Dick is forced to turn detective to expose the killer and save his own life.

There's almost a frontier feel to this novel, since space travel has progressed only as far as Terran colonies on Mars and Venus and is actually fairly primitive. I don't mind a big sprawling galactic empire space opera once in a while, but I really like this sort of smaller scale story, too.

I would have absolutely loved this book when I was twelve years old. Heck, I enjoyed it a lot now, and I'm considerably older than twelve. Unlike many of you, I haven't read a great deal of Jack Vance's work. I've enjoyed what I've read, he's just one of those authors I've never sampled extensively. In the reviews of this one I've read by Vance fans, there are a lot of comments about how it's one of his early novels and his later books are much better written, but I've got to say, I think VANDALS OF THE VOID is very well written, with a smart plot, a refreshingly realistic and likable protagonist, and plenty of excitement. I had a great time reading it.

I may have to see if any of those other Winston SF novels are available as e-books.

Stan Lynde, R.I.P.

Most of you probably know what a huge fan I am of writer/artist Stan Lynde and his long-running comic strip RICK O'SHAY. I'm very sorry to report that Stan has passed away from cancer at the age of 81. His obituary in the Washington Post can be found here. I'm glad I got to know him and had a chance to tell him how much his work meant to me. Somewhere Hipshot Percussion is looking up at a snow-capped mountain and telling his ol' pard so long.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Van Helsing

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on December 12, 2004.)

Tonight we watched VAN HELSING. A fairly entertaining movie, I thought, but boy, is it frantic. Running, jumping, shooting, fighting monsters, getting in all the scenes that'll work to adapt for the video game, piling on the CGI and special effects . . . Well, it just wore me out after a while. Some REH fans think that the movie stole Hugh Jackman's look from Solomon Kane, and I can see that with the big hat and the black duster. That's all that seemed Howard-influenced to me, though. Kate Beckinsale looks great, especially in the first shot where we see her, when she's drawing her sword. My biggest problem with the movie is the legacy of Mel Brooks. Every time somebody calls Igor by name, I halfway expected him to say, "That's EYE-gor!" And of course I kept thinking that the Frankenstein Monster was going to break into a chorus of "Puttin' on the Ritz".

Ah, well . . . I think I've seen all of Stephen Sommers' films. Each one has gotten more elaborate and piled on the special effects, and each one has been a little weaker than the one before it, in my opinion. I liked THE JUNGLE BOOK a lot and loved THE MUMMY. Sommers just needs to have his characters take a breath now and then and try to work in a little more actual story. But then, who am I to be telling anybody how to make movies?

Fight Card: Rumble in the Jungle - Jack Tunney (David James Foster)

This has been such a busy year that I've fallen behind on my Fight Card reading, a situation I'm going to attempt to remedy, beginning with RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE, written under the Jack Tunney house-name by David James Foster, who contributed the first international entry in the series, KING OF THE OUTBACK. In this excellent yarn, boxer Brendan O'Toole, haunted by tragedy and seeking refuge in the bottle, winds up working on a construction crew building a hotel in an African country wracked by revolution. When the Americans are captured by rebel forces, they're tossed into a jungle prison camp known as Hell Camp XXI, which is under the command of a brutal ex-Nazi who stages boxing matches between the prisoners and a giant guard.

If that plot set-up doesn't pull you right into the story, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. Foster does a fine job with the action as the prisoners try to survive and O'Toole has to step back into the ring several times. The boxing scenes are great and Foster keeps the tension building to a satisfying conclusion. This volume is a good reminder of just how entertaining the Fight Card series is, and I hope I can get caught up on it soon. In the meantime, if you haven't read this one, you should give it a try.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Complete Adventures, December 1937

This appears to have been the only issue of this pulp, but it has a good cover and one of the best adventure writers in J. Allan Dunn. I'm not familiar with the other authors, but I'm sure they're pretty good, too. Just another example of too many pulps on the newsstands for all of them to survive.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Popular Western, January 1946

This is really a prototypical Western pulp from the Thrilling Group. A nice cover by Sam Cherry, and stories by Oscar J. Friend, Larry Harris, Johnston McCulley, a Sheriff Blue Steele yarn by Tom Gunn (really Syl McDowell), and a Buffalo Billy Bates story by Scott Carleton (a house-name, maybe Walker Tompkins). I'd read this one for sure. And I may someday, because I think I own a copy of it, but I can't guarantee that.

PWA Banquet Info

The Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards Banquet will be Friday night, Sept. 20th, starting at 6:30 PM, in Albany, NY the same weekend as Bouchercon. The event is open to the public. You need not be a PWA member to attend. Come rub elbows with your favorite writers. For questions and ticket information email RRandisi@aol.com.

(I've only been able to attend one PWA banquet, but it was a lot of fun. If you're going to be close to Albany in September, you ought to check this out.)

Forgotten Books: Wolf's Head - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

This entry in Ben Haas's superb Fargo series finds soldier of fortune Neal Fargo in the Pacific Northwest. As a favor to his old friend, former president Theodore Roosevelt, Fargo signs on to help a timber company get a huge shipment of logs downriver to Puget Sound. A rival company will stop at nothing, up to and including sabotage and murder, to stop that from happening. But the bad guys hadn't reckoned on Fargo.

If you want to learn something about logging in the early 20^th Century, this is the book for you. Haas obviously knew a lot about the subject and communicates it in clear, easy to understand prose. This is no dry educational tract, though, because Haas mixes in the background with plenty of action scenes, and nobody, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard, ever wrote action btter than Ben Haas. Shootouts, epic fistfights, a desperate duel with axes, large scale gun battles, forest fires, and millions of tons of logs rampaging down a flooded river . . . well, you get the idea.

And of course I loved every bit of it. The Fargo series is one of my all-time favorites. My only quibble about it is that Haas spends a little too much time in each book filling in Fargo's background and going over the weapons he carries. But that's a very minor point. The offbeat settings and plots, the relentless pace, and the smooth, action-packed prose much more than make up for it. Great stuff, and if you haven't read any of the Fargo books, you should.

Writing Update

In a comment on an earlier post, Jeff Meyerson reminded me that I haven't posted any writing updates for a while, so the first day of the month seems like a good time to resume. Unfortunately, today was my first day off from writing in a couple of weeks, so I have no pages to report. I can mention, though, that June was my most productive month ever, with 707 pages written. That's the first time I've hit the 700 mark after coming close a couple of times in the past. Then I followed that up with exactly 500 pages in July. For the year I'm 12 pages off a 6000-page pace, so I've got a good shot at achieving that. I've hit 6000 twice before and would like to again. Mainly, though, I just want to get a million words done again. If I do that this year and next year, that'll make 10 years in a row. Has anybody ever written a million words a year for 10 straight years? I don't know, but it seems likely Walter B. Gibson did when he was writing two Shadow novels a month and a bunch of other stuff besides. Frederick Faust might have. It can't have been done too many times, though.

Of course, all this talk about pages and words doesn't mean anything unless the work is good. I think I'm doing a pretty good job most of the time, but the final decision on that is up to somebody other than me.

Tomorrow it's back to work. 

Rag Baby - Mark Ellis

Mark Ellis is best known for his science fiction and action/adventure work (he's the creator of the highly successful series OUTLANDERS and served as its principal writer for many years) and for his excellent comic book scripts for THE WILD, WILD WEST, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., and THE JUSTICE MACHINE, among many others. But he started out to be a hardboiled crime writer, as he explains in this post on his blog, and he's reviving those early efforts, starting with the excellent novella "Rag Baby".

Bonaparte "Bone" Mizell is a retired DEA agent, security consultant, and unofficial private eye who's hired by a strip club owner and gangster to deal with a blackmailer. Soon enough, in classic hardboiled fashion, Bone finds himself involved in a twisty yarn including murder, drugs, and a deranged Iraq war vet who seems to have come back from the dead. The plot has enough surprises to be effective, but where Ellis really shines is in the relentless pacing of the story, the vivid depiction of its scruffy central Florida setting, and its rugged, likable hero. I suspect Bone Mizell will be making a return appearance in the future, and I'm certainly looking forward to reading more about him. For now, if you're a fan of hardboiled crime fiction, I recommend you check out "Rag Baby", which is available in a very affordable e-book edition.