Exotic Adventures of Robert Silverberg - Robert Silverberg

Travel to faraway lands of mystery, danger, and erotic intrigue in stories from a time when the world still held secrets to be uncovered. From safari to bordello, from smugglers' cove to opium den, Robert Silverberg's lost pulp exotica returns to print for the first time since its original 1950s publication, in bold new oversized facsimile re-creations. Available in softcover and deluxe expanded hardcover editions that look fresh off the newsstand, circa 1958. Go EXOTIC...or go home.

One of the greatest names in science fiction, Robert Silverberg's work is beloved by millions of readers worldwide. He has been awarded virtually all of the top honors in the realm of speculative fiction, including multiple Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards, and induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

But his long career as a writer includes many lesser known detours outside SF. One of those detours led to this intriguing set of stories, written and published in 1958 and 1959 for EXOTIC ADVENTURES, a short-lived men's adventure magazine (or MAM) that emphasized tales set in foreign locales then considered mysterious and intriguing. Silverberg proved so adept a storyteller in this mode, he was soon composing nearly the entire magazine under a variety of pseudonyms.

Now, with Silverberg's full cooperation, The Men's Adventure Library presents these long-lost tales of exotic adventure, most never before reprinted, in a unique facsimile presentation that mimics their original publication in the 1950s.

EXOTIC ADVENTURES OF ROBERT SILVERBERG invites you to take a walk on the wild side. Experience life as a smuggler in Tangier...witness the secret sex rites of Uganda...visit a nudist paradise on the French Riviera...take a bride for the night in Kashmir...lose yourself in the opium dens of Vietnam...and much, much more in globe-trotting adventures spun entirely from the vivid imagination of one of speculative fiction's most honored voices.

EXOTIC ADVENTURES OF ROBERT SILVERBERG is available as a 118-page softcover, and as a deluxe 142-page hardcover with additional stories.

(These stories are just really entertaining, and the book is beautifully put together by editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle. Several of them, with the addition of a little more plot, easily could have been expanded into lurid but also really entertaining novels, had Silverberg chosen to do so. My favorites were "Safari of Death", "Bride of the Jaguar God", and "Island of Exiled Women". Those titles ought to give you a pretty good idea whether or not this is a book for you. I loved it. And yes, that's Silverberg himself on the cover, in a reworked version of a cover by Rafael DeSoto that first appeared on the April 1957 issue of FOR MEN ONLY. If you're like me and enjoy revisiting that era from time to time, I highly recommend EXOTIC ADVENTURES OF ROBERT SILVERBERG.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Story Quarterly, Winter 1951

Hey, watch those hands, you guys! I thought at first this cover was by Earle Bergey, but it's not attributed to him anywhere that I can find. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's certainly suggestive and eye-catching no matter who painted it. This issue of FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY is mostly reprint, with only two new stories by Frank Belknap Long and Milton Lesser, best remembered as Stephen Marlowe. The reprints, from various issues of WONDER STORIES and WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the Thirties, are by Eric Frank Russell, Clark Ashton Smith, Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder), and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, Alan Connell and Siegfried Wagener (his only credit in the FMI).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Pioneer Western, December 1950

This is the first and apparently only issue of this Western pulp published by Avon and edited by Donald A. Wollheim. There was an earlier PIONEER WESTERN, a few issues of which were published by Popular Publications in the Thirties, but the two magazines aren't connected other than by title. I don't know why this version of PIONEER WESTERN lasted only one issue, but it couldn't have been because of the authors: William Hopson, Dean Owen, Will C. Brown (C.S. Boyles, the other author from Cross Plains, Texas), Roe Richmond, C. William Harrison, Walt Sheldon, and Robert Moore Williams. That's a really solid line-up of pulpsters. I like the cover, too. I thought at first the art might be by Norman Saunders, but this issue isn't listed on his website. Whoever painted it, I like it. There's also a comic strip story inside with art by the great Joe Maneely.

Forgotten Books: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in River of Peril - Cole Fannin (Frank Castle)

When I was a kid, I read a lot of the juvenile novels published by Whitman, many of them based on TV shows or movie stars I liked. I was a big Roy Rogers fan, so I would have read this one if I’d ever seen it. Clearly, I just never came across a copy. Until now. (That’s an Internet scan of the cover, by the way. My copy is beat up and has loose covers.)

ROY ROGERS AND DALE EVANS IN RIVER OF PERIL is a clumsy title for a pretty good book. Unlike many of Roy’s movies and his TV show, which were contemporary Westerns including modern technology and even Cold War espionage, this novel is in a more traditional Western vein with nothing more advanced than railroads and the telegraph. As the book opens, Roy is on a secret mission for an unnamed U.S. president who’s pretty clearly Theodore Roosevelt, which places the time period as very early 20^th Century.

Roy’s job is to find out who’s trying to keep settlers out of the Bitter River country in Idaho, which the president wants to open for settlement by homesteaders. He’s assisted in this effort by a talkative old-timer named Kammas Tibbs, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gabby Hayes. Dale shows up, even though Roy tried to keep her from taking part in what might be a dangerous job. There’s a gang of bad guys ramrodded by a head henchman who would be played by Roy Barcroft is this was a movie, and a mysterious mastermind behind all the villainy. Since this is a novel aimed at young readers, nobody gets killed, but there’s plenty of gunplay and a few brutal fistfights, plus some good scenes involving the rapids in Bitter River. This is almost a plot that could have worked as one of Roy’s late features directed by William Witney and written by Sloan Nibley.

Speaking of writers, the author of this novel is by-lined Cole Fannin, but that was actually veteran pulpster and paperbacker Frank Castle. Castle wrote a bunch of hardboiled Westerns and crime novels, but he was a thorough pro and could turn out juveniles like this, too, and in fact wrote quite a few of them. He had a very distinctive style in some of his paperbacks, but either he kept it under control on this assignment or some of his more oddball sentence structures were edited out. What’s important to me is that I enjoyed this fast-paced yarn and thought Castle did a good job of capturing Roy and Dale’s personalities. If you’re a fan of their movies, I think this book is well worth reading if you can find a copy.

Paperbacks at War - Justin Marriott, ed.

LEGION OF THE DAMNED!

World War Two has long been a recurring theme in popular culture.

Its grand scale, themes, and emotions offered rich inspiration for authors, who readily provided the public with tales of fearless heroes, diabolical enemies, and enduring love.

This book reviews 170+ of books, comics and pulp magazines that used the setting of war, providing information and opinion on their entertainment value and historical importance.

From pioneering pulp heroes such as The Operator and Lone Eagle, to comic icons such as Sgt. Rock and The Unknown Soldier, to the cynical and ultra-violent paperbacks of the 1970s from Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler.

Fully illustrated with 200+ reproductions of paperbacks and comics.

(Following up on several superb volumes of reviews concentrating on particular genres of adventure fiction, editor Justin Marriott strikes again with PAPERBACKS AT WAR, a wonderful collection of reviews by knowledgeable fans about scores of war-themed novels, mostly paperback originals, with many series entries and also plenty of stand-alones. This is the sort of book you can dip into now and then, if that's what you want, but I found myself compulsively reading it . . . and then heading to Amazon to compulsively buy the books that appealed to me the most. I've read a considerable amount of war fiction, but PAPERBACKS AT WAR contains reviews of plenty of books that are new to me, too. I had a great time reading it, and I'm pretty sure I'll have a great time reading the books it prompted me to buy. Highly recommended.)

Tarzan: Untamed Frontiers - Gary A. Buckingham

Tarzan wasn't my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, at least not if you're talking about the novels and not the movies based on them. That was the novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, which I've written about here before. But very early on, I bought a copy of the Whitman edition of TARZAN OF THE APES (the one with the Official Ape-English Dictionary; I'd bet a hat some of you have a copy of that very edition still on your shelves) and was hooked on the series. I think I've read all the Tarzan novels, some more than once, and also read Fritz Leiber's TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD and Will Murray's two Wild Adventures of Tarzan novels. The character is one of my all-time favorites. I even wrote a Tarzan fanfiction novel when I was in junior high. I'm talking probably 30,000 to 40,000 words. The handwritten manuscript is long gone, of course.

So when I heard about a volume called TARZAN: UNTAMED FRONTIERS, collecting a novella and a novelette about Tarzan by Burroughs scholar Gary A. Buckingham, I had to have a copy. I'm glad I was able to get my hands on one, because these two yarns are thoroughly entertaining. The title novella is a prequel to one of the best novels in the series, TARZAN THE UNTAMED, and concerns the Waziri tribe's move across Africa to make their home in the area where Tarzan establishes his own headquarters. There are some excellent action scenes in this one. The novelette, "Tarzan and the Secret of Katanga" (first published in the hardback edition of Will Murray's novel TARZAN: RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON) is even better. This is a sequel to TARZAN THE UNTAMED and is set in the days leading up to World War II. The story finds Tarzan battling Nazi agents trying to take over a uranium mine, which is good enough by itself, but that mine holds a dangerous secret that makes the story even better. Great battles against man and beast abound.

Probably the best thing about these stories is that Buckingham really captures Tarzan's personality, both as the King of the Jungle and as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. There's more Tarzan by Buckingham in the pipeline, and I'm looking forward to it.

The present volume is a limited edition and is available direct from the author. You can find information on how to get a copy here. I should also mention that it has a spectacular wraparound cover by Dan Parsons, as well as interior illustrations by Parsons, Neal Adams, Joe DeVito, Chris Adams, and Peggy Adler. Beautiful work, all the way around.

West of Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper in the Wild West - Wayne D. Dundee

WITH A HUNGER FOR TRUTH, THIS THRILLING WESTERN WILL KEEP YOU ON YOUR TOES.

In the late 1880s, a series of grisly murders swept through the Whitechapel slums of London. The victims were all prostitutes, each found with her throat cut and her stomach sliced open. Sensationalized newspaper accounts of the killings spread throughout England and beyond to a horrified yet fascinated reading public. Heightening interest all the more were the taunting letters sent by the killer to Scotland Yard – boldly signed “Jack the Ripper”.

But then, abruptly, the killings stopped. The Ripper was never identified or captured, but the terror seemed over.

A few months later, however, on the American frontier in the raucous, rowdy mining camps that sprang up out of a silver boom in the Colorado Rockies, some eerily similar murders began to occur among the flocks of “soiled doves” who gathered to serve the men in those remote camps. With no law to speak of in such places and sudden death being all too common, no one seemed to take much notice.

Not until a sharp-eyed female journalist spotted the possible connection and became determined to find out the truth. Aided by a guilt-ridden though equally dogged frontier detective, the pair follow a bloody trail through the rugged mountains and boisterous mining camps to try and prove if Jack the Ripper truly ceased his killing ways … or did he merely move them out here – west of Whitechapel?

(Wayne D. Dundee is one of the most consistently entertaining Western writers in the business, so it's no surprise that his new novel from Wolfpack Publishing is excellent. The pace races along, he does a great job with the historical elements in the plot, and there are some twists I didn't see coming, which is always nice. Plus Lew Torrent, an operative for the Omaha & Points West Detective Agency, is a really likable narrator/protagonist and works well with the female journalist who draws him into the case. I really hope we see these two again, maybe tackling another historical mystery. In the meantime, WEST OF WHITECHAPEL gets a very high recommendation from me.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Detective Stories, January 1934

Clifford Benton's cover for this issue of STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES is pretty exciting. I don't think I'd heard of Benton before. Looks like he did only a few pulp covers, all of them either for this magazine or its predecessor, NICKEL DETECTIVE. There's a strong group of writers in this issue, too: Norvell W. Page, E. Hoffmann Price, Arthur J. Burks, Frederick C. Painton, Ralph Perry, Harold Ward, Samuel Taylor, and a couple less familiar to me, Jack Smalley and Les Tillray. This is Tillray's only entry in the FMI. Might have been a pseudonym, might've just been his only sale. I don't know much about STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES, but based on this issue, it appears to have been a pulp worth reading.

UPDATE: I've learned from Lynn Munroe that the Les Tillray story in this issue, "Terror Trail", was actually written by none other than Erle Stanley Gardner, and that its original title was "Death Trail". Many thanks to Lynn for this great bit of literary detective work!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Spicy Western Stories, June 1942

Good old SPICY WESTERN STORIES. Covers don't get much more garish than this one by Allen Anderson. It's sure eye-catching, too. Most of this issue's contents are reprints from four or five years earlier with the titles and house-names changed. Laurence Donovan has one of the two original stories, and one of the reprints appears to be by him, as well, since it was published originally under the name Larry Dunn, which as far as I know was a personal pseudonym for Donovan. The other original story is by Edwin Truett Long writing as Wallace Kayton. The rest of the TOC is a hodge-podge of house-names.

Now Available: Never Trifle With Murder - Livia J. Washburn

It’s early summer in Weatherford, Texas, and retired teacher/amateur sleuth Phyllis Newsom and fellow retiree Carolyn Wilbarger are taking British cooking classes at the local senior center in this suspenseful Fresh-Baked mystery.

In the latest from Livia J. Washburn, the nationally bestselling author of the Fresh Baked Mystery Series, Phyllis Newsom learns to make a trifle that’s to die for…

While Sam Fletcher is playing dominoes with the guys, Eve Turner is busy flirting with the English chef since she has a fascination for English accents and handsome men who can cook. This puts her in competition with a couple of other ladies from the senior center, who also have their caps set for Chef Alfred Dorrington.

The third and final class features desserts, and more than the stove heats up when the trifle is poisoned! Once again Phyllis finds herself involved in a murder case filled with hidden motives and colorful characters.

Includes recipes!

(I love these books because I always get to read them before anybody else. And, of course, because they're funny and well-plotted and full of great characters, surprises, and poignant moments. I get to sample the recipes, too! The trade paperback of this one also includes the Fresh Baked Mystery short story "The Coconut Bunny Butt Caper", which was only available digitally until now. NEVER TRIFLE WITH MURDER is also available at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.)