The third volume of collected posts from Dark Worlds Quarterly. Buy it as an Amazon ebook or Paperback and author direct sales.
Contents
A Cowboy, a Space Captain, a Private Investigator and a Barbarian Walk Into a Bar….
Good Guys & Better Coffee
HORROR MONSTERS
The Christmas Ghosts Stories of Charles Dickens
The Children of Dracula
The Ghosts of an Antiquary
The Handy-Dandy Mythos Plot
Etheridge & Peters: Supernatural Policemen
Malcolm Ferguson -Super Fan
The Case of Edgar Allan Poe
Mike Shayne’s Weirdest Case
Monster Island: Two Classics
The Case of the Coptic Priest
Charles L. Grant – In the Shadow of Udolpho
SCIENCE FICTION MONSTERS
G. Peyton Wertenbaker, Science Fiction Pioneer
The Green Splotches
More Than Silver Underwear: A History of Space Opera
GW and Jack Shoot the Poop: Space Opera
The Hidden World
Guns Drawn! Space Westerns!
Bolos: Relics of War
June 6, 2016: Predictions & Predilections
Philip Wylie & The End of the World
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Mystery Challenge
Robots Can’t Lie
The Veiled Lady or Let Me Spillane It To Yah
Shooting Star: Murder From the Moon
The Darker Drink: The Pseudonymous Saint
The Robots of Thrilling Mystery
FANTASY MONSTERS
Tarzan Never Dies: The Bid For Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Legacy
The Vines of Tarzan – A Mystery
The Invisible Bond – A Mystery
Dreamer’s World: A Tribute to Normal Bean
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Doc Across the Genres
Gifts of Blood: The Fiction of Susan C. Petrey
When Elephants Ruled the Earth
The Lord of Bat-Manor
Posthumous Collaborations
Appendix I: How To Get Your Name on a Magazine
Appendix II: Ten Things Doc Savage Taught Me About Writing
Appendix III: The Curse of Hemingway: To Ornate or Not Too Ornate
From: A COWBOY, A SPACE CAPTAIN, A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR AND A BARBARIAN WALK INTO A BAR….
That could be the beginnings of a really lame joke, but it’s something more. All four of these characters, these separate genre icons, share something in common. They are all cut from the same bolt of cloth… the American hero.
The Cowboy grew out of the nostalgia for a Wild West that never really existed outside the imagination of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. You can see the beginnings of him in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper (1820-1850s), but it is Owen Wister who gets credit for the first official Western novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902). After him came all the rest, from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour, along with his near cousin, the Northern hero: Mounties to gold-miners in the fiction of writers like Jack London or Rex Beach. North or West, the trappings of the Western and Northern include the tough, solitary cowpoke who enforces his own stern code with a shooting iron or a hanging rope. Locales where you’ll find him include the wilderness and smoky saloons.
The second of these true, American heroes is the hardy Space-faring Captain. Pinpointing an exact creator is a little harder, for science fiction heroes begin with John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs in February 1912 in “Under the Moons of Mars,” acquiring all the fighting skill of the old romantic heroes, but then moving on to Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Hawk Carse, Eric John Stark, and the list goes on and on… Best of all of them was CL Moore’s Northwest Smith, who hung around the seedy bars of Mars with his pal, Yarol the Venusian. These tough spacers drank segir, slept with alien chicks, and could shoot or punch their way out of any situation. They lead the way to the final icon, Captain Kirk of Star Trek.
The Private Eye was invented by Carroll John Daly in “The False Burton Combs” in Black Mask (December 1922). Daly may have been first, but his work was expanded by Dashiell Hammett, who had actually been a Pinkerton agent, and later by Raymond Chandler, who elevated noir pulp fiction to the highest level. The central hero is, of course, a private detective, who knows the mean streets and follows his own code of justice. This doesn’t always match that of the police, who are often as corrupt as the criminals. Mystery tales date back to at least Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841), but was made hugely popular by British author Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes in The Strand. The Private Eye was America’s response to the effete murders in the vicarages over tea that the British cozy mystery was at the turn of the century. None of that middle class snobbery for the PI. He is a creature of independence, often found drinking in an illegal speakeasy.
The barbarian hero of sword-and-sorcery is our last of the foursome. The author who created him was Robert E Howard, in January 1929 with “The Shadow Kingdom,” starring King Kull. Kull, like his replacement, and by far, the quintessential icon of S&S, Conan the Cimmerian, was a rough, deadly warrior, who claws his way to kingship. The barbarian is skilled with weapons, a hater of sorcery and evil magic, and a hero, but on his own terms and for his own price, which is often taken in gold, booze, or sex. He marches to the beat of his own drum, whether in a desert, a jungle, a filthy city with its steamy dens of iniquity. Conan walks a dark path and no furry little hobbits need apply.
