Paperback Fanatic # 23

[dem bones]

An urgent read & burn communique smuggled out of Fanatic HQ

"Attached are pdfs of the cover for issue 23 and a sample page- randomly chosen of course, rather than hand-picked to draw in more subscribers from the Vault.
It goes to print next week with a print run based on subscriber numbers, so the message is the same- subscribe or miss out!"

You heard the man. Hit this PF panic Link fast and spare yourself a lifetime of remorse!

[jamesdoig]

Jul 19, 2012 12:07:54 GMT dem bones said:

I haven't seen that Panther cover of Werewolf of Paris before. I loooove werewolf books, so this PF is a must.

[dem bones]

indeed it is, James, and, if i read him right, Justin is planning a part two. My copy has just arrived so no time for anything but the most cursory of scans. We horror freaks have been spoiled rotten over recent issues, so this time some balance-redress, with the emphasis on men's adventure, Joe Kenney's triple-header and Andreas's run in with a sexy spy accounting for almost half of the 88 glossy pages between them. Michel Parry supplies further reminiscences on the final days of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, this time featuring a young woman named Salamanda, and once again, it's heartbreaking stuff. Lovely to see another feature on one of the great pulp magazines. Issue 23 is dedicated to the memory of Ray Bradbury who is celebrated by way of a gorgeous cover gallery. Great to see Mr. Flanagan is now on the case, Sandy Robertson, too!

Justin Marriott (ed.) - Paperback Fanatic #23 (August, 2012)

Here's the roll call.

Fanatical Mails
Andy Boot, Alan Brennert, Alan Keegan, Scott Forrest, Barry Sandoval, Mike Chivers, John Croot, Colin Clynes, Sandy Robertson, Sukhdev Sandhu, Kev Demant, Andreas Decker, Michel Parry, Nigel Taylor, David Hyman, Graeme Flanagan, Bam!!!

Joe Kenney - The Marksman/ Sharpshooter Connection
Len Levinson - My So-Called Literary Career
Joe Kenney - As Though As They Come: An Interview With Len Levinson
Jim Walker - Fantastic Adventures (incorporating cover gallery)
Andreas Decker - Kiss My Assassin: Rod Gray's Eve Drum, The Lady From L.U.S.T..
Graham Andrews - Dastardly Digits: Edgar Wallace in Digit paperback
Justin Marriott - The Werewolf Scrapbook
Ray Bradbury covers gallery.

Review, comments, mindless meandering & Co to follow. Thank you Justin for providing such a feast for eyes and brain!

[andydecker]

What can I say? Another great issue.

The Sharpshooter/Marksman article was one of those write-ups the PF is so good with. Lots of information, a fascinating interview. I have to read more of Levinson. Took a quick look in his Kung Fu novel which sat unread in my Rosenberger collection and it is radically different in style.

Also liked Fantastic Adventures. Very nicely written. Beautiful covers. Yes, they are sf-kitsch, but it must have been nice to see them at the stands.

The Wallace article was also very interesting. I read a lot of old fiction and never could get into Wallace, I have a hard time understanding his success and his appeal.

The Bradbury gallery was a nice idea. One of the highlights was the further rememberance of RCH. This is so sad. I never could warm to the man´s work, but he deserved a better end. Everybody does.

[jamesdoig]

Aug 8, 2012 18:49:58 GMT andydecker said:

What can I say? Another great issue.

Agreed! Lady from L.U.S.T. indeed! My wife wasn't too impressed when she snuck a peak. I must try and find a few - they sound hilarious. The werewolf article was great as was the Fantastic Adventures gallery, though there's an odd para where Jim says early issues of Weird Tales had sf stories by Bradbury, Sturgeon etc, and later issues had horror by Lovecraft and Howard - maybe he's talking about when he came to it in the 40s and the Lovecraft and Howard stories were reprints. Altogether another fine issue.

[dem bones]

Aug 10, 2012 22:17:17 GMT jamesdoig said:

Agreed! Lady from L.U.S.T. indeed! My wife wasn't too impressed when she snuck a peak.

Ha! I get that from mrs. dem whenever a new issue arrives. The groans: The "tsk, you men are incorrigible!": The eyes shooting to the heavens. But I swear i detect a sense of disappointment on the rare occasion Justin neglects his smut peddling duties. And then my copy "mysteriously disappears", to just as mysteriously reappear where I left it two days later. Maybe PF has more women readers than Fanatical Mail would lead us to believe.

The challenge with Paperback Fanatic is trying to come up with something new to say about it. I exhausted my bag of clichés somewhere around Pulpmania! and you can't keep repeating "best one ever!", no matter that the latest often is.

The Fanatical Mail column outdoes itself every issue to the point where nowadays you risk info-overload before you've even made it to the magazine proper. It's heartening that the supernaturally unlikely pairing of Birkin & RCH received a largely positive response from the readers, especially as up until now Fanatic has concerned itself almost exclusively with the novel. Very well done, Justin and Michel, who, regardless of his protests to the contrary, certainly played his part in bringing us one of PF's finest articles to date.

Alfred H. Bill - The Wolf In The Garden (Centaur, Feb. 1972: originally Longmans Green, 1931)

Virgil Finlay

Blurb:
WEREWOLF THRILLER
Here is a marvelous werewolf thriller set in up­state New York in the days close after the American Revolution. A series of bizarre and horrifying events besiege the village of New Dortrecht with the advent of the French Comte de Saint Loup and his hound DeRetz. A giant wolf, possessed with evil intelligence and savage fury, sates its desire for blood in a series of horrifying and supernatural killings.

THE WOLF IN THE GARDEN is destined to be­come a classic werewolf tale. First published in 1931, this long-forgotten novel may be the finest werewolf thriller ever written.

Stand-out for horror freaks is The Werewolf Scrapbook. For once a subject thought I was pretty up on, so of course Justin has to lob in the likes of Frank Belknap Long's The Night Of The Wolf, Leslie Whitten's Moon Of The Wolf plus much other lupine lunacy I either never hrard of or haven't read. Can help a little with Alfred H. Bill's The Wolf In The Garden. It was first published by Longmans Green in 1931 and Virgin Finlay's cover illustration began life as a scene from The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, a three-part serial by 'Gans T. Field' (Manly Wade Wellman) for Weird Tales from January-March, 1936. Can't tell you anything worth knowing about the novel itself as i abandoned it through impatience with the microscopic print and a binding so tight even Lady Saliva would struggle to claw it open.

Pulphack's been encouraging me to try some Edgar Wallace for ages and could be Graham Andrews' Dastardly Digits finally tips me over the edge. Two pages of concise biography and then a dizzying trawl through the convoluted history of novels and collections whose titles and contents would often undergo a drastic overhaul with each new publisher. Blue Hands, described by Mr. Andrews as "a cross between a Gothic 'hospital romance' and something nightmared up by Edgar Allan Poe" looks as promising a place to start as any. Clearly, there's more mileage to be had from the mysterious Digit and their eclectic catalogue.

Jim Walker's reminiscences struck a chord. You only have to attend a book-fair or lurch around a car boot sale to realise that pulp fans come in all shapes, sizes, age-groups, genders, species etc.. That dull-looking novel you toss contemptuously aside as a pile of junk is just as likely the next person's holy grail and vice versa. I've come to believe that if there's a single common bond it is this - we've all experienced the moment. My guess is anyone reading this has experienced the moment. It's when you chance on some dog-eared, beat-up old paperback makes you let out an involuntary gasp of equal parts shock, joy and awe, instinctively realise you're not the casual reader you took yourself for and this is no fleeting interest. You're an addict, and you'll be chasing the thrill for the rest of your life. If that's right, then in Jim's case it happened in the early 'fifties when he found a copy apiece of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventure in an Edinburgh bookshop. As you'd expect, the covers gallery accompanying his reminiscences is a wonder to behold - and that's even without an example of Earle K. "inventor of the brass brassière" Bergey's work.

And that still only brings us half-way ....

[dem bones]

Where were we ...?

I've yet to land a single sexy spy novel and my guess is that, should the big day eventually arrive, whichever Girl from T.O.M.C.A.T. or similar shows up will be nowhere near as entertaining as the articles devoted their adventures in PF. Andy's exposé of Eve Drum, the Lady from L.U.S.T., in particular, her foiling of a Fourth Reich in Kiss My Assassin and the supernatural entry, Blow My Mind, makes the entire series sound totally 'must have' regardless that he spends rest of piece advising us that its anything but. To give Vault readers a taster, Andy's synopsis of Blow My Mind begins:

"The Russians are using ESP. Ghosts are stealing top-secret papers. Eve and her boss, David AnderJanian, enlist the help of a swinger couple, Marion and Martin Berwick, who can project their astral bodies and have sex with them ..."

If i know next to nothing of the sexy spies, i'm even less clued in on the men's adventure, porno novels and western genres, so Graham Andrews' interview with Len Levison, "low rent pulp fiction commando" and man of a million pseudonyms, is another instant education - we actually get to meet someone with hands-on experience of Manor Books! The author's autobiographical companion piece, My So-Called Career, is further confirmation that a house author's lot is one of near misses, cancelled series', and dealing with mad people on an hourly basis. Len may not always see himself as a pulp author, but everyone who reads this issue certainly will, and they'll appreciate him all the more for it. Joe Kenny's literary detection regarding psychotically driven mob-busters Johnny 'The Sharpshooter' Rock and the spectacularly unpleasant Phil 'The Marksman' Magallan, throws up yet more 'must reads' - and these one's probably are - while providing plenty bonus insight into what Leisure Books (which, he reveals, is Belmont-Tower by another name) were up to before the 'eighties horror explosion.

Thanks incidentally, to Graham Andrews, whose review in PF 22 prompted me to finally read Robert Bloch's The Couch