Oh, I think I’m going to like this… via Michael May’s Adventureblog I’ve just heard about a new series of pulp-adventure novels to be published by Hard Case Crime, the wonderful small-press company that’s been trying to single-handedly revive a bygone aesthetic with a mix of Golden Age reprints and new material by current authors, all wrapped in lurid vintage-style art work. (FYI, Hard Case may be best known for publishing Stephen King’s experimental mystery/journalism novel The Colorado Kid, which I quite liked although I know many other folks did not).

Bookgasm has the goods on this new series:

Debuting next May, the novels will be issued once a month in true serial fashion, ghostwritten by several Hard Case authors under the nom de plume of [Gabriel] Hunt himself, the globetrotting adventurer, with painted covers by Glen Orbik.

The publisher promises classic adventure fiction aimed squarely at “anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs or watching Harrison Ford wield his bullwhip at the movies.” Sounds right up my alley, and in fact I’m jealous I didn’t think of doing this myself. The timing probably couldn’t be better; I suspect there’s a whole lot of people out there for whom Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just good enough to whet their appetite for more period adventure, but they haven’t quite known where to find it. In fact, when I saw the promo art above, I thought at first glance that it was for a new Indy tie-in (it was the Sallah clone in the fez that did it, I think, since Gabriel Hunt himself looks more like Rick O’Connell in the Mummy movies).

Anyhow, if you think this might be something you’d like, too, head over to “Hunt’s” official web site and sign up for the email newsletter. I’ll post more details about the series as I encounter them…