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…

Here’s kind of an interesting little page, whereupon you can listen to “brief recordings of authors and illustrators saying their names.” I must confess that I don’t recognize most of the names on the list, and also it seems that some of the names are pretty self-explanatory — really, who can’t figure out how to pronounce “Ann M. Martin“? — but I like the idea here. It would be especially useful in science fiction circles, where many authors seem to flaunt esoteric and/or eccentric noms de plume.
(Manys the time I’ve encountered some doughy geek-boy in a Doctor Who t-shirt — the sort who claim to despise the original Star Trek but secretly covet Captain Kirk’s skill with the ladies, green-skinned and otherwise — who defiantly insists that Author X says his or her name this way, and anyone who would dare to pronounce it differently is obviously a complete ignoramus. It’s a sci-fi thing, I guess, that unique combination of obstinate arrogance and screaming insecurity.)
In any event, the web site did help me clear up one nagging question for me: Neil Gaiman, author of the amazing Sandman comics among other things, says his last name “GAY-mun,” not “GUY-mun.” Good to know…

Diving right in:

Continue Reading…

I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August — I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I liked these books, far more than I ever anticipated — and I’ve got to admit, it never occurred to me that Dumbledore was gay. His sexuality never entered into my conception of him at all, actually, just as I never really wondered what kind of trouble Gandalf got himself up to after smoking a big old bowlful of, ahem, “hobbit leaf,” or whether crazy old Ben Kenobi occasionally liked to visit the famous “Bantha Ranch” House of Hospitality in Anchorhead’s red-light district. The respective texts simply don’t provide — nor do the stories require — this level of characterization for these guys, who we all know are little more than archetypal mentor figures, no matter that we love them so much. But hey, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so be it. She would know better than us, and it doesn’t trouble me in the least if he is. It’s just not anything I imagined, and I personally don’t see any hard evidence for it within the story. (I will grant that Dumbledore is probably the best fleshed-out of the three mentors, in terms of having a detailed backstory that the reader is allowed to experience as part of the book’s main plot, but there’s still nothing there that suggested any kind of a sex life, gay or straight, in my opinion.)

That doesn’t mean, of course, that other people won’t see whatever they want to see now that the idea has been planted. I imagine this will only add fuel to the fire for those busybody whackjobs who are already down on the Potter books because they’ve got our kids thinking about that evil, nasty witchcraft. Um, yeah… and all the other beloved classic stories that people have been exposing their kids to for generations, from the Brothers Grimm to The Wizard of Oz to, yes, Star Wars, have absolutely nothing to do with magic or the supernatural…