EDitorial Comments

Murania Press Sale at the Upcoming Windy City Pulp/Paper Expo

The 2013 Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention begins just two weeks from today, and it promises to be a real barn-burner of a show. Murania Press will be on hand with a broad selection of publications, including recent issues of Blood ‘n’ Thunder (including the latest, our Winter/Spring double), all four volumes in the Classic Pulp Reprints series, and both volumes of The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder.

We’re offering Windy City attendees some special deals on product they purchase at the show. Anyone buying both Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder volumes will get the pair for $40, which represents 20 percent off the list price. Anyone pre-ordering The Island, the upcoming Murania Press edition of J. Allan Dunn’s sequel to Barehanded Castaways (currently our best seller in the Classic Pulp Reprints series), can get both books for $30 postpaid. And anyone who subscribes to Blood ‘n’ Thunder for the first time at the convention will be entitled to a 20 percent discount off any Murania Press books purchased on the spot. These deals are good only as long as supplies last, and only for the duration of the Windy City convention.

Look forward to seeing some of you in Chicago. If you’re a current Blood ‘n’ Thunder subscriber, make sure you stop by our table and pick up your copy of the latest issue. If not, stop by anyway and introduce yourself. If you go away empty-handed it won’t be for lack of effort on our part!

Wuxtry, Wuxtry: Hot Off The Press! THE BEST OF BnT: VOLUME TWO

Now available — The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder: Volume Two! Just received the first copies and it looks fine. If you’re a relatively recent subscriber to BnT and have had little luck locating the out-of-print issues, this meaty tome is a must-have item. Its 316 pages are crammed with the best articles and reviews from issues Eleven through Twenty-One. That adds up to more than 100,000 words of history and commentary on vintage pop culture, emphasizing coverage of pulps but also featuring pieces on movies, story papers, and Old-Time Radio. Subjects, writers, magazines, and characters include Adventure, The Shadow, Black Mask, Talbot Mundy, Doc Savage, H. G. Wells, Short Stories, Sam Spade, L. Ron Hubbard, The Phantom Detective, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Erle Stanley Gardner, Bill Barnes, Detective Fiction Weekly, and much more. Waste no time; hop on over to our Home page and order your copy today!

Now Available: WILDERNESS TRAIL

Hot off the press! The fourth volume in Murania’s Classic Pulp Reprints series is ready for purchase. By early next week I should have a proof copy of The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder: Volume Two, which will become available as soon as I give it the once-over and approve it. Both books, along with the Winter/Spring 2013 issue of Blood ‘n’ Thunder, will make their official debuts at next month’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention. But why wait? Be the first on your block to get Wilderness Trail! It’s a rousing pulp adventure yarn making its American debut in book form.

The Upcoming BLOOD ‘N’ THUNDER

Scheduled for debut at next month’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, the upcoming double issue of Blood ‘n’ Thunder (36/37, Winter/Spring 2013) boasts more contributors than any previous number of the magazine.  The distinguished roster includes old favorites as well as new additions to our Writers Brigade. And the issue itself has everything BnT readers crave — well-researched articles, eye-popping pictorial features, and carefully chosen stories reprinted from rare pulps — in twice the usual quantity.  Here are the highlights, in the order in which they appear:

• Our “Tricks of the Trade” department features a meaty excerpt from H. Bedford-Jones’ 1929 book, This Fiction Business.

• Veteran fan and professional fictioneer James Reasoner reviews vintage pulps in our “Off the Shelf” department.

• This issue’s “Series Spotlight” falls on a long-running Zorro clone, El Coyote, whose career is summarized by Roberto Barriero.

• Will Murray continues to share with BnT the latest results of his detective work on long-forgotten pulp writers, this time uncovering the true identity of the author behind Munsey’s short-lived “Doc Harker” detective series.

• Fred Nadis provides an informative excerpt from his biography of pioneering science-fiction fan and writer Raymond A. Palmer, who assumed editorship of the nearly moribund Amazing Stories in 1938 and turned it into a publishing powerhouse within a few short years.

• A blue-ribbon panel of experts selects the most underrated adventures of Doc Savage.  Among the contributors to this survey are Will Murray, Link Hullar, and Dafydd N. Dyar, who also collaborated on an influential 1980 poll of the top ten Doc novels.

• Eminent film historian Richard W. Bann offers “Nick and Nora: The Beginning,” a fascinating article on the making of The Thin Man. This lengthy piece is accompanied by scenes from the movie, rare behind-the-scenes stills, and the Joseph Franke illustrations used in the Redbook magazine publication of Dashiell Hammett’s classic whodunit.

• As part of BnT‘s celebration of the Fu Manchu centennial, novelist William Patrick Maynard — officially licensed by Sax Rohmer’s estate to continue the series — summarizes the Devil Doctor’s infamous literary career and offers his opinions on outstanding installments of the saga.

• Present-day pinup queen Mala Mastroberte brightens the pages of BnT with a portfolio of her pulp-cover recreations, in which she is not only the model but also the photographer and the graphic designer!

• One of this issue’s “Blood ‘n’ Thunder Reprints” is a seminal story that heretofore has escaped the notice of pulp collectors and historians: “He’s a Good Little Guy at That,” the actual first entry in William Wirt’s long-running series featuring soldier-of-fortune Jimmie Cordie.

There’s more, but the above lineup should give you a pretty good idea just how special this book-length double issue will be.  Watch for it next month!

H. Bedford-Jones: King Of The Pulps

Today’s pulp-fiction devotees, born during the Baby Boom years (1946 to 1964), are too young to have bought rough-paper magazines on the newsstands and therefore gravitate primarily to those characters whose life spans were extended by Sixties paperback reprints and frequent appearances in other media: Conan, Tarzan, Doc Savage, The Shadow, and so on. Lester Dent, Walter B. Gibson, and Robert E. Howard are lionized in the fan press, and justifiably so. But they were not pioneers; they trod paths already well worn by the generation of pulpateers that preceded them. And of those, one loomed larger than most of his contemporaries.

Born in 1887, Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones spent his early months in Ontario, Canada, the family moving to Michigan when he was barely a year old. The future fictioneer showed an aptitude for writing as a public-school student, and he matriculated at Toronto’s Trinity College but dropped out after one year to pursue a career in journalism. As H. Bedford-Jones, he contributed to newspapers in Detroit and Chicago before turning his hand to fiction. His earliest short stories appeared in Frank A. Munsey’s pioneering pulp magazine, The Argosy, during 1909. He was not quite 22 years old when editor Matthew White purchased them. Published under the pseudonym “H. E. Twinells,” these initial efforts revealed him to be a born storyteller, if not a literary wunderkind.

Over the next few years Bedford-Jones threw himself headlong into full-time fiction writing, placing additional yarns with The Argosy and its sister pulp, The All-Story (later All-Story Weekly), as well as Street & Smith’s People’s Magazine, Top-Notch Magazine, and New Story Magazine. In a 1914 Argosy two-parter, “The Gate of Farewell,” he created what would become his most popular series character: John Solomon, the outwardly amiable, innocuous-looking Cockney who was actually a capable covert operative of the British government.

Of Bedford-Jones’ early output his biographer Peter Ruber had this to say: “His writing style during those years was remarkably fluid and polished; his imaginative storytelling ability far superior to many of his contemporaries, and a significant number of those stories are not as dated, nor the dialogue as stilted, as might be expected.”

Late in 1914 Bedford-Jones submitted a book-length novel to The Blue Book Magazine, an up-and-coming sheet published by Louis Eckstein’s Story-Press Corporation. Edited by Ray Long with the assistance of young Donald Kennicott, Blue Book was finally hitting its stride after several years of relative mediocrity. Long purchased the yarn from Bedford-Jones, beginning the author’s decades-long relationship with the magazine. A historical adventure set in early 19th-century America, The Wilderness Trail saw print in the February 1915 issue alongside tales by such popular fictioneers as H. Rider Haggard, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Ellis Parker Butler, and Albert Payson Terhune.

Over the next 34 years H. Bedford-Jones sold Blue Book an astounding 360 stories, including another five complete-in-one-issue novels and seven serialized novels. He was prolific in every genre but seemed to have a special affinity for historical adventures. Although he had no trouble selling to Long’s successor, Karl Harriman, it was Blue Book’s next editor, Donald Kennicott, who bought the most Bedford-Jones stories—some 280, of all lengths, between 1935 and 1949.

Having gone through a rough patch in the early years of the Depression (the inevitable consequence of failing magazines and reduced word rates), H. Bedford-Jones evolved the strategy of pitching editors not just individual yarns but entire series of stories with a central theme. In 1934 he simultaneously persuaded Kennicott and Short Stories editor Harry Maule to let him adopt this approach.

Blue Book’s February 1935 number offered the first installment of “Arms and Men,” a historical series that extended to 28 entries. Bedford-Jones followed this in 1937 with two more skeins, the self-explanatory “Ships and Men” and 17 Foreign Legion adventures collectively titled “Warriors in Exile.” In 1938 he launched what is arguably his best-remembered series for Blue Book. “Trumpets to Oblivion” combined fantasy, science fiction, and historical adventure. The premise involved a wealthy inventor’s perfection of a combination time machine and TV set—a device that reached back into the ether and retrieved images from past history. Each series installment opened with the inventor welcoming an audience to monitor the repeat “broadcast” of some famous event.

Bedford-Jones wrote 19 series for Blue Book, some of them overlapping, and until he died in 1949 each issue contained at least one and often two installments. They were published under his own name and also as by “Gordon Keyne” and “Captain Michael Gallister.” He occasionally turned out novel-lengthers for Kennicott as well, the most memorable of these being They Lived by the Sword, a fictional account of Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps. Remarkably, in addition to pounding out his Blue Book work, Bedford-Jones still found time to contribute regularly to other pulps, placing thematically linked series in Weird Tales and Short Stories as well.

An obituary published in the New York Herald-Tribune stated that H. Bedford-Jones earned more than a million dollars during his 40 years as a fiction writer. In King of the Pulps: The Life and Writings of H. Bedford-Jones (Ontario: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2003), Peter Ruber estimated that the veteran pulpateer wrote a minimum of 25 million words. The true total may never be known, as Ruber allows that some yarns could have appeared under pseudonyms not yet attributed to the legendarily prolific author.

The Wilderness Trail is a seminal work in Bedford-Jones’ oeuvre. It not only kicked off his 34-year association with Blue Book but also was his first historical novel with an American setting. The author had a deep and abiding interest in the country’s post-Revolutionary War expansion and returned many times to the milieu he describes so well in this yarn. His employment of such real-life characters as Daniel Boone, Zachary Taylor, John J. Audubon, and the Indian chief Tecumseh is particularly skillful; we have no way of knowing if these historical figures ever interacted, but Bedford-Jones weaves the tale so cleverly that it’s easy to believe they did.

The novel is ambitious but never unwieldy. Its plot is straightforward and seemingly random or divergent events are shown in the concluding chapters to have a critical bearing on the adventure’s climax. The story’s only failing—a minor one—is the awkwardness of romantic interludes featuring hero and heroine. The dialogue in these passages is stilted, which is surprising inasmuch as the exchanges between male characters have a natural ring.

Despite having been written relatively early in the author’s career, Wilderness Trail is a smooth, polished work with the unimpeded narrative drive that was a hallmark not only of H. Bedford-Jones, but of all popular and successful pulp fictioneers. Strangely, no American firm published it in book form, although the London-based firm of Hurst & Blackett Limited issued a British hardcover edition in 1925. Murania Press is both happy and honored to present to American readers this fine example of early pulp fiction, available in this country for the first time in nearly a hundred years.

Coming Soon, Classic Pulp Reprints #5: THE ISLAND, J. Allan Dunn’s Exciting Sequel To BAREHANDED CASTAWAYS

By popular demand, Murania Press in April will release The Island, J. Allan Dunn’s 1922 sequel to Barehanded Castaways, arguably his finest work of pulp fiction. Our trade-paper edition of Castaways, first published in a 1920 issue of the pulp magazine Adventure, has been the top-selling title in Murania’s Classic Pulp Reprints series, and appreciative buyers have been clamoring for Dunn’s follow-up — which, like its predecessor, never appeared in book form.

The sequel originally saw print in Adventure‘s October 30, 1922 issue. It continued the adventures of the first novel’s surviving characters and took several unexpected turns, thanks to Dunn’s skillful plotting. While not quite the sensation that Barehanded Castaways was, The Island amply satisfied Adventure readers interested in learning what had happened to the castaways following the events described so vividly in the original story.

The novel’s text has been scanned and is ready for proofreading. We’re now searching for a vintage illustration that will make a suitable cover.

We’re hopeful that finished copies of The Island will be available in time the upcoming Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, but if not they’ll certainly be ready for shipping by the end of April. Like Barehanded Castaways, Murania’s trade-paperback edition of The Island will carry a retail price of $19.95.

Attention, Writers: Articles Needed For The Upcoming BLOOD ‘N’ THUNDER!

In order to get back on schedule, I’m making the upcoming Blood ‘n’ Thunder a book-length double issue of more than 200 pages. Dated Winter/Spring 2013 and numbered 36/37, it will debut at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Expo in mid-April and carry a retail price of $21.95.

While I already have on hand many outstanding contributions from leading pulp and pop-culture historians, doubling up means I still have pages to fill. So I’m soliciting material — feature articles and department installments alike — from aficionados interested in sharing their knowledge with BnT readers. Have you done research on an obscure pulp writer? Compiled a bibliography? Analyzed an author’s series of works? Come up with a fresh slant on a familiar topic or character? If so I’d love to hear from you.

Although I’m just about to begin assembling the double’s contents, I still have about four weeks in which to review article submissions. If you’re interested in joining BnT‘s Writers Brigade, please contact me through the site or directly at muraniapress@yahoo.com.

THE BEST OF BLOOD ‘N’ THUNDER VOLUME 2 — Coming Next Month!

Coming from Murania Press early next month is the long-awaited sequel to our top-selling 2011 collection of material from the first ten issues of Blood ‘n’ Thunder.

For more than a decade, BnT has explored American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifested in its mass-market fiction—dime novels, nickel weeklies, pulp magazines—and such complementary storytelling forms as stage melodramas, motion pictures, and Old Time Radio thrillers. The first 21 issues of this limited-circulation journal are long out of print, and collectors have been known to pay as much as ten times the original cover price for back numbers that infrequently turn up on eBay.

A follow-up to 2011’s The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder, this deluxe volume reprints the finest reviews and articles that appeared in issues 11 through 21—more than 100,000 words of history, biography, criticism, and commentary. In these pages you’ll read about such popular characters as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Sam Spade. You’ll read about such legendary pulp magazines as Adventure, Black Mask, and Short Stories. And you’ll read about such famous authors as Talbot Mundy, Dashiell Hammett, and L. Ron Hubbard. Like its predecessor, The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder: Volume Two is a one-volume encyclopedia for aficionados of vintage adventure, mystery, and melodrama.

Like its predecessor, Volume Two comes in trade-paperback format and carries a suggested retail price of $24.95. Watch for it here in just a few short weeks!

Coming Soon: WILDERNESS TRAIL

The fourth volume in Murania’s Classic Pulp Reprints series is about to go to press and will ship early next month. It’s a crackerjack novel by one of pulp fiction’s true giants.

In 1810, the still-young United States of America continues its westward expansion as a national economy begins to flourish. But the country’s commerce is seriously disrupted in Kentucky, at the juncture of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, by daring pirates who strike from nowhere and then disappear into the wilderness. Captain John Norton, a young military officer working undercover, mounts a secret campaign against the buckskinned brigands, who are led by a mystery man known as Blacknose. Along the way Norton receives aid from such legendary figures of early American history as rugged pioneer Daniel Boone, future President Zachary Taylor, prominent naturalist John J. Audubon, and Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh. Yet the clever Blacknose and his followers continue to evade their would-be captors.

The Wilderness Trail originally appeared in the February 1915 issue of Blue Book and was the first of more than 370 fictional works—novels, novelettes, and short stories—H. Bedford-Jones wrote for that distinguished pulp magazine over a period of 33 years. It was also his first historical novel with an American setting. Issued in hard covers many decades ago by the British firm of Hurst & Blackett, The Wilderness Trail has never been published in the United States as a book—until now.

Murania’s trade-paper edition also features an introduction by Blood ‘n’ Thunder editor Ed Hulse. It carries a suggested retail price of $19.95 and will be available on the Murania Press site shortly.