EDitorial Comments

Murania’s First Year-End Sale!

For these last two weeks of December only, all Murania Press publications — Blood ‘n’ Thunder, Western Movie Roundup, the Classic Pulp Reprints series, and our other books — are being made available at reduced prices. Every item in our catalog has been marked down at least 20 percent for this special year-end sale (some are closer to 25 percent off), and I’ve already adjusted each individual listing to reflect the discount. Sale prices include domestic shipping only; international customers still have to inquire first about mailing rates to their countries.

The discount does not apply to new or renewed subscriptions to Blood ‘n’ Thunder or Western Movie Roundup, which still cost $40.00 per year.

This is a great opportunity to catch up on those back issues you may have missed, or to get started on the Classic Pulp Reprints series. You can also use this sale to grab copies of our top sellers, The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder and Blood ‘n’ Thunder’s Cliffhanger Classics.

The sale prices apply only to Murania Press publications purchased from this web site. Remember, you’ve got until 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to place your orders; on January 1, 2013 all items revert to their suggested list prices with the small surcharge for shipping.

Murania On The March Once More!

I can hardly believe it’s been more than six weeks since I last updated this blog. Hurricane Sandy, which was just about to strike New Jersey when last I posted here, spared my immediate neighborhood but wreaked havoc nearby; we were dealing with power outages, blocked roads, and long lines at gas stations for weeks afterward. Having just moved, I was still trying to organize things in my new home when the storm hit. That process took longer than anticipated due to periodic blackouts that afflicted the area as power-company repair crews shut down the grid for many hours at a time. I did manage, however, to keep working on the Murania Press publications announced for November and December release, and while I’m running a little late, you can still count on seeing some of the new product by year’s end.

Blood ‘n’ Thunder’s Fall 2012 issue (#35) is in layout as I write these words and will go to press shortly. It features a double-pronged tribute to Tarzan, the immortal ape man created by Edgar Rice Burroughs one hundred years ago. Pulp-art historian David Saunders contributes a career overview of Stockton Mulford, the talented illustrator who painted several Argosy All-Story covers touting ERB stories. Mulford also had a, shall we say, special connection to another Burroughs illustrator, and David spells it out in considerable detail (including original illustrations to boot).

Part two of the Tarzan centennial tribute is my installment of “Cliffhanger Classics” covering the 1933 serial Tarzan the Fearless, long considered lost except for an 85-minute feature version edited in England and imported here decades ago for TV syndication. My research uncovered many heretofore undisclosed facts about this chapter play, and the article also features the recollections of Tarzan the Fearless star Buster Crabbe, with whom I spoke several times during the 1970s.

Buster Crabbe and Jacqueline Wells in TARZAN THE FEARLESS (1933).

The other department installments are equally noteworthy, I think. “Pulp Page to Silver Screen” explores the similarities—or lack thereof—between A. Merritt’s 1932 novel Burn, Witch, Burn! and its 1936 film version, The Devil-Doll, directed by horror-movie specialist Tod Browning. “Tricks of the Trade” reprints a 1939 Writer’s Digest article by Fawcett editor Ralph Daigh, reporting on pulp writers who migrated to true-crime magazines when their old markets began drying up. And “Adventurous Airwaves” finds regular BnT contributor Martin Grams Jr. giving a brief history of the 1935 Phillips H. Lord radio series G-Men, which was the predecessor of his even more successful Gang Busters.

Nathan Madison, who contributed a lengthy article on Argosy founder Frank A. Munsey in a previous issue of BnT, attended his first pulp-fan convention earlier this year and accepted my invitation to write a con report. But he went beyond the simple who/what/when/where account I expected, in the process raising some important questions about the future of the pulp-collecting hobby. Therefore, instead of severely editing his piece to make it an installment of BnT ’s “Convention Corner” department, I decided to run it complete as a feature article. You’ll find it very interesting, even if you’re not a regular attendee of such confabs as the annual PulpFest and Windy City shows.

The issue’s longest piece—nearly 10,000 words—documents the working relationship between Wild West Weekly editor Ronald Oliphant and his star writer, Paul S. Powers, who published his WWW yarns under several Street & Smith house names and created many of the magazine’s most popular recurring characters: Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, King Kolt, Freckles Malone, and Johnny Forty-Five. This article relies heavily on Oliphant’s letters to Powers (who saved practically all of his correspondence with the editor) and therefore offers an inside look at the process of editing and publishing a successful weekly pulp magazine.

Bob Harris painted this 1935 WILD WEST WEEKLY cover.

Additionally, the new BnT includes our longest letter column to date. This time around, “Epistolary Exchange” is dominated by reader response to the previous issue’s look at the New Pulp movement. I received more comments on this piece than on any other article I’ve ever printed in BnT, and they were almost uniformly negative. Do these letters reflect your own opinion? I’ll be curious to know.

The latest BnT boasts nearly a hundred illustrations, including numerous pulp paintings scanned from the original art. Watch this site’s home page for the announcement that copies are ready for shipping. If you aren’t currently subscribing, why not take advantage of our Shopping Cart option and sign up today? A couple mouse clicks and you’ll be good to go.

Battening Down The Hatches….

The last few weeks have been extremely chaotic for me, which is why I haven’t updated this blog much since returning from California earlier this month.

Yesterday I moved from my home of the last 18 years after spending two frenzied weeks packing up my collection and carting it to storage.  My condo, which had been on the market since the spring, finally sold and the closing is scheduled for tomorrow.

Yeahhhh, that’s not gonna happen.

Turns out my current, temporary home — only ten miles from the condo — is right in the path of  “Frankenstorm,” and everybody here is hunkered down for what appears to be a long and stressful siege.  Although we should be able to withstand Hurricane Sandy without sustaining major damage, we’re concerned about flooding and possible extended power outage.  As I write these words Sandy is scheduled to make landfall within a few hours.  It’s a monster, that’s for sure. Not exactly what I need to deal with after  finally completing the long-planned move to new digs.

Nonetheless, I wanted to check in and assure everybody that the Murania mill will resume churning, one way or the other, sooner or later.  I’ve got a whole bunch o’ books in progress and I still expect to get them to market in the weeks to come — certainly before year’s end. They include, in order of scheduled release, the Fall issues of Blood ‘n’ Thunder and Western Movie Roundup, the long-delayed Distressed Damsels and Masked Marauders (which recently cleared the legal hurdle placed before it some months ago),  and The Best of Blood ‘n’ Thunder: Volume Two, the fourth volume in Murania’s Classic Pulp Reprints series (H. Bedford-Jones’s 1915 historical novel, The Wilderness Trail). Finally — and hopefully in time for Christmas — you can look forward to The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction, the revised and greatly expanded second edition of what was originally published as The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps. Editorial work on these books has been completed (barring whatever minor corrections are needed after proofreading), and I’m getting some layout assistance not only to speed things up but also to relieve the burden on Murania Art Director Chris Kalb.

I’d hoped to be further along on these releases by now, but I severely underestimated the amount of time I’d need to pack and store the many thousands of books, DVDs, pulps, and magazines — not to mention additional effluvia — I’ve accumulated in the last two decades. Obviously, a prolonged power outage won’t help matters, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the worst doesn’t happen.  And I hope the same for those of you who are also in Sandy’s path.

A “Major” Pulp Reprint Series

Given the tireless efforts of small-press publishers to get vintage pulp fiction back into print over the last decade, I often wondered why L. Patrick Greene’s Africa-based adventure stories had been overlooked. From 1919 until 1947 (with six years off for World War II service) Greene chronicled the exploits of Aubrey St. John Major, who started out as a charming rogue but evolved into a knight errant. The Major’s bailiwick was South Africa’s Transvaal region, although some adventures took him to other parts of the continent. Accompanied by his faithful native manservant, Jim the Hottentot, the Major matched wits with gun runners,  white slavers, diamond smugglers, international spies, and assorted criminals of every stripe and nationality. He often operated outside the law — especially during the early years of his career — but always served the cause of justice.

Created for the venerable rough-paper magazine Adventure, the Major most frequently appeared in Short Stories, published by Doubleday until 1937 and afterward by erstwhile shoe manufacturer William J. Delaney. The series included approximately one hundred stories of varying lengths, and the Major was among the relatively few characters mentioned by name on Short Stories covers.

Some 19 collections of Major yarns were reprinted between hard covers here and abroad, but those books have been out of print for many decades. Happily, the indefatigable Matt Moring has chosen to bring the series back into print under the auspices of his Altus Press. Matt is presenting the stories in the order in which they were originally published, with the first volume (a cover scan to which is included below)  tentatively scheduled for release sometime next month. I’m honored that he asked me to write an introduction to the series, because the Major is one of my favorite pulp-magazine characters and I believe he’s long overdue for rediscovery.

Shameless Plug Department: Check Out My Article In New SHADOW Reprint

My blog post for August 31st mentioned that an upcoming issue in Anthony Tollin’s series of Shadow pulp reprints would contain an essay I wrote on the two Shadow movies released by Grand National Pictures in 1937 and ’38. In case you haven’t heard, that volume (#66) is currently at the printer and will be shipping by month’s end. If you haven’t ordered it already, by all means hop on over to the Sanctum Books site and buy a copy. The book reprints “The Ghost of the Manor” (1933), the source for The Shadow Strikes, and “Foxhound” (1937), the ostensible source for International Crime. Neither story has ever been reprinted — officially, at least — but both are well worth reading.

Tony sent me a JPEG of the book’s cover, which I have attached below.

Another “Lost” Serial Has Resurfaced — At Least In Part

The last few years have seen the reemergence of several movie serials — both silent and sound — thought to have been lost forever. The latest, now available from our friends at Hermitage Hill Media, is a 1933 Universal cliffhanger titled Clancy of the Mounted. It’s the third of the studio’s four chapter plays featuring silent-screen cowboy Tom Tyler, who is probably best remembered by serial fans for his starring turns in Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phantom (1943). Hermitage Hill recently obtained the first six of Clancy‘s 12 episodes, and until the others turn up (if indeed they ever do), I’ll happily settle for these.

Like all Universal sound serials made up to the fall of 1936, Clancy of the Mounted was produced by Henry MacRae, the affable Canadian filmmaker who was one of the earliest employees of Carl Laemmle’s Universal Film Manufacturing Company, which incorporated in 1912. Although he held many management positions during his thirty-odd years at Universal City, MacRae never stayed away from serials for long. With the exception of director Spencer Bennet, no other person was involved in the production of more chapter plays.

Chapter One begins with RCMP Sergeant Tom Clancy (Tyler) in action, riding hell bent for leather across the Canadian wilds. Apparently in hot pursuit of suspicious characters, he’s actually headed for the home of his brother Steve (Earl McCarthy). Clancy storms into the house, strips off his tunic…and delivers his nephew into the world. When Steve expresses surprise at his older sibling’s acumen, Tom says casually, “Well, Steve, in the service of the Mounted one must know a little bit of everything.”

While the Clancy brothers take turns admiring the new arrival, trapper Dave Moran (William Desmond) rides up and breathlessly informs Tom that prospector John Laurie has just been found murdered — stabbed to death — with Steve’s knife buried in his chest. The younger Clancy denies any knowledge of the crime but Tom is forced to place him under arrest.

In short order we learn that Laurie’s killing has actually been committed by Pierre La Rue (Leon Duval),  henchman of “Black” MacDougal (W. L. Thorne), who runs a trading post in the village of Old Fort. MacDougal, who owns a mortgage on Laurie’s property, has learned that the old prospector located extensive deposits of silver and radium on his land. The trader expects to seize control of the claim but is stymied by the unexpected arrival of Laurie’s daughter Ann (Jacqueline Wells), whom the old prospector had summoned by mail before meeting his untimely end.

The goodies: Tom Tyler and Jacqueline Wells.

Realizing that the girl must be eliminated at once, MacDougal orders La Rue and some flunkies to wipe her out. Steve Clancy, having been released on his own recognizance, fears that he’ll be convicted on circumstantial evidence and decides to run away until his innocence can be established. He encounters Ann and saves the girl’s life when La Rue and his men attempt to kill her.

Subsequently, Tom recaptures Steve and persuades him to stay in jail while the Mountie investigates Laurie’s murder. Ann refuses to believe her erstwhile rescuer capable of such an heinous crime and agrees to help the Sergeant clear his brother’s name.

The baddies: W. L. Thorne and Leon Duval.

That’s about the size of it. The scenario by Ella O’Neill, Basil Dickey and Harry Hoyt is straightforward and Ray Taylor’s direction gets the salient plot points across without embellishment. The first six chapters won’t be surprising to those viewers familiar with Universal serials of the early Thirties, but they are fast-paced and entertaining. Tyler acquits himself handily and cuts a dashing figure in his Mountie uniform. Jacqueline Wells, one of the loveliest serial heroines of the early talkie years, delivers a capable performance and — rather surprisingly — participates in several potentially dangerous action sequences. She’s photographed in a canoe shooting down river in foaming rapids and in a speeding buckboard careening wildly along dirt roads.

My favorite chapter ending is one I can’t remember having seen in any other serial. Tom and Ann are heading back to Old Fort with a captured heavy when a violent storm suddenly breaks. They are proceeding along a flimsy rope bridge when it is struck by lightning, precipitating all three into the churning river below.

Lightning is about to strike this bridge, plunging all three into the river below.

MacRae was nothing if not loyal to the veteran actors who toiled in chapter plays of the silent era. He gives good parts to Universal serial and Western regulars such as Francis Ford, William Desmond, Tom London, Edmund Cobb, Fred Humes, Monte Montague, and Artie Ortego. Pathé’s top serial villain of the Twenties, Frank Lackteen, turns up in Chapter Six as a renegade Indian.

At this time Universal spent an average of $150,000 on its 12-chapter serials. Some were brought in for less, and I suspect Clancy of the Mounted was one of them. Unlike most Mountie pictures, which were filmed on location at Big Bear Lake or Lake Arrowhead, in the densely wooded mountains of San Bernardino County east of Hollywood, Clancy appears to have been shot largely in the hills behind Universal’s back lot and in the forest surrounding Lake Sherwood in Ventura County — less than an hour’s drive from the studio. This meant that the actors went home every night, saving MacRae the expense of food and lodging attendant to location jaunts.

It would be nice if all the newly resurrected serials turned out to be classics. But that’s more than we have any right to expect. I’m perfectly satisfied with Clancy of the Mounted because I like the people in it, and I like Universal chapter plays of the early talkie years. Hermitage Hill has done a fine job of mastering a slightly worn but sharp print with nice tonal range. At a mere $12.95 plus postage, this DVD is well worth the price.

Long Time No See….

Sorry it’s been so long between updates, but I got back from the Left Coast just a few days ago and am still trying to catch up with everything. My trip to California was productive but not as relaxing as I’d hoped it would be. The folks who run the annual Lone Pine Film Festival kept me busy moderating panels and conducting one-on-one interviews with guest stars. While attendance at this year’s Festival was down slightly, there was no shortage of enthusiasm and it’s fair to say the usual good time was had by all. I’m waiting on pictures taken by a friend before filing a complete report. Look for it early next week. Meanwhile, work resumes on the upcoming Murania Press books….

Gone Fishing…Again

There won’t be any updates here for a week or so, as I’m off to Southern California for the annual Lone Pine Film Festival, which begins Thursday evening with a star-studded cocktail party at the town’s Film History Museum.  As usual, I’ll be moderating several panels, and this year the Museum is adding one in which several movie historians (including me) will discuss the process of researching and documenting our cinematic heritage.

Of course, I’ll also be plugging the 2012 issue of Lone Pine in the Movies and Murania’s own Western Movie Roundup. No horseback rides in the hills this year; insurance rates have shot up and the price of renting horses has risen accordingly.

Will report on the Festival (and other things) when I get back. There are lots of things in the works and it promises to be an exciting Fall season.

Coming Soon: BLOOD ‘N’ THUNDER’S GUIDE TO PULP FICTION

Almost five years to the day of its publication, The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps has been retired to make room for a greatly revised and expanded edition. Blood ‘n’ Thunder’s Guide to Pulp Fiction will be available this December, just in time for the holiday gift-giving season. At nearly 350 pages, the new Guide is half again as large as the previous version and will sell for $29.95.

The change in title signals an intent to appeal to a broader audience. The old Guide was geared to collectors of vintage pulp magazines, but since I began writing it in 2005 the hobby has changed significantly. At that time we were just on the cusp of a boom in pulp reprints fueled by the increasing sophistication of “desktop publishing” software and the rapid proliferation of “Print On Demand” companies. The intervening years have seen the issuance of literally hundreds of reprint volumes from such publishers as Adventure House, Age of Aces, Altus Press, Girasol Collectibles, Off-Trail Press, Sanctum Books, and my own Murania Press, to name just a handful.

Moreover, during the same period of time, pulp fiction achieved greater mainstream respectability thanks to anthologies from major publishing houses. Otto Penzler’s massive collections for Random House’s Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint — The Big Book of Pulps, The Big Book of Black Mask Stories, and The Big Book of Adventure Stories — got wide distribution and elicited glowing reviews from critics writing for top magazines and newspapers. Nowadays more people than ever are interested in pulp fiction (although the phrase is defined with more elasticity than was the case when newsstand racks bulged with rough-paper magazines). As a result, lots of it is available.

With so much product to choose from, and so little money to spend, both enthusiastic newbies and long-time aficionados crave guidance. So, in addition to steering them to the original periodicals, Blood ‘n’ Thunder’s Guide to Pulp Fiction offers comprehensive listings and appraisals of the various reprints being marketed by specialty publishers and mainstream houses alike. I’ve also beefed up the old Guide‘s Appendix covering books on pulp history, adding a number of indispensable works that have been published since the list was first compiled in 2007.

For readers still interested in using the Guide as a reference to vintage pulp magazines, I’ve not only fleshed out the original text but also written new chapters covering genres mentioned only briefly in the first edition: Sports, Romance, Aviation/War, and Girlie Pulps.

Blood ‘n’ Thunder’s Guide to Pulp Fiction will have the same format as the previous version — seven by ten inches, just like the old rough-paper mags themselves — and sport even more illustrations. At last count I’d assembled over 500 scans of pulp covers, book covers, and original art. I’m guessing the final number will be closer to 600 by the time layout has been completed.

I’ll be seeking wider distribution for the new Guide than any Murania Press book to date, including traditional brick-and-mortar chains and large mail-order companies. This book will appeal not only to experienced hobbyists but to casual readers and novice collectors as well.

Stay tuned for further details. As soon as I get a cover design, I’ll post it here.