Pulp Fact Reviews

  FROM HOLMES TO SHERLOCK By Mattias Bostrom The Mysterious Press 501 pgs   When one of our writing colleagues and good friends, Paul Bishop, first reviewed this book, he gave it glowing marks calling it a remarkable achievement in regards to all things Sherlock Holmes. With that kind of applause, we wasted no time in picking up a copy for ourselves. It is everything Bishop said it was plus so much more. What Swedish author Mattias Bostrom has done has given us to complete, and exhaustive, biographies for both the writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, and his amazing creation, Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes.  Everything and anything you would ever want to know about both is in this 500 page tome. From the earliest dreams of a young Scottish doctor wanting to be a writer to his first published pieces in various British periodicals. It’s all here. Then the ground swelling in reader popularity that would people the character onto the stage to be portrayed by dozens...

  TOMBSTONE By Tom Clavin St. Martin’s Press 365 pgs   When look back in history on powerful empires, we soon learn that all the great ones had rich folktales and myths. The Greeks had the Aeneid and the Odyssey, while the Brits had the Legend of King Arthur. In America, the closest thing to such was the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ. The good guys were the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and the bad guys were the cattle rustling Clantons and McLaurys. This one particular moment of violent lasted all of 33 seconds but its effect on the image and culture of the American character is still being felt today.  Western historian Tom Clavin echoes those statements in his own preface and mentions all the dozens of movies made on the subject, never mind the countless books. While aware he is going to be treading over lots of well known locales, the wonder of this book is how he focuses on the details and minutiae. He doesn’t drop us into that dust...

  IN THE PULP FICTION TRENCHES A Memoir by Len Levinson Rough Edges Press 292 pgs   We first met paperback writer Len Levinson at the Windy City Pulp & Paper convention several years ago. Then in his early eighties, he was there as the major Star Guest of the show. This was due totally to his amazing career in pulp writing which ultimately saw him write 86 published novels. He’s a little guy with a white goatee and twinkle in his eyes that threatens instant mischief at any moment.   This wonderful book is Len’s looking back on his writing career through the good times and the bad. Be forewarned, he’s brutally honest and not above adding events that aren’t truly relevant to writing but remain crucial elements of who Len is. These includes reprinting a scathing article he wrote about the New York Child Services agency and details on his later medical woes from prostate cancer to a severe heart attack. Though we could have easily done without either, ther...

  SPILLANE – King of Pulp Fiction A Biography By Max Allan Collins & James L. Traylor Mysterious Press 337 pgs.   After reading this book, our initial reaction was that we’d actually been given the history of not one person, but two. Writers Collins and Traylor deftly interweave the story of both the real Mickey Spillane with that of his most famous fictional character, Mike Hammer. With both Collins and Traylor bonafide fans of both, what results is a truly intimate reflection of two equally fascinating and complex beings.   Now allow us to backtrack a wee bit. In the early 60s we were in high school discovering so many different writers who forever change our lives. From Edgar Rice Burroughs to Robert E. Howard, Ed McBain to Richard S. Prather and Donald Hamilton. All were found the twenty-five cents paperbacks we devoured weekly. Way more interesting fare than what was dished out in our literature classics. Somehow, among all this reading, we m...

  MR. GATLING’S TERRIBLE MARVEL By Julia Keller Penguin 243 pgs   This is not only the biography of American inventor, Richard Jordan Gatling (Sept 12, 1818 to Feb 26, 1903) but that of America’s amazing evolution to the status of a world superpower in the 19 th Century. Author Keller wonderfully depicts the agricultural world into which Gatling was born and then shows, through the episodes of his life, how that world around him changed propelled the ingenuity of the American people. Thousands of inventions were granted during those early years of that century of all manner of purpose from farming implements, to household doodads and ultimately weaponry.   Keller invokes the spirit of the new country in the growth of its patent office, the birthing pains of the Civil War and the invariable marriage of the industrial revolution with that of military complex via weapons manufacturers. She dares question the naïveté of an age and the twisted moral philoso...

    MASTER OF MYSTERY The Rise of the Shadow By Will Murray Odyssey Publications 2021 310 pgs We first met Will Murray at a small one day show somewhere in Massachusetts. The year was 1986. We sure of this because Will dated his signature on his autograph in “The Duendes History of the Shadow Magazine” copy that had been published six earlier in 1980. Our best guess is we’d hooked up via fanzines and correspondences long before and we recall being so thrilled to finally having a copy of this amazing history of the classic pulp hero. In person, Will proved to be as personable as he was in his letters and thus begun our very long friendship. Will was one of our favorite writers at Starlog and was the source of boundless research information years later when we dared attempt to bring the Green Hornet back to comics. He was a big part of our making that happen. So now, after all those years, along comes this new, revised and expanded Shadow book and there was never a...

  ALEX TREBEK : The Answer Is… (Reflections on my Life) By Alex Trebek Simon & Schuster 287 pgs I rarely read biographies. The thing is both my wife Valerie and I have been fans of the game show  Jeopardy for so long and in that time we came to admire the show’s host, Alex Trebek. When we, like the rest of the millions of his viewers, learned he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, it was really sad news. It was this same cancer that had taken my own father at the young age of fifty-nine. On the other hand, Trebek was approaching eighty years old, and once he had made the news public, he seemed to find an acceptance that appeared both spiritual and graceful on air. Thus it was no surprise when the news of his memoir books arrived and quickly topped the bestseller lists. Enough so that Valerie picked up a copy and read it immediately. I’d wait a bit longer, what with all my own writing commitments and list of To-Read books stacked high in my office. Then...