One last look at DIME MYSTERY this week. In fact, we go to the end of the line, where the zine actually costs .25 and its title has been changed to 15 MYSTERY STORIES

The covers — and story titles — lose some of their zest, though, oddly, Egyptian elements still figure prominently. Someone in that office really must have liked Egyptian iconography. Do look closely at the story titles to catch the one name whose presence that surprised me.

NEXT WEEK: Sure, everyone here has heard of Doc Savage — but how about the Blond Adder? Stay tuned.

In Memoriam: Allow me a few words to say goodbye to Gary Carter, or, as he was known to 19 years worth of teammates, Kid. He passed away yesterday at the age of 57 after a tough battle with brain cancer. I knew he was ill, but I hoped that he’d be able to beat it, because he was one tough mofo, but it was not meant to be. He was one of the ten greatest catchers to ever play the game, somewhere around 7-8, actually. By the time he got to the Mets he was past his peak, but he still hit fourth on a team that featured a young Darryl Strawbery. He may not have been the greatest of the 1986 Mets, but he was the toughest and the most admirable and probably the nicest. My fondest hope is that you’re suited up today all ready to go, and the knees no longer ache and you’ll get to find out what it’s like to catch Walter Johnson. Adios, Kid.

Plans.  We all have them.  God knows I do. However, mine seem to work out about as frequently as  Soviet Union Five Year Industrial Plans. IE, never. Fortunately, I have defeated the flu that kept me under its hideous thumb for most of last week, so now I’ve just got to catch up on all the stuff I’ve gotten behind on, some of which is Posts I Planned To Do For Cheese Magnet. To wipe the slate clean on that score, I’m going to do a quick romp through some recent books/movies [Which has now taken me three days. Plans!], starting with the red-headed stepchild of Japan’s kaiju industry, Gamera. Yes, the giant turtle.

Notoriously difficult to find in their original Japanese versions, most of these I’ve seen over the years were the quite inferior various American versions, most of which were television rather than theatrical releases. For example, in GAMMERA THE INVINCIBLE (GAMERA THE GIANT MONSTER) not only did our heroic turtle suffer the indignity of having his name spelled wrong in the title of his own movie, but he had to make do with Brian Donlevy in the Raymond Burr role. Further movies in the series had their own difficulties.

Well, no more of that, thanks to Shout Factory, who has released all eight of the Showa Era (1965-1970) Gamera flics, the first two as solo DVDs and the next six paired chronologically on three DVDs. I haven’t gotten the last DVD yet, but recently we watched GAMERA VS BARUGON, the second entry in the series, in the original Japanese version, and were suitably impressed.

A better name for the movie may have been Various Crackpot Japanese Scientists vs. Barugon because Gamera actually spends most of the film frozen stiff as the scientists try increasingly bizarre and desperate measures to defeat Barugon. They finally come to their senses and say, screw it, unfreeze the turtle, and let him take over. A good kaiju flick. Rates an 8

One of my favorite historical time periods is the British Isles’ Romano-British age of about the first three centuries AD. Not a period commonly covered in pop culture, so imagine my surprise when two movies came out last year about the exact same historical incident, the Roman legion that wandered north of Hadrian’s Wall and was never heard of again. The one I managed to see in the theatre, THE EAGLE, was very good. THE CENTURION, which I just saw via Netflix, is even better. It’s a pretty grim but even-handed look at what life must have been like in those not so good old days. I had a couple of minor quibbles (one, the Picts, who are either a) the wronged indigenous people or, b) the horrific savages who need to be taught a lesson in civilization by the Romans, look a tad too much like Klingons; and various small bands of people wandering around the vastness of the Scottish wilderness kept bumping into each other; yes, I know, some were trying to find each other, but it was too easy at times). Still, an excellent historical adventure. Rating: 9

Finally, a book, the best sf novel I’ve read in quite awhile: THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING-HEELED JACK by Mark Hodder. Just a quick summary: King’s Agent Sir Richard Francis Burton ably assisted by his friend, the diminutive poet Algernon Charles Swinburne go up against an unholy alliance of the Rakes, led by the Mad Marquess Henry de La Poer (who, due to an unfortunate riding accident had to have his brain transplanted into the body of an orangutan by the brilliant experimental surgeon Florence Nightingale), the Eugenicists, and the Technologists, led by a cabal of scientists including the brain-enhanced Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the afore-mentioned Miss Nightingale, to discover the secret of the legendary creature known as Spring-Heeled Jack, before the social network of 19th Century British society becomes utterly unraveled. Yes. The King’s agent. That’s a clue. Highest recommendation.

Finally: Bill — you are the winner of THE MYSTERIANS giveaway!!!! If you already have it, or would perfer another movie, I can send you a list of other available titles. Let me know if you have VHS capability, because I have a fair number of tapes also available to enhance your choice.

Your humble Cheese corrrespondent has been sick as a dog almost all week. A flu-y type thing came out of nowhere and barreled me over like a runaway freight train. However, it seems to have left almost as quickly as it hit. I staggered off to bed at 9:30 last night, but woke up at 1:00 a.m., if not 100% better, at least 80%. I felt well enough this morning to leave the house to forage for sustenance, ate most of my lunch, and am back at the computer trying to catch up for time lost. I didn’t have a chance to do a couple CM posts I wanted to get in this week, but I couldn’t miss Pulp Cover Friday.

So here we are with DIME MYSTERY, again. It’s now the 1940s, though, and things have changed somewhat. Women in peril are still a mainstay and they still have coffins and Egyptian iconography galore. But there’s also plenty of girls with gats (and knives) and a subtle shift to more frequent aggressive postures in the “weaker” sex. I’ve noticed this in other pulp titles around this date, and I wonder why that is. Any thoughts?

There’s still enough DM issues for another column, then I’ve got something line-up that you might find interesting: Lester Dent: His Other Heroes.

You’ve got one more day to get your bid in for the copy of THE MYSTERIANS I’m giving away. See my last column for details.

So, over dinner last night I mentioned to the Czarina of All Knowledge that I’d caught part of a song that afternoon on the oldies station that I had never heard before (which is unusual) but thought was pretty good.  It was a male/female duet and I hadn’t caught the name but the lyrics “summer wine” were prominent, and she said, “Oh, you mean Summer Wine by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.”  It wasn’t a question, and, as usual, she was right.

I’m not a huge Nancy Sinatra fan (Though I admit that the Paleolithic-era video she made for “These Boots Are Made For Walking” haunted my adolescent dreams.  Look it up.) but I was enough intrigued by the song to go to You Tube.  There was indeed a Lee Hazlewood/ Nancy Sinatra video of it, and although the quality is not the best, I liked its austere, dare I say Bergman-like atmosphere to share it here. Check it out.

Of course, there were other version of the song and on a whim I watched the Ville Valo and Natalia Avelon cover, because, with those names, who wouldn’t?  Turns out Ville Valo is a Finnish singer who won the “Golden God” award from METAL HAMMER magazine (what?) in 2004 and Natalia Avelon is a Polish-German actress and the duet was on the soundtrack of a 2007 German film called DAS WILDE LEBEN (EIGHT MILES HIGH in English speaking countries) about a rock star groupie in the 1960s, starring Avelon as said groupie, but, Holy Cats, who cares about the movie?  I’d rather have watched Valo and Avelon stare at each other across the table for the entire length of the video.  You can see why, yourself.

My You Tube video excursion led to spending a pleasant hour or two wandering down the dusty side-streets of 1960s musical history and gave me enough material for three or four more posts, easily.  Let me know if you want to see them.

Also.  Lately I’ve been going through my video collection, trying to impose order on the chaos therein, and have discovered a number of duplicate DVDs or VHSs that I had upgraded to DVD.  So, lucky readers, I’m going to unload some of them on you.  First up, a DVD of THE MYSTERIANS, one of my favorite Japanese 1950s sf movies, to one of the lucky readers who writes in with the correct answer to this question: To what American actor does Viller Valo bear more than a passing resemblance to?

You have through next Saturday to chime in.

Suddenly, things get funky.

Everyone has heard of the Yellow Peril, but Egyptian Peril, not so much.  Somebody in the editorial office must have had a massive fear of ancient Egyptians rising from their graves to snatch our women for whatever nefarious reason. (I couldn’t even use all of them, as much as I like images of ancient Egypt-like stuff).  Coffins (although they don’t disappear) are largely replaced by sarcophagi.  Weird menaces abound.  I mean really weird menaces.  Red underwear suddenly becomes very popular.  I can’t even began to figure what the heck is going on in the featured image, but definitely Ian Fleming was anticipated by about 25 years.

And yet — you haven’t seen anything, yet.  Next week, the 1940s, and the return of girls in glass.

Welcome to our second installment of covers from the seminal shudder pulp DIME MYSTERY.

What have we learned so far about this pulp?

1.  Their covers are a little less zany than DIME DETECTIVE — but there are some to come that are pretty out there,  so stay tuned.

2.  The like coffins.

3.  The like women in red dresses.

4.  They like women in red dresses in coffins.

5.  With a few obvious exceptions, their cultists seem to shop at different supply stores than cultists we’ve encountered in the past.  Though there is the occasional scarlet-garbed fiend, most of the DIME MYSTERY cultists seem to prefer earth tones, perhaps the better to blend into their dank underground hideouts.

6.  The bad guys in these covers seem to eschew the gat, and prefer more visceral weapons, like the whip.

7.  Story titles compare favorably to those in DIME DETECTIVE for sheer outrageousness.

8.  I’ve got to get me an Arthur Leo Zagat collection.

Enjoy!

I haven’t posted anything lately on my 1950′s SF novels review project, so after taking yesterday off for getting shot sixty-seven times in the left eye by a laser (by actual count, though I may have missed one or two blasts because the doctor was pretty quick on the trigger), I thought I’d get back on track with a review of this forgotten minor classic by two of the great sf writers of the 1930′s – 1950′s.

First, a brief intro in case you’re unfamiliar with their names.  Kuttner was a teen-aged prodigy published in Weird Tales.  He corresponded with the Old Gent himself (H.P. Lovecraft) and was a very prolific pulp writer.  He wrote a fan letter to C. L. upon reading “Shambleau” (Moore’s first story and a classic adventure of Northwest Smith on a decadent Mars) in WT.  He was astonished to discover that C. L.’s first name was actually Catherine.   They married in 1940 and from then on formed the greatest wife-husband writing team in SF, and, for all I know, all of English literature.  Their collaborations were numerous and seamless.   At times one would leave the typewriter in the middle of a sentence and the other would pick right up and continue the story.  Their stories were usually published under Kuttner’s name (his word rate was higher, as Moore herself explained) or under pseudonyms the prolific pair shared (eg, Lewis Padgett).  This fact has led to some confusion (as they did occasionally author solo efforts) and, in fact, two of the three excellent sources I rely on attribute WELL OF THE WORLDS to Kuttner alone, but in this case I will agree with the minority and attribute it to both.   We can discuss this in footnotes, if you’d like to delve into the matter further.

WELL OF THE WORLDS has a moderately complicated publishing history.  It first appeared in STARTLING STORIES (March 1952) under Kuttner’s byline.  It was republished almost immediately In the GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS (#17, 1953) as by Lewis Padgett.  Its first book publication  was as an Ace PB in 1965 (see featured image for cover).  I don’t understand why that took so long.

Kuttner, sadly, died in his sleep from an apparent stroke in 1958.  Moore married again in the early 1960s after writing for television for a few years.  Apparently her new husband despised the SF field, and she wrote no more fiction.  She passed away in 1987.

The review below is based on my usual 100 point format.

Characters: Protagonist Clifford Sawyer is fully defined by his activities within this book.    He is a man with a job to do (ie, discover the reason behind the dwindling output of an Arctic uranium mine), but his character is nicely delineated within these limits.  The same can be said for the human antagonist Alper and the alien antagonist Nethe.  As this is a short novel, this spare but entirely effective characterization only adds to the headlong pace.  84

Setting: This book is set mostly on the other-dimensional world inhabited by an alien humanoid race called the Khom, their god-like overlords the Isier, and the enigmatic Sselli.  It is truly an alien world with a unique topography of floating islands set within an ovoid sphere delineated by energy fields.  The primitive, beast-like Sselli inhabit the lower islands and the angelic Isier the upper, along with their put-upon servant race.  Not excessive detailed, but certainly imaginative.  86

Plot: Like other Kuttner/Moore collaborations, this is a plot-driven book.  Sawyer is thrown pell-mell into the bizarre events that transports him from a uranium mine in the 1970s Arctic to another dimension.  He doesn’t stop to eat, sleep, or take a bathroom break.  Fortunately, it’s a short book.  Sawyer has to solve the mystery of the disappearing uranium, get out from under the thumb of the despicable Alper who has implanted a device in his brain that causes him anguish (and possibly death) if he goes against Alper’s demands, and save the Khom from the tyranny of the Isier.  The action plays out against the metaphor of demonic Sselli and the angel-like if not exactly angelic Isier set within a structure derived from atomic theory.  And it works.  92

Style: The driving prose impels the relentless plot along at a brisk pace.  88

Rating:  88

As veteran readers know I’ve been at this for awhile.  This is the 97th novel on my ’50s scorecard.  It ranks (so far) as tied for the 11th best SF book of the 1950s, and is the best of 1952, a year with an atypically large number of pretty good novels.  The vintage Ace PB is not difficult to find on eBay for under $10 (including shipping).  It was also reprinted in 2009 by Wildside press.

So, it’s been rather an unusual week around here.  Bought a car.  Got my right eye lasered (almost).  Gail’s 1981 Corolla finally succumbed to old age.  I’m not a car guy.  There’s probably nothing I dislike more than spending money on cars, but I guess every thirty or so years you’ve got to suck it up, head down to the dealership, and get taken advantage of.  Actually it wasn’t as painful as it was boring, kind of like the eye.  After losing all day Monday to the car, I lost all day Wednesday to the eye.  Had to be done of course.  Initially the surgeon thought he could do it in one visit, but then realized he hadn’t authorization from an insurance monkey.  I have to go back next Wednesday and pretty much have it done all over again.  It’s the time thing that bugs me.  The procedure itself isn’t much, although they did take like forty photos of my eye using a flash placed approximately one millimeter away that was about as bright as your average solar flare.  The best thing about the whole experience was that they injected me with a dye that turned my urine a fantastically neon-glowing yellow (TMI?).  So, I have that to look forward to, again, next week.
Which is all my way of saying I didn’t get some posts up here I wanted to this week, since it’s already Pulp Cover Friday time.  But here’s the good news.  I recently got a book written by Robert Kenneth Jones called THE SHUDDER PULPS, which is a history of the weird menace pulps.  Pretty good, though I am not too far into it.  One of the things I learned immediately however, was that DIME DETECTIVE had a companion magazine called DIME MYSTERY, so we’ve a nice new batch of covers to work our way through.
DM started out as just your average detective ‘zine.  It’s gimmick was to have one very long story (probably a somewhat condensed novel) and a few short ones to fill in the remaining pages.  That format was illustrated on the covers of the first bunch of issues, which all showed characters stepping out of an actual book onto the cover of the magazine.  Nice if not spectacular idea.  I’ve included a couple of these.
But the mag wasn’t selling well, so publisher Henry Steeger envisioned a magazine built on the concept of the Grand Guignol theater in Paris, and the October 1933 issue was the first of the weird menace pulps.  Within a year, DM’s motto was “The Weirdest Stories Ever Told.”  I’m sure WEIRD TALES wasn’t to thrilled with that, but, what the heck.
I’ll include some more educational notes in future installments.  Enjoy the covers.  They get weirder.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I’m engaged in a couple of long-term research projects on American science fiction of the 1950′s.  They’re progressing steadily, like glaciers, but recently I came across something that I thought I’d share with you-all this week.

There were three magazines in the 1950′s (some dating back to the 1940′s) that were reprint ‘zines  publishing what were regarded as classics in the field which dated from the teens to the forties:  FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, FANTASTIC NOVELS, and A. MERRITT’S FANTASY MAGAZINE.  Usually each issue presented a full length novel and as many shorts as could fit in.  These “novels” were actually usually really full length novels, not forty or fifty page novellas advertised as novels, but because they ran in a single issue were sometimes abridged.  This presents me with a dilemma when it comes to evaluating their quality.  Is it fair to the writer to consider abridgments which are usually inferior to the original versions?  My decision is, no, so what I try to do is run down original editions which present the story (usually but not always) as the author wanted.  In any case, I try to find the author’s preferred text when it comes to reviewing their work.  Not always easy to do, but then the scholar’s road is often weary.

So, I’ve been noodling around the interwebs in search of information on various editions and have discovered some interesting things, most of which are not germane to this post.  One of the guys I’ve been looking at is A(braham). Merritt, who, as noted above had a magazine named after him which featured his work.  Merritt was an immensely popular writer of the teens through forties who is largely forgotten today, but whose work did have something of a revival in the fifties and sixties, and still is published at irregular intervals.  I’ve read a couple of things by him, which I’ve generally liked, if I wasn’t exactly totally enthusiastic about, but this post isn’t actually about his writing.  The interesting thing I’ve noticed about him is that he has had some damn fine covers associated with his books.  They are colorful books, so he gives the artist every opportunity to go crazy, but still, he’s been rather lucky over the years (and decades).

I’m restricting this blog to covers for one of his novels, DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE, which I haven’t read yet.  But, from the look of these covers, I probably should.

First book edition, Liveright, 1932

Argosy serial, 1-23-32

Fantastic Novels, 4-41

Fantastic Novels, 9-49

Avon paperback, 1952

Paperback Library, 1965

Futura (UK), 1974

French pb, 1974

French pb, 1984

Collier, 1991

Which is your favorite?  I’d probably go with the FN 1941 Finlay cover, though the ARGOSY one is pretty wild.  Love the priest’s robe.

In the first of a series of posts concerning science fiction and fantasy writers whom, for various reasons, you might not know about whom you really should be reading we’re going to talk about Roger Zelazny.

So you know where I’m coming from, here’s my biases in re Roger.  This is nothing I haven’t said before, but, who knows?, maybe you’re new here.  My relationship with Roger Zelazny started way back about 1969 or so when I read LORD OF LIGHT.  I was about fifteen and I still consider it not only the greatest science fiction novel I’ve ever read, but the greatest novel, period, I’ve ever read.  I learned how to read before kindergarten, and I was always a great reader, but nothing I’d ever experienced before prepared me for LOL.  In the parlance of the time (late 1960s) it blew my mind.  It’s a learned book steeped in eastern religion, set in the far future on a colonial planet where things have gone horribly wrong and its full of great characters, villains and heroes both who are immensely powerful and yet totally human, punctuated with fantastic action scenes and written in beautiful, lyrical, and yet muscular prose.  What more can you ask for in a book?

I was just then starting on the writing road (having already collected a couple of rejection slips from the sf zines of the day) and Roger became my writing hero.  I read as much of him as I could find and he was one of my major influences.  I wanted then (and still do) nothing more than to write something as good as LORD as I could, and I’m still trying.  I moved to New Mexico in 1976 as a grad student, the writing sidetracked by a career (I thought) in academia.  One of my wife Gail’s first jobs was as a manager of WaldenBooks, and through that we met a bunch of local writers.  There’s way too many to mention, but I was surprised and delighted to learn that Roger was one of them.  I met him then, but it was some years later in the mid-1980s after interaction with other writers in the area seduced me away from the ivory tower of academia into the seamy dark side of writing that I got to know him well, as we were both original members of the Wild Card gang.  I was delighted to learn that he was a kind, generous, and self-effacing man as well as a great writer.  He taught me a number of lessons, perhaps the most important of which was not to be ashamed of our roots and the things we love about our genre.  He was as knowledgeable about Doc Savage (having read all 181 adventures) as he was about the complexities of Buddhist philosophy.  I worked with him on Wild Cards and some other projects, and was looking forward to years and years of further fellowship on the writers’ road.  But it was not meant to be.  Roger passed away in 1995 from complications due to colon cancer.  He was 58, an age I’m rapidly approaching.

Before he died he left a large if not massive body of work, including stories and novels nominated for an incredible 28 Hugos and Nebulas, with 9 wins of these most prestigious genre awards.  I can’t even mention all of them or this would turn into a dissertation.  Among his great novels that I would especially recommend are, of course, LORD OF LIGHT, THIS IMMORTAL, CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS, ROADMARKS, DOORWAYS IN THE SAND and, A LIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER.  He was also a master of the short form, with such stories as “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “Home Is The Hangman,” “24 Views of Mt. Fugi, By Hokusai,” “The Keys to December,” and the tales of Dilvish the Damned (a series he wrote early in his career which were a great influence on me), and many, many more.

Just to give you a taste of his writing, I’d like mention one secondary character from one of his novels.  The novel is CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS, the character is the Steel General.  The book itself is based loosely on Egyptian mythology, and is written in a non-traditional narrative wherein some “chapters” for lack of a better term, are straight narrative, some are vignettes or prose poems, some are actual poems, and the conclusion is presented as a short play.  It is bursting with inventiveness and beautiful prose.  The Steel General appears only in a few scenes, but, thanks to Roger’s deftness with words and language, we know a lot about him.

In a very brief nutshell, the plot revolves around conflict between the House of Life (led by Osiris) and the House of Death (led by Anubus) located at either ends of the Galaxy.  Their agents are locked in battle with Wakim, of the House of Death, seemingly set to win, and then:

“Upward stares Wakim, seeing the Steel General.

“‘Faintly do I feel that I should have knowledge of him,’” says Wakim.

“‘Come then,” says Vramin.  All know of the Steel General, who ranges alone.  Out of the pages of history comes the thundering hoofbeats of his war horse Bronze.  He flew with the Lafayette Escadrille.  He fought in the delaying action at Jarama Station.  He helped to hold Stalingrad in the dead of winter…On every battleground he has left a part of himself…All of the causes for which he has fought are now dead, but a part of him died also as each was born and carried to its fruition.  He survived, somehow, his century, with artificial limbs and artificial heart and veins, with false teeth and a glass eye, with a plate in his skull and bones out of plastic…–until finally science came to make things better than those with which man is normally endowed.  He was again replaced, piece by piece, until in the following century he was far superior to any man of flesh and blood… He is always on some Attorney General’s list, and he plays his banjo and he  does not care, for he has placed himself beyond the law by always obeying its spirit rather than its letter.  He has had his metal replaced by flesh on many occasions and been a full man once more – but he always hearkens to some distant bugle and plays his banjo and follows – and then he loses his humanity again…He is almost invariably beaten and used and taken advantage of, and he does not care, for his ideals are more important to him than his flesh…The General may be beaten, but he may never be destroyed.”

The Steel General always wears a ring of human skin on his finger to remind of his humanity.  He keeps a collapsible banjo in a compartment where his heart used to be, and when he plays it he becomes a negative Orpheus and men follow him to hell.  He is a master of temporal fugue, and his horse, Bronze, has eight hoofs of diamonds and each stride he takes doubles the previous one – given enough of a run-up, it is said, he can cross the Universe in one stride.  What happens then is anyone’s guess.

I’ve always wanted to read a novel about the Steel General.  But it was not meant to be.  But for all of you out there, there is an entire universe of wonderful Zelazny stories.  Read them.

******

So I put Dan Blair’s name in the hat, then pulled it out.  Dan – you get the five Amber novels.  Give me an address to send them through – send a fb message if you want (let me know when you do, because sometimes I don’t get around to checking messages there for a long time), or send an e-mail to jjm1954@aol.com.  Thanks for entering, and I hope your daughter enjoys the books.