This week’s challenge: going against authority. Man this story could be another two thousand words longer, couldn’t it? Anyway, highly appropriate that Tom gets to come out and play on this one. and yeah, Sunny’s there, in the background, even if she doesn’t get screen time. Alas.
As always, comments are appreciated.
A bit on Dashiell Hammet, because you can’t talk pulp without talking about hardboiled detectives.
The Continental Op from Cameron’s library
Dashiell Hammett lived the life of a hard-boiled detective before he created one of his own. His Continental Op character was one of the most popular detectives of the 1920s pulp fiction era. Hammett’s work with the Op and other characters appeared alongside such notable writers and characters as Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, among scores of others.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, or even many of the people who came after, Hammett has the distinction of having been a private detective, which lends his stories even more gravitas than his stripped down fiction and inclusion of grime and grit do alone. The Continental Op, the character he spent the most time writing about, is loosely based on his own experiences working for the Pinkerton Agency before and after the First World War. The Op is never named, nor…
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This week’s challenge: To Behold the Divine. I took the opportunity to get Liam the Black back out there, even for a non-canon story, to explain a little bit more where he comes from and why has little patience for gods, spirits and other such hoodoo. Maybe not quite what the challenge was calling for, but given my current state of mind it was good to write something, maybe even especially because a Liam the Black story was just rejected. Comments and such are welcome, as always.
Article on one of the three main stays of Weird Tales: Clark Ashton Smith!
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.-The Hashish Eater – or- The Apocalypse of Evil
No discussion of classic pulp would be complete without mentioning Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), one of the leaders of the Weird Tales school, along with his contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and arguably the one whose legacy hasn’t lasted to the extent of either of the other two.
Though the three never met, they all maintained correspondence with each other during the pulp golden age of the 1930s, and Smith helped contribute to what would later be called the Cthulhu mythos. In fact, Smith would go so far as to create a family tree of sorts, where Hastur is…
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This week’s challenge was either:
I went with a bit of both, really. Also, sees me going back to the Nightshades well.
Flash Gordon has had a long and storied life. Starting as a comic strip, it’s been a movie serial, a live-action adaptation (twice), a cartoon series (three times), and most famously, the 1980 film…
Source: Pulp Appeal: Flash Gordon
This week’s challenge: the random flickr challenge. Get a picture, use it as inspiration.
I ended up with mmcclair‘s image of Eilean Donan‘s castle in Scotland. Reasonably happy with how it turned out, and it gave me an excuse to take Heinrik and Viona back out for a spin. If you enjoy they’re anctics, you’ll be happy to know a story featuring them was accepted by New Realm magazine. Also- in which I am reminded that writing “quick” sword and sorcery is in some ways harder than writing the long stuff.
As always, comments, likes, and shares are much appreciated.
Dark Perceptions 