Pulp Consumption: JIMBO YOJIMBO

I get to talk about the fin bizarro hillbilly samurai revenge novel JIMBO YOJIMBO.

Broadswords and Blasters

What happens when you take a hillbilly samurai on the path of revenge and put him against the ruler of the world, a nigh-immortal chef who runs the ultimate fast food franchise? Why you might just end up with David Barbee’s bizarre novel JIMBO YOJIMBO. The premise is that the world as it was ended a long time ago, thanks to s a plague of frogs covering everything with slime. Bushido Budnick helped bring the world back from the brink, mainly by finding a way to serve up delicious frog legs. Along the way he did experiment on himself and others, not because he was all that interested in bettering them, but because he could. Along the way he founded the Buddha Gump company, an unholy matrimony of fast food, transhumanism, and religion. As it happens, Jimbo Yojimbo was part of the last rebellion against Budnick, only it…

View original post 353 more words

Pulp Consumption: Jules de Grandin

Cameron talks Jules de Grandin, racism, and the occult.

Broadswords and Blasters

Last month Horror on the Links, a collection of Seabury Quinn’s detective stories featuring Jules de Grandin, went on sale on Amazon for an amazingly low price. As a fan of Weird Tales and pulp fiction in general, of course I’d heard of Quinn, but his works are hard to find and have been out of print for awhile. The book starts with a little essay, as most of these collections do, which goes over the history of Quinn’s works and the rationale for why they’ve fallen out of favor while Howard and Lovecraft saw their fame grow. The fact is Quinn was more in demand at the time of the pulp heyday, and more of the magazine covers featured his works than either of his more famous contemporaries.

For those not familiar with the character, as I was not until reading this book, Jules de Grandin is a…

View original post 545 more words

Pulp Consumption: Playback

Cameron talks about the one Chandler property that was never made into a film… but it did get a graphic novel.

Broadswords and Blasters

Raymond Chandler is one of the foundational authors of noir. His Philip Marlowe is the quintessential hardboiled private investigator, a character Chandler rode until Marlowe seemed to become a pastiche of himself. This is not to say the acclaim Chandler derived in his career was unwarranted, but the pressure took its toll the author, and in his later years he became cantankerous and hard to work with, partly because he’d been taken advantage of (or so he felt) by the film industry and partly because he was a sour, curmudgeonly man. It didn’t help that he was also an alcoholic.

All of his novels, bar one, were filmed in one incarnation or another. The Big Sleep is the most famous as it established him on the pulp fiction scene, and the film version with Humphrey Bogart is as iconic as Bogart’s turn as Sam Spade, the PI creation of Dashiell…

View original post 672 more words

Pulp Consumption: Chinatown

This week I talked about the neo-noir film CHINATOWN, and how it subverts a lot of the old hardboiled PI tropes.

Broadswords and Blasters

“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

Arguably one of the greatest noir films in existence, CHINATOWN exemplifies the best of the genre. Jake Gittes isn’t what anyone would consider to be a typical hero. He’s ex-police turned private eye, more interested in making a buck than seeing justice done. He’s hired by someone claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray, the wife of the city’s water commissioner. Only a simple job turns out to be not so simple when Mrs. Mulwray turns out not to be Mrs. Mulwray and the water commissioner ends up dead.

What follows is an excellent example of crafting plot and counter plot, of showing the not only the big picture plot elements (the water shortage and its cause), but the personal elements as well. Jake, while not what anyone would call a knight-in-shining-armor does come to care for the real Evelyn, which makes the ending even more of…

View original post 414 more words