FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE DEAD WORLD

The Dead World by F. Paul Wilson (first published in Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, edited by Robert T. Garcia & Mike Resnick, 2013; published as a separate e-Book, 2015)

This is actually a novella, but I'm including it here because 1) it received a separate publication, and 2) what the hell, we all need an excuse to get back to the fantastic visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Dead World is a Pellucidar story, taking place in that unusual world located at the Earth's core, the subject of five novels from 1922 to 1944, plus one collection of stories published in 1963.  Pellucidar is a land at the Earth's core, which can be accessed by an opening in the "polar region," which is how David Inness and the eccentric scientist Abner Perry originally entered it.  It's an "impossible" world, "five hundred miles below the crust...seven thousand miles in diameter, with a miniature sun suspended in the center."  Because the sun is stationary, there is no nighttime and the natives have no real sense of the passing of time.  Next to the sun is a small moon, about a mile from the surface, in a stationary position; this moon casts a shadow on just one area of Pellucidar -- the kingdom of Thuria, also known as the Land of Awful Shadow.  Thuria is occupied by post-Neanderthal humans, ruled by King Goork.  Pellucidar is also occupied by non-human races, including the Mahars -- cruel winged creatures that ruled the inner world until David Innes arrived, defeated them, and banished them to the "northern area."  (How one can tell what is the northern area on this strange world is something that neither Burroughs nor Wilson explain.)  David Innes became the Emperor of Pellucidar, ruling with his wife, the beautiful Sarian native Dian.  Innes takes his role seriously, which is why he makes occasional state visits to Thuria.

One one such visit, Innes and Goork are interrupted by Koort, Goork's second sun.  A large stone had some through the air and smashed the head of Koort's lidi, a saurian used for transport and other things.  The stone was actually a ball made of an unknown metal, which had come straight down from the sky from the mysterious moon, the "Dead World" of the title.  While examining the object, it released a plethora of red seeds, which soon sprouted into voraciously spreading plants.  Innes took a sample with him back home for Abner Perry to examine; b ut the plant died before he could return home.  Several days later, Koort arrived with the news that everyone on Thuria was dead, killed by a strange mist that had  been expelled from the plants; Koort himself had survived only because he had been away hunting.  Armed with gas masks designed by Abner Perry, Innes, Perry, and Koort return to Thuria to investigate.  They retrieve the bodies of Goork and his eldest son to take back with them.  The strange mist appears to be spreading both horizontally and vertically and threatens to take over all of Pellucudar.  Goork and his eldest soon revive -- they had been in suspended animation but revived once outside the range of the strange mist.

Innes realizes that he must travel to the Dead World of the moon to discover exactly what the threat to his world is.  The moon had always been beyond the reach of Pellucidan science but Abner Perry managed to design a balloon that could make the trip.  From the surface of Pellucidar, one could make out mountains, rivers, and bodies of water on the moon, but there has never been any sign of life on the Dead World.

As the balloon reaches the moon, Innes realizes that it is a hologram:  the landscape that they thought belonged to the moon was nothing more than a construct.  When the balloon passes through the hologram they discover that this moon was actually and artificial metal object.  Jus what is is and how it came to be is a mystery to be solved.  Along the way, Innes and Perry may discover the true nature of Pellucidar and how such an "impossible" place could exist.

Great fun, and perhaps an explanation of the world that Burroughs had created will-nilly by throwing out fantastic concept after fantastic concept.  Could the Burroughs' creation actually align with twenty-first century rationality?  You have to read it to see.

(I also got a kick out of a throwaway reference to the Minunians, the "ant men of Africa," from Burroughs' 1924 novel Tarzan and the Ant Men.  We all remember that Tarzan had travelled to Pellucidar in the 1929 novel Tarzan at the Earth's Core.  Just a little Easter Egg for Burroughs fans...And just for jollies, let's throw in a bit of Lovecraft and a dash of Charles Fortean "We are property.")

THE INSPECTOR CHEN MYSTERIES: A CASE OF THE TWO CITIES

On December 15, 2015, BBC Radio broadcast the first of ten episodes of The Inspector Chen Mysteries, beginning with Qui Xiaolong's Anthony Ward-winning novel Death of a Red Heroine.  The fourth episode of the radio series featured the fourth novel in the series, 2006's A Case of the Two Cities.  (For some reason, the internet was very reluctant to give me an air date for this episode, and I was too lazy to spend more than fifteen minutes trying to find it,  C'est la vie.)

Inspector Chen Cao is a poetry-spouting member of the Police Bureau in Shanghai of the 1960s.  Qui's 13 novels about Chen have proven to be very popular.  The books and radio program offer a fascinating look both old and new Shanghai.  Actor Jamie Zubeiri plays Chen in all ten BBC episodes.  The series was directed by David Hunter (who directed this episode) and Toby Swift,  This episode was dramatized by John Harvey, himself the author of the highly popular Charlie Resnick mystery novels.

In this episode, "The head of the Shanghai anti-corruption squad is found dead in compromising circumstances.  Inspector Chen is drafted in as 'Special Envoy to the Emperor with an Imperial Sword.' "

Enjoy this unusual mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rayGb-A7Hbc&list=PLRgmctpa6b8RG1IYyMuFw1Mqow6uPvs-h&index=4

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

 "Love at First Sight"  by Richard Middleton  (from New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors, edited anonymously by "John Gawsworth" (T. Fytton Armstrong), 1943; reprinted in The Little Book of Horrors, edited by Sebastian Wolfe, 1992)

A brief slice of the macabre.

Our narrator has known Benham for years at his club, but had never met his wife until after Benham was married.  In our narrator's mind, the wife is only known as Darling.  That fist night at Benham's house, he was seated between his host and Darling.  She could tell from her eyes that she was attracted to him.  When Benham stepped out for an errand, our narrator kissed Darling,  She made no protest.  Alas, our narrator was poor and Benham was rich.  But our narrator determined that he, and he alone, would possess Darling.

He has a small cottage in the wood in Surrey.  He persuaded Darling to come with him to the cottage for a week during which they would live on love.  After the week, because there was no future for them without money, they would kill themselves.  During that week at the cottage, they dug their grave.  They would lie at the bottom of the grave, anticipating what would come at the end of the week, then emerge to continue their lovemaking.  

At the end of their week they climbed into the grave with a pistol.  Darling was nervous and perhaps was having second thoughts.  Our narrator pressed the pistol into her hands and urged her to fire a bullet into her brain.  He would then follow.  She hesitated still.  Then...BANG!  Her shaking hands caused great damage but did not kill her.  I horror, our narrator leaped from the grave; the pistol lay beside Darling's shattered countenance in the grave.  Suddenly, Benham was there behind him, yelling, "For God's sake!  Cover her up!"  Our narrator still could not move, so Benham filled the grave, mourning his dog.  Our narrator could not understand.  There was no dog.

A tale of mental aberration worthy of de Maupassant.

Richard Middleton (1882-1911) was an English poet and short story writer, best known for the classic humorous tale "The Ghost Ship."   He worked as a clerk from 1901-1907 at the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation; but was unhappy and during his evenings "affected a Bohemian life," becoming friends with Arthur Machen, Arthur Ransome, and Edgar Jepson.  He became an editor at Vanity Fair, and fellow editor Frank Harris to whom he stated his desire to be a poet; Harris soon published Middleton's poems "The Bathing Boy."  Throughout his brief life Middleton suffered from severe depression,  He committed suicide in December 1911, at age 29, by ingesting a bottle of chloroform, which had been prescribed for his "melancholia."  The following year, the short story collection on which his reputation is based, The Ghost Ship and Other Stories, was published.  John Gawsworth helped maintain his reputation by publishing a collection of prose miscellany, Pantomime Man, 1in 1933.  Gawsworth also included a number of Middleton's previously unpublished stories in his several anthologies, including New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors, which presented six new stories by Middleton, including "Love at First Sight."

An interesting bit.  A young Raymond Chandler met Middleton and decided to postpone his writing career:  "Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess: and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could."

OVERLOOKED FILM: TEENAGE WOLFPACK (1956)

 The movie poster screamed:  "NOTHING LIKE HIM HAS HIT THE SCREEN SINCE JAMES DEAN" ( you have to supply your o exclamation point.)  Naturally they are talking about Henry Bookholt.  Wait.  Who?  Actually they mean Horst Bucholz, who name was changed for the American release of this film because the distributors didn't want it to be too German-y.  Likewise they changed the name of actress Karin Baal to Karen Baal.  This didn't happen to others in the German cast -- Christian Doermer, Jo Herbst, Viktoria von Ballasko, Stanislav Ledinek, Mario Ahrens, Manfred Hoffmann, Hans-Joachim Ketzlin, Friedrich Joloff, and others -- most likely because their names were far down on the credits.

For the record, the original title for this juvenile delinquent flick was Die Halbstarken.

Also for the record, this is not a great film, although it is watchable, mainly because of the presence of Henry Bookholt Horst Bucholz. who would soon go on to major roles in Tiger Bay, The Magnificent Seven, Fanny, and One, Two, Three.  Teenage Wolfpack was one of Germany's attempts to cash in on the popularity of movies like The Wild One, The Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause.

The tagline tells it all.  "THINK OF A LAW...They've broken it!  THINK OF A CRIME...they've committed it!"

Freddy (Bookholt Bucholtz) is a young criminal and a nasty piece of work who tries top bring his girlfriend Sissy (Baal, who was barely sixteen when this was filmed) and his brother Jan into the very unpleasant world of crime and violence.  Things do not go well.

JD films were the rage in the 50s, and Teenage Wolfpack is a good (although certainly not a shining) example of that ilk.

Give it a try.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Jp5WYhrgk

HYMN TIME

 Fred Napier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NJQwSYPrvA

CURLY KAYOE #1 (1946)

 Curly Kayoe was a popular comic strip professional boxer created by Sam and Mo Leff.  Not as popular as Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, mind you, or even Elliot Caplin and John Cullen Murphy's  Big Ben Bolt, but still pretty popular.  Especially if you realize he was an interloper.

The origins of the Curly Kayoe comic strip began in 1918 with Vic Forsythe's Joe's Car, featuring Joe Jinks.  Over the years Joe's attention went from automobiles to airplanes.  By 1928, Joe's mechanical obsessions waned a bit, as evidenced by a title to Joe Jinks; the same year the strip expanded to Sundays, featuring mainly domestic comedy revolving around Joe and his wife, Blanche.  Also at the same time, Joe's interests veered from aviation as he became a fight promoter.  Joe's first boxer was a guy named Dynamite Dunn.  Forsythe left the strip in 1933 and, from 1934 to 1936, the title of the strip was Joe Jinks & Dynamite Dunn.  Various artists worked on the strip over the next few years.  In 1944, Joe met Curly Kayoe, who would soon replace him as the focus of the strip.  The strip was now drawn by Sam Leff and inked by his brother Mo.  On December 31, 1935, the strip officially changed its name to Curly Kayoe.  Joe Jinks remained as Curly's manager for another year, then he moved both out west and out of the strip.

Curly was big, blond, kind-hearted, and not too bright -- pretty much cut from the mold of Joe Palooka.  Not a coincidence really; at the time Mo Leff was ghosting the Palooka strip for Ham Fisher.

Alas for Curly, history repeated itself fourteen years later.  A secondary character, a seaman named Davy Jones, was becoming more and more popular. and, in 1961, the strip's name was once again changed, to Davy Jones this time.  Under that title, the strip continued for another decade, but without Curly Kayoe.

(I remember reading the Curly Kayoe strip when I was a kid.  Curly had a trick -- in the middle of a fight, he would whisper something in his opponent's ear; the opponent would let down his guard enough for Curly to land a knockout punch.  What Curly said remained a secret, although readers could write to the strip and and the secret would be revealed to them!  I never wrote in so I had no idea what those secrets words were.  Now, in my dotage, I'm curious -- not enough to fully regret not writing in, but still curious.)

Curly Kayoe's comic book career consisted of eight issue published between 1946 and 1950, as well a a one-shot as part of Dell's Four Color Comics series in 1958. 

Curly Kayoe #1 opens with Joe Jinks pointing out to a young reporter some of the many famous fight fans at that day's event at Madison Square Garden -- Paul Muni, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Coburn, and bandleaders Frankie Carle and Xavier Cugat.  Jinks also breaks out his scrapbook and we view photographs of Jack Dempsey knocking out Jess Willard, and of Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring, as well as the 1926 upset when Gene Tunney won the title from Dempsey.  But, Jinks said, the greatest boxer of all time never won a title.  It was "Killer" Kayoe from 1921, when he won 40 fights, all by knockouts.  The, on the evening when Killer Kayoe's wife was due to deliver a baby, the boxer had a match against Ernie Judd.  Kayoe was anxious to end the match so he could join his wife.  During the second round, Kayoe landed a punch and Ernie Judd hit the canvas...dead.  Kayoe's guilt drove him from the ring.  Kayoe, his wife, and new-born son left town.  A week later it was revealed that Judd had entered the ring with a fractured skull from an accident her did not report.  Killer Kayoe was exonerated, but he never knew that -- no one could locate him.

You know where the story is gong from here.  the years pass and Joe Jinks, knowing that Killer Kayoe had a son, was determined to find him and turn him into a heavyweight champ.  When Joe finally found Curly, Killer Kayoe had been dead for a year.  Before he died he made Curly promised never to to fight in the ring.  Curley is determined to honor his father's wished and to stay and run the family farm.  In a flashback, we see and aging Killer saying, "If I hadn't killed a man in the ring -- I'd like nothing better than to see Curly become a top-notch fighter."  After learning that his father had not killed Judd, Curly decides to become a fighter, and a handshake seals the deal with Joe as his manager.

And a boxing legend begins.

The issue closes with four pages of humorous fillers, including two featuring Ernie Bushmiller's Fritzi Ritz.

Enjoy the origin of Curly Kayoe.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=89273&comicpage=&b=i 

FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE LAST CHRISTMAS

 The Last Christmas by F. Paul Wilson  (2019)

More of a How The Hell Did This Slip Under My Radar Book than a Forgotten Book.

I am a big fan of F. Paul Wilson's urban guerilla Repairman Jack, whose saga ended (kind of) with the 2012 publication of the second revised edition of the 1992 book Nightworld.  Since then, Jack has returned in a trilogy about his youth in New Jersey and a trilogy about his adventures as a young man after moving to New York.  Although there has been talk over the years of a Repairman Jack (or Young Jack, or Early Jack) series of graphic novels, they have not come to fruition, except for 2020's Scar-Lip Redux, in which Jack hunts a rakosh.  (A what?  Never mind.  It's something only Repairman Jack fans will understand.)   And then there's The Last Christmas, an interlude in the main Repairman Jack sequence, taking place between Ground Zero (the thirteenth novel in the series) and  Fatal Error (the fourteenth); the events in The Last Christmas take place some five months before the world is scheduled to end.  (What?  Never mind.  It's something only Repairman Jack and Adversary fans will understand.  What?  Adversary?  Where did that come from?  Don't worry about it.  Well, not much.)

Obviously there's a lot to unpack here, especially since the rEpairman Jack series is intertwined with many of Wilson's other novels.

First of all, Jack.  He's a cipher.  No last name, no social security card, no credit card,  no utility bills, no record of him anywhere; nothing, nada, zip.  The most anonymous person you could ever meet.  Medium height, medium weight, run  of the mill brown hair.  Nothing in his appearance stands out.  He makes his living fixing things, often violently.  But Jack is a force for good.  He's one of the good guys and he has a strong moral code.  He also has a fierce determination and dies not back down.  His basic philosophy it to take the fight to the enemy.

There are basically four people of importance in Jack's life.  His girlfriend, Gia; her young daughter, Vicky; Julio, who runs an old-fashioned neighborhood bar that discourages tourists and walk-ins, and Abe, the slovenly owner of Isher Sports Shop.  It is Abe's purpose in life to have every customer who comes into his store to leave without purchasing a thing, because Abe's main business is the huge cache of weapons stored in his basement  (the name of his store is a hint to its real purpose, and a nod to the author's libertarian leanings).  Abe also has many connections and is a fount of secret information, which prove to be a great help to Jack.

Now we have to look deeper into the cosmos.  Somewhere in eternity, there is an eons-long contest (maybe a war, maybe just a game) between two powerful entities.  This is not  matter of 
Evil versus Good, it's more a matter of Evil versus Doesn't Give a Flip.  The reasons for this battle and even the way its being fought are beyond our ken, well above the pay grade of human understanding.  In this battle, Earth is an insignificant piece -- less than a pawn, but if the Evil side wins, life here will be hellish and civilization will end.  The major player for Evil on Earth is someone called the Adversary, who had been taken off the board and trapped for centuries until 1941, when he is released from captivity in The Keep, the first book in Wilson's Adversary Cycle.  Repairman Jack enters the scene i that series' second book, The Tomb, where he was meant to be a one-off character.  (The third book in the series was The Touch; both it and The Tomb were originally not meant to be part of the series but were retrofitted into the Adversary Cycle with the publication of Nightworld.)  The character of Jack demanded  more stories and Wilson the adventures of Repairman Jack with Legacies.

Jack soon finds himself pitted against various supernatural and mundane forces supporting the Adversary.  He eventually meets up with the Adversary's counterpart, the thousands-year-old Glaeken, along with the Lady, a shape-shifting being who appears to be tasked to guiding Jack from his youth in his battle with the cosmic forces, and her equally supernatural Dog. Along the way Jack loses his family one by one, some in the most horrifying ways.

Added to the mix are various other intertwined novels and series written by Wilson, including Black Wind  (a World War II novel focusing on Japan), the Ice Trilogy, Wardenclyffe (which brings Nicola Tesla into the mix), The Peabody-Ozymandius Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium (which introduces the rakosh, among other creatures, and forms the setting for the Horror Writers of America themed anthology Freak Show), The Compendium of Srem, the science fiction future sequence The LaNague Federation; and the recent DUAD duology (which ties in Wardenclyffe and a greatly revised Healer from the LaNague series).  

Almost all of these are referred to in one way or another in The Last Christmas.  One entering this novel unawares might be left scratching his or her head.

Anyway, on to the novel.

Jack is hired by two scientists to locate a lost animal, a specimen created by a secret government lab, half wolf and half human.  The animal, supposedly escaped while being transported across New York City has had an electronic locater embedded, so locating it should be easy.  Capturing it is a different story.  Of course, the scientist are lying.  The "wolfman" is a convicted murderer named Quinnell, who had been perhaps unfairly jailed by government officials in a hush-up.  Quinnell was dying of cancer and the scientists offered him $500,000 to experiment on him -- an experiment that was bound to kill him, but Quinnell had a wife and a three-year-old daughter to think of.  The experiment not only altered Quinnell's physical appearance, it also began clouding his mind with feral thoughts.  While on the loose, he killed to teenagers who tried to set him on fire, as well as a local pedophiliac targeting his daughter.  The scientist, BTW, kept the money, and Quinnell's wife is dead broke and about to lose their house.

At the same time, Jack is hired by the mysterious Madame de Medici to guard a strange looking object, the Bagaq, one of seven articles from prehistory assumed to possess supernatural powers.  A billionaire named Roland Apfel had illegal possession of the object which had been stolen from her Egyptian estate during an earthquake,  Madame de Medici regained possession of it and now Allard wants it back at any cost -- he is dying and believes it will heal him.  Jack takes the object and stores it with Abe.

Tier Hill is a private detective, a Mohawk Indian, and an expert tracker.  He is hired by Apfel to trail the Madame and locate the Bagaq.  Hill finds that Jack has been given the item.  He is then tasked to get the artifact back, by any means necessary.  Apfel sends his bodyguard Albert Poncia to go with Hill, instructing Poncia to kill Hill and Jack -- as well as any other witnesses, ncluding Gia and Vicky -- once the Bagaq is recovered.  

We also learn that Hill can hear painful noises coming from the Sheep Meadow that no one else can.  It turns out that these are coordinated signals presaging the Year Zero events in Nightworld.  the signals are being tracked by Burbank, a 118-year-old "watcher," and a friend of Madame de Medici.  Madame de Medici, turns out to be an eons-old person who hold knowledge of the Secret History of the Universe.  At the end of the book, we discover Madame de Medici's true identity but Jack does not.

For some reason, Glaeken has begun aging horribly and is now in a weakened condition.  The Lady, too, has become inform; her Dog has been killed.  Glaeken must keep his condition a secret or the Adversary will become aware of it and strike much earlier than expected.  Jack must keep these things secret while dealing with traitorous scientists, government conspiracies, the violent and unpredictable creature that was Guinnell, and the murderous Poncia...and a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

Yeah.  So all this would be a bit confusing to any newbie coming on to the book.  And there are a number of threads that don't do much for this particular story, but tie into what is to come in the series.  But the action is fast.  The thrills are real.  The stakes are high.  And it's always great to see Repairman Jack on the job.

I mentioned that author's libertarian stance earlier.  It's a philosophy that informs some of the best thriller books and films, from James Bond to westerns.  It is great for the one man against large odds type of conflict that steers much popular entertainment, the "in this case, the end might justify the means" type type of meme.  I enjoy that type of fantasy wish-fulfillment in my reading, I really do.  In real life, however, it is the type of philosophy that people tend to drop around their second or third year of college, much like the works of Ayn Rand.  Wilson's libertarian bent seldom bothers me, unless he gets on his high horse about socialized medicine (Wilson is a medical doctor).  He does that very briefly in this book and it left a bad taste in my mouth.  Not enough to detract from the rest of the novel, mind you.  But.  I.  Just.  Wish.  He.  Wouldn't.