To my 3 or 4 loyal readers :-)

Here's the thing: I am a serial monogamist when it comes to my enthusiasms, whatever that means. What it usually means -- and meant most recently -- is that I'm halfway thru a fairly good (in my opinion) sword & sorcery story, about 8,000 words in, and I just get stuck. Worse than that, I find myself distracted by a book or two from one of my *other* favorite fictional subgenres, in this case noir crime fiction. And so, long story short, I need to work on this new noir blog for awhile, before I get back to the blood and thunder of S & S. (Go to http://www.whiskeybottleoverjesus.blogspot.com for the other blog.)

Thanks a heap!

Sabu

Recently, in a magic carpet kind of mood, I turned to Netflix for something to satisfy the urge. Two somethings, in fact, 1940s "The Thief of Bagdad," with the child actor Sabu as the little thief and Conrad Veidt as the evil Grand Vizier Jaffar; and 1942's "The Arabian Nights," again with Sabu and with Maria Montez as Scherazade.

One of the brightest points of both films is the presence of the child actor Sabu, he of the John Prine song and moves like "The Jungle Book" and "Elephant Boy." He served in WWII as an Air Force tail gunner, but upon returning to civilian life found movie tastes had changed, and his career -- at least for movies like "Thief of Bagdad" -- had come to an end.

Sabu has an innocent charm impossible to duplicate and perhaps outdated in the years after the war -- I can't speak to that, really -- but he is perfect in "Thief" and "Arabian Nights."

These movies have it all -- technicolor sword fights, djinn, flying carpets, acrobats, sleeping princesses ... all I need now is to watch "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (1944) to round out my flying carpet trilogy.

There is too little Arabian Nights-style sword and sorcery, even today. I would love to read some. I have been acquiring some Harold Lamb, who wrote fiction set in that geography, but since it's historical I won't expect too many djinn.

Perhaps somebody needs to revive the old pulp FLYING CARPET MAGAZINE to focus on more tales of this type. I for one would subscribe.

half elven chaotic neutral fighter thief

I was thinking the other day about D & D. It has been about 27 years since the first time I played, and probably over 20 since I was in a serious game. I posted a note by the elevators of Twin Towers, the dorm where I lived at ASU in Jonesboro, Arkansas, asking if anybody in the building was willing to teach me how to play; I had read about it somewhere but didn't know what it entailed.

Within the hour, two jocular fellows, one tall and skinny and black-headed, the other short and stocky and with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, had shown up at my door to take me under their collective wings.

We all three flunked out, although not because of D & D specifically. When I saw the lads on campus are about to play their first game this Friday night, I RSVP'd I'd attend. I've never DM'd, but as for playing, it's like riding a bike. All you need is a two-liter of Mtn. Dew and a big bag of cheetos.

I've been reading some of the RPG-based novel omnibuses (omnibii?) put out by the Black Library, based on the fantasy side of Warhammer. I have on hand, in a big stack, the following:

MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER
BLACKHEARTS: THE OMNIBUS
GOTREK & FELIX V. 1
MALUS DARKBLADE V. 1
&
FLORIN & LORENZO

So far so good. So far there haven't been any Fritz Leibers or Robert E. Howards in the stack, but I have a feeling that books like those published from the Black Library are and will be the closest thing on a mass market scale we see to the kind of popularity the pulps had back in their heyday.

That isn't a bad thing. People remember the stars of the field and forget the other 90% of what appeared in those pages, the stories that were a good read but that didn't immortalize their author. There was only one Robert E. Howard, after all.

And Gotrek & Felix aren't bad at all, actually.

This Crooked Way by James Enge

If you love to read, one benefit of being out of the loop for awhile is that when you start paying attention again, there are whole unread series, not just a book here and there, to hold your attention for hours at a time.

Morlock Ambrosius is, as someone else said somewhere (?), one of the few iconic figures to emerge in the current/ongoing Sword & Sorcery renaissance. I read "The Red Worm's Way" in the anthology RETURN OF THE SWORD and ordered the first novel, BLOOD OF AMBROSE, quickly, hoping for more of the same, and got it. What a great book!

So could THIS CROOKED WAY possibly be equal to what'd come before?

It is. It's the same only different. James Enge is an interesting thoughtful writer. You see him do these little things all the time in the writing that show either off-the-cuff genius or a lot of rewriting, no way to know which.

Example? Okay. One of the most fun parts of his writing is when hero Morlock, faced with some impossible task, pulls a magic whatsit out of his pocket and turns it on and the story proceeds uninterrupted. Now, this sort of deus ex machina could get old fast in the wrong hands, but as one example of careful writing and how you get around it, there's a point in THIS CROOKED WAY where the characters have to access a high up window in an unassailable house. So Morlock pulls a magic bean out of his pocket, plants it, and rides up on the fast-growing beanstalk.

It turns out he had 3 more, but he traded them to some guy for his cow. I don't have the book in front of me as I write this, but Morlock's comment on the wisdom of trading the magic beans for the cow is, "But I really needed that cow." So: it isn't just a plot gimmick, suddenly Morlock is the guy from "Jack and the Beanstalk"! And on the story goes.

THIS CROOKED WAY is what's called a picaresque novel (meaning episodic), unlike BLOOD OF AMBROSE, which built and built upon its plot arc until the spectacular ending. (These pieced-together novels also used to be called "fix-ups," a term I believe invented by A. E. Van Vogt for novels made up of previously written short stories, but used by others including the legendary Philip K. Dick, who wrote several and may have gotten the concept from Van Vogt for all I know [he was a huge admirer of his on numerous other levels]).

THIS CROOKED WAY is different than its predecessor also in that it's told from multiple points of view; moreover, multiple first person points of view. As a struggling amateur fiction writer myself for many years, I can tell you getting the voice in the story right is a big deal, and so to deliberately switch it around?

But it works. Again and again, I had that slight bump for a page or two when the new "story" began and the pov character went from a soldier to mother to daughter, etc., inevitably within a page or two I'd forgotten and was wholly into the tale again.

Because of this approach, we get to see Morlock Ambrosius from multiple angles, which only lends complexity/depth to a character whose "obvious" traits become more and more familiar to us as we go along.

(The reference to Morlock as "iconic" makes total sense to me, and will to anyone who's enjoyed the stories. I assume our response is partly due to Enge's comfort with writing the character. He said in one interview he'd been writing about Morlock for thirty years. Anyway, I get it. One has a sense of Morlock after awhile the same as you do reading Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, or Sherlock Holmes, et. al. We get a sense of a stable character, yet the stories continue to surprise.)

I haven't said too much about the plot and won't. There are nasty bug invaders, and the parts told from their pov are particularly well done, reminding me for some reason of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live In Vain." You aren't fed the backstory on these creatures; you get their story from their pov and figure it out as you go. Highly effective; well done.

THIS CROOKED WAY is definitely a keeper. I read it in two days. And now it's going to be a YEAR before the next one comes out. Blah.

L. Sprague de Camp, the Col. Parker of S&S?

I just read an amazing 15-part article over at rehupa.com, starting July 2008, on the influence of L. Sprague de Camp on the development of Conan in the late 1960s and later (I was referrered to it by its author Morgan Holmes.)

It is worth a look. I very well remember the 3 vols of Conan stories Karl Edward Wagner edited (remember the ones with the little pull-out posters? Amazing cover art!) And I knew since then, from reading here and there, that apparently L. Sprague de Camp, who had co-written, edited and pastiched numberous Conan works posthumous and otherwise with Lin Carter, working from fragments of Howard material and even changing Howard non-Conan stories into stories featuring the brawny Cimmerian, I had *no idea* of the extent of de Camp's influence on the Conan "cottage industry," much of it negative. Which included causing the termination of the KEW project after 3 volumes instead of six.

In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the stories of Col. Parker simultaneously promoting, vampirizing, and screwing up the career of Elvis Presley. Like Tom Parker, de Camp savagely fought to "corner the market" on the material (and as Morgan Holmes shows in explicit detail, the de Camp/Carter material was almost always quite inferior to the Howard source material), but in later years he actively worked to promote a poorer product, insisting on the "dumbing down" of the pastiche novels written by others after he and Carter finished their series of "canon" books.

I had operated for years under the assumption that if not for de Camp, Conan wouldn't have been re-discovered, and there might well not have been a sword & sorcery boom in the 1960s/1970s. Boy was I wrong. In fact, de Camp had as much as anybody to do with ending it...

Subjective Taste

I hadn't read much sword and sorcery for a long time before starting this blog, except for a few old favorites now and again. No real reason why; I was a teenager 1975-1982, peak years during the last big S&S boom, and read everything I could lay hands on at that time. After that I got into other things.

But reading tastes change, and in the intervening decades my own reading (and writing) have changed a lot. So when I came back to pick up where I left off, I was interested in seeing how much if any of what I loved before could endure my now-jaded tastes.

I'm happy to report so far that none of my old favorites have fallen by the wayside. I opened this blog with a defense of Lin Carter, whom I've always loved, and it's true he was not on the same level with some other writers, but on the other hand he kept me in good books to read for years. What I was afraid of was that I would now find him unreadable (as I do with a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, sorry to say.) Happily such was not the case.

Still, it's not the same. I found myself annoyed by excessive exclamation marks in the Karl Edward Wagner story I was just reading. Kane! doesn't! need! excessive! punctuation! to! be! exciting! And when I re-reading the first few Elric stories a month or two ago, I was mildly surprised not to be more blown away by the prose, which had made quite an impression on me at age 15. I mean, it's *fine* -- Moorcock is a favorite -- but memory is a tricky beast, and I remembered it differently than it was.

And although I have recently purchased the new-ish 3-vol. Conan stories, as well as the Solomone Kane collection, Howard's stuff is in a stack by my chair, yet-unread. I'm kinda afraid to. What if he sucks? What if *I*, therefore, suck?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

My favorite stylist at the moment is James Enge of BLOOD OF AMBROSE and THIS CROOKED WAY, which I began over the weekend. Now that guy can turn a phrase!

"Just now it was early spring; patches of snow lay, like chewed crusts, beneath the hungry-looking trees. The leaves, crooked blue veins showing along the withered gray surfaces, were like the hands of dying men. They rustled irritably in the chill persistent breeze, as if impatient to meet and merge with the earth."

See what I mean?

I have been buying (used) these big thick 3-in-1 Warhammer fantasy anthologies. So far, I am not totally crushed, although they are kinda what I thought: the writers hearts are in it, but sometimes the writing is a little weak.

So how important is it for there to be "great writing" if you're just looking for an exciting/fun read? Do you need a literature degree to have a good time? (No, and you don't need an ideology to knock over a liquor store, to quote Hal Hartley in "Simple Men.")

If the writing gets in the way of the enjoyment, that's a problem. If not, not. I also enjoy pickled eggs and anchovies and other disgusting things. De gustibus non disputandem est.

The later Kane stories

I had an exchange of comment posts following a blog entry I made earlier about Karl Edward Wagner and my fondness for his character Kane. A couple of people responded less than enthusiastically about the small handful of Kane stories set in the modern world -- particularly, "Lacunae" and "Deep in the Depths of the Acme Warehouse" (though most agreed "At First Just Ghostly" is pretty great.)

Anyway, I landed a copy of MIDNIGHT SUN via Interlibrary Loan, the complete Kane short stories, and ... um ... well, guys, you were right.

"Deep in the Depths of the Acme Warehouse" was written for an Elvis anthology, which explains (?) the Elvis penis angle, but as with "Lacunae," I think ... Wagner worked with Kane. Kane was his guy. So when he decided to write these horror stories, he went w/ Kane as the protag. He could have as easily done without and it wouldn't have changed the stories much. Or maybe he just wanted to mess with people's heads, using the character that way. I'm not enough of a KEW scholar to know.

"At First Just Ghostly" is a different case. Horror too, but w/ Kane and his daughter filling in for John Steed and Emma Peel from the Avengers. I rather dug that a lot.

I will say this, too, and possibly it's an unfair comment for me to make, but, okay: when I've been drinking a lot and writing a lot, the characters tend to drink a lot too. I've written entire stories about beer. And I don't think I could've kept up with Cody Lennox in "At First Just Ghostly," though as a creepy story it worked just fine. Likewise the references to Kane's "uber-cocaine" in these stories (and references to "ground coca leaves" made in some of the historical tales: coke's not my drug of choice, but you write about what you know, and given the time period the stories were written, I find that aspect of them very much Of Their Time.

I think the historical Kane tales stand well on their own and the modern ones might best be considered experiments at best, though de gustibus non disputandem est.