Ordering a book called SCOUTS IN BONDAGE might land you on an FBI red-flag database. Luckily for you and your arrest record, SCOUTS IN BONDAGE AND OTHER VIOLATIONS OF LITERARY PROPERTY will get you into no such trouble.
Edited by UK secondhand bookseller Michael Bell, this slim volume is an impressive collection of questionably impressive tomes from simpler times, when one thing meant something entirely different than it does today. Thus, we get covers for meant-to-be-totally-innocent books like 50 FAGGOTS and INVISIBLE DICK.
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The fine folks over at Black Lizard/Vintage Crime are reissuing some of Ross Macdonald’s harder-to-find titles, slapping a nice new coat of paint on some truly great noir. First and foremost, their covers are a huge improvement over the other Macdonald books they have put out … or maybe I’m just a sucker for black-and-white photos of girls smoking.
From 1951, THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE is the third of Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective novels, and one of the more bloody ones, racking up a nice-sized body count by the end. What starts out as just a case of finding an adult daughter for a woman who won’t let go turns into double-crosses and drug-running.
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One thing I took away from reading SHOWCASE PRESENTS BATGIRL: VOLUME 1, featuring the first adventures of Barbara Gordon, librarian turned superheroine: It’s amazing how many criminals frequent the library. Daughter of Gotham City’s Commissioner Gordon, Barbara makes her own costume to step in to help Batman and Robin out with the lawless element every now and then.
But it’s amazing how little respect she gets, just because she’s smoking hot. Even after Barbara gets herself elected to the U.S. Congress – Congress! – Batman refers to her as “a cute, sunshiny little redhead.” Some battles you just can’t win, but then again, you’re making the hill ever steeper when you deliberately tear your tights to distract crooks.
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“Oh, no,” you groan, upon learning of the release of THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM. “Not another repackaging of H.P. Lovecraft stories we’ve already read and already own.”
“That’s right,” we say. “It’s not repackaging of H.P. Lovecraft stories you’ve already read and already own.”
I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft over the past five years, but even I wasn’t aware that he made more money as a short-story editor and collaborator than he did as an author of same. This new collection from Del Rey finds those rare weird tales that he wrote with amateur writers, completely rewrote, ghostwrote or tweaked. To be honest, you could’ve told me these were 100 percent Lovecraft, and I would’ve believed it, because that’s how they all come off.
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The difficulty with pastiche is when authors attempt to use well-loved characters created by another author. We always are conscious of the differences between how the originating author created his or her world, and how the successors create new stories within that world. This is nowhere more prevalent than with Sherlock Holmes. Few authors ever have been able to recreate the magic conjured by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but many have tried.
This is why it often seems a wiser move for an author, if they wish to write a Victorian mystery novel featuring two strong characters – one an enigmatic superman and the other a brave and doughty lad – simply to start from scratch and come up with entirely new characters. This is what Will Thomas has done with Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn in his series, the newest novel of which is THE HELLFIRE CONSPIRACY.
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