Marksman and Other Stories

Author: William Campbell Gault
Publisher:  Crippen & Landru
Date: Mar. 2003
Pages: 206

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

Marksman contains a loving end-piece by Shelly Gault, daughter of William Campbell Gault. In it, she reminisces about how her father would proudly claim that from the moment he began writing up until the early 1980's, he had sold everything he had ever written.

It's no surprise. Gault could write exceptionally well, and was quick to spot opportunities. When he saw dwindling sales of mystery fiction in the 1960's he turned his attention to writing juvenile fiction exclusively and began a long and successful period of his career. As she adds he "loved it when he heard that his titles were among the most stolen from libraries"!

Crippen & Landru have been publishing a series of books in their The Lost Classics Series since 2002. These consist of uncollected stories by great mystery and detective writers of the past. Most are published in hardback, but if you look carefully you can find some in eBook format. This particular issue is currently not available in electronic format yet.

This collection of short literature from William Campbell Gault consists of twelve tales published between 1940 and 1957 in magazines such as Clues, S&S Dectective Story Magazine, Mercury Mystery Magazine and premier titles such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Blackmask and Manhunt (none of which made it into 2019's The Best of Manhunt if you are wondering). The first six are stories unrelated to each other, and cover the period from 1940 to the middle fifties. A few contain detectives, but most of them involve men-about-town who are involved in strange circumstance. The second half of Marksman contains the complete collection of short tales featuring one of Gault's most famous creations, Private Investigator, Joe Puma that appeared in 1956 and 1957.

Rough Trade

Author: Robert Silverberg
Publisher: PS Publishing
Date: Dec. 2017
Pages: 415

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

In 2012, Hard Case Crime published Robert Silverberg's novelette Blood on the Mink, packaged together with a couple of short stories (Dangerous Doll and One Night of Violence). These stories had been written by Silverberg in the late fifties and early sixties for pulp magazines of the time. The success of the HCC paperback prompted a new interest in the authors crime back catalogue, and so in 2017, British independant publishing house PS Publishing release a limited run of his stories from the same period as Rough Trade.

This new collection contains 23 short stories (but does also include One Night of Violence from the HCC paperback) covering the years from 1957 to 1961. Most of the stories are around ten to twelve pages in length, with a few 10,000 worders increasing that to 30 page tales. All of them appeared in one of two pulp magazines that Silverberg was providing a constant stream of material too, Guilty and Trapped. As he says in one of the introductions that preface each story, for some reason Guilty was the more poular magazine despite it covering exactly the same type of crime/hardboiled/delinquent teenager type of content as its companion magazine. Both magazines were edited by the same man, W.W. Scott, to whom Harlan Ellison introduced Silverberg. Thus was born a period of his life where he supplemented his living by sending rapidly written shorts to Scott for consideration.

Silverberg left college and got married in 1956. He immediately began to write full-time - he had already started writing science fiction whilst in college, and wanted to continue to write for a living. Whilst his partner went to work, there was pressure on him to contribute to their living costs. At this time there were very few publishers issuing regular science fiction magazines, nowhere enough for Silverberg to earn good money. Needing to branch out, he began to write for many of the pulps inclinding submissions of Westerns, Sports and Mens Adventure tales. But crime was still king in the late fifties, and so he eventually began to churn out the sort of stories that he hoped would appear in Manhunt. 

The Horror on the Links (The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin #1)

Author: Seabury Quinn

Ebook Publisher: Night Shade
Ebook Date: Apr. 2017
File size/Pages: 1109KB / 512pp
First Published: 2017 (original tales 1925-28)

Night Shade books produced a fantastic set of hardback books in 2017 that have collected all 92 tales of the occult detective, Dr Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn. These are handsome editions set in chronological order across five volumes. Thankfully they decided to also make them available in the eBook format.

Volume One contains a sumptuous 23 tales, across a hefty 500 pages, the first of which graced the pages of Weird Tales in 1925. The tales cover the first four years and culminate with the story featured in the December 1928 issue.

Seabury Quinn was born in Washington, USA in 1889 and died in 1969. After graduating from law school he attained the bar in the District of Columbia. Serving in World War One, he subsequently became the editor for trade papers in New York, started teaching medical jurisprudence, wrote technical articles and began submitting pulp magazine fiction stories. He continued to write for the pulps despite still remaining an active lawyer. His most famous creation was Dr Jules de Grandin.

De Grandin is a French doctor who has a particluar expertise in all matters of the paranormal and supernatural. His is a flamboyant character, wearing immaculate clothing, and always recongnisable due to his white hair and waxed moustache. His manners are also, at various times, brusque; demure; excitable; unforgiving, and ingratiating. But underneath there is a vicious hatred of evil in all its forms. It's sometimes quite surprising how ruthless de Grandin can be when dispatching his enemies - death befalls most of them.

Accompanying the French investigator is the loyal and level-headed partner, Dr Samuel Trowbridge. A Physician based in Harrisonville, New Jersey, he assists de Grandin in a succession of cases due to accidental meetings in America and abroad (The Isle of Missing Ships is a wonderful example, see below). These meetings soon dissapear as de Grandin seemingly moves to Harrisonville permanently.

The Keep

eBook edition

Author: F. Paul Wilson

Ebook Publisher: Wilsongs

Ebook Date: Nov. 2013

File size/Pages: 1162KB / 377pp

First Published: 1981

F. Paul Wilson is an author who has made his mark. He is the author of more than fifty books. He has covered many genres including horror, science fiction and thrillers. He has also written for the comic medium, plays, television and movie treatments. He sometimes writes young adult novels. He is probably most well known for his Repairman Jack series of novels about an anti-hero involved in a age-long battle across time. His first published novel was The Healer in 1976, a Sci-Fi book that eventually became part of his LaNague Federation sequence.

In 1981 Wilson published The Keep. A horror novel involving Nazis, a Romanian Castle/Keep and an ancient vampire. This novel became the first in what is called The Adversary Cycle, which now encompasses six titles. The book was a hit, and very quickly the film rights were snapped up. By 1983 a motion picture was distributed by Paramount Pictures starring Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow and Ian McKellen amongst others. German electronic music band Tangerine Dream produced the soundtrack (which is great if you can get hold of a copy). The film was not received very well, and is probably deserved. It has a fascinating history I'd recommend anyone looking up. I haven't seen the movie for a long time - but my own memory of seeing it as a teenager, most likely on video cassette, was that it was extremely creepy (I was most likely heavily influenced by the music if I'm honest). With that in mind, I thought I'd choose The Keep as one of the books for Horror Month here on Digital Bibliophilia.

Almost the whole of The Keep is located within or close by the Keep. Set in the Dinu Pass, high up in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania in April 1941, this ancient fortification is targeted by the Nazis as key spot to post a garrison of troops. Their orders are to guard the pass from Allied encroachment in to the Romanian oil fields that will soon be made available to them after their newly formed pact with the country. 

Cujo

Author: Stephen King

Ebook Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Ebook Date: Mar. 2010

File size/Pages: 1716KB / 402pp

First Published: 1981

Now let's get something straight. Stephen King is a brilliant writer. I love to read King. Some of his books have had a major influence on my reading material over the last forty years. I think he is one of the most exceptional authors around today. His style is so comforting to read, which sounds strange to say when you are talking about a body of work that mainly encompasses the horror genre. But it just is. You can start a novel by King and instantly be sucked into the characters and places of his story. He is one of the rare authors around for who, when you see the latest book is over 500 pages, you don't think "jeez, this is gonna be a slog" - you think, "wow! this could be great, can't wait to get into that one."

I won't say, I'm a King aficionado, or even a King enthusiast. I don't race out to the bookshop to grab the first edition hardback for each and every novel to come along. But I do stop and pause when I see a new cover with his name on it, pick it up, read the back cover blurb, and think, "Is this one up my street?". Because I know if it is, then I'm gonna eventually read it cover to cover, and usually very quickly. Like a dog that hasn't eaten all day, and is sitting there drool dangling off of his jowls.

So when it came to choosing books for Horror Month, I walked past my little collection of King novels languishing on the small bedroom bookcase we have, and I thought to myself, "Which one of these haven't I read yet? Cujo. I've not read Cujo, yet. I'll have that one thank you ma'am. Let's see what Mr King was all about in 1981 Shall we." Well, it turns out he was on a high. Quite literally. And literally. Does that make sense?

When Cujo was published in September of 1981, King was coming off the back of successive hits with Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter and The Dead Zone. He was effectively untouchable, and had even started writing under the Richard Bachman pseudonym (see reviews of The Long Walk and The Running Man) to see if his books would sell as well without the King 'label', as they did with it. He also simply wanted to just get more of his work out there, but was hindered by his publishers wishes to keep his fans on a strict diet. 

Haunted

1988 UK NEL Edition

Author: James Herbert

Ebook Publisher: Pan

Ebook Date: May 2011

File size/Pages: 893KB / 228pp

First Published: 1988

Horror Month kicks off with a right cracker from British horror writer James Herbert. There hasn't been a single book by Herbert that I didn't enjoy reading, so I was bit excited to start this once I'd decided to do a month of horror reading. I'm pleased to report that he didn't dissapoint me again. I was gripped from the first twenty pages. Haunted is a classic ghost story where the gradual build-up of an unsettling atmosphere over the course of 220+ pages had me glancing nervously at the dark corners of the living room while I was reading. 

James Herbert died suddenly in 2013, at the age of 69. It's a real shame because I feel that he had a few more great books in him, and I'd have loved to be able to read them. The last book he published was titled Ash, and acts as the final book in a trilogy about the titluar character, David Ash. Haunted is the first novel to feature Ash, a paranormal investigator.

James Herbert was born in 1943 in London, not so very far from where I myself grew up in the East End of London. He was educated locally and eventually went to work for an advertising agency. His writing success began with The Rats and The Fog in the late seventies horror boom (although to be fair, they rely on more of a scientific basis for their preimse than a supernatural one). Herbert received the Grand Master Award from Stephen King at the World Horror Convention in 2010. Herbert and King were good friends, both of them starting out with their first books at almost the same moment in time with The Rats beating Carrie by just a few months from publisher New English Library.

I was working in advertising as an art director for five years in the West End of London. I realised as soon as I was writing books full time (before I was writing them in the weekends and during any other spare time), I had to decide if it was one or the other . . . I had to make the decision to either stay in the job I loved or start this new job that I had being doing for five years which I loved even more, because I was king, I played God, characters did what I wanted them to do; whilst in advertising everything is brought down to a certain level. So that's how the career began, and because I no longer had to work in London we moved down to Sussex.

Interview with Jonny Mains