Razorfist presents: The Shadow: DANGER IN THE DARK

After last year's success in recreating the Alfred Bester-penned episode of The Shadow Radio Show, The Immortal Murderer, Razorfist is back for Halloween with Danger in the Dark, the THIRD EVER, Orson Welles-era episode, until now, lost to the mists of time! This episode sees The Shadow match wits with an emerging supercriminal, whose blindness allows his other senses to function at peak efficiency!



This episode is dedicated to Emer Prevost (1982-2017), who played the Announcer.

Trends: Covers

I page through a lot of Amazon pages to put together the New Release Spotlights and Roundups over at the Castalia House blog. And while I am constantly playing catch-up in keeping track of the sheer volume of titles released every week through Amazon, this allows me to find and follow the ways authors use their Amazon pages to try to drive sales. Currently, I see three trends: covers, customer reviews, and featurettes. I'll look at each in separate posts:

Covers

Ebook artwork has matured from its early days, where covers like these two could often be found:

Both are great stories, by the way, and The Dark Wing cover is for a release after Tor gave up the rights. For comparison, here's Tor's cover from the mid-2000s:

Now, let's take a look a sample of recent science fiction and fantasy ebooks:

The arms race of artwork for ebooks has elevated the covers to a level that can compete with those of traditional publishing. To stand out, an author now needs to place as much effort into cover art as the story. There are many sites that will provide technical advice for an author, and there are many debates over whether a portrait or an action scene is preferable. Meanwhile, tradpub is turning to the abstract:

If there is one bit of advice that I would give prospective authors, it would be to spend the time and money to find the art that best sells a story. Before a customer can read the blurb, the reviews, or the new featurettes, they have to have a reason to click on your page. An excellent cover gives them that reason. The challenge these days is to stand apart from the other excellent covers crowding the Amazon page. The bar has been raised.

Fotoboekies: South African Pulp

In addition to providing an introduction to Hindi pulps, Paul Bishop at Bibliorati also shines a light on South African pose-books, also known as poseboekies or fotoboekies, a mix of pulp, comics, and photography:

Recently, I came across an interesting short documentary on YouTube celebrating South African fotoboekies kultuur—which translates as pulp photo story culture. I also came across a trove of covers for a photo-book series named after its gorgeous title character, Tessa, a platinum blonde who battled evil in the jungles of urban South Africa clad only in a bikini and high heels. Clashing with sinister looking individuals wearing bad suit and sunglasses, Tessa always came out on top, with not a strand of her bottled blonde hair out of place. 

To her ardent continent-wide fans, Tessa, the bikini-clad, Karate kicking government agent, was akin to a goddess. Every 30,000 copy issue of Tessa sold out almost instantaneously on the newsstands—creating a lucrative secondhand market. Those 30,000 copies in today’s Internet savvy market would equal numbers to put the Kardashian’s Twitter followers to shame. 

The South African publishing company Republican Press was the low-budget force behind the phenomenon of the photo comics Tessa and Kid Colt, as well as the Playboy knockoff Scope. At its zenith, Republican Press was printing 20 different fotoboekies a month. Grafting Western influenced literary myths onto African settings, fotoboekies were most often written by authors based in Johannesburg—many of them black South African students working for minimal pay—then photographed by white professional shutterbugs using a team of black actors in Swaziland. 
 The actors were mostly locals from working-class neighborhoods. While the top poesboekie models were paid 25 to 30 rand a day—which at the time was a lucrative way to pay your rent—most appearance fees were negligible. The recognizable main male actors were generally consideredeccentric, hard-living, womanizers. Working quickly, an entire book could be shot in one to three days depending on the complexity of the simple sets. 

There were also army heroes—Swart Luiperd, Wit Tier, Kaptein Duiwel, Grensvegter (Black Leopard, White Tiger, Captain Devil, Grantsman) and others. They were most often depicted out in the jungle clutching their wooden machine guns, killing cigar smoking Cuban clones. Almost always, the villains held the proverbial disheveled damsel in distress captive after her convoy/aircraft/helicopter/hospital was invaded/crashed/broke down. The real South African soldiers who read these outrageous tales figured they could go back to civilian life if only these heroes existed outside their fervent imaginations.

Make sure to check out that documentary.

Hindi Pulps

Although the pulps in America effectively died out in the fifties, their spirit still lives on in the world. Previously, I've looked at Japanese light novels and Chinese YY novels. The pulp spirit is not contained to just East Asia, as Paul Bishop dives into the world of the Hindi and Tamal pulps over at Bibliorati:

Known as the father of Hindi pulp crime fiction, Surender Mohan Pathak has written close to 300 novels, including 60+ standalone thrillers, 120+ adventures of crime reporter Sunil, 22+ investigations of the Philosopher Detective Sudhir, and 42 of his anti-hero Vimal crime thrillers.

While working a full-time job in Delhi with Indian Telephone Industries, Pathak began his writing career in the early 1960s translating Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and the works of James Hadley Chase into the Hindi language. His first original story, The Man 57 Years Old, was published in 1959, followed by his first full length novel, featuring his crime reporter series character Sunil, in 1963.
The character Sunil is a suave and principled investigative journalist working for the daily newspaper Blast. He lives in the metropolitan city of Rajnagar located on the coastline. Both the newspaper and the city are fictional, much the same as the city of Isola in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels.
Sunil has a weakness for damsels in distress, who seem to drop into his life with the regularity of the rising sun. In his 30s, Sunil is willing to go to any lengths in pursuit of justice. He is aided by his best friend, nightclub owner Ramakant Malhotra. Every strong character requires an equally strong nemesis. In Sunil’s case it is iron-rodded, incorruptible Inspector Prabhudayal, who is in charge of the homicide division of the Rajnagar Police.

Pulp fiction has long been fascinated with the full breadth of the Asian continent as setting and source for its mysteries. It is fascinating to see how Asia reveres and reinterprets the pulps.

Millhaven Press: Amateur Pulpsters Wanted

Reprinted from Books of the Broken (h/t: Misha Burnett):

Today I am foregoing my usual Saturday Spotlight feature for something a little different.  Every Saturday I feature a pulp story from the past to shed a little light on some of the nearly forgotten authors.  Today’s entry is almost the exact opposite.  I am featuring a new idea by Millhaven Press.

Millhaven is seeking short stories from amateur writers in the hopes to put out a quarterly pulp inspired print magazine.  We think there is enough interest in these types of stories to make this idea feasible.  We miss the print pulps of yesteryear and want to bring some of that back.

Amateur writers are encouraged to submit their stories (millhavenpress@gmail.com) for consideration.  We will also need some art (even cover art) for the magazine.  All the relevant details are to be found at the Millhaven Press website.  Just click the link:
Millhaven Press Website 

Here’s to making this idea a reality (and fingers-crossed).

Invincible, by Kit Sun Cheah

In an Empire beset by internal rebellion and ferocious yaomo, the elite Shenwujun stand ready to defend human civilization. Among the Shenwujun there is none finer than Ensign Zhang Tianyou, who earned the nickname Zhang the Invincible. During a mission to quash a nascent rebellion, a Shenwujun detachment discovers evidence that the Grand Union is supporting the rebels. Zhang is tasked to investigate and destroy this new threat.

But will Zhang the Invincible meet his match at the hands of the rebel called Han the Demon Sword?

With this summary, Kit Sun Cheah (an alias of Castalia House author Kai Wai Cheah) introduced Invincible, his serialized novella that won an Honorable Mention at the Q1 2017 Writers of the Future contest. Through its seven chapters, he brings the fantasy genre of xianxia to English-speaking audiences, mixing generous portions of pulp action and military fantasy into the Chinese setting.

Most xianxia fantasies feature magicians who cultivate their internal energy to perform a dazzling array of magical and martial feats as they ascend a near infinite ladder of power levels, most far beyond the reaches of mere mortal cultivators. The primary drive for these characters is to gain more power, through such means as making contracts with magical beings, raiding treasure houses, or clashing with bandits and rivals. This leads to proud and selfish protagonists taking what they want because no one can stop them. Invincible's Zhang uses some of the same techniques, as he draws on the purifying methods of cultivation to remove fatigue, enjoys the blessings of his contract with the celestial phoenix Hong Er, and has earned his reputation as a skilled magical warrior on the battlefield. But Cheah upends the usual wish-fulfillment fantasies of xianxia by placing Zhang under military discipline. Duty, not power, becomes the driving force for Zhang, who must fulfill the duties to his country, his regiment, and his celestial partner as he pursues monsters and men who might as well be monsters. For each duty may grant privileges, but also demand obligations in turn. And, as Zhang finds out, sometimes these obligations conflict with each other.

"War Lord of Many Swordsmen"

The war lords and bandits of Western China thought all visitors were fair game—until they ran into Norcross and his hard-boiled black army from the American Expeditionary Forces.

Starting in 2015, Altus Press has rereleased the stories that filled the first and the greatest of pulps, Argosy Magazine, with its Argosy Library line. With over thirty volumes, stories by well-known pulpsters such Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, Max Brand, and Abraham Merritt have returned to print for the first time in years. Alongside these more familiar authors, Altus has introduced new generations of readers to George F. Worts, Loring Brent, Victor Rousseau, and many, many others, drawing from 96 years of pulp adventures and packaging them with the gorgeous covers from the pulp age. And it was the striking painting of a Manchu princess standing in front of her army that drew my attention to War Lord of Many Swordsmen, the first collection of the adventures of John Norcross by chinoiserie enthusiast and former lawman W. Wirt. Within its pages are two short novels detailing the adventures of Norcross, his infantry company of black soldiers, and his adopted sister, Princess Ch'engyuan.

The first adventure, "War Lord of Many Swordsmen", interrupts Norcross's pursuit of a legendary lost Zulu impi regiment into China. A wealthy donor hires his company of black WWI veterans to retrieve a sealed cylinder from a Chinese fortress city. Along the way, they rescue the exiled Princess Ch'engyuan and her betrothed, formerly of the same fortress city where Norcross's treasure lies, ousted by a warlord supported by the same Russian and British spies sent to frustrate Norcross's mission. Ch'engyuan and Norcross forge an alliance. He will help liberate her city and she will help him find the cylinder. But before they can reach Ch'engyuan's city, Norcross's company must first march through the Chinese hinterlands, with Russian Cossacks, Manchu bandits, and the Zulu impis barring his way.