Belloq was Right

Different people recall different portions of favorite films. I tend to remember snippets of dialogue. This actually evolved into something of a game with the Kidette, then a shorthand way of speaking, relating films to daily life. So, if someone tries to do the same old thing, but differently: "He's just changing the dog's name." Or if someone claims to be a good guy: "There are no good guys, there are no bad guys; there's just a bunch of guys." So, while some might take away from Raiders of the Lost Ark the image of the adroit swordsman being shot or an inattentive Nazi being sliced and diced by a flying wing's propeller, I tend to remember what Belloq, the evil French archaeologist, said about his pocket watch:

 "You know it's worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless... like the Ark. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me."

Belloq was right, you know. Let anything acquire a patina of age and it becomes valuable. I often wonder what future archaeologists, whether evolved Cockroaches or visiting scientists from Altair IV, will make of the room where I do all my writing. A book shrine? An ancient library? A temple dedicated to the triune god Asimov-Bradbury-Clarke? And what if my remains are there, my skeleton sitting at a typewriter or laptop? The last Archivist? The Priest of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler? Divine Being? Maybe I'll end up in an alien museum. I do like museums.

However, we need not wait so long to see our things become valuable. Recently, I was book-searching on the internet, curious about some of the Lovecraftian publications from Necronomicon Press. The results were quite startling.

The three booklets pictured contain prose and poetry written by HP Lovecraft that had not been previously collected for publication. Mostly, they consist of amateur writings from HPL's Amateur Press Association days; poetry and essays from what we would now call "fanzines;" poems, essays and vignettes culled from his corpus of letters; and discarded drafts of later stories. When published, they each cost $4.95 in the late 70s, early 80s, so I spent about $15 for all three, plus a modicum of postage. I figured they had probably increased a bit in value over the years, driven by collector demand and the increasing worthlessness of the US dollar. However, I was not prepared to find a listing offering the three booklets for $224.95+$8.95 s&h. I also found six reproductions of Lovecraft's articles from The Californian offered for $350 and a two-volume set of HPL's letters to Robert Bloch for $225. The HPL Christmas Book sold for $1.50, but I found listings of it for $41.25+s&h. The History of the Necronomicon (1992 @  $1.50) is available for $84. Even Lovecraft Studies #7, Necronomicon Press' scholarly periodical which contained my article "The Old Man and the Sea," is available on Amazon for $35, quite a bit more than the original.

I don't plan on getting rid of those booklets anytime soon, but it did set me wondering about some of my own Small Press efforts, both the Sherlock Holmes stories published by Gryphon Publications and my own modest chapbooks that I published under the imprint of Running Dinosaur Press. Was it possible that either had gathered enough of a time-worn patina to become valuable or (dare I suggest?) respectable? Well, as it turned out, they had acquired much more value than I suspected.

The first book I looked at was Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods. The story was first published in the Trek fanzine "Holmesian Federation." I've already written about the genesis of the story, so won't go into it here, except to say that it does have some significance amongst Holmes/Lovecraft pastiches because it was the very first story to combine the two literary universes, beating the excellent Pulptime by a few years. When Gary Lovisi republished the story as a chapbook, the price was $5. I thought it a little steep at the time, but I knew that specialty publications were often priced in advance of trade-published books. In a recent listing, I found it priced at $45+$4.95 s&h. Of course, I have in the past seen it listed at $60 or so, and, once, for $112 on Amazon by a rare books dealer. 

The sort-of sequel to the book, Sherlock Holmes in The Dreaming Detective, also published by Gary Lovisi's Gryphon Books was listed recently for $25+$5 s&h. That is more in line with what I would expect for a specialty book now out of print (for the time being), but I have seen other listings in the past asking upwards of $100 for a "Fine to Very Fine" reading copy.

I have to admit that neither listing (Necronomicon Press nor Gryphon Books) really shocked me all that much. After all, the quality was very high, the books were unique and not available elsewhere, and both presses were (and are) highly regarded by scholars, fans and collectors. The shock came when I looked up some of my own Running Dinosaur Press publications.

I have to admit that Running Dinosaur Press was never more than a hobby for me, a creative outlet for myself and others. Despite being a paying market for stories, poems and illustrations, I never made a penny on any booklet. Press runs were meager. When I was invited to sit on a Small Press panel at the 1991 World Fantasy Convention, I represented more the Micro Press than Small Press. And I purposely kept prices at a minimum, just enough to cover production and postage. I truly thought that the chapbooks would never be of interest to anyone but those whose names appeared within.

A Walk in the Dark had a horror/dark fantasy theme. I asked for poems about what scared people and received several hundred submissions, out of which I chose 49. It included such notables as Janet Fox, Steve Rasnic Tem, Duane Rimel, t. Winter-Damon, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Scott Green, and a contribution from Randall Jarrell (posthumously) via his publisher. The cover was light blue, as were all RDP covers, and the price was just $2.35, which included mailing. So I was more than a little surprised when I found a listing offering it for $26.25+$4 s&h.

In Alternate Lives, I gave authors the difficult task of exploring alternate histories, timelines and universes via poems and fiction of 100-200 words. There are a few anthologies that explore the theme, my favorite being Worlds of Maybe, but, let's face it, it's a daunting task to create a new history or timeline, put some characters in it and tell a story in anything shorter than a novel. And, yet, about thirty people accepted the challenge and did a very good job. The price on this booklet was only $1.25 (again, including postage), but I found a listing that offered a copy for $30+$5 s&h.

The last publication I want to look at is HP Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, his famous sonnet sequence, permission for which I obtained from Arkham House. I wanted to publish this for a hew reasons. I believe there is a story told in the course of the sonnets, and argued that in an issue of Robert Price's Crypt of Cthulhu, and continued that argument in this booklet.  Though a few Lovecraftian scholars agree, most do not, so over the years it has become a bit of a tempest in a Lovecraftian teacup. The second reason is that I wanted to illustrate the sonnets, in which I was joined by my good friend Nick Petrosino, who is an accomplished artist and designed much of the armor used in the film Army of Darkness. The third reason...well, what HPL fan does not want to become part of the author's mythos? Anyway, again I charged the minimum I could to cover expenses (yes, Nick was paid, I insisted) and postage, only $2.50. I found several listings in my search, but they were all around $50+s&h. I have to admit this surprised the least, as I know first hand how popular anything connected with HPL is.

So, yes, Belloq was indeed correct. Let enough time pass and almost anything, even me, can become respectable and valued. Who knows? Maybe I will end up in that alien museum after all. As a bonus, let me leave you with one of Nick's illustrations, the one he did for "Antarktos," one of the sonnets.

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly

Of the black cone amid the polar waste;

Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,

By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.

Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,

And only pale auroras and faint suns

Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources

Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder

What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;

But the bird told of vaster parts, that under

The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.

God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew

Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

--H.P. Lovecraft 

Sherlock Holmes & The Coils of Time (Redux)

Back in 2005, Gryphon Books of Brooklyn, N.Y., published my book Sherlock Holmes in The Coils of Time, in which the Great Detective, just risen from his supposed death at the Reichenbach Fall three years previously, teams with H.G. Wells' Time Traveller to save Victorian London (and us modern folk) from an invasion by the cannibalistic Morlocks of the distant future. Since I've already written something about the joy and trial of collaborating with Wells and Conan Doyle. we need not rehash that here, nor the success the story had in Germany and Croatia. But I do want to tell you about how the Gryphon Books edition had a tragic intersection with Hurricane Sandy (AKA "Superstorm Sandy") in 2012.

Gary Lovisi, owner of Gryphon Books, and I have known each other for 30+ years, ever since he published my first modest Sherlock Holmes opus, Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods, in which an elderly Holmes meets fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft at the height of his creative powers and becomes involved with the highly destructive cosmic creatures of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. We did not know it at the time, but what seemed a quite logical variation on the usual pastiche (logical to us anyway) had never been done before, but that was then, and we want to move toward to when Gary published the Sherlock Holmes/Time Traveller pastiche. As with all the books published by Gryphon Books, copies of The Coils of Time were stored in the basement of Gary's house, a place that had never been flooded in all the history of Brooklyn. All that changed, however, when Hurricane Sandy came to town. His basement became a surging maelstrom of water and mud an event Gary relates quite poignantly in the news section of his website.

While the Federal government is more than willing to dole out money lavishly to labor unions and political cronies, a small press institution does not fall into that category; and I suppose New Englanders trying to get money from their insurance companies and the tight-fisted FEMA would have some stories to tell as well. Of course, no amount of money can make a disaster, even a minor one, "like it never happened," despite the trite and patronizing slogan of a well-known insurance company. And that's especially true when it comes to decades of publishing and collecting. So, with just about everything lost (including my books) Gryphon Books is looking forward, but not back...i.e., I'm out of print.

Had it not been for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I wrote about late last year, I probably would have just sighed about the loss of The Coils of Time and the other books, and figured, "Well, that's that." However, in November 2012, as part of NaNoWriMo, I wrote Paws & Claws: A Three Dog Mystery, a trio of real Scoobies, and by completing that month of "literary abandon" I came into contact with Create Space, a POD business run by Amazon, through which I published my thoroughly uncommercial (and apparently very popular) tale of detective doggies. So, I decided to take a second plunge into the waters and bring The Coils of Time back from the dead.

However, I wanted to more than just re-print that old 2005 story. Needless to say, I planned on correcting any flubs that made it into the old book and of course revising the text to make it flow better and be more logical, but I wanted to do more. I wanted it to be a whole new reading experience, which meant writing new stories to go with the old one, so I did what I often do when I have ideas but no plots...I jotted down titles, and after I oodles of them, I whittled them down to a half-dozen and commenced to write.

• "The Long-Suffering Landlady" -- Having Sherlock Holmes as a lodger could not have been an easy matter, especially back in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras when a landlady was actually more like a servant who collected rent. In about a thousand words, I referenced more than twenty Holmes stories and also fitted in nods to HPL and Professor Challenger.
• "An Incident in the Night" -- Originally, this was supposed to be "Doctor Watson's Afghanistan Adventure," but when a title comes to you too quickly and sounds too good (just as in the naming of a character), check it out. A similar title was already in use, and though my story would have been nothing like that which was already published, I decided to take a different tack, setting my story on the HMS Orontes, during Watson's long voyage back to London in 1880.
• "Lestrade and the Lost River Pirates" -- the odd thing about this little tale of Inspector Lestrade's attempt to solve a series of seemingly impossible crimes is that as soon as I had the title I had the plot, probably because I have long been interested in London's "lost rivers." But there are always surprises, even with tales that spring forth like Athena from the brow of Zeus, and that came in the form of the highly eccentric and possibly dotty character Miss Eliza Cookwell of Lower Westbourne Court, London, and her basement filled with the effluvia of empires.
• "The Man Who Was Not Sherlock Holmes" -- In this story, I descended into comedy. While some of the other stories are decidedly light-hearted, I wanted this tale of actor Reginald Sterling, who just got the sack after playing the lead in the 1950s BBC series Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for three years, to bring at least a smile to readers' lips, and perhaps even a chuckle or two.
• "The Adventure of the Counterfeit Martian" -- This take on Sherlock Holmes during the War of the Worlds invasion (Manly Wade Wellman previously [1975] wrote on the same theme) went very well as far as plotting, but neither Holmes nor the Martians helped at all when it came to keeping the tale true to my original title, "The Adventure of the Martian Eye." So I did what authors always do when faced with mutinying characters...I surrendered. And, so, instead of encountering cosmic vistas of horror, Holmes learns to walk like a Martian.
• "The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes" -- Levi, the Dachshund-mix detective from Paws & Claws, helped me out with this one. Given his fondness for the Great Detective, it did not take much effort to convince him to channel his inner Sherlock Holmes in this poignant tale of love, courage and detection.
• "Sherlock, HPL, Gary & Me" -- Not a story, this one, but an essay about the Sherlock Holmes pastiches I wrote for Gryphon Books. Nowadays, people who were in the small press movement of the 1970's - 1990's are being asked for their memories; now that most of all that has gone away, scholars are beginning to set down histories, and the publications that have survived, all those magazines of limited circulation and duration, only tell a fraction of the story, and many of the people from then are no longer with us. I wanted to chronicle what we did in our little corner of the publishing universe.

So, in March 2013, Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories was published under the Dog in the Night Books imprint. And since it is inscribed in servers and hard drives, not just recorded on paper, it will not be susceptible to the vagaries of an angry planet, and will remain in print until the lights go out in the world for the last time.

Collaborating With Conan Doyle

If the fiction writer is viewed as an artisan with the consumer end-products being short stories and novels, then the raw materials are imagination, research and life experience. So, if I write, for example, a murder mystery set in the 1960s, the characters might come from people I knew or be created broadcloth to advance the story, and the plot might stem from some social conflict of the times, such as anti-war protests or the counter culture, or revolve around the Big Three (sex, greed or revenge) with the milieu of the 1960s chosen simply because men still wore hats and women gloves.

When you venture into an already established literary universe, however, the "raw materials" of the story are provided and limitations are in place. A writer for DC Comics once told me that there were many things he would have liked to do with the Superman character, many facets of his personality that he would have liked to explore, but no matter what you want to do you always have to remember "you are a guest in someone else's playground, playing with some other kid's toys; when you move on, you leave the toys behind for the next kid."

You you can plot a free-for-all in H.P. Lovecraft's realm (as long as you kill your characters or have them go stark barking mad) and you'll be fine, but when you enter the universe of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are Rules. After all, we're talking about Sherlock Holmes, the icon of icons, the most famous fictional character in the world, and every single mannerism, every little utterance, every little nuance has been the subject of intense study and several monographs by people who live on Baker Street, breakfast with Holmes, and likely have London fog in their lungs and a seven-percent solution coursing through their veins. Make a grievous error with the characters of Holmes or Watson (or even a lesser light like Lestrade), or erroneously describe a gasogene or tantalus, they will not only heap scorn on you, you might receive an envelope with five orange pips in it.

In other Sherlock Holmes books I've written, I introduced the character into original plots, though against recognizable backgrounds -- an elderly Holmes encountering HP Lovecraft in the 1920s, Holmes in a pure adventure story with Professor Challenger, Holmes as a consulting detective in the Dreamlands with Nikola Tesla as his Watson. In these and others, the character was established but the plot was entirely original.

When I wrote Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time, however, I had to work around an already established plot, the one Conan Doyle used in The Adventure of the Empty House, which returned Sherlock Holmes to life in 1894, after his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls on 4 May 1891. To refresh your memory, Holmes returns to London and reveals himself to his shocked biographer, but his life is in danger from Colonel Sebastian Moran, dead Moriarty's former associate and the "second most dangerous man in London." Through a ruse involving Mrs Hudson moving a bust of Holmes behind a window shade, Moran is captured in the empty house across from from 221B Baker Street, ending the threat and bringing the bounder to justice for the murder of the Right Honourable Ronald Adair (actually, he apparently escapes the hangman's noose he is mentioned as still living in His Last Bow).

As The Doctor will tell you, there are points in time where you jimmy about, go on a lark, muck around, trample all over the sands of history without changing the warp or woof of things; and there are points in time which cannot be changed, no matter what -- Pompeii will always be destroyed by Vesuvius, the Great Fire will always sweep through London, and Rose Tyler's Dad will always die in a traffic accident on 7 November 1987. And it's "the burden of a Time Lord" to know what points in time are fixed and which are in flux. Well, I may not be a Time Lord, I may not be a madman with a Blue Box (I would like to have a Blue Box), but I surely know that Holmes' return to London on 5 April 1894, and all that events that occurred on that long-ago Thursday, is a fixed point in time if there ever was one. I could not change one single event, as recorded by Conan Doyle.

In Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time, I had my own original plot of Morlocks in London, vanishings in the East End, and H.G. Wells' Time Traveller. I also had in mind what Philip Jose Farmer did in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, in which he took the events and characters of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and made them set-pieces in a conflict between two adversarial alien races, the Erindani and the Capellans. In my story, Holmes did not return to London because of Adair's murder, but because of a letter sent him by a future version of himself. For awhile there are two Sherlock Holmeses coming and going from 221B Baker Street, which helps Conan Doyle explain why Moran thought Holmes was there when he was not -- afterwards Mrs Hudson is hurried on her way (and Watson too) when she asks about the soft moving sounds in Holmes' locked bedroom. After the events of the Empty House are played out, Holmes goes on the case for which he was really recalled to London.

Though the entirety of Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time takes place on Thursday, 5 April 1894, it also ranges from the beginning of time to the end of it. Although it was fun "collaborating" with Conan Doyle on a story, it was very difficult being original while remaining faithful to the source material. My favorite moment in the story, however, is my own  -- as Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Kent pass down Baker Street in a Hansom, bound for the East End and the and the year A.D. 802701, Holmes gazes up and sees a familiar figure in the window watching him, knowing that, in time, he will be the one gazing down from the window of 221B at a Hansom passing in the night.

The Time Machine
Classics Illustrated, 1951

Sherlock Holmes' Triligual Time Travel Adventure

In 2005, I wrote Sherlock Holmes & the Coils of Time which was published, featuring a great cover by Jukka Murtosaari, by Gary Lovisi's Gryphon Books of Brooklyn, New York, an excellent small press geared to book collectors, crime fiction fans and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. It details what really happened the night Holmes returned from his supposed death at the hands of Moriarty, and put Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London, into the hands of Scotland Yard. What was a matter of hours in Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Empty House," was for me an adventure that stretched from the beginning of time to its end, with a couple of alternate histories thrown in for good measure. If you have not read this book, I urge you to do so, as I feel it is one of my better efforts. The story was told, the book was published, and I thought that was the end of it. As it turned out, not quite...

Through Gary Lovisi, I was introduced to a German literary agent who asked me to sign a simple agreement and to send him my Sherlock Holmes tales. I did, and promptly forgot about it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I receive a check and a copy of Sherlock Holmes I Zavojnice Vremena (Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time). Yes, I suddenly found myself translated into Croatian, published by Zagrebacka Naklada, a book publisher in Zagreb, featuring an eerie cover by Tihomir Tikulin that depicts Sherlock Holmes encountering some of the cannibalistic Morlocks in London's foggy East End. One note about this book is that it contains a second story wedded to the end of the first...a sort of "joining" story I wrote when I contemplated an omnibus edition of all five novels, a framework that would link all the novels into an episodic whole. While I was pleased with being published abroad, I was even more pleased by the reception of the book by readers in Central Europe.

And lightning strikes a third time for Coils of Time, this time in German as Sherlock Holmes und die Zeitmaschine, published May 2012 by Blitz Verlag. The cover is by designer Mark Free. It's being marketed as a collectible book, limited edition, and billed as the "First German Edition." I am very pleased with the reviews that have been published, and, more, that a new audience is being entertained by a story that was so satisfying to write.

Whenever an author finishes writing a book, there is a sense of satisfaction and completion, but also a tinge of sadness and depression, especially when so much has been invested in it -- for Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time I spent hundreds of hours researching Victorian and Edwardian London, but for this book I did at least triple that, for I had to knit together the lives of various real and fictional characters into my own story of Morlocks in London. When a book actually sees print, there is a leap of excitement...and then you move on. I count myself lucky, and privileged, to have experienced three leaps of excitement, with the same story. Thanks, Gary, and thanks, Uwe.

Reading Upsidedown

51375, 1970

Sometimes, when I was much younger, I bought the same book twice, but, then, I was sometimes accused of reading books upside-down. Quite true, but it wasn't my fault. I blame it all on Donald Wollheim, the mastermind editor at Ace Books who in 1953 came up with a novel idea of printing two books back-to-back, so they were upside-down relative to each other -- finish one story and you were staring at the upside-down ending of the other story (or ads), so you turned it over and started again., a trick I often played on my children...till they figured it out. The genesis of this publishing revolution is recounted in Don Wollheim's introduction to James A. Corrick's Double Your Pleasure: The Ace SF Double.

I can't do any better than James did in this excellent tome published by Gryphon Books of Brooklyn, N.Y. And if you're even halfway serious about collecting this long-lived series (35 years) you really need to get this book. Not only does it have Wollheim's introduction and James' highly detailed and informative thesis, it has a complete checklist of all the issues and reissues. While Ace also published westerns and mysteries, their science fiction issues are, justifiably, the most famous and popular; while I occasionally bought a mystery, rarely a western, I was a regular buyer of Ace's SF doubles, hitting the newsstand for then-current issues, scouring used-book stores and thrift stores for books published while I was still following the adventures of Dick and Jane. Since I can't trump James Corrick's achievement (sometimes the best really is the best and should not be messed with -- Hollywood hacks considering remakes, please take note) all I'll do here is add some some of my memories and reminisces about the Ace Double series...I'm sure you must have some of your own.

My Uncle Bob, one-time husband of my Aunt Joyce, had a whole shelf of books built into the headboard of his bed, which I thought was just the neatest thing ever, since I had to settle for a box at home. Among the titles was The Seed of Earth/Next Stop the Stars (Ace F-145), both titles by Robert Silverberg, published in 1962. The sight of that hairy big-eared creature covertly watching a classic 1950s rocketship (the original story, The Winds of Siros, first appeared in the September 1957 issue of Venture magazine) was very disturbing to me. It was definitely up to no good, and is probably the reason I never really trusted Debbie the Bloop...the space monkey from Lost in Space that everyone else thought was so cute. If they had seen this cover by prolific (79 Ace Double covers) artist Ed Valigursky (1926 - 2009) they might not have been quite so trusting of little Debbie...I certainly wasn't taken in, thought I can't say the same thing about Doctor Smith.

One of the great things about the Ace Doubles was that they carried ads and listings for other Ace books. Now, that was hardly unusual. Most Ace publications did as well. The difference is that since the Doubles were printed back-to-back and upside-down, the end of each story was in the middle of the book. Call me easily amused (it runs in the family) but to me that was nearly as fascinating as the format itself. And the ads gave me goals in my searches for the out-of-print books...no internet, no checklists, I needed all the help I could get.

The interior pages of M-111
Fugitive of the Stars by Edmond Hamilton
Land Beyond the Map by Kenneth Bulmer

D-242, 1957

D-437, 1960

Two of the covers that intrigued me greatly were those painted for The Sioux Spaceman by Andre Norton and Empire of the Atom by A.E. van Vogt. Both covers are by Valigursky, an artist whose style was well suited to the Ace idea of bringing the pulp magazine to the mass market paperback. Beyond the artistic skill, there is the mix of the ancient or traditional with the futuristic, or what might be called now "retro-futuristic." On Andre Norton's book (I was a long-time fan of "his" before I discovered I was a fan of "hers") you have an Indian with an eagle helmet wearing a modern tunic and carrying a space gizmo; with van Vogt (also was a great fan of his stories, especially the Null-A series) you have an ancient Roman with a spaceship flying around for-crying-out-loud. I suppose it's the same reason people are attracted to Coca-Cola, the mix of two tastes that shouldn't go together, the sweet and the acid. The same sort of visual appeal is present for Life with Lancelot by John T. Phillifent, an English author who usually wrote under the pseudonym John Rackham, sporting another Valigursky cover.

As James Corrick points out in Double Your Pleasure, "Despite its availability as a market, many Double writers left Ace as soon as their finances allowed." It was a combination of low advances (when writers were paid at all, or on time) and ruthless editing to accommodate the format, which bothered established writers more often than it did beginners breaking into the paperback book market; much to the chagrin of giants such as Asimov, Ellison and van Vogt, "unabridged" did not always adhere to its Webster's meaning when it came to Ace Double cover claims. Also, "Ace Doubles were blessed with some of the best (and, to be honest, worst) SF pulp paintings in paperback history." Of course, I, as a reader, did not recognize some of the shortcomings that are obvious now; what I did know, however, was that the writing was vibrant, almost electric, and the covers were fantastically imaginative and evocative. Looking back, I think that energy might have stemmed from the breakneck pace required from the writers and artists to fill those newsstand racks week after week, month after month. I depended upon the Ace Doubles to be there for me with a regularity usually only satisfied by periodicals.

D-299, 1958

D-299, 1958

Sometimes, the two-story, two-cover format of the Doubles made for strange bedfellows. One such mixed combo that gave me pause were Star Born by Andre Norton and A Planet for Texans by H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire. Okay, I look at the cover painted by Emesh for Norton's story, and I think, Fine, a half-naked guy fighting an alien beast gladiator style in an arena in a futuristic city...still, it's Andre Norton, so it's gotta be good. On the other title, however: Did they get one of the westerns mixed up with the SF? What gives? A cattle stampede? And a spaceship? Wow, those are big cows! Well, it turned out not to be such a mismatched pair after all, since A Planet for Texans really was space opera after all, not a horse opera, and both were on the themes of interplanetary colonization, Norton's about rebels with the desire to escape a nasty dictatorship on Earth, the other about the whole state of Texas getting fed up with Earth and settling its own planet where everyone could wear hoglegs and shoot politicians who deserved it...silly idea, maybe, but not without its allure, especially these days.

Let's finish up with a few of my favorite Ace Double titles and/or covers. As I mentioned earlier, I'm sure you have your own list of titles that stick in your mind for whatever reason, whether they were glimpsed on the racks, back when every American town had a newsstand, or a candy store where trashy SF magazines and books were sold, along with five-for-a-penny candy and wax bottles, or were found in used book stores and charity shops.

D-303, 1958

D-413, 1960

War of the Wing-Men by Poul Anderson has a wonderful cover by Emesh and takes place in the universe of Anderson's Polesotecnic League, one of the best ideas ever for a realistic interstellar economic system.

Harlan Ellison's A Touch of Infinity is an odd duck in the realm of the Ace Double, being a collection of short stories. It has a Valigursky cover, and was paired with Ellison's novel, The Man With Nine Lives.

D-94, 1955

D-53, 1954

A. E. van Vogt's One Against Eternity is really his famous novel The Weapon Makers, first serialized in the February through April issues of Astounding Science Fiction in 1943, and though the cover states "Complete and Unabridged," don't you believe it. As everyone who has read this novel knows, "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free," which has become something of a rallying call for Second Amendment proponents. Among the many fabulous inventions were weapons that could only be fired by the owner, a technology which is only just now being developed. I love everything everything van Vogt wrote, and I think he was the one writer who truly understood that science fiction is a literature of ideas. And I love the grand pulpishness of this cover, another triumph by Valigursky. Perhaps not so grand, but just as exciting, is Stanley Meltzoff's cover for van Vogt's seminal tale of the Weapon Makers who exist in opposition of the Isher Empire; Meltzoff, who died in 2006, is nowadays more known for his fine art of game fish and maritime subjects.

M-107, 1964

M-107, 1964

Another favorite writer for me growing up was A. Bertram Chandler, an Australian in the merchant marine whose love of the sea pervaded his science fiction stories, especially those about Commodore John Grimes, into which series falls Into the Alternate Universe, which features an irresistible cover by Valigursky; Commodore Grimes is the most fully realized character in all science fiction. Not in the Grimes series but also exploring an alternate universe is The Coils of Time, sporting a Jack Gaughan cover, another great artist.

F-199, 1963

F-199, 1963

These two stories from 1963 packed a double punch for me. Captives of the Flame by Samuel R. Delany, one of science fiction's most "literary" writers, is a dense and challenging story that I did not quite understand fully till thirty years later, when I re-read it as part of the Fall of the Towers trilogy, but I did love the cover by Gaughan and the calligraphic title. Emesh's cover for the other half of the book, The Psionic Menace by Keith Woodcott (John Brunner), just freaked me out -- I mean, look at those guys...the stuff of nightmares. But despite what our nanny-world now believes, nightmares do serve a purpose, and pity that young person who tries to enter life without the fortification of his nightmares.

G-597, 1966

When I started reading Mankind Under the Leash by Thomas Disch, I immediately recognized a keen literary sense of humor at work. If Charles Dickens had decided to write a science fiction novel, he might have written something like this book, "...a true and faithful account of the great upheavals of 2037, with portraits of the principals involved, as well as reflections by the author on the nature of art, revolution & theology." Perhaps it will help you take the story a little more seriously if you know the original magazine title was White Fang Goes Dingo...well, maybe not. But I enjoyed immensely this story in which an Ace author indulged in as much satire as action. And the cover by Kelly Freas was outstanding.

G-632, 1967

Also outstanding was Kelly Freas' cover for Nebula Alert by A. Bertram Chandler, one of the three novels from his Empress Irene series. If Valigursky is rivets and ray guns, then Freas is satin and stardust, and nowhere is that more evident than in this depiction of a spaceport.

G-618, 1967

G-618, 1967

I was first attracted by the evocative covers for this 1967 Ace Double, both of which are by Jack Gaughan, though each is painted in a totally different style. While lots of science fiction has been based on Greek, Roman and Egyptian myths, Petaja may be alone in using Finnish myth, the Kalevala, of which The Stolen Sun is the third in the series. H. Warner Munn's The Ship From Atlantis was the second in his series about Merlin's godson (the first was published in 1939!), and is a grand fantasy in the Weird Tales tradition, a magazine for which he often wrote in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

23775, 1969

Let's finish up with not one of my favorite stories, though Treasure of Tau Ceti by John Rackham (John Phillifent) is a well-written though minor story, an old-fashioned adventure tale which leads from London to a the mysterious jungle planet of Verlan, orbiting Tau Ceti. But it is the cover which entrances me, one of the most beautiful to grace an Ace Double, subjectively speaking. It is, of course, by Kelly Freas, and it captures the mystery and adventure of the story even better than does the story itself. And while there may be nothing unique or special about a metal tower rising from a jungle landscape, did we not see this on Yavin? Greatness always inspires...but credit is always appreciated.

Never Lost in London...as long as Queen Victoria reigns (or maybe Eddie)

It's all Gary Lovisi's fault...or so I tell myself.

Gary Lovisi is the publisher of Gryphon Books of Brooklyn, N.Y., avid collector of paperback books, and Sherlock Holmes expert. When it comes to paperback collecting, he wrote the book...no, really, he did write the book: the Antique Traders Collectible Paperback Price Guide. And when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, his knowledge is inexhaustible. And the books published by his own small press house are worth collecting themselves. If you have never visited his website, please do yourself a favor:

http://www.gryphonbooks.com/

But back to Gary Lovisi's culpability. After Gryphon Books published Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Ancient Gods, Gary suggested that, were I to write a sequel, he'd be interested in "first refusal." A sequel was far from my mind, but Gary had planted the seed, and eventually I wrote Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time and Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time. So, am I blaming Gary Lovisi for those books? No, not at all; I blame him for my fondness ("addiction" is such an ugly word) for London guidebooks.

Before ever I write a single line, I delve deep into a region's lore and history. Nothing unique about that. Many writers' yarns could be used as walkabout guides. Personally, I love stories with a strong sense of place. Sir Arthur's own tales document London with the accuracy of a camera; one of my favorite books pairs quotes from his stories with period photos. Other writers who have married fiction and geography include Raymond Chandler, HP Lovecraft, Steven Saylor and William Faulkner. I also read books about time periods, but I favor books from from those periods, particularly guidebooks.

This edition had a full-sized fold-out map of all London in the back.

I told myself I was tracking down various editions of Baedekers, Muirhead's, ABC Rail Guides and many others just so I could accurately trace my way through London and provide readers with a memorable and accurate visit to Baghdad on the Thames. Of course, after about a dozen acquisitions through EBay, estate sales and various booksellers, here and abroad, that excuse began to wear thin, even to me.

When a passing cab picked up India Jack Neville near the East India Docks it was equally important to me that all the streets and buildings were correct as it was that poor India Jack not get rooked by the driver. However, since the British tar did not live long enough to pay a fare, the amount was actually something of a moot point. Still, knowing how much it would cost for a hansom cab ride from Charing Cross to the Zoological Gardens, for example, is a nice thing to know. Like it might come in handy some day. Well, it might! All right, maybe not, but still nice to know.


Guidebooks of London from the Victorian and Edwardian eras are not really that difficult to find, nor need they be expensive. A great many came to me via the EBay auction site, which used to function like a global car boot sale or a million garage sales; unfortunately, the once-friendly site has been overrun by corporate entities, grifters and swindlers from the Far East. ABE Books was another good source, but, caution is always advised when buying a book online, even if a photo is supplied, and sellers found themselves peppered with queries. My favorite method of purchase was in person, and it really is surprising how often antique guidebooks show up at estate sales and charity shops. Regardless of how I came across them, I still had more books (Victorian, Edwardian, the VI Georgian and the II Elizabethan) than I could ever justify with any number of books and stories I could write set in London.

This was the cultural/economic heart of London; another book I have, The London of Oscar Wilde, discounts
entirely London's East End, averring there was no need for a gentleman to ever set foot there.

It's a little difficult to see in this scan, but some 19th Century London tourist annotated the map in pencil.

Despite its small size, the Zoological Gardens was a marvel of its time;
when an antiques dealer is killed nearby in the unpublished The Quest of the Copper Scrolls Scotland
Yard conveniently blames it on an escaped lion...that somehow found its way back in.

The previous owner of this copy of The Streets of London decided
to keep his book updated through tipped-in articles from and
letters to the London Times.
I love used books!

Augustus Hare's two-volume opus is strictly not a "guidebook",  but it one of my favorites; It is just
what the title claims...street by street...step by step...house by house...profusely illustrated.

One interesting thing about guidebooks of the past was they were often rife with advertisements. While most of the ads concerned hotels in London (none in the East End, of course) and in popular spots along the many rail lines, others were for charitable associations, house agents and purveyors of "personal" products. Here are a few examples:

"Temperance Hotel" -- Don't expect it to have a bar, American or otherwise.

Mystery writer Agatha Christie was born in Torquay in 1890, and it continued to play a part in her life
and fiction; when she and husband Max Mallowan bought a home there they would have used house agents
such as those who advertised in the various guidebooks of the times.

Rowland's Kalydor might protect and promote soft, delicate skin, but a little arsenic
will give the cultured lady of society that peaches-and-cream complexion so appealing to dukes and earls.
(Hint: Don't go overboard with the arsenic)

So, you see, I would not have any of these dozens of books had Gary Lovisi not asked for "first refusal" of books I had no intention of writing. Acquiring so many was just an outgrowth of my desire to provide readers with literary excursions that were as accurate as possible, a sense of verisimilitude that they could "take to the bank," so to speak; I'm sure I was just trying to follow the guidance of the great Isaac Asimov, who once said: "No one reads a story for scientific facts, but certainly no one reads it for errors." And I think the stories I wrote were the better for the cultural immersion of their author.

Croatian edition:  Coils of Time

German edition: Coils of Time

The new incarnation of "The Coils of
Time"...plus a few friends

On the other hand, while I might be able to pass off responsibility to another for my collection of London  guidebooks, street histories and books about the lore of London, it is, I admit, difficult to explain my affinity for Victorian novels, especially those of the sub-genre known as London shop girl stories...will the poor lass discover the truth about her inheritance...will she marry the duke who does not realize her lowly status in society...will she find happiness? I just have to know.