Cinema (Art of the Movies): We all love rooting for our screen heroes but they would be nothing without a great villain to go up against. Here is the second half of our countdown of forty of the finest.

Comic Books (Conan Chronology): I detailed in “How Conan Conquered the Comics Code” how The Savage Sword of Conan came to life in the space left open by a revised Comics Code Authority to become an unlikely Bronze Age hit. Savage Sword would go on to become one of the greatest 1970s creations for Marvel and one of my favorite comic books of all time.

Weird Tales (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Parasite Mansion” (Weird Tales, January 1942) by Mary Elizabeth Counselman is probably her most famous story. Counselman began publishing gentler ghost stories in 1933 for Farnsworth Wright but this story is a later one for Dorothy McIlwraith. MEC is one of a group of brilliant women who penned creepy tales for the Pulps. Counselman describes her work in This Is a Thriller (2004) :

Fiction (DMR Books): In 2020 DMR Books made arrangements to reprint Manly Wade Wellman’s final novel, Cahena, bringing it back into print for the first time in nearly thirty-five years. The contract is expiring soon, and at the end of May it will once again be unavailable.

Pulp (Comics Radio): “The Game,” published in the January 10, 1926 of Adventure, is a fun tale. It involves an American army captain stationed in California. He’s held in disdain by the rich Mexican ranchers who live in the area. This becomes a problem when he falls in love with the daughter of one of those ranchers.

Authors (Goodman Games): By virtue of his unusual last name, Roger Zelazny is last in Appendix N. And so, around the anniversary of his birth, let’s take a look at this three-time Nebula Award winner (nominated 14 times), six-time Hugo Award winner (coincidentally, also 14 nominations) and “last-but-by-no–means-least” author, focusing on his best-known work: The Chronicles of Amber.

Weird Tales (M Porcius): The classic run of Weird Tales was from 1923 to 1954 and there is no reason to refrain from extending our project backwards and forwards.  So today let’s check out some stories from the penultimate issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, the January 1940 ish.

Fiction (Skulls in the Stars): This one caught my eye a while back while I was browsing my favorite vintage gaming store site, Wayne’s Books, and after a few moments of hesitation, I had to snap it up! The book is Hiero’s Journey (1973), by Sterling E. Lanier, and my copy is a 1983 edition.

Robert E. Howard (The Silver Key): How do you review a new Robert E. Howard biography? Perhaps with the question: Do we need a new Howard biography? After all, we have two major works already: L. Sprague de Camp’s Dark Valley Destiny and Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder. There are others too, which I have not read and cannot comment on: David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography.

Pulp (SFF Remembrance): My question then is, if I’m not gonna continue my review of Triplanetary, what could I use as a substitute for the rest of the month? There were many options; as you probably know, a lot of novels and novellas were serialized in three installments. But for me the answer was obvious: I’d be returning to Robert E. Howard.

Fiction (Vintage Pop Fiction): Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black was published in 1948. Woolrich’s particular genius is that his stories were so perfectly adapted to film adaptation. Very few writers have had more stories adapted for film and TV and that made him a crucial figure in the history of pop culture. And it turned out to be almost impossible to make a bad movie from a Cornell Woolrich story.

Conan (DMR Books): I think about the Hyborian Age a lot. Maybe not quite as much as the Roman Empire, but more than ‘now n’ then’. I’ve been a student of Hyborian Age cartography since I was barely a teenager. The same goes for Hyborian Age lore, only that goes even further back. Here is something that I noticed quite few years ago, but have never commented on:

History (Jack Carr USA): THE UNVANQUISHED pulls back the curtain on a little-known shadow war that raged alongside the Civil War’s better-known battles. At its center: Lincoln’s special forces, the Jessie Scouts—Union soldiers who disguised themselves in Confederate uniforms to carry out daring raids, intelligence gathering, and high-risk missions behind enemy lines.

Cold Steel (Schola Gladiatoria): The Hittite Empire was incredibly powerful and feared in its time, and famously gained several large victories over the Egyptians. However, is it true that one of the secrets of their successes were their iron sword technology?

James Bond (MI-6 HQ): Jarvis & Ayres’ tenth James Bond dramatisation for Radio 4. The 1953 spy thriller – the first and most famous of all Ian Fleming’s novels. With a devastating final twist.

The mysterious Le Chiffre works in France as undercover paymaster of a communist-controlled trade union. He’s embezzled union funds and lost the lot. His plan – recoup the money at the gambling tables of Casino Royale, Northern France.

Fiction (George Kelley): I read plenty of Chris Offutt’s father’s SF and Fantasy novels growing up. Andy Offutt was a prolific writer and his son is certainly following in his footsteps with the Mick Hardin mystery series. I read and reviewed the first two books in the series–The Killing Hills and Shifty’s Boys–a few years ago (you can read my reviews here)

T.V. (Critical Drinker): From pride flags to ridiculous fight scenes to Ellie becoming a “dad”, Last Of Us has become a sad joke of a show.

History (Marzaat): The War of 1812 has a dim place in American memory: the burning of the White House, the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, and the irrelevant Battle of New Orleans. The theater of the war covered by this book — roughly Lake Erie, the Great Lakes to the west of it, and the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys

Crime Fiction (Crime Reads): I’ve never forgotten what John Huston wrote about the work of W.R. Burnett—“There are moments of reality in all those books that are quite overpowering. More than once they had me breaking into a sweat.” When I think of the crime novels of Charles Williams, I know exactly what he means.

History (MSN): Countries of the world had thousands of years of history that preceded the territory’s discovery, putting it on the map. The United States of America was one such nation, the discovery of which was credited to Christopher Columbus. However, the find of Venetian glass beads in Alaska attested to a trade before the arrival of Columbus.

Weird Tales (Dark Worlds Quarterly): I have found August Derleth’s work fascinating, even without the Lovecraft connection. He wrote over a hundred stories for Weird Tales. There are very few authors who can claim more — only Seabury Quinn. (For more on the most prolific writers in WT, go here.) Quinn and Derleth share more than big numbers. Both were fans of classic Horror authors and knew a thing or two about occult matters as a source for stories.

Fiction (Cabinet Obscura): The original manuscript of Robert W. Chambers’ “The Harbour-Master” surfaced recently at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, and the news brought back a memory of the strange creature — half man, half fish — encountered in the story.

Fiction (Skulls in the Stars): I definitely underestimated Francis Stevens on this one. Stevens was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948), an author of fiction that now tends to fall under the label of “dark fantasy.” Quite a long time ago, I read a complete collection of her short fiction and followed up with her 1920 novel Claimed!, about a man who stubbornly refuses to return the possession of a dark power of the seas.

Fiction (Marzaat):  As you would expect from Wollheim, this is a very science fictional weird story. It opens by noting how relatively recent our understanding of physics, chemistry, and geography is. Nuclear physics is still developing.