Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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Five by Dodge

More ebooks – it’s been a while since I last talked about pulp.

David Dodge (1910-1974) is one of my favorite authors when it comes to thriller crime fiction.
Dodge is universally known as the author of To Catch a Thief, from which Alfred Hitchcock made his classic caper movie featuring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, but in fact had a huge catalog of titles, most of which are hard to find and have never been reprinted in these last forty years.

To Catch A Thief

Apparently, Dodge – an accountant with a passion for amateur theater – had started his writing career on a dare: when he had complained about the poorly written crime novel he was reading on the beach, claiming he could do better, his wife Elva bet him five dollars that he could not.

David and Elva Dodge, Princeton, NJ, 1956

In 1941, David Dodge wrote Death and Taxes, and won his five bucks. Continue reading →


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Hard Case Crime in ebook

The good news is that I have discovered that finally a batch of Hard Case Crime novels are available in ebook format.
The bad news is that now I’ll spend a lot of money on Hard Case Crime ebooks. And I have already started, actually.

thieves fall outYesterday night, to give myself a prize for a job well done – and for discovering it was only Wednesday while I thought it was Friday already – I got me a copy of Gore Vidal’s Thieves Fall Out, a “lost” pulp novel the American writer originally published as Cameron Kay in 1953.

I had set my sights on the paperback a while back, but it was way too expensive for my tastes – especially considering I have a love/hate relationship with Vidal.

But then… the plot seems fun – a story of scoundrels abroad. And an Egyptian setting.
Also, the novel has been compared to the work of Eric Ambler – and that’s high praise as far as I’m concerned.
And the cover is absolutely fantastic – as per Hard Case tradition.
All this, for one buck? C’mon – how could I resist?
Now I have something for the weekend. I’ll let you know my impressions.

And as I said, it’s very likely that more titles will follow.
Don’t you hate it too, when that happens…?


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The Desert Road to Turkestan

DOL2Last night, I dug out the only Owen Lattimore book I own – 1928 The Desert Road to Turkestan.
Of all the adventurers on the Silk Road I discovered during my researches, Lattimore is probably the one I have more dear.
Maybe it’s because he was subject to much injustice, or because he was a keen observer and a charming storyteller.

Owen Lattimore was born in the USA in 1900. He was raised in China and educated in Switzerland and England. Unable to afford a university education, he got back in China, studied Chinese and was employed by a British commercial firm as jack of all trades and troubleshooter.
A load of wool blocked somewhere in the wild at the whim of a warlord? Send in Lattimore.
He actually liked it. Continue reading →


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One day inside a book?

I was looking for a good idea for a post, today after lunch, and then my friend Claire came to the rescue.

“Imagine you can spend a day inside a book,” was the prompt – one of those things going around on Facebook, you know, that a friend passed on to me. “What would you choose?”

Aha!
Now that looks like the sort of easy thing that could land me a post in ten minutes!

fantasie121zv4

But then I started thinking – if not along the same lines tha Claire follows in her own post, along pretty similar tracks.
One day inside a book? Continue reading →


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The Swift One: El Borak

el borak 2Today is Robert E. Howard’s birthday, and it seems a nice thing to do to post something about one of the most popular and influential pulp authors of all time.

I discovered Howard – I think I already mentioned it – with Conan the Adventurer, when I was fifteen or thereabouts.
But I’m not here to praise Conan.
In his brief career Howard wrote a huge number of stories, and created an army of characters, and one in particular I always liked, and I consider fitting for Karavansara’s themes and topics.

His name is Francis Xavier Gordon, but they call him El Borak. Continue reading →


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Three on the Silk Road

51DHEESMHZL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_OK, so I decided to complicate my life some more.
And this time I’m complicating my life for you, dear Karavansara readers.
I hope you are moved by  this.

As I mentioned, one of the “minor” (but not minor at all) gifts I got for Christmas is Stuart Stevens‘ Night Train to Turkestan.
That is an attempt at retracing the road followed by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in their famous China-to-India (by way of Afghanistan) journey, in 1935.

Now, the interesting bit is – both Fleming and Maillart wrote about their experiences on the road.

Continue reading →


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The last flight of the Gremlin Special

margaret hastingsThe lady portrayed here by the side is Corporal Margaret Hastings, WAC.
She was one of the survivors of the Gremlin Special1, a C-47 Skytrain that, on the 15th of May 1945 crashed in unexplored Shangri-La valley, New Guinea.

Margaret Hastings, described as a woman that “liked her liquor, in moderation, and her men, also in moderation”, had apparently joined the service to escape a life of spinsterhood in her hometown.
She was thirty, and beautiful – spinsterhood?

This seems to have turned into a women & airplanes sort of week, so, why not take a look at the adventure of the Gremlin Special? Continue reading →