Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Companions on the Road


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The alphabet ends at Y

51Gg8fx8UeL.SX160.SY160I have just got the sad news that author Sue Grafton passed away on the 28th of December, at the age of 77.
I enjoyed her novel, A is for Aalibi when I discovered it in the early ’90s during one of my mystery bouts.

It was her will that her novels should not be turned into movies or a TV series, and the family has announced no one will continue writing the Kinsey Milhone novels, also known as The Alphabet Series. The last novel in this solid PI series came out in 2017, Y is for Yesterday.
The alphabet stops here.

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C. Aubrey Smith

This is very very circuitous.
I was looking for details about A Night in Cairo, a 1933 movie better known as The Barbarian – a pre-Code movie that features Ramon Novarro and Myrna Loy.
The reason is simply explained.
First, of course, there is my veneration for Myrna Loy, especially in her younger roles. And second, the movie is set in a Cairo hotel that is a pretty close reconstruction of the Shephaerd’s Hotel… that is the place in which the first episode of AMARNA opens.
So, research, and Myrna Loy – and her famous bath-tub and rose petals scene…

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While I was looking for more details about The Barbarian, I checked out the cast listing, and I found a name that’s well known to lovers of old movies: C. Aubrey Smith.
And I thought, what the heck, I might as well do a post about the old chap. Continue reading →


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The Miskatonic Repository

On the 12th of this month, Chaosium announced on their blog the forthcoming Miskatonic Repository, basically doing what D&D and TORG and other roleplaying games are doing: opening the door to user-created content.

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Through the Miskatonic Repository, it will be possible to create and distribute Call of Cthulhu material on DriveThruRPG…

Here’s how it works – you create content, format it to our design template, and then upload the PDF to the site. Your work becomes part of the Miskatonic Repository content on DriveThruRPG – able to be accessed by the community and, optionally, providing a financial return to you.

Meaning it will be possible to distribute these contents as pay what you want, or for free, or for a fixed price. Continue reading →


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Crooks in history

I have just delivered a 33.000 unproofed manuscript to all those that last summer supported my crowdfunding for the fist Italian-language outing of BUSCAFUSCO.
The book is called La Storia Fatta coi Cialtroni (literally “History made with slobs”) and it is a first collection of eccentrics, adventurers, loose women and other assorted crooks and cranks across the last three centuries.

The proper book will come out (hopefully) for Christmas or (more likely) for Twelfth Night, and it was a hoot to put together and a cow to edit.
That’s why I sent off an unproofed version.

My Patreon supporters will probably get new excerpts of a second volume, and some English-language snippets of the first.

Because it’s fun.


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Jolanda and Me

It is always a pleasure receiving your author copy of a book you contributed to. When the book was edited by the likes of Franco Pezzini and Fabrizio Foni, it is an extra pleasure because you know it’s a high-quality volume.
So here I am, in my very messy library…

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… with my copy of Jolanda & Co – le Donne Pericolose, a far-ranging survey of dangerous women in popular fiction.
I contributed a piece about a classic trope, the Queen of the Lost City in fiction from Haggard to the 1930s – and took the opportunity to once again show my affection for the Egyptian Amenartas.

And now the book’s here, and it’s a beauty, and I am very proud of being part of this beautiful project.


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Earhart in the Marshall Islands?

416uDLSiwgL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_I started reading about Amelia Earhart back in university, after stumbling on a slim book called I Was Amelia Earhart, a fictionalized account of Earhart’s final days.
Most obviously fictionalized because nobody knows exactly what happened to Earhart after she disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937, together with her navigator Fred Noonan.
The book was strange, not exactly what I had expected, but what the heck, there was a mystery in there, one I had heard mentioned for ages, but never got into.
So I started reading on the subject. Continue reading →