Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Other People’s Pulp


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Other People’s Pulp: Krimi, Giallo & Slasher – a Guest Post (Part 2)

91Last week, we started discussing the strange legacy of the pulps, of German Kriminalfilm and of Italian Giallo on the development of slasher movies.
Lucia Patrizi, webmistress of the blog Il Giorno degli Zombi1, horror expert and an accomplished writer on her own right, is giving us a preview of her forthcoming essay on slasher cinema.
In case you missed the first installment, you can find it here.
Nowe, it’s time to meet the Master – and see how Mario Bava created a whole new genre of cinema.

Enjoy!

Continue reading →


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Other People’s Pulps: Krimi, Giallo & Slasher – a Guest Post (part 1)

91I was asked by a reader, a few weeks ago, about a post on the European tradition of crime movies and “Giallo”, and the connections thereof with pulp stories and later slasher films.
Great topic – but I’m not the right man for the job.
The right man is, actually, a woman – my friend Lucia Patrizi, that blogs the movie blog Il Giorno degli Zombi, and is currently writing a book about the evolution of horror movies. I asked her for a guest post, and she was so kind she donated the chapter about Kriminalromance and Giallo from her forthcoming essay.
The text – quickly translated by yours truly (and any mistake is solely my responsibility) – will be published as a series of posts.
Here goes the first.
Enjoy! Continue reading →


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Lamb’s Birthday, too

lambdesk… and, as we are talking about birthdays, today is also Harold Lamb‘s birthday1.
Master storyteller and a giant in the field of historical fiction, Lamb was apparently so successful with his biographies of famous characters from the past – Genghis Khan, Hannibal, Tamerlane etc. – that his biographies actually pushed his narrative work into oblivion.
Much of Lamb’s catalog has been reprinted recently – and he’s certainly an author worth discovering.

We’ll have to talk about him, in the future.
For starters, here’s a small gallery of (some of) his books…

 

  1. yes, Burroughs and Lamb share a birthday – it gets you thinking, right? ↩


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Other people’s pulps – Con Games (and a Top Five)

The mother of one of my pals from university was an incredible woman. When I met her she was in her seventies, tall, extremely elegant, terribly witty.
Her husband was a judge, one day we got to talk about crime1.
While she was tough on crime, she admitted she admired very much pick-pockets (“They need nerves of steel to do what they do on a crowded bus!”) and big time con-men.
Not the kind that swindle old ladies out of their pension, mind you. Big time con-men, the sort that can drain up a company accounts and vanish into tin air.482124
“It takes a lot of intelligence to do that,” she said.
I have to agree.
And as a lover of crime novels, I like grifter and heist stories much more than straight murder mysteries.

Mind you, I like a homicide investigation like the next guy, but a good, large scale, complicated swindle is my fave sort of thing.
It’s a noirish thing, really. I think the first book of this sort I ever read was Len Deighton‘s Only when I larf, and then Jim Thompson’s The Grifters came following suit. Continue reading →


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Other People Pulps – Not a Country for Pulps

pulp_coverAs I probably mentioned already, I’ve been a roleplayer for the last 25+ years – having started to play seriously with Call of Cthulhu in the mid-80s.
It will come as no surprise that I like very much pulp-themed RPGs – home-brew stuff run on Savage Worlds, mostly, but also games such as Adventure!, or Hollow Earth Expeditions.
I like the genre, and I can slip quite easily into pulp-adventure-mode.
It’s fun.
My players often have a lot less fun.
Fact is – being Italian, they lack the pulp background.
They are pulp-illiterate.
And lacking the pulp culture, they have a hard time coping with the stories I pitch at them – with the characters, the situations, the mood.
The problem is similar to what would happen should I pitch one of my stories to most Italian publishers.
This is not a country for pulps. Continue reading →


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Other People’s Pulps: Italian Speculative Classics

Genre fiction is often considered as a second-class form of literature, if literature at all.
This stigma was particularly strong in Italy, where a cultural tradition dating from the late 19th century – and probably influenced by catholic culture – considered science and technology, as well as imaginative fiction, as unworthy of serious consideration.
In this realist desert, few authors and publishers flourished.

Here’s a collection of classic covers and illustrations from that heroic age, courtesy of the Acheron Books Pinterest boards.

Enjoy!


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Other People’s Pulps: The Spanish Master

viscontiArnaldo Visconti was probably the greatest pulp writer in the Spanish Language.
He was really Pedro Víctor Debrigode Dugi (1914-1982), but he was also known as P.V.Debrigaw, Arnold Briggs, Geo Marvik, Peter Briggs, V. Debrigaw, and Vic Peterson.
His production, published between the 1940s and the early 1970s, is simply enormous – consisting mostly of historical adventures: westerns, pirate yarns, exotic adventures and swashbucklers.
And while I am trying to get a fix on some of his works to offer an informed opinion, here’s a very small gallery of some of his covers. Continue reading →