Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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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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A Jack Vettriano Gallery

I like Jack Vettriano’s art a lot.
Probably because it reminds me of the atmospheres of old pulp stories, and the style of certain old paperback covers. And I mean that as a compliment.
A self-taught former miner from Scotland, Vettriano is now one of the highest paid artists in the field.
I love a painting of his, called The Road to Nowhere.
It’s this…

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So here’s a gallery of some of my faves from this wonderful painter.
(as usual, click on an image to see it enlarged)
Enjoy!

VLUU L110 / Samsung L110


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The Barbarian, 1933

“In the older days, they’d have built the Nile for you. Nowadays, films have become travelogues and actors, stuntmen.”
(Bette Davis, while filming “Death on the Nile”, 1978)

The_Barbarian_FilmPosterAnd so, on Christmas night, I went and watched The Barbarian, also known as A Night in Cairo. Not exactly a Christmas movie, as we’ll see. The movie features Myrna Loy and Ramon Novarro, and was directed by Sam Wood in 1933.
While the name might not ring any bell, Wood was the man behind the camera for A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Raffles, and The Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Not an amateur, in other words.
The movie is a remake of a previous, silent film, called The Arab (1915), and based on a play of the same title.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to see the movie because of the reconstruction of the Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. Because, true to the Bette Davis quote above, this pre-Code movie was really shot in a time in which the studios recreated whole chunks of exotic locations in their backlot. Continue reading →


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The Curse of Fantomah

This is a strange story.
It connects a pulp bad guy from 1929, a Japanese superhero from 1931, an American superhero from 1940, and an Italian master criminal from 1964.
The lot, because of my idea of doing something new with Fantomah.

Fantomah (1)

Fantomah, as you’ll remember, was the jungle queen/daughter of the pharaohs created in 1940 by Fletcher Hanks,later variously re-imagined, and currently on the public domain. In her original incarnation she was a statuesque blonde that turned into a gray-blue skinned, skull-faced super-witch.
Now here’s my idea: in AMARNA1, one of the characters is a pulp magazine reader. He always carries a folded pulp mag in his back pocket. So, I thought I’ll make him read my stories about Fantomah, as published by Spicy Oriental Adventures (a title that, as far as I know, never existed). The idea, in other words, is to write and publish a serial-within-the serial. Short 3000-words episodes presenting my own take on Fantomah, as explained in a previous post.
It sounded easy, it sounded fun.
I would call this serial-within-a-serial The Curse of Fantomah.
Then, I started thinking about Fantaman, and my project started spiraling out of control. Continue reading →