Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Other People’s Pulp: The Thirty-Nine Steps

buchan-thirty-nine-steps-bookcoverLast week it was the centenary of the first book publication of John Buchan‘s The Thirty-Nine Styeps.
Buchan’s book about a single man – Richard Hannay – on the run from both unknown enemies and the authorities, and trying to solve a mystery in order to save his own life, became the template for a lot of subsequent “thrillers” – a genre which Buchan called “shocker”, and that he contributed in creating, together with Erskine Childres.

If we are to believe Wikipedia (how could we not?), Buchan

described a “shocker” as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened.

Sounds pulpy enough, right?
So influential was the book, that most of us today discovered it through one of its movie adaptations – possibly Hitchcock’s from 1935.
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War & Peace in Afghanistan

cover74505-mediumI got an advance reader copy of Melissa Burch’s My Journey through War and Peace.
I got it not by some strange chance, but because I requested it.
What caught me was the tag-line: Explorations of a young film-maker, feminist and spiritual seeker.
For the uninitiated, Melissa Burch was a young camera operator and reporter during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
So I expected the book to be about the sort of exploration that I like – a first-hand account of a war-torn sector of the map that has been war-torn for most of our history.
What I got was much more.

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Born Free

Born_Free1When I was a kid, I used to watch a TV show called Born Free.
It featured Gary Collins and Diana Muldaur and it was based – I learned much later – on the books by Joy Adamson, an Austrian-born naturalist and writer who in Africa, together with her husband George Adamson, took in three orphaned lion cubs and kept on of them, a lioness called Elsa.
The series lasted only 13 episodes – and that sounds weird to me, because I seem to recall it lasted forever.

The show was everything a kid of about ten could want – it featured African landscapes, wild beasts and a mix of adventure and positive messages. It was environment-friendly, and green before there was a Green party. Now I’ve been told they don’t broadcast it anymore, here in Italy, because it is not politically correct enough, whatever that means. The sort of thing that makes me feel old1.

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Other People’s Pulp: Krimi, Giallo & Slasher (Part 4), a Guest Post

91Last installment of this lengthy but fun overview of the connections between Krimi, Giallo and Slasher movies.
The previous three episodes can be found here, here and here.
And we are about to close with a bang.

But before the bang, I must once again thank Lucia Patrizi for her contribution, and wish you all a happy reading.

Last time we discovered Mario Bava‘s Reazione a Catena…

And yet, if analyzed in depth and compared to the Giallos by Argento (and in part with those by Martino), it is easy to notice how little of the formula is maintained, and what seeds of the future Slasher movie it carries within its frames.

So, let’s do it!
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