Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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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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Burroughs’ Birthday

Screen-Shot-2013-03-19-at-6.26.45-PMSeptember the first is Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ birthday.
One of the great storytellers of the 20th century, Burroughs has left behind a corpus of narratives that are fun, entertaining, and much more sophisticated than those that never read them believe.

Like most kids in my generation I discovered Burroughs through the Tarzan movies, that were once the basic fare provided by the TV during the summer – and also, our parish cinema used to feature Tarzan in massive doses.

I discovered John Carter when I was in high school – and it caused a lot of raised eyebrows, not only from my teachers, but from my schoolmates too.
Stories set on Mars, written in the 1920s and 1930s?
C’mon.

Why don’t you read something more… realistic?

A few years more, and my Pellucidar or Venus paperbacks would be harshly criticized by friends that were “really into” cyberpunk.
More recently, poor ERB and his readers have been accused of almost everything, from violence to elephant poaching to rape, and a lot of friends frowned – once again – at my decision to re-read the Tarzan novels. As I said, a lot of people that never read Burroughs entertain a lot of weird ideas about his books. Continue reading →


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Pulp History – the legend of the False Lama

English: Ja Lama

English: Ja Lama (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They called him the Avenging Lama or the False Lama, and said he had no navel.

A number of weird characters – adventurers, maverick scientists, bona fide gods – ran footloose in that area comprised between China, Russia, Tibet and Mongolia, in the final years of 19th century and in the early 20th. Their lives and adventurea have long been one of my interests.

Among the gods – or at least demi-gods – Ja Lama is one of the least famous, and most colorful. Continue reading →


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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 →