Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: adventure


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Pulp History: nobody does it better

Me and my big mouth!
I promise a short post in a few hours.
Yes, you genius… about what?!

About the pulps, and adventure, and exotic locales, of course – because that’s what we deal in, here on Karavansara.

And when it comes to adventure, and the pulps, to me nothing beats reality.
It’s a tough statement from someone writing books with tentacles on the cover, but it’s one of my most rock-solid certainties: no matter how good is your pulp, the real world can trump that.
In fact, to be a good writer, you have to be as outrageous, unlikely, absurd and strange as only reality can be.
It takes practice.

running_the_show5One of the best places in which to practice is history – not so much the slam-bang, big numbers history of great men and nations, but the small-scale, local, oft-forgotten, “useless” sort of history.

Consider, if you will, a book like Running the Show, by Stephanie Williams, roughly 500 pages of paperback dealing with those faceless bureaucrats that managed the affairs of the British Empire.
Boring, right?
Not so.
In this globetrotting overview of the men (and women) that ran the Empire, we find no end of adventures, madness, tragic death, slapstick, espionage, two-fisted diplomacy and the natives are restless tonight.
Not faceless paper-pushers but often young men in search of their place in the world, the heroes (and villains) of this book are a good example of the way in which history can hit you with a curved ball when it comes to plausibility.

It’s good – and thanks goodness, there’s a lot of books dealing with this shadier, pulpier side of history.
I should know – I wrote one.

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Companions on the Road – Martin & Osa Johnson

Sometimes it feels like a conspiracy.

lMartin Johnson was the cook on Jack London’s Snark during the ship’s two-year cruise in the Pacific.
Johnson put together a sideshow with photos and stuff from that adventure, and made a living travelling through rural America.
In Kansas, he met a young woman called Osa Leighty.
They fell in love, got married, and became adventurers.
It was 1910.

In the following years, Martin and Osa Johnson were captured by cannibals on tropical islands in the Pacific, explored Africa, met European royalty and assorted savages, and made lots of documentaries, which were extremely popular.
Much of the material in the films – some of which were among the first talkie documentaries ever produced – was later remixed and restyled as a series of TV documentaries in the ’50s.
Continue reading →


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Hunting sunken treasures

The first comment I got when I shouted “Wow! This is just great!” was along the lines of “Sounds like the sort of junk Clive Cussler writes.”
Talk about feeling alienated.
But let’s proceed with order.

1111bigOne of the few perks of living smack in the middle of Southern Piedmont is, in two hours I can be on the Cote d’Azure.
The sun, the sea, acres and acres of nubile, scantly clad young women stretching on the beaches…
And I normally end up in some antiquarian bookstore.
They even publish (or used to) a map of antiquarian bookshops in the Nice area.

So a few years back I was browsing the stalls of one such small Alladin caves of librarian wonder, and I caught me the three volumes of the Born Free series, first edition, and to round up the bill, I threw in a weird little book called Treasure Diving Holidays, by Jane and Barney Crile.
The book – a 1954 first edition – once bought and brought home, was placed on a high shelf together with other sea-oriented books, and soon forgotten.
Which is all right – I’m quite convinced books should be read at the right moment, so sometimes forgetting them on a high shelf is just what’s needed.
Then, when the time comes… I need some color and information for some seafaring stories I’m planning, and I go and rediscover this hidden gem.

What’s it all about? Continue reading →


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The Master of Dragons

Henry Bedford-Jones was known as King of the Pulps – the sort of man that writes two novels at the same time, working on two typewriters*.
Bedford-Jones loved Dumas, and if historical adventure was probably is preferred field, he also wrote any other kind of story he was able to sell to the pulps.
A real pulp writer, he had a dozen pen names.

One of the best, earlier finds of this year is the reprints of H. Bedford-Jones stories by pulp specialists Black Dog Books, which complement the meagre selection of stories in the public domain found through the Gutenberg Project and its Australian counterpart.

The Master of Dragons collects the stories starring O’Neil and Burke, two American adventurers that find themselves in the employ of the self-styled Governor of Szechwan in the 1920s. Continue reading →


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The Treasure Hunter (2009)

Set in “the great desert northwest of China”, The Treasure Hunter, a Taiwanese fantasy adventure feature from 2009, is a fun movie with some minor drawbacks.

The story steals happily from a number of classics – from Indiana Jones movies and the Mummy franchise (unscrupulous archeologists, lost cities), with major nods towards Romancing the Stone (the shy woman involved in an outrageous plot), Highlander (some pretty Kurgan-ish warriors), the old Army of Darkness (a certain Raimi-esque use of camerawork), to old Spaghetti-western (costumes, sets). Continue reading →