‘The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes 2’

Okay, round 2. Some time back I did a review of the first Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes. And I was a bit disappointed. Well, a lot disappointed.

As I’ve noted, New Pulp is great, but too many slap the word “pulp” on works that have little to do with pulp fiction. And if you are going to put out a volume of “pulp heroes,” then please give us a volume of pulp heroes — not stories based more on comicbook heroes. Not stories that would better fit into a volume of adventure tales or detective tales. And certainly not postmodern tales that deconstruct the hero, or give them a lot of emotional/psychological baggage. Pulp heroes have none of that. Give us tales with larger-than-life heroes that would or could have appeared in the pulp magazines. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.  I feel I should be channeling Razorfist and his mantra of “reject modernity, embrace pulp heroism”.

So I have picked up The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes 2. Alchemy Press is a British publisher which have several anthologies, and this one is again edited by Mike Chinn. Chinn created pulp-inspired hero Damian Paladin. They have done three “pulp hero” ones so far.

This time we get 14 works by various authors, only a handful who have done what I’d call New Pulp. We even get a classic reprint from the pulps. Maybe part of the problem is that if this is a collection of British authors, they really don’t have much experience with pulp fiction, which was a largely American phenomenon. But let’s see how they do.

Oh, and the cover this time is a reprint. The piece by Les Edwards was used in the first (and only) I.V. Frost volume by Fedogan & Bremer. It is a nice work, and most appropriate for a pulp-hero collection. Let’s see if the interior lives up to the outside.

From Chico Kidd, we get “Pandora’s Box.” So if you know the legend of Pandora, you might have an idea. A sea captain in modern times (I think) finds the box and has to figure out to how close it. Sigh. We’re not off to a good start here. A new Carnacki story from Kidd would have been better.

Next, in “The Flyer” by Byrn Fowly, we get a detective story were the P.I. is asked to find a missing aviator. It turns into a bizarre sf story with UFOs. But there’s no pulp hero.

We then get a reprint from the pulps. Arch Whitehouse was a former World War I pilot who wrote for the air pulps, and one of his works was the air-pulp hero The Griffon, who is being reprinted by Altus Press/Steeger Books. So we get a proper pulp hero. This is his second story, so is reprinted in the first collection.

In Pauline E. Dungate‘s “Night Hunter,” we have a hunter named, uh, Hunter, who is after a big cat in England killing sheep. Yes, this is something people believe happens. But when a woman shows up who is a “weretiger” and tells him he’s after another “weretiger” who is also a drug smuggler, things get weird — not the least being what makes this pulp? Another no here.

We get a western tale in Marion Pittman‘s “Meeting at the Silver Dollar.” But it’s more a post-modern western, as a young man wanting to be a gunslinger hero is talked out of it by his hero, who is now a town sheriff. So, no pulp hero.

For a change, we get a post-apocalypse sf tale in Ian Hunter’s “The Monster of Gorgon.” Our “hero” for some reason wears a hood and calls himself The Wraith. But he’s not much of a pulp hero.  In fact, I had to work to figure out the “world” this was set in.

“Dragon’s Breath,” by Anne Nicholls, is set in China of the 1920s. And I’m not sure who the hero is here. We have a young woman trying to free her little brother from slavers, who is aided by a Englishman working to end them as well. We get a pirate queen. And we learn the Arab slave trader isn’t an Arab, which isn’t explained. But, again, no pulp hero.

We get another detective tale in “The Laws of Mars,” by Robert William Iveniuk. But it’s set on a Burroughs-esque Mars, and our detective is a human looking for who killed the ambassador from Earth. Again, I don’t count detectives as pulp heroes, no matter the setting, unless they are occult detectives or have some unusual qualities, which this one doesn’t.

A return from volume 1, Willaim Meikle has been writing several new stories of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Professor Challenger, and “The Penge Terror” is one of those. Another good work. I would count this as one.

In Andrew Coulthard‘s “Ula and the Black Book of Leng Yen,” we get a sword-and-sorcery story where the woman warrior Ula, teamed up with a bunch of pirates, is on a quest that turns out to be something else. It’s a good tale that would have been great in a sword-and-sorcery collection. But there’s no pulp hero. For me, I don’t view Conan-like characters as such. Or Red Sonja -types.

Martin Gately‘s “The Sons of Crystal City” was reprinted in a collection of his work I reviewed. In a story set in Detroit in the 1960s, we get vigilantes Kibosh and his partner Knighhand going against a Japanese-American gang, the Sons of the Crystal City. There is very much a Green Hornet and Kato vibe with these two, and it would be interesting in seeing further stories with them. So I’ll count this one.

Another return from volume 1, we get Adrian Cole with a Nick Nightmare story. Nightmare is a hard-boiled detective who has become an occult investigator. Cole has two collections of Nightmare stories, and this one was reprinted in the first volume. I’ll also count this one.

Next up, we get a planetary-romance tale, with a former WWI British pilot on an alien world where he is now a hero and husband to a princess, in “Do Not Go Gently” by Stuart Young. But unlike a pulp hero, he is burdened by an occurance in that war. This preys on his mind as he works to save his princess. So I can’t really count this one either.  This could have been a John Carter-type story, but it was too modern to be pulp.

Finally, we have Mike Resnick‘s “The Incarceration of Captain Nebula.” Our hero is Captain Nebula, who comes to Earth from another world to save us. But things don’t go like they should. This story could have turned out a few ways. I would have liked it to have gone a different way. So, one more.

So 14 stories. I only count four pulp-hero tales, plus the reprinted one. In volume 1, I counted three. So it’s a little better than the first volume. I don’t know if I’ll get the third volume. Frankly, Airship 27 has done better with their Mystery Men (& Women) series than Alchemy. Again, not that these story are bad, they aren’t.  It’s just that most are not pulp heroes.