Jerry Murray on writing sleaze

The new issue of Earl Kemp's fanzine has some nice articles. Jerry Murray discusses writing sleaze for Kemp's legendary publishing house, Greenleaf. The article is a bit long, but interesting. I would've loved to see a bibliography of his works, though. Richard Lupoff reminiscences his way to become a publisher of his own.

Lee Raintree: Dallas, the Finnish version

I was very fascinated by what Steve Lewis wrote at the Mystery*File blog about Con Sellers, a paperback hack who wrote lots of pornography, some crime and adventure, some soapish saga, some science fiction. I noted in Steve's posting that Sellers has been credited with writing, under the pseudonym Lee Raintree, the official novelization of the Dallas TV series which I'm sure you remember so well that I don't have to find a link for it. I've been wondering about the book for some years now and been fiddling it in thrift stores and such. Now I found out who really wrote it - and as it happens, we were today on a flea market trip to Salo with Elina and I found a nice copy of the book with a dustjacket!

What? A dustjacket? You'd think the book would've been published as a paperback, but no. We take things seriously here in Finland. Con Sellers/Lee Raintree's Dallas came out here as a hardback and with a very artful cover by Pekka Loiri (who's one of the most important illustrators that has been working in Finland for some 30 years now). The book looks more like a piece of Polish poster art than a TV tie-in paperback!

Nevertheless, I've been interested in Con Sellers's career for reasons other than Dallas. The book that Steve Lewis was reading - one of the three paperbacks taking place in the Korean war - has been translated and I will be including them in the sequel of Pulpografia I'm slowly (that should read: "slooooooooooowly") putting together. Pieces like this are always very encouraging and I'd really much like to see more reviews of forgotten paperbacks of yesteryear. Maybe I could do a list of what I need and people around the world could participate in this? Right?

Here's a link discussing Sellers's a must-be-rare paperback Red Rape and here's a link seemingly containing a men's mag story by Sellers!

PS. The Finnish private eye writer I promised earlier is coming next. Unless I decide to write about Lucio Fulci first.

Origins of Batman and Manly Wade Wellman

No, they don't have anything to do with each other, I just thought I'd put them together. Here's a bunch of articles and stuff on Manly Wade Wellman that Jeremiah Rickert edited for the Oregon Literature Review, and here's an article about the origins of Batman and The Shadow's influence on the character. Both interesting stuff.

It's also interesting that both of these, Wellman and The Shadow, are relatively little known in Finland. I know only of couple short story translations from Wellman and I've never seen any Shadow story translated in Finnish, even though both are quite big cult figures in the USA. Yes, we saw the horrendous film with Alec Baldwin and in the backpages of the Thriller magazine there were some Shadow stories in the early nineties, but that's about it.