In 2022 Blood ‘n’ Thunder celebrates its 20th year and to commemorate this monumental achievement, Ed produced a massive "Special Edition" boasting more than 100,000 words and over 100 illustrations in 336 pages. Historian Will Murray leads off with an article on the rare one-shot supervillain pulps The Octopus and The Scorpion. Life-long fantasy fan Donald Sidney-Fryer shares his memories of old friends and fantasy/horror authors August Derleth and Fritz Leiber Jr. Film historian Richard W. Bann offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of This Gun for Hire (1942), an early film noir classic. Karl Schadow uncovers fascinating details on late ’20s and early ’30s radio programs adapted from pulp magazines. Another film historian, Daniel J. Neyer, presents a perceptive overview of the sound-era movie serials produced by Universal Pictures. Legendary pulp-art collector Robert Lesser discusses his passion for the stuff in a wide-ranging interview. Gilbert Colon catalogs myriad pulp and pop-culture references in the CBS Access series Strange Angel, which dramatized the life of space-program pioneer Jack Parsons. Five articles reprinted from 1930s issues of Writers Digest feature prominent pulp fictioneers Erle Stanley Gardner, H. Bedford-Jones, Frank Gruber, and others offering valuable tips about wordsmithing.
The highlight of the book consists of some 120 pages—more than a third of the book—which chronicle the Golden Age of Doubleday’s Crime Club, the influential mystery-fiction imprint that published novels featuring such immortal characters as The Saint, Dr. Fu Manchu, and Bulldog Drummond. Also discussed at length in this section are ’30s movies and radio programs adapted from the Crime Club novels. There is much previously unpublished information, a good deal of it culled from obscure publishing-industry trade journals. And there are complete chronological lists of all Crime Club books, films, and broadcasts from 1928 to 1940, the imprint’s Golden Age. As a fan of the B-mysteries produced in Hollywood, this is a highlight worth the cost of the book.
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