STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Though it is set during World War II, it would be somewhat disingenuous to refer to  The Hill  as a war novel. Written by Ray Rigby, a veteran of British television of the 50s and 60s,  The Hill  deals not with enemies on the battlefield but instead focuses on the escalating battles of will between disgraced British soldiers held prisoner in a Libyan wartime prison, and the authorities who lord over them within these barracks.  The title refers to a manmade structure, 60’ high and 200’ long hill of sand, that has been built in the middle of the grounds in order to provide a grueling challenge for the prisoners who are forced to march up and down its sides under the intense blaze of the desert sun. Our main character is Joe Roberts, a warrant officer imprisoned for insubordination for refusing orders that he felt would get him and others killed. Our protagonists consist of the other 4 prisoners in R...

I bought this book on a whim but was slightly reluctant about starting a noir crime thriller with a length of over 400 pages. Noir crime thrillers in my experience are best when they are lean and stripped of padding (like the Parker thrillers by Donald Westlake or the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins). The mistake was mine though in assuming that  Five Decembers  was just a crime thriller, as it is far more than simply that. Five Decembers  is simultaneously an action-packed period-set noir crime thriller, a murder mystery police procedural, a hard-edged unflinching view of war, a tragic love story, a multi-cultural adventure, and an espionage-infused cat and mouse chase around the globe. In a word, this book is genuinely EPIC! It’s 1941 and Honolulu cop Joe McGrady is getting his first big case after five years in the police department, investigating a particularly brutal double murder in which one of t...

Andrew J. Offut was a prolific writer in many genres, including   science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, and even erotica. In fact, he   authored some   420+ published works of erotica under a variety of different   pen-names. But his real passion as a writer under his own name was in creating   fantasy   tales and writing books for the sword and sorcery brands originally   created by Robert E. Howard, with 3 Conan books, and a total of 6 books   featuring the   Gaelic Viking, Cormac mac Art.  Cormac is a contemporary to King   Arthur, though the British king never makes an appearance.  The Sign of the   Moonbow  is a direct sequel to  The Undying Wizard  and picks up immediately after that novel’s   resolution with Cormac and his crew having imprisoned   the powerful wizard,   Thulsa Doom, whom they keep impaled by swords to their ship’s mast to impede   his shape-shifting abilitie...

If an author were to set out with the intention of creating the anti-Conan, one couldn’t do a much better job of it than Michael Moorcock did in penning these first tales of Elric, albino ruler of the ancient island empire of Melniboné in the distant past of an alternate Earth. Physically weak and requiring the use of drugs, herbs, and sorcery to maintain his strength, Elric is a tragic figure made even more so by his symbiotic relationship to the sword, Stormbringer, a supernatural living weapon that feeds on the souls of those whom it kills. The sword is hated by Elric as it can cause him do things against his will, such as killing his beloved cousin out of drunken bloodlust in the early pages of the first of five stories contained in this volume. Melnibonéans are elf-like beings that are not fully human and have a long history rich in sorcery and divination with allegiances and pacts with many dark b...

I recently found myself sucked into the limited television series,  The Offer, which details the behind the scenes trials and tribulations involved with producing the motion picture adaptation of Mario Puzo’s hugely successful novel,  The Godfather . I was sufficiently intrigued to re-watch all three of Francis Ford Coppola’s highly regarded and Academy Award-winning films based on the book and its characters. I have always been a huge fan of the films (especially those flawless first two) but this recent viewing, along with the knowledge of what was involved in making the first one, spurred me on to pull the original book down from my shelves and finally read it for the first time ever. Originally published in 1969,  The Godfather  was a juggernaut, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks and selling over nine million copies in only two years. It transpires over the cour...

Red Sonja began life as a comic book, the creation of writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973 for Marvel’s popular  Conan series. She was partially based on a character created by Conan author Robert E. Howard,  Red Sonya of Rogatino . However, it was the Marvel Comics version that captured the imagination of young boys in the 70s with her voluptuous curves wrapped in a chain mail bikini, her sword fighting skills, and her take-no-prisoners kick-ass attitude. She finally made the leap to novels in 1981 through the combined efforts of established fantasy authors David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney.  The first book in a 6-book series,  The Ring of Ikribu , even had its prologue written by Roy Thomas, giving it his personal blessing as a proper extension of his character. What follows is a reasonably straightforward sword and sorcery adventure tale with the twist that its sword-wiel...

I   have been aware of the tales of Fritz Leiber’s towering barbarian Fafhrd and   his diminutive companion, the thief known as The Gray Mouser, since my   earliest   flirtations with the Sword and Sorcery genre going back into my mid-teens. For   whatever reason though, I never read them back then, opting   instead for Robert   E. Howard’s Conan stories and their many (and typically inferior) pastiche   imitators. In retrospect, I am glad that is the case, as I never   would have   appreciated these stories as a teenager as much as I do now as a seasoned adult   reader.  My first foray into the tales of Lankhmar—the   mythical land where the   stories transpire—comes courtesy of the fourth collection of adventures,  Swords Against Wizardry . These three   stories and one   novella all feature a world-weary, lived-in quality that makes   Lankhmar seem quite tangible. Supernatural elements and magic...

Prolific British author Kenneth Bulmer wrote over 160 novels and numerous short stories (mostly within the science fiction genre), both under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. He may be best known for the  Dray Prescott  series of sword and planet books published as Alan Burt Akers. I didn’t know when I started this book that it is actually the second in a three-book series detailing the adventures of Odan, a Conan-like demigod in a revisionist version of Bronze-age Mesopotamia.  The mid-70s saw huge interest in the concept of extraterrestrial alien visitation in ancient history that directly influenced human culture. This theory was popularized by books, of which the first and most famous was Erich von Daniken’s  Chariots of the Gods . Clearly this inspired Bulmer as he embraces this concept as the source of the origin of the gods who visit earth in Whetted Bronze . And to be honest, it wa...

Gardner F. Fox was a highly prolific writer who worked in multiple genres and formats, from short stories, to novels, to comic books. In fact, it is estimated that he wrote over 4,000 comics stories, 1,500 for DC Comics alone. So, it was with some excitement that I waded into the first of four books in a series of sword and sorcery novels featuring the mighty Kyrik, a barbarian swordsman in the mold of Conan, but with blond hair (or tawny as we’re often reminded) and green eyes.  What I unfortunately discovered was a poorly constructed pastiche of Conan that lacked depth, characterization, or compelling plot. From the moment when Kyrik is released from a thousand years of bondage, having been imprisoned in a small statue of himself, all he seems to care about is drinking, fighting, and bedding down with every woman he sees. Furthermore, he’s just not that smart. We are reminded at every turn that everything ...

Long before the term Grimdark became a specific sub-genre of sword and sorcery, there was Karl Edward Wagner and his novels and short stories featuring his anti-hero, Kane, a hulking, amoral, mystic swordsman. Cursed with immortality, the red-haired and bearded brute is a wholly unique blend of Conan, Elric, and Barry Sadler’s Casca as filtered through H.P. Lovecraft. His immortality has enabled Kane to gain knowledge beyond most mortals which he puts to use in areas of warfare and arcane sorceries.  At their core, the Kane books and stories belie the fact that Wagner was  fundamentally a writer of horror stories. There is pitch black darkness and sense of foreboding nihilism that builds a palpable dread as the plot of Dark Crusade gets underway. It takes a while for things to get established as the reader is forced to wade through some needless history and politics involving the kingdom of Shapeli bef...