READING REPORT: Sailor Tom & Reconcile

 

I had a pretty impressive - for me, anyway - weekend of reading. I finished two books (one cover-to-cover in a handful of hours) and started a third.

First up was Mark Finn's homage to Robert E Howard's Sailor Steve Costigan: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey. 

One of the big differences between Sharkey and Costigan is that Sharkey was a real professional boxer in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Finn has simply given him, via the use of "tall tales", a pulpy life outside the ring and past his retirement.

Another big difference is that Sharkey's two-fisted adventures are much wilder and weirder than Costigan's, this collection includes weird science, ghost stories, battling robots, dinosaurs, and monsters (of several stripes). 

Because of his time in the ring, Sharkey is also a celebrity and is often recognised on his various travels, freely giving out autographs to his admirers.

Each story is short and succinct, but told with great gusto by Finn channelling Sharkey's voice.

My next read - which thankfully only took a couple of hours - was far less inspiring: Bruce Campbell's Western novella Reconcile. 

I hoped the A.I. art of the cover was just a glitch, a slight error of judgement. But the more I read of this short work the more I began to wonder if A.I. hadn't also infected the text within as well.

The adventure is set in Oregon in 1866 and within a few pages we meet a tribe of Northern Paiute Indians... playing (American) football!

If it had been kickabout proper football it wouldn't have stuck out so much like a sore thumb.

So I had to stop and check: American Football was first played between two college teams in November, 1869.

From there, it just kind of went downhill. There's no sense of place and direction for all the scenes that unfold, so when some crash into others it strains credibility.

If only there had been a map included, I might have had a better grasp of how close everyone was supposed to be, and what directions headed where. 

After his family is 'accidentally' massacred by an enraged Paiute, elderly engineer, George (who I think is who Campbell is portraying on the cover) teams up with an ex-army scout Joe (half-Paiute/half-white).

Togther, they seek to thwart the impending war between the natives and the real bad guys, the US Government forces who have just erected a new fort in Paiute land and want to corral the original inhabitants of the land into a reservation (or simply kill them).

The plot is pretty pedestrian, but I couldn't help wondering if the story (which gets quite gung-ho in its finale) wasn't recycled from an old Xena, Brisco County Jnr, or Jack Of All Trades script, because it can't decide if it's cartoon craziness or deadly serious (for instance, the brutal slaying of George's family is quite horrific, but the ultimate fate of the fort's commander almost comes with built-in Looney Tunes sound effects).

A disappointment in the wake of Campbell's excellent series of memoirs, nevertheless Reconcile was a quick read and that freed me up to start Cruise of Shadows.

This is an anthology of weird fiction by Jean Ray, an author I only recently learned about from the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast.

I'm two-and-a-half stories in... and it's very weird. But in a good, Lovecraftian way. 

A WESTERN NOVELLA BY BRUCE 'ASH' CAMPBELL!!!

A new arrival for my "to be read" shelf has immediately leapfrogged to the head of the queue, and will be the next book I crack open once I've finished Mark Finn's Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey .

So, what is this tome of great literature, I hear you ask...

It's only a freakin' Western novella written by the B-movie legend Bruce Campbell.

That's Ash from the Evil Dead franchise, Autolycus from Xena: Warrior Princess, Pizza Poppa in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Winkie Gate Keeper in Oz the Great and Powerful, and countless other roles: the most pertinent of which is, possibly, the titular lead in all 28 episodes of the weird western The Adventures of Brisco County Jnr.

This isn't Campbells first book, as he's written a number of humorous autobiographical memoirs, as well as a couple of satirical works and a political thriller.

But this is a Western! 

Released just at the tail-end of the month-long window for the annual June On The Range event, sadly, I didn't learn of Reconcile until too late for that reading challenge.

But, never mind, the 105-page novella is now in my greasy mitts.

The back cover blurb, which is also the promotional text for the book, reads as follows:

"My mother, Joanne, loved the Western genre. She read every Zane Grey novel he ever wrote. I know because I drew stick-figure cartoons in the margins of her massive paperback collection.

"Westerns, by nature, are riddled with clichés – the steely-eyed, unshaven hero protecting innocent pioneers from brutal, unforgiving savages.

"With Reconcile, I tried to sidestep many of the cliché elements we've read or seen in Westerns for a generation. Reality isn't tidy or reliable. Reality has unpleasant circumstances that don't always resolve themselves like they do in the movies. In the heat of battle, the "good guys" and "bad guys" aren't so easily defined.

"In the sprawling history of the American West, I'd like to think a different kind of story was possible, and I hope you enjoy it."

So, do I have a clue what it's about? Nope. But it's a Western... written by Bruce Campbell. That's all I need to know. And that's why it's at the top of my TBR list!

PS. I know the cover looks like AI, but I have read that it is genuine art from a friend of Bruce's that has been "modified" by AI (I guess to put his head on the main character?).

Yes, I think it's disappointing if AI was involved in the production of this cover, even in an apparently, "small" way. Perhaps future editions will feature real, untampered, AI-free art? That would be nice.

What's To Be Read?

My current "to be read" (TBR) books

As a notoriously slow reader these days, I have been inspired by Booktube (particularly Michael K Vaughan's channel) to really try and pull my finger out this year.

Last week, I actually finished two books: Philip Reeve's latest thrilling World of Mortal Engines offering, Bridge of Storms, and then a short history of the fascinating Mansa Musa, the 14th Century emperor of Mali.

Although I had a vague knowledge of this celebrated - and incredibly wealthy - ruler, it wasn't until he popped up as a character in Apple TV's criminally underappreciated Time Bandits series that my interest was truly piqued. 

I'm currently reading Mark Finn's Sailor Steve Costigan homage Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey, but this week's potentially record-breaking, red-alert heatwave (thanks global warming) is putting the kibosh on reading as its scrambling my already shaky concentration.

Nevertheless, I still have a "to be read" collection of four books by the side of the bed that I am determined to get as soon as possible.

This is, of course, on top of any new comics that arrive and my concerted effort to read the core rulebook of the Dragonbane roleplaying game, which has really taken my fancy of late.

A mix of novels and short story collections, the books on my reading list (as pictured above) are:

• Cruise of Shadows, a collection of early-to-mid 20th Century weird fiction by Jean Ray, a Belgium author I hadn't heard of until a few weeks ago when the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast did a breakdown of his short story, The Mainz Psalter, which is included in this collection. It was such a mind-blowing, Lovecraftian tale that I knew immediately I had to read the full thing and some more of Ray's work. I have to thank Rachel for getting this for me as a present, which arrived this morning and immediately jumped to the top of my TBR list.
• The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison. A post-apocalyptic take set on Britain's South Coast. Like the subsequent books on the list, I know nothing really about this story except that its marketing on the Blackwells book store site made it seem really interesting And this special edition - signed by the author - includes a bonus short story.
• Corpse Priest by Carson Winter. I think this one might have been mentioned on Michael K Vaughan's booktube channel, but the fact that it's described on the back cover as a mix of "sword and sorcery and cosmic horror" makes it sound like just the sort of thing I'd like.
• Warriors of The Boundless by Mike Chinn. This was a Christmas present, although I can't for the life of me remember where I first heard of it. It sounds like something Michael Moorcock would have written in the '70s or '80s. The back cover blurb talks of infinite worlds, bizarre lifeforms, and "now something is wrong, something is not where it should be and needs to be returned by any means necessary". The book contains six interconnected stories of epic fantasy.

DING! DING! ROUND TWO!

Yes, I am wearing my Conan The Barbarian t-shirt. 

Just over a year since the first glorious volume arrived from the Robert E Howard Foundation Press (via Amazon, I must confess), the second hardback collection of the prodigious pulp writer's boxing stories is now in my hands.

And on the weekend of 40th annual Howard Days over in Cross Plains, Texas, no less.

I was particularly keen to get my mitts on Fists of Iron: Round Two because it's wall-to-wall Sailor Steve Costigan yarns. 

Although Howard is best known for his swords-and-sorcery stories featuring the likes of Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn: as I've declared many times before, Sailor Steve Costigan is my favourite of Howard's many characters. 

That's Steve and his bulldog Mike on the cover

This is only the second volume of a planned four-volume series of Howard's boxing stories. And money - and space - willing I'm all in for the complete set.

I'm not generally what you'd call a sporty person, but there's a definite fascination in Howard's journalistic, blow-by-blow descriptions of boxing bouts, be they legal or otherwise. 

And Costigan is a charming, hard-drinking, goofy lunk, prone to being led into chaotic misadventures by a pretty face, and who resolves his problems with his fists and his feisty bulldog, Mike. I mean, what's not to enjoy?

Complementing Fists of Iron: Round Two, I also picked up  the self-published Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey by Howard scholar Mark Finn (he even wrote the introduction to Fists of Iron: Round Two!).

Finn's homage to Sailor Steve imagines a boisterous, pulp adventure-packed life for the very real, early 20th Century, boxer Tom Sharkey after he officially hung up his gloves. Sharkey, I believe, was an inspiration for Howard when penning the Sailor Steve tales. 

Mark Finn also wrote Blood & Thunder, the highly-regarded biography of Robert E Howard.

Sailor Steve has already found a home on my Robert E Howard shelf