Today in pulp... let me introduce you to Scotland Yard's most famous detective*: Geisterjäger John Sinclair!
(*In the German speaking world)
John Sinclair is a Scotland Yard Chief Inspector who has been battling all manner of undead and demonic creatures since 1973.
He's a busy chap...
Chief Inspector Sinclair is a direct descendent of Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. He is also the Son of the Light due to his exceptional demon fighting skills.
Sinclair reports into Sir James Powell, head of Scotland Yard's special division for fighting supernatural crime. Along with Inspector Suko - a Shaolin trained martial arts expert - Sinclair travels the world in his battle with the demonic and the possessed.
John Sinclair is armed with a Beretta pistol full of silver bullets and a silver cross made by Ezekiel. Suko also has a whip made from the skin of a demon. With these they fight the good fight across the world against the forces of darkness.
Geisterjäger John Sinclair first appeared in 1973 in Bastei's Gespenster-Krimi series...
...but he proved to be such a popular character that in 1978 Bastei gave him his own series.
Sinclair does has had a few recurring foes, such as Doctor Tod and Der Schwarze Tod...
...but with several hundred stories in print the Geisterjäger has fought everyone: from Dracula to killer clowns!
Helmut Rellergerd, aka Jason Dark, wrote most of the Sinclair novels. Born in Dahle he trained as a chemical technician before a spell in the Bundeswehr In 1966, where he wrote his first stories for Bastei.
He was soon working permanently as a horror writer and was pretty busy doing it: Bastei wanted a John Sinclair story every week, and since 1978 that's what Rellergerd (later assisted by a few other writers) has been producing.
John Sinclair has featured in a number of audio adventures as well as a TV show and a TV movie. As a demon hunter there's plenty of life left in the old dog yet!
I'm pleased to say that Helmut Rellergerd is still writing, knocking out the stories on his old Olympia typewriter. Long may he continue.
Geisterjäger John Sinclair, Twitter salutes you!
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Today I'm looking back at the work of British graphic designer Abram Games!
Abram Games was born in Whitechapel, London in 1914. His father, Joseph, was a photographer who taught him the art of colouring by airbrush.
Games attended Hackney Downs School before dropping out of Saint Martin’s School of Art after two terms. His design skills were mainly self-taught by working as his father’s assistant.
Today I'm looking back at the career of English painter, book illustrator and war artist Edward Ardizzone!
Edward Ardizzone was born in Vietnam in 1900 to Anglo-French parents. Aged 5 he moved to England, settling in Suffolk.
Whilst working as an office clerk in London Ardizzone began to take lessons at the Westminster School of Art in his spare time. In 1926 he gave up his office job to concentrate on becoming a professional artist.
Today in pulp I look back at the Witchploitation explosion of the late 1960s: black magic, bare bottoms and terrible, terrible curtains!
Come this way...
Mainstream occult magazines and books had been around since late Victorian times. These were mostly about spiritualism, with perhaps a bit of magic thrown in.
But it was the writings of Aleister Crowley in English and Maria de Naglowska in French and Russian that first popularised the idea of 'sex magick' in the 20th century - the use of sexual energy and ritual to achieve mystical outcomes.
Between 1960 and 1970 Penguin Books underwent several revolutions in cover layout, at a time when public tastes were rapidly changing.
Today in pulp I look back at 10 years that shook the Penguin!
Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935, aiming to bring high-quality paperbacks to the masses for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. Lane began by snapping up publishing rights for inexpensive mid-market novels and packaging them expertly for book lovers.
From the start Penguins were consciously designed; Lane wanted to distinguish his paperbacks from pulp novels. Edward Young created the first cover grid, using three horizontal bands and the new-ish Gill Sans typeface for the text.
Today in pulp: a tale of an unintentionally radical publisher. It only produced 42 books between 1968-9, but it caught the hedonistic, solipsistic, free love mood of the West Coast freakout scene like no other.
This is the story of Essex House...
Essex House was an offshoot of Parliament Press, a California publishing company set up by pulp artist Milton Luros after the market for pulp magazines began to decline. It specialised in stag magazines sold through liquor stores, to skirt around US obscenity publishing laws.
By the 1960s Parliament Press was already selling pornographic novels through its Brandon House imprint, though these were mostly reprints or translations of existing work. Luros was interested in publishing new erotic authors, and set up Essex House to do just that.
Today in pulp... one of my favourite SF authors: Harry Harrison!
Harry Harrison was born Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925. He served in the US Army Air Corps during WWII, but became disheartened with military life. In his spare time he learned Esperanto.
Harrison started his sci-fi career as an illustrator, working with Wally Wood on Weird Fantasy and Weird Science up until 1950. He also wrote for syndicated comic strips, including Flash Gordon and Rick Random.