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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It was the biggest manhunt in Britain: police, the press, aeroplanes, psychics all tried to solve the disappearance. In the end nobody really knew what happened. It was a mystery without a solution.
This is the story of Agatha Christie's 11 lost days...
By 1926 Agatha Christie's reputation as a writer was starting to grow. Her sixth novel - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - had been well-received and she and her husband Archie had recently concluded a world tour. But all was not well with the marriage.
In April 1926 Agatha Christie’s mother died. Christie was very close to her: she had been home-schooled and believed her mother was clairvoyant. The shock of her sudden death hit the author hard.
Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.
Let me try and set it out.
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing.
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines.
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.
Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel...
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice.
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic?