Tag Archives: occult detectives

HOLMES & THE DAUNTLESS DETECTIVE BOOKSHELF

August 10, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

In which Sherlock Holmes goes canonical with MX Publishing, goes speculative with Belanger Books, and finally goes downright supernatural with Willie Meikle. We also call in on Vernon Loder’s 1928 classic murder novel The Mystery at Stowe, and revisit The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers. So today’s article is for anyone who like a good crime or detective story. Unless you insist it has to be set on the mean streets of Glasgow with an alcoholic Scottish police officer barely hanging on to his job. We might have one of those in a later article, mind you…

The Great Detective

So, first out of the cells is Sherlock Holmes, with two huge collections of new Holmes tales coming up this Autumn. In the interests of full disclosure, we note that John Linwood Grant, the old reprobate, has stories in both, but you can always pull his stories out and feed them to the cat.

The ideas behind these particular anthologies were too cool to miss out on, which is why he chanced it. Authentic Holmes with a special twist, and a new version of Wellsian fiction. Who could resist?

1) Eliminate The Impossible

For MX Publishing, the Holmes scholar and editor David Marcum has put together two volumes of new stories under the title Eliminate the Impossible. These are Volumes VII and VIII of the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – forty eight new tales specially written for Halloween.

All the stories are set in the canonical world of the great detective, with the stimulating proviso that these are cases which initially appear to have some supernatural element – until Holmes is through with them. JLG contributed ‘The Second Life of Jabez Salt’, a curious tale about a hanged man who has apparently returned to threaten those who turned on him…

Royalties will go to Stepping Stones, a school for children with learning difficulties) for specific projects such as the new literary program. The Kickstarter has already exceeded its goals, but if you want to take up one of the offers, you’ll find it here, along with details of the authors:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229605719/eliminate-the-impossible-sherlock-holmes?token=fd92312c

2) In the Realms of H G Wells

Our second Holmes for the day is another anthology with a somewhat different approach. Derrick Belanger and C. Edward Davis have collected more than twenty exciting tales which take Holmes into the imaginative realms of H G Wells.

Drawing on Wells’s speculative stories, here our detective hero has to consider some truly strange conundrums which take him out of his usual zone. Although Conan Doyle and Wells had their occasional differences, you would hope they might appreciate a work which explores both their creations.

This, like Eliminate the Impossible, is a two volume anthology, with a wealth of wonders. Have the Martians returned – or did they ever leave? What altered beasts dwell in the shadows? And what could Cavor’s last words from the moon really mean? The anthology includes ‘The Affair of the Red Opium’, a novelette by greydog. Gosh.

The Case of a Natural Selection by M. M. Elmendorf
The Pigeon’s Rest by Emma Tonkin
The Curious Case of the Sleeper by Steve Herczeg
The Manor House Horror by Michael Siverling
An Adventure in Darkness by Daniel D. Victor
The Adventure of the Traveler’s Bootstraps by William Campbell Powell
The Mystery of the Last Martian by G. C. Rosenquist
The Affair of the Red Opium by John Linwood Grant
The Adventure of the Invisible Man by David Friend
A Matter of Some Gravity by Derrick Belanger
The Adventure of the Red Planet by Steve Poling
The Clash of the Miracle Men by Rohit Sawant
The First Selenites on the Earth by Derek Nason
The Martian Spy-Glass by Jaap Boekestein
The Adventure of the Beastly Excisions by Benjamin Langley
The Adventure of the Disintegrated Man by Michael T. Wells
Sherlock Holmes and The New Accelerator by Mark Levy
A Trap to Catch the Sun by Andrew Lane
The Misplaced Mystery Writer by Richard Paolinelli
The Beast Within by Katie Magnusson
Dr. Watson and the Martians by C. Edward Davis

(Bonus Story if Kickstarter meets Stretch Goal)

Sherlock Holmes in the Realms of H G Wells will be launched via Kickstarter in October, and published before Christmas by Belanger Books. We’ll keep you posted.

3) The Dreaming Man

Thirdly in our Holmes news, we have the pleasure to publish a special review by Dave Brzeski, in which he reports for us on Willie Meikle’s book, Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man, out from Gryphonwood Press earlier this year. This seemed a good point to mention it, and yep, in this one the detective openly meet the supernatural.

Dave Brzeski writes:

I have to confess that I have a bit of a history with this book. When the first part was initially published on its own as Sherlock Holmes: Revenant in 2011, I picked up a review pdf… but I didn’t get around to it. I actually bought a signed paperback copy at Fantasycon in 2012, but still didn’t read it. Them in 2013 it was reissued as a bonus story in the collection, Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy and Other Stories in 2013 and again I managed to get a review pdf from the author. Nope, still didn’t find the time.

Now ‘Revenant’ has been reissued once again, but this time as the first half of the novel, Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man. Yet again I was supplied with a review copy, this time on Kindle. Unwilling to face the potential embarrassment of not getting around to reviewing it yet again, I decided I’d better prioritise it.

I’ve read quite a few post-Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories – I’ve even edited several. I can’t deny the fact that I have at times expressed some concern over the sheer number of Sherlock Holmes supernatural adventures that have seen print over the last several years. I felt there was a very real danger that they could soon outnumber the canonical styled tales. This does not mean that I’m automatically biased against supernatural Holmes stories, just that they really need to be very good.

There’s another element that I generally do not want to see in a new Holmes adventure—Moriarty! Yes, he’s always been regarded as Holmes’ greatest adversary, but he only appeared in two of the original stories. It has sadly proven near impossible for the many authors who’ve followed in the wake of Conan Doyle to resist using Moriarty to an extent that’s only rivalled by Jack the Ripper.

William Meikle has not only given us a supernatural Holmes story, but it also involves Moriarty—I hope no one considers this too much of a spoiler, but I figure anyone who can’t work out exactly who is referred to in the blurb, “A fall is coming, a fall that has haunted Holmes’ dreams, and now must be faced again, in the place where past and present become one, and two old foes meet for a final battle.”, has likely never heard of Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty.

I’m a fan of Meikle’s work, so I didn’t let myself be put off. Just as well, as this is possibly the best Sherlock Holmes supernatural adventure I’ve read to date, if not one of the best post-Conan Doyle stories of any sort.

Any misgivings I may have held about the supernatural elements of the story were soon dispelled. Meikle treats the supernatural in a very scientific way, which makes it much easier to stomach Holmes’ reluctant acceptance. It works so much better than the endless re-imaginings of the Hound of the Baskervilles as a werewolf tale. ‘Revenant’ is very good, the new material, ‘The Dreaming Man’ is even better.

I’ve yet to read Meikle’s Concordances of the Red Serpent, or Augustus Seton Collected Chronicles, both of which are referenced here, but I hope to find time to rectify that soon. Seton in particular is a major player in this story which cleverly ties in Sherlock Holmes to the author’s own Meikleverse characters and concepts.

I recommend this book very highly to anyone who might fancy seeing how Holmes and Watson might cope with a case which does not lend itself so easily to a rational explanation. This is not to say I didn’t find any faults. When I’ve edited new Sherlock Holmes books, I tend to keep a copy of the complete stories open on my desktop, so I can check the dialogue against that of Conan Doyle. Willie Meikle has a tendency to overuse a mild pejorative, “bally”, that was never present in the original adventures. When I have to resort to that level of nitpicking to balance an overly positive review, I must really like the book!

(Dave Brzeski is a regular reviewer and editor of things strange, pulpish and/or arcane, as well as being an editor for the magazine Occult Detective Quarterly)

You can find copies of the book in various formats through these links:

51Ni21ZtcCL dreaming man on amazon uk

dreaming man on amazon us

Stowe It, You Chaps

If you want a break from the consulting detective, then why not spend time with an ex-Colonial Administrator who is really after the girl. In Vernon Loder’s The Mystery at Stowe (1928), the amateur sleuth Jim Carton doesn’t turn up until page 57, and his main motivation is to clear suspicion from his childhood sweetheart. Not quite Conan Doyle. Carton both annoys and interests the police officers as they go about their investigation, and is looked on with doubt by most of the participants in general. Even his sweetheart is uncooperative – but why?

The Mystery at Stowe was the first of twenty two novels by Vernon Loder, who was really a chap called John George Hazlette Vahey (1881-1938). Vahey also wrote under the pseudonym John Haslette from 1909 to 1916, including The Mesh (1912), and used few other names besides – even Henrietta Clandon.

We decided to include it on greydogtales because it’s rollicking good fun, a great example of classic crime fiction, with a cast rather too large to remember most of the time. In addition, the suspect is a bold female explorer, expert in using poisoned Amazonian weapons, the murder victim has a dart in her back, and no one can work out how any of it happened.

Cue 200 pages of misdirection, and a most peculiar solution, which one commentator described as ‘borderline genius yet utterly insane’ – well, we just had to mention the book. Our only warning is that you need to get through the first couple of chapters and all the many people littering the house party before it gets into its stride. More a Poirot-type gathering than a Holmesian one.

There are no ghosts or Martians here, by the way. It may be something to order from the library for a laugh – we’re not pretending it’s anything more than a satisfying bit of Golden Age mystery. Should you want your own copy, it’s on Amazon.

stowe detective the mystery at stowe

The Inverted Detective

Finally, a brief reminder of a book we covered some time ago, The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers. Our initial mention of this detective oddity was here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/sherlock-holmes-versus-the-thinking-machines/

As we said at the time, The Rubber Trumpet, the first of Vicker’s thirty-seven stories featuring the fictitious Department of Dead Ends, appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in September 1934.

Partial collections of the stories were later made in 1947, 1949, and 1978. We have the 1978 Dover Edition, introduced by E F Bleiler (who also edited science fiction and fantasy fiction anthologies).

A friend of ours, Nina Zumel, has recently written up her own take on the collected stories, including discussion of the ‘inverted mystery’ concept. Her article is well worth a read.

“The bulk of each story focuses on the crime and its background: what makes the murderer tick, what drove them to what they did. The narration is omniscient and rather distant, and tends to read a bit like a non-fiction true crime article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. In fact, Vickers worked for a while as a journalist on the crime beat, as well as a court reporter. As in real life, the crimes are messy and often unpremeditated, the solutions less brilliant deduction than luck plus legwork and the ability to remember things and put them together.”

You can find the whole piece on her site here:

https://multoghost.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/the-department-of-dead-ends/

Enough detective stuff for today. We’re away for a few days, but will be back later next week with the usual irrational mixtures of literature, lurchers and life…

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The Many Identities of Thomas Carnacki

July 15, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

Today, dear listener, we make a point, show off some fantastical art from the 1940s, and then mention a new book coming from that ace storyteller Willie Meikle. It’s all a bit Carnacki and William Hope Hodgson here again, for a brief moment. Oh, and the WHH covers gallery has been updated, under Weird Media (all art copyright its creators/owners).

I am Carnacki! No, I am Carnacki! The crowd erupts into a frenzy of self-sacrifice, at which point the Cistercian Abbot Amalric says “Kill them all. God will know which are his,” and then realises that he’s in the wrong film.

Meanwhile, thousands of Roman soldiers and a cohort of jobbing plumbers, who thought someone said ‘cisterns’, get out their copies of Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder and try to find out where they come in.

The Truth

Thomas Merton Carnacki, dubbed the Ghost Finder by the popular press, was a man troubled by the role in which he found himself. Much of his brusque procedure was designed to cover up his own awkwardness. His own lack of any dramatic psychic ability made him prone to nagging doubts, and his true interests were fine dining and exploring the new world of electrical inventions.

As everyone knows, Carnacki died a mysterious death in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. His funeral was held at Steeton, near Keighley, close to the rambling house which he maintained up there, Hathering. Some said at the time that the mistress of Hathering, a Miss Catherine Weatherhead, was also mistress to the Ghost Finder. This was never publicly confirmed.

In his will, Carnacki left 472 Cheyne Walk and its contents to his chronologer Henry Dodgson, veteran of the Boer Wars and illegitimate son of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. With some reluctance, Dodgson took on the mantle of the Ghost Finder, relying on other associates to make up for his lack of ab-natural knowledge. It was to be a mantle he never managed to shed, and the true tale unfolds through Mr John Linwood Grant’s series ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’.

Despite the above being very clear, and a matter of public record, interfering folk such Joshua M Reynolds, Willie Meikle and Brandon Barrows (amongst others) have insisted on various re-interpretations of Carnacki’s life, and of those who followed him. Oh, their work is fine and dandy, and most enjoyable, but one wonders if they ever question the liberties they have taken.

For example, whilst Mr Reynolds has woven a charming succession of talented Royal Occultists, and Mr Meikle has added to the range of astonishing paraphernalia which might be employed in Ghost Finding, their bravado sometimes shocks. As for Mr Barrows, he is perhaps more restrained in his addition of further almost canonical events, but is no less culpable.

We are gracious, though. Joshua M Reynolds is rumoured to be gathering a new collection of his Royal Occultist stories, and is also available on Patreon for discerning folk.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/roaring-ship-12760969

And Brandon Barrows’ collection The Castle-Town Tragedy is now widely available on Amazon, after an initial limited edition release:

Castletown the castle-town tragedy

We shall come back to Mr Meikle later below, but first – an interlude…

Famous and Fantastic

Let’s have some of those illustrations, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries. FFM was an American SF and fantasy pulp magazine, edited by Mary Gnaedinger and published between 1939 to 1953, first by the Munsey Company and then by Popular Publications.

Incidentally, Frank Munsey, the Victorian founder of the former company, also started the famous Argosy magazine, which lasted until the late seventies.

FFM published a range of short stories and reprinted novels included G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Rider Haggard’s The Ancient Allan, and works by Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen.

In the process, it reprinted at least three works by William Hope Hodgson – his novels The Ghost Pirates and The Boats of the Glen Carrig, plus his story ‘The Derelict’. With illustrations.

December 1943. Cover by Lawrence Stevens. “King of the Gray Spaces” by Ray Bradbury, and other stories by J. Leslie Mitchell, William Hope Hodgson, and Robert W. Chambers. Illustrations by Hannes Bok.
March 1944. Cover and illustrations by Lawrence. “The Man Who Was Thursday (A Nightmare)” by G. K. Chesterton and “The Ghost Pirates” by William Hope Hodgson.
Volume 6 Number 5, June, 1945. Art and Cover by Lawrence. “The Boats of Glen Carrig” by William H. Hodgson, and “Even a Worm” by Henry Kuttner.

Lawrence, Lawrence Stevens and Lawrence Stern Stevens (1886-1960) were the same fellow. He did both covers and interiors for FFM at various times.

“He was most admired for his interior illustrations, which became his major activity when the aging Stevens was called upon to replace the great Virgil Finlay when the younger artist was drafted. Although faster, more versatile, and excellent at pen-and-ink stippling, he never achieved Finlay’s fame. Stevens’s finest work may be the dozens of interiors he did for Adventure from 1943 to 1954, though his interior illustrations for Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Startling Stories, Super Science Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories were also admired.”

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

(thanks also to http://www.sffaudio.com/about/ for some of the art)

If anyone finds any more, do let us know.

Forthcoming Carnacki

Now, back to our authors, for we hear that author Willie Meikle, ever busy in multiple directions, has announced a brand new collection of his own Carnacki tales, to be released late 2017 by the Lovecraft ezine.

CARNACKI: THE EDINBURGH TOWNHOUSE AND

OTHER STORIES

CARNACKI operates in shadowy occult realms, on the fringes of science, in places out of sight and out of mind of normal everyday people. But sometimes the darkness touches the lives of others in ways they cannot understand, and they find they need help – the kind of help that only Carnacki can provide.

In MR. CHURCHILL’S SURPRISE and INTO THE LIGHT Carnacki is called on to help a young Winston Churchill investigate a strangely empty German U-Boat captured in the North Sea, and in dispelling something that is lingering in a London inn that was home to a club of gentlemen seeking illicit pleasures and a path to power.

In FINS IN THE FOG and THE KING’S TREASURE, Carnacki again aids another Hodgson character, Captain Gault, in ridding him of a nemesis brought up from the deeps of the ocean intent on revenge, and in the salvage of a cursed treasure off the coast of Scotland.

In other tales you will meet an Egyptian amulet and the thing that protects it, a photographer whose pictures contain strange developments, a very strange occurrence on a cricket field, an old Edinburgh townhouse that is much more than it seems, and much more.

In these all new stories Carnacki helps old friends and new acquaintances in the never ending battle to keep the Great Beyond at bay.

CONTENTS

THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S FRIEND
FINS IN THE FOG
THE CHEYNE WALK INFESTATION
AN UNEXPECTED DELIVERY
A STICKY WICKET
THE KING’S TREASURE
MR CHURCHILL’S SURPRISE
THE EDINBURGH TOWNHOUSE
A NIGHT IN THE STOREROOM
INTO THE LIGHT

We shall look forward to that. Naturally, a more accurate version of history will be found in Mr Linwood Grant’s novella A Study in Grey, his Last Edwardian stories and his forthcoming collection A Persistence of Geraniums, but let’s not quibble. You can also find further Hodgsonian goodness in books such Carnacki: The Lost Cases, and Sam Gafford’s fascinating Hope Hodgson journal Sargasso. Amazon UK and US links below.

LOSTCASESc http://amzn.eu/eVPhTXZ

http://a.co/hsIvSBq

http://amzn.eu/d8xQRXD

http://a.co/4HRrq4M

All of the modern authors above will be found in the pages of Occult Detective Quarterly, Issue 2 of which is available on Amazon now (see right-hand sidebar). Additional details of Carnacki pastiches, follow-ups and so on can be found here:

carnacki – the second great detective

And that’s quite enough Ghost Finding for one day, we think.

Next time: We haven’t a clue – but there will be something weird…

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Anthology Madness – Is Your Future Occult?

June 10, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

Or Horror Under the Linwood Tree Pt 2. So it’s the Future. Yay! You’re in your Linux 3000 hover-car, going to meet the egg-parent of your fifteen high-gravity adapted children, and you want something to read. You swipe through your retinal store, and bring up some weird and occult classics, for a change. How did they make these things, you wonder, before the invention of the EZ-Reads Writer-bot? And why did so many EZ-Reads Writer-bots commit suicide, come to think of it?

Continue reading Anthology Madness – Is Your Future Occult? →

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Horror under the Linwood Tree Part 1

June 5, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

Time for a quick projects update and to share some news of what’s to come. So in the next couple of days we’ll try to cover all the latest on Occult Detective Quarterly, a forthcoming collection from Mr Linwood Grant – A Persistence of Geraniums, the exciting ODQ Presents anthology, a further planned anthology of classic occult and psychic detectives, and more…

Linwood Nonsense

Let’s get a personal project out of the way first so we can move on – A Persistence of Geraniums. I did writ enuff stories for a general collecshun, I did, too. But this isn’t it. This is fairly specific. It began as a chap-book centred on the titular story, and then got out of hand. Which happened because I realised that I had a range of peculiar tales which went together quite nicely, slightly separate from my main line of post-Carnacki and hoodoo stories. The latter follow a plan going into the 1930s so far; the collection is pure Edwardian.

If you like strange and scary tales, this may suit you. It’s a sort of ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ branch line, a collection of John Linwood Grant’s tales of murder, madness, and sometimes the supernatural. The ‘sometimes’ is there because a few of the stories are ghost stories at heart, whilst others are tales of terrible crimes, including the work of Mr Edwin Dry, the so-called Deptford Assassin. Tales of loss, and occasional justice – of a sort. And it was nice to have an excuse to gather together the various stories and observations concerning the popular Mr Dry, as none of them have been in print before.

In addition to Mr Dry, the collection includes two long, brand-new supernatural stories, notes on the period and the concepts, and has an introduction by Alan M Clark, a gifted writer who himself covers the late Victorian period on a regular basis. It also includes a very unusual Carnacki story, of which one reviewer kindly said:

“…This is the first time I’ve read a true first person Carnacki tale. Not only does it succeed brilliantly but, for the first time, I got a sense of Carnacki himself as a fully developed character…”

If that wasn’t enough, Paul ‘Mutartis’ Boswell provides not only a most excellent cover but perfectly nuanced interior illustrations as well. Interior design is by me, but you can’t win them all.

A Persistence of Geraniums should be out in print by the end of July, with luck, published by Electric Pentacle Press.

Quarterly Occult Detecting

Down to business. Issue Two of Occult Detective Quarterly is available to purchase now – and this time it’s on Amazon, to make availability and distribution easier. It’s a fantastic issue, and we’ve been really fortunate with both writers and artists again.

You can skip this chunk if you’ve already seen the contents list, but if you haven’t, check it out. Inside Issue Two, Steve Liskow brings us a Native American female cop on a nasty case, and Brandon Barrows conjures Carnacki the Ghost Finder, but this is a Carnacki early in his career—and in Boston, USA. Kelly Harmon introduces us to a Catholic, demon-marked girl who takes down demons whilst having to work with a somewhat unusual ‘friend’, and Bruno Lombardi offers supernatural danger for two Fin de Siecle Parisian policemen.

From Edward M Erdelac comes a tale of John Conquer, a cool black investigator in seventies Harlem, balanced by Tricia Owen’s story of a prejudiced American PI getting out of his depth in sixties Hong Kong. And Tim Waggoner’s psychologist-with-a-difference takes on the case of a young woman with nightmares.

Finally for fiction, we present Mike Chinn’s occult adventurer between the wars, accompanied by Joshua M Reynolds’ instalment of our Occult Legion series, set in haunted Scotland. This follows Willie Meikle’s previous tale ‘The Nest’, but is a wild ride in its own right.

On the non-fiction front, we’re delighted to bring you an interview with British actor Dan Starkey, whose superb Carnacki audio was reviewed here last time. Tim Prasil returns, with a most diverting piece concerning the Occult Detective Physician in literature, and our counterpoint is Danyal Fryer’s perspective on the English roots of the comics character John Constantine. Plus we have reviews by Dave Brzeski and James Bojaciuk.

And our artists have done us proud as well. Award-winning artist Alan M Clark provides our cover, plus we have the coolest interiors from ace illustrators Luke Spooner, Mutartis Boswell, Sebastian Cabrol, Russell Smeaton and Morgan Fitzsimons.

Moving Forward

We have a lot to do yet. Here are some of the tasks with which we need to wrestle:

Subscriptions – As some others have found, meshing Kickstarter subscriptions with a longer term plan isn’t always easy. We began with a simple four issue subscription to pdf and print. Pdfs for #2 have gone out; print is shipping now. But we have new requests for subs, and people who want to extend their existing ones, so we need to tackle that. – the price must be good, we must be able to fulfil each time and so on. Which includes the question of formats…
Formats – ODQ’s initial concept was for a classic print magazine. But nowadays, eformats are ubiquitous, and easier for some. They’re also good value, and we’ve tried to respond to various requests. ODQ is designed as two-column print magazine, which means that to move beyond pdf, we will have to reformat the entire contents for things like Kindle. We’re going to have a try, which would ultimately mean that the eformat could also be ordered straight through Amazon.
Issue One – This landmark animal is almost sold out in its print form. If we think it’s worth it, we might put it through Createspace (which has its own problems) in order to make that available on Amazon as a clearly marked Second Edition. The same eformat considerations as above apply.
Long-term Submissions – One of the questions which comes up with a magazine (as opposed to an anthology) is how to manage submissions which are tempting, but for which you might not have space until two, three or even four issues down the line. With a big company and a long history, it’s probably quite easy. For a small press and part-time editors, not so simple. Don’t forget, a small press can’t usually afford to pay up-front. So do you accept stories without knowing when and where you can use them? Hold them on a short-list, and possibly limit the writer in circulating them elsewhere, while they wait in hope? We want our writers to get the fairest and fastest deal we can manage, and we’re still working on how to speed up and clean up this process.
Content – We’re still seeking stories based outside the UK and the US, though naturally they have to be damn good as well. In Issue Two we managed to stretch the boundaries. We have hopes of ODQ #3 including more unusual settings, in addition to the obvious core. We actively want diversity of entertainment, with occult detectives and writers of every creed, colour, identity and all the rest. And we still have moments where we’re receiving excellent stories which we can’t in all conscience use, as they’re too far off-theme. Whether or not we relax the edges to bring you any of these is an internal argument – we never set out to be a general weird or supernatural fiction magazine, so we have to be careful.

ODQ Three

Our third issue will be out over the Summer, probably late August/September. We have some excellent fiction already in hand from previous rounds, and have almost filled the issue, in planning terms. That means that we should soon be able to send out acceptances to the best of the short-list, and tell the others if we might be able to fit them in at a later date.

In addition to fiction, we do know that we’ll have another fascinating article by that erudite supernatural story hunter Tim Prasil (with a touch of Dickens this time). We’ll also be presenting a specially written piece concerning Robert E Howard’s ‘occult’ detectives, by Howardian scholar Bobby Derie. Dave Brzeski and James Bojaciuk are on the review trail again, though we might ease their load with one or two other guest reviewers as we develop.

When we open again for new submissions, which will be widely announced in the Summer, we’ll be looking for contributions to Issues Four and Five. We’re talking to those talented artists George Cotronis and Sebastian Cabrol about possible covers, and we’ll be looking for interior art to complement the stories as usual.

Phew!

Tomorrow or Wednesday – Part 2, with news of the ODQ Present anthology, due this Autumn; an exciting publication planned for early next year; the concept of ‘Hell’s Empire’; less John Linwood Grant (hurrah) and more news. Don’t forget that you can sign up simply by email (top left) if you want to be kept up to speed – and no sales-dogs will call…

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