Blood 'N' Thunder 2024 Special Edition

Blood 'n' Thunder's annual book-length issue for 2024 packs nearly 100,000 words of pulp- and pop-culture history into 276 pages. As always, our in-depth articles combine rigorous scholarship with fannish enthusiasm, exploring the world of vintage adventure, mystery, and melodrama in pulp magazines and other storytelling mediums. In this issue novelist Will Murray weighs in on a "lost" detective story supposedly written by Maltese Falcon creator Dashiell Hammett. Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker Don Hutchison contributes appreciations of the classic 1932 film White Zombie and pulp fiction that features Royal Canadian Mounted Police as heroes. Old Time Radio expert Karl Schadow documents a 1931 radio series that dramatized stories from Adventure magazine, the "Dean of the Pulps." Paperback authority Gary Lovisi covers a mid-1920s series of proto-paperbacks reprinting yarns from the pulps. Fanastic-literature historian Will Oliver survey The Black Cat, a late 19th-century magazine often cited as the precursor to Weird Tales for its periodic forays into the strange and supernatural. Matthew Bradley takes a close and comprehensive look at the early fantasy and science-fictional stories of acclaimed fictioneer and dramatist Richard Matheson. Gilbert Colon reviews the participation in science-fiction fandom of the late film critic Roger Ebert. Blood 'n' Thunder editor-publisher Ed Hulse takes a deep dive into the occult world of Chandu the Magician, whose long-running radio adventures and big-screen appearances thrilled millions of fans during the 1930s. Finally, there's another handful of how-to articles, culled from the long-ago pages of Writer's Digest, by such prominent pulp-fiction writers and editors as Erle Stanley Gardner, Hugo Gernsack, Henry Kuttner, and Leo Margulies. Each article is profusely illustrated with vintage magazine covers and artwork, rare movie stills, vintage advertisements, etc.