Robert Reginald (1948–2013)

As I noted in my review of Reginald’s first new Phantom Detective book, the Phantom Detective was an extremely long-running pulp vigilante (a la the Shadow and Doc Savage) whose original adventures were published from 1933-53. Those works are now all in the public domain and being reprinted by Adventure House. A few years ago, John Betancourt of Wildside Books commissioned two all-new Phantom Detective novels, both written by Robert Reginald, and THE NASTY GNOMES is the second of those.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

THE NASTY GNOMES picks up where THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM left off (note, though, that knowledge of the first novel is not required to enjoy this one). The Phantom Detective, the alter ego of Richard Curtis Van Loan, has nominally retired, but he has recently established a detective bureau on the West Coast to continue his work. Van Loan has returned to his old stomping grounds of New York City, where the city is being plagued by a rash of savage attacks by little people (it’s 1953, so they’re more commonly called dwarfs and midgets), who engage in a campaign of terror by repeatedly robbing, threatening, brutalizing, and extorting citizens before escaping into New York’s network of underground tunnels. Worse, these little guys seem to disappear even after they’ve been shot or otherwise put out of commission. Van Loan realizes he can’t deal with this crime wave alone, and quickly recruits a team of assistants, just as he had in California. The story gets a bit more complicated than that when it becomes apparent that the swarms of evil little people (the eponymous “nasty gnomes,” of course) are actually pawns of a larger conspiracy spearheaded by a crypto-John Birch Society represented in the story by real-life McCarthyite attorney Roy Cohn. The addition of Cohn and allusions to McCarthy and his witch hunts are a nice addition to the novel. (If Wildside had continued with new Phantom Detective novels, I suspect Cohn and this group would have popped up again.)

Just as with THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM, this novel explores some of the moral dimensions of vigilantism and the effects of violence on a man like Van Loan. Keep in mind that this is a man who, during his active days of crime-fighting, probably killed hundreds of criminals over the years. He obviously enjoyed his work, and perhaps relished the violent side of detective work just a bit too much. Exploring that set of issues adds some richness to the narrative that many similar novels written in the original pulp era mostly lacked.

Though Reginald’s aging Phantom Detective is more of an investigator and strategist than a brawler, this is very much a novel in the pulp tradition, much more so than Reginald’s first Phantom Detective novel. How could it not be, after all, with scores of midgets swarming out of alleys to attack passers-by before escaping into the sewers with their loot? It’s a rollicking good story, and I certainly recommend THE NASTY GNOMES to fans of pulp fiction vigilantes, especially those looking for a bit of an update to the pulp avenger formula.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers… (mais)

I’ve been a fan of the old pulp adventures – Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, etc. – for a long time. We live in a golden age of pulp reprints, so it’s not hard to acquire reasonably priced reprints of these classic adventures. The original stories tended to be in the format of short novels (about 40,000 words or so) produced once a month. Some were decidedly better than others, even within the same series, depending on who the actual author was behind the house name and how inspired they were that month. Quality sometimes suffered. You also have to read them with a solid suspension of disbelief at times, but the over-the-top action is a big part of the attraction. But one of the original pulps hasn’t gotten as much attention as the others in recent years, and that’s a bit surprising. I’m talking about the Phantom Detective (not Lee Falk’s Phantom), which ran for 170 issues (the third longest running title) from 1933-1953. Beginning in February 1933, the Phantom Detective was the second of these pulp heroes to come out (the first was the Shadow, the third was Doc Savage, which began in March 1933).

My understanding is that through some oversight the copyright of the Phantom Detective was never renewed, and all the original stories have now become part of the public domain (oops!). Because of this, a number of publishers have reprinted Phantom Detective stories over the years, and the good folks at Adventure House seem committed to reprinting every single issue of the original Phantom Detective stories, one per month. A few years ago, John Betancourt commissioned two all-new Phantom Detective novels – both written by Robert Reginald – the only new Phantom Detective novels to be written since 1953 to my knowledge. THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM is the first of these novels.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM is set in 1953. The Phantom Detective, the alter ego of Richard Curtis Van Loan, has retired. Both the world and Van Loan have changed since the heyday of the Phantom Detective. The Cold War era isn’t as free-wheeling as Depression and WWII era America, or as suited to pulp vigilantes dispensing justice outside the bounds of the law. His old friend from the original pulps, Frank Havens, the wealthy publisher, has died under mysterious circumstances, and Van Loan is asked to look into the matter by Havens’ widow. Though the Phantom Detective operated primarily in New York City, THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM mostly takes place in San Bernardino, California, a picturesque area Reginald knows well and does a good job describing here. Once there in sunny California, Van Loan realizes that all is not as it seems, unsurprisingly enough. As he tries to solve the apparent murder of his friend, Van Loan is also being stalked by an old enemy, and he unexpectedly finds a love interest. He also gathers a selection of new allies in California and ultimately goes on to found the Phantom Detective Agency under his direction, which will carry on the investigative legacy of the Phantom Detective. It’s a great premise that set up the possibility of a renewed Phantom Detective series. I suspect that sales of these two new Phantom Detective novels did not warrant the further continuation of the series unfortunately.

Never having read any of the original adventures (a little bird told me they’re fairly thin gruel, even as pulps go), I don’t know how a big fan of the originals would react to Reginald’s re-imagining here. THE PHANTOM’S PHANTOM is definitely recommended for fans of the original pulp detective stories, as Reginald has successfully manage to inject new life (and interest) into one of the original but less-known pulp detectives. The shift from third person (in the originals) to first person perspective offers a great deal of potential for humanizing a pulp hero. Van Loan is a man who had solved crimes and dispensed vigilante justice for two decades, sending a couple thousand evil-doers to their deaths. He’s now in his early fifties and ready to move on with his life, assuming his past will let him. I’m unfamiliar with the Phantom Detective’s original modus operandi, but here he seeks to solve the crime through solid detective work, never dons a costume, and only resorts to violence at the climax when other means are exhausted. It’s a low-key adventure in some ways, but it retains plenty of pulp tropes to ensure that it’s still a fun story of a crime-fighting vigilante. It also features an interesting framing narrative of a man inheriting his uncle’s estate and discovering a set of manuscripts that tell of the Phantom Detective’s adventures.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers… (mais)

We are all going to die. Everyone you have ever met, everyone you have ever cared about, and you yourself are all going to die. Sooner or later, we must each come to that realization and deal with it. How we deal with it and how we allow death to affect life – I think – matters. Robert Reginald is a man who has wrestled with, and come to terms with, these issues, particularly his own mortality. TRILOBITE DREAMS, OR, THE AUTODIDACT'S TALE: A ROMANCE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY is an autobiographical account, not just of Reginald’s near-fatal heart attack, but also his life as an editor, publisher, writer of genre fiction, librarian, and academic.

Like most people, I suspect, I have never personally faced a life-threatening health crisis. I’ve almost died on a handful of occasions, but those were each spontaneous, catastrophic events that came close to ending my life but just as quickly passed without doing so. There was no time to reflect, ponder, or worry, except afterwards, when it was all too easy to dismiss the possibility of near-death. Not so Reginald. In 2003, and on a couple occasions after that, he came perilously close to dying. As his health crises were happening, he was conscious of exactly what was going on, and how close he was to dying. That has to change a person. His recovery was long and painful, offering more than enough time for reflection, and physically he’s probably not quite the same man he was a decade ago. I don’t think he’s the same psychologically either – he’s seen too much, experienced too much, and has had to deal with painful truths, the kind that inevitably change people.

Having said all that, none of us wants a life that is defined by death, and Reginald has not written a mopey, morbid account of his health woes and crises. Chapters about his brushes with death are interspersed with chapters about the rest of his life. Before going any further, in case you’re unfamiliar with Robert Reginald, I should briefly try to summarize his life in very broad terms. Reginald, with his wife Mary, founded and ran the Borgo Press, a prolific and long-running small press publisher of a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction that ran from 1975-1998. Eventually the company got to be more trouble than it was worth, so the Borgo Press folded. Fortunately for the rest of us, John Betancourt of Wildside Books eventually acquired the remnants of the Borgo Press – and Reginald’s services – so it still operates as an imprint of Wildside. While running Borgo, until his retirement in 2010, Reginald also served as an academic librarian and university official at California State University, San Bernardino for decades. That doesn’t begin to do his life justice, but hey, you should read the autobiography not just my summary of it!

There’s a great deal of interest here on the history of the science fiction and fantasy genres, the trials and tribulations of being both the owner/operator of a publishing venture and an author, and the politics and petty-mindedness of life as an academic. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I know Robert Reginald and consider him a friend. I was interested in reading his thoughts on life, death, and everything in between. Your mileage will necessarily vary. But I think that Reginald has a lot to say that’s of value for a general audience, and writers specifically. TRILOBITE DREAMS is a quick read, and one I found riveting. I recommend it for readers interested in the story of someone who has come close to dying, but survived to tell us about it. It is also a fascinating account of a man who spent decades not only as an academic librarian and university official but also as a prolific editor and founder of a small publishing imprint and writer of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery novels.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers… (mais)

The concluding book in the trilogy of the author's modern retelling of Wells's War of the Worlds. Like the middle volume, this is also more original and contains more modern science fiction ideas. Indeed, it is probably the best of the three, though that isn't saying overmuch in my view; much of the dialogue is banal and fairly dull, though a number of the human characters are better developed here than in the earlier books. The development of the alien way of thinking of the Martians is again well handled. 3.5/5… (mais)