Introducing New Pulp Author Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson: Tom was an early pulp fan after discovering The Shadow and Doc Savage in paperback reprints in the 1960s. It wasn’t long before he found the rest of the pulp heroes. Returning from a tour in Vietnam he met a fellow fan that introduced him to Fred Cook’s BRONZE SHADOWS. Tom and his wife, Ginger, were fascinated with the concept of Fred’s fanzine and subscribed to every pulp fanzine on the market until 1982 when they published their own pulp fan magazine, ECHOES, then in 1995 they began a string of fiction magazines that would last for another decade. Over the years Tom has created new pulp heroes, as well as writing new stories featuring the original characters.

         Three of those new pulp heroes are The Black Ghost, The Masked Avenger, and The Mind Master.

         Tom also researched and wrote histories of such pulp characters as Dan Fowler (G-Men Detective), The Phantom Detective, The Black Bat, Secret Agent X,and The Belmont Shadow (From Shadow To Superman), as well as Operator #5’s Purple Wars, The Green Ghost and The Black Hood. These he published in his FADING SHADOWS magazines. When ALTUS PRESS came along, Marr Moring picked up Tom’s research books and some of his new pulp stories, publishing them in more professional volumes. Tom was also special guest editor for ALTUS PRESS’ Triple Detective series.

         Now retired from writing, Tom is enjoying the many new writers in new pulp, and especially their continuing stories in the original pulp series. It’s like a return to the old days to pick up a new Phantom Detective, Moon Man, or Dan Fowler.

Introducing New Pulp Author Ginger Johnson

Ginger Johnson: With her husband, Tom, she published ECHOES and several genre magazines, contributing articles and fiction. She created Mr. Minus, a new pulp hero in the mold of Captain Zero, plus helped compile essays on the new pulp heroes. A long time fan of Doc Savage and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, she became a pulp fan in the 1960s with the explosion of pulp reprints. She has also written western and mystery short stories, The Cowboy From Texasand The Suicide That Wasn’t.

Introducing New Pulp Author Teel James Glenn

Introducing New Pulp Author, Teel James Glenn

Teel James Glenn: TJ is a man of many talents. Hewas born in Brooklyn New York and started out as a sickly kid until he discovered the likes of Judomaster comics and Doc Savage novels that set him on the road to the martial arts and physical development. Eventually he traveled the world for forty years as a stuntman, fight choreographer, sword-master, jouster, illustrator, storyteller, bodyguard, actor and haunted house barker. One of the things he’s proudest of is having studied stage sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double which he continues to teach.

He’s had stories in over a hundred magazines from Weird Tales, Spinetingler, SciFan, Mad, Fantasy Tales, to Sherlock Holmes Mystery SciFan, Sixgun Western, Crimson Streets, Silver Blade Quarterly, Tales of Old, AfterburnSF, and Blazing Adventures as well as tales in close to a hundred anthologies in many genres. His short story “The Clockwork Nutcracker” won best steampunk story for 2013 from Preditor and Editors poll. 

He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.

His Dr. Shadows and Maxie/Moxie series are both echoes of his pulp loving roots and continue to be popular.

Mr. Glenn worked regularly as an actor on Guiding Light and New York soaps alternately doing stunts or acting in over 300 episodes. He worked as an actor and stuntman (in a fight scene with Hawk) on the “Spenser for Hire TV Series and in episodes of the Equalizer.

His most famous ‘small screen’ appearance was as Vega in the worldwide web series “Street Fighter: The Later Years.” 

His website is: theurbanswashbuckler.com

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHOR KATE A. GANNON

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHOR KATE A. GANNON

Kate A. Gannon: From Novato, California, Kate was a very prolific writer, not only for the FADING SHADOWS magazines, but many others. So prolific she had to use a number of pseudonyms, such as Ed (Edilsson) Barsse, Wren Wynn Burke, Chuck Bushnell, Mem Merkader, Kathleen Eastland, Linney Teague McCall, Mario Kesh Navar, and a couple of others. Her list of pen names rivaled those of Steve Mitchell, in fact. Although her stories lend more toward literary fiction than pulp, they seemed to fit in perfectly with the rest of the writers at the time. We are still in contact with Kate, and she continues to write for small literary presses.

New Pulp Author John French

Introducing New Pulp Author John French

Sorry for being so late, my computer crashed three weeks ago, and I only today received my new one.

John French: John is a crime scene investigator for the Baltimore Police Department. He has been writing crime fiction for over well  over thirty years and has been published in a variety of magazines and collections, including Alfred Hitchkock Mystery Magazine, Hardboiled, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, DIME, and various Fading Shadows Magazines. Some of his characters include The Grey Monk and The Devil. His current book from Bold Venture Press is a hardboiled titled The Last Redhead. 

New Pulp Author Colleen Drippe

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHOR: Colleen Drippe

         The FADING SHADOWS’ magazines literally had hundreds of contributors turning out new pulp stories every month, from 1995 through the end of 2004. Unfortunately, we did not collect all of their bios at the time. Thankfully, Ginger started doing this when she was publishing her anthology series, TALES OF MASKS & MAYHEM. She was selecting stories from our old fiction magazines, and decided to add author bios in the back of each issue. So, basically, what we have here are authors that wrote for our magazines. But elsewhere I have invited other new pulp authors to submit bios.

Colleen Drippe: Colleen wrote mysteries and SF, and was very prolific. She appeared in four of our magazines: CLASSIC PULP FICTION STORIES #54, 55, 57, 59, 68, 78 & 79. EXCITING UFO STORIES #2 & 3. ALIEN WORLDS #2, 3, 11, 19 & 33. and STARTLING SCIENCE STORIES #11, 15, 19, 24 & 32. Since those long ago days she has continued writing SF novels in a series of priests populating the universe. Check out her novels, Gelen; Freightliner; and Sunrise On the Icewolf. These are exciting action novels in space and on other worlds.

Introducing New Pulp Author Jeff Deischer

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHORS: Jeff Deischer

         Once in a while I will be spotlighting one of our new pulp authors. These will just be short bios. The author is encouraged to add more information at any time, and since my data is a bit old (taken from the back of books we – or others – published) new information would be appreciated. This is not limited to just the authors of the FADING SHADOWS magazines. Other new pulp authors can be included. Just send me a short bio, and an illustration if you have one.

Jeff Deischer: Jeff is probably best known for his chronologically-minded essays, particularly the book-length The Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology, about the pulp DOC SAVAGE series. It is a definitive chronology, rather than the definitive chronology, he explains, because each chronologist of the DOC SAVAGE series has his own rules for constructing his own chronology. Jeff believes his own chronology to be the definitive one – using his rules, which were set down by Philip Jose Farmer in his book, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.

Jeff was born in 1961, a few years too late, in his opinion. He missed out on the Beatles, the beginning of the Marvel Age of comic books and the early years of the Bantam reprints of the DOC SAVAGE series, the latter two of which he began reading when he was about ten years old (on the other hand, he was too young to go to Viet Nam ….).

Jeff had become enamored of Heroes – with a capital “H”, for these were not ordinary men – at a very young age. He grew up watching DANIEL BOONE (to whom he is distantly related, by marriage), TARZAN, BATMAN, THE LONE RANGER and ZORRO on television. There is a large “Z” carved into his mother’s sewing machine that can attest to this fact (as you might imagine, it did not impress her the way it always did the peasants and soldiers on ZORRO).

This genre of fiction made a lasting impression on his creative view, and everything he writes has Good Guys and Bad Guys – in capital letters. As an adult writer, he tries to make his characters human, as well.

Jeff began writing as a young teenager, and, predictably, all of it was bad. He started to write seriously while in college, but spent the next decade creating characters and universes and planning stories without seeing much of it to fruition. This wasted time is his biggest regret in life.

In the early 1990s, Jeff began a correspondence with noted pulp historian and novelist Will Murray, while he was writing both the DOC SAVAGE and THE DESTROYER series (THE DESTROYER #102 is actually dedicated to Jeff). Jeff currently consults on Will Murray’s DOC SAVAGE books (as evidenced by the acknowledgements pages in the novels of “The Wild Adventures of …” series), a privilege that he enjoys. Will Murray’s sage advice helped turn Jeff into a true author.

Producing few books over the next few years, Jeff’s writing finally attained professional grade, and, after being laid off from the auto industry in 2007, he was able to devote more time to writing. From 2008, he produced an average of three books a year, most of it fiction, and most of that pulp. Reading so much of the writing of Lester Dent, the first, most prolific and best of those using the DOC SAVAGE house name “Kenneth Robeson”, Jeff’s own natural style is similar to Dent’s. He “turns this up” when writing pulp, and “turns this down” when writing non-pulp fiction.

Jeff primarily writes fiction, and, combining his twin loves of superheroes and pulp, began THE GOLDEN AGE series in 2012. This resurrected, revamped and revitalized the largely forgotten characters of Ned Pines’ Standard, Better and Nedor publishing companies. These characters, drawn from superhero, pulp and mystic milieus, fill the “Auric Universe”, as Jeff calls it. In 2015, he started documenting his own Argentverse, filled with characters of his own creation. It is a nostalgic look back on the comic books he read as a young teenager.

Jeff’s webpage is jeffdeischer.blogspot.com, where he posts the first chapters of his novels, so that potential readers can peruse his work without having to spend several dollars on a trade paperback to find out if they like it or not.

Introducing New Pulp Author Shawn Danowski

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHORS: Shawn Danowski

         Once in a while I will be spotlighting one of our new pulp authors. These will just be short bios. The author is encouraged to add more information at any time, and since my data is a bit old (taken from the back of books we – or others – published) new information would be appreciated. This is not limited to just the authors of the FADING SHADOWS magazines. Other new pulp authors can be included. Just send me a short bio, and an illustration if you have one.

Shawn Danowski: Shawn was a genius in plotting and building characters. A young man raised in Greenville, Texas he became friends with Steve Mitchell, and the output of both men just about filled up the pages of Fading Shadows magazines. Shawn loved old radio drama, especially Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – and The Shadow, of course. Plus, he loved the old pulp heroes like Secret Agent X and The Phantom Detective. Besides his many short stories, he also wrote three novels featuring The Visage, and one novel featuring Number Nine. Shawn was over seven foot tall, and had to use a cane for balance. He was working on a new magazine for Fading Shadows, Racy Mystery Stories when he passed away from a rare cancer at age 30 or 31. He would have gone far in the new pulp community if he had lived. And, sadly, his work may never be reprinted for modern readers. We met with Shawn in Archer City, Texas, at the big book stores of Larry McMurtry one day to visit while looking through rare books. Shawn, of course, was looking for old radio memorabilia.

New Pulp Author Thomas Condarcure

INTRODUCING NEW PULP AUTHORS

         Once in a while I will be spotlighting one of our new pulp authors. These will just be short bios. The author is encouraged to add more information at any time, and since my data is a bit old (taken from the back of books we – or others – published) new information would be appreciated. This is not limited to just the authors of the FADING SHADOWS magazines. Other new pulp authors can be included. Just send me a short bio, and an illustration if you have one.

Thomas A. Condarcure:  From Phoenix, Arizona, Tom is a science fiction fan, and contributed many stories to small press magazines in the style of the old pulp SF magazines of old. For Alien Worlds he wrote such titles as The Tombs of Saturn, Under The Seas of Titan, The Veil At The Center of Time, and the novel Astro Athena & The Robots of Doom. For fun, he wrote the missing and unpublished Flash Gordon novel, The Sun Men of Saturn as James Edison Northfield.  Tom was in our area one day and stopped in for a short visit.