So back a few years ago, when I started collecting these "Post-Modern Pulps" as I began to call them - men's adventure novels from the late 60's into the 90's - the Death Merchant series by Joseph Rosenberger became the focal point of my little project. Here was a series of SEVENTY novels published over the course of more than a decade (the exact years escape me at the moment), and at the time I was looking online, there was nothing out there. No fan websites, no author information, nothing. A few used bookstore websites caries copies of the novels, but there was no real information about who the author was, what else he had worked on, reviews of his novels...not a damn thing out there.
I was amazed.
Now several years have passed, and it looks like things have picked up just a little. The rise of wikipedia has given us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Merchant
A pretty good resource of general information about the series. Even more recently, someone has gone and created this site:
http://www.death-merchant.com/
Just cover thumbnail photos at the moment, but it's a start.
Now, I don't exactly claim to be the catalyst for getting the whole Death Merchant internet movement going, but I would like to note that back in the day, if you were looking for this series on the Net, my site was really the only thing you'd hit, and there's still a good amount of chatter about the books on the PMP Message Board.
Now that the main PMP site is defunct, I'll be porting over my reviews of the Death Merchant books and other titles to this blog. If you're like me and have a soft spot for completely and utterly non-politically-correct action / adventure fiction, you might just like Rosenberger's blue-eyed Texan psychopath, Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant.
7 comments:
And did you see that they dared to question whether my Death Merchant entry on Wikipedia met its writing guidelines, and even whether it met the requirements for notability? (Fortunately the latter was quickly confirmed!)
Cosmic Lord of Death Damn Them. . .
That is a load of crap. You know, Wikipedia in general is a half-assed source of information, but complaining about the "tone or style" is just moronic. If you have a massive population of contributors all writing on various different subjects, you're not going to get one common "tone or style" anyhow. They should be thankful you're not re-editing entries on whales or changing the dates of WW2 to meet your own socio-political agenda.
My past literary sin involves reading the "survivalist" books, a series of utterly trash post-apoc fiction novels wherin the hero is a bulletproof death machine.
the later in the series the more absurd they get :)
I've read / own a half dozen or so of the Survivalist novels. The first few are entertaining but completely over-the-top. Later on...yeah...they just go friggin' nuts. I can't remember if it's time travel or hibernation or what, but I know that something like 300 years pass halfway through the series.
Still, fun times...
so i'm sure you saw that the www.thedeathmerchant.com website now has an advertisement for a NEW Death Merchant book on there. . . what's your take on this?
Actually, I'm trying to get my hands on an advance copy if possible, and if not, I want to be first in line for this new book. I am curious if Rosenberger's "unique" style of writing can possibly imitated in a way that works without coming across as hopelessly artificial.
Any idea if this book will actually come out?
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