What's new Brad?

I'm a little behind in promoting my stuff but better late than never!

I did my first ever podcast appearing on Percival Constantine's The Exploding Typewriter

My topic was Creating Pulp Characters.  Percival was a great host and it was a pleasure chatting with him. 

Sadly, this is the final episode of this podcast and if you have any interest in writing in general or pulp writing in particular I would highly recommend listening to the other twenty episodes.  Percival has assembled a fascinating array of guests covering a number of interesting topics. 

Pro Se has released the first of my Pro Se Single Shots : Australis Incognito: Bus Bait Blues

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PULP DOWN UNDER IN NEW PRO SE SINGLE SHOT SIGNATURE SERIES-
AUSTRALIS INCOGNITO DEBUTS FIRST DIGITAL SHORT STORY!
...

Masked men and mystery women from the Land Down Under explode to life in author Brad Mengel’s Pro Se Single Shot Signature Series- Australis Incognito!
Crime is alive and well in Australia and thankfully so are several Pulp Heroes ready to take on evil! Brad Mengel’s own creations, including The Question Mark, The Cutlass, The Aggressor, Sai, Risqué, The Bushranger, and others will stand alone and combat thugs, crooks, and psychopaths in their own stories. But behind the scenes, a puppet master of Machiavellian proportions is yanking the strings, jerking the world toward the brink with every tug, and pulling Australia’s heroes closer together. Closer to the answer. And to the final battle.
In the first stand alone short story, Bus Bait Blues, a hero known as The Question Mark follows in her predecessor’s footsteps trying to protect the common people of the city. Witnessing what appears to be the pick up of a young girl for a life of prostitution on the streets, the Question Mark uncovers something much more heinous. Can she survive the gauntlet she must run to save a girl and herself? Or will she be the second bearing the name The Question Mark to disappear? Find out in Bus Bait Blues by Brad Mengel.
Brad Mengel’s Australis Incognito, a Pro Se Single Shot Signature series from Pro Se Productions, features an evocative cover by Jeffrey Hayes and digital formatting by Russ Anderson. The first short story in the series is available for Kindle at http://tinyurl.com/loya4o2 and for most digital formats at http://tinyurl.com/lp8wb6f for only 99 cents. Australis Incognito - A Pro Se Single Shot Signatures series from Pro Se Productions.

Metro 7 by Matthew J. Hellscream (2014)

 

This novel is the first Australian kickstarter,  I was lucky enough to meet Matthew at the Brisbane Library Comic Book Reading group.

 

Metro 7 was a really good book, Hellscream makes an exciting scenario with lots of complicating subplots .  The story opes with the crew of the Icarus transporting the most dangerous prisoner in the

galaxy back to New Earth for trial when they get a distress signal from the Metro 7.  Metro ships are basically giant space cruise ships.   

 

What the crew finds on board the Metro 7 makes for an exciting adventure that might be best described as Matthew Reilly meets Alien turned up to 11.  Indeed there was one scene that was a neat homage to Reilly's Scarecrow series that I was grinning ear to ear, however Hellscream writes the scene in such a way that it is still effective even if you weren't aware of what he is homaging.

 

The characters were all well drawn and I got enough information about each of the main characters to understand them and I want to know more about them.  More than that Hellscream has created an entire universe that I want to see explored in future books

 

I'm also keen to see more of Hellscream's writings in other stories.  This is recommended

 

  

The Wild Gesse II by Daniel Carney (aka The Square Circle, AKA The Return of the Wild Geese)

So every collector has a 'holy grail" an item that has been eluding them.  There have been several for me, Decision for Dusty Fog, The Hardy Boys Survival handbook, The Three Investigators 39 The Case of the Wandering Caveman and The Wild Geese II.

I'd found copies of  Daniel Carney's The Wild Geese and The Whispering Death and found a copy of Mike Hoare's Mercenary. I'd found a DVD copy of The Wild Geese and caught The Wild Geese II on pay TV.  Hell I'll even count the Marvel New Universe Marc Hazzard: Merc where one of Hazzard's team mentioned that he was involved in the events of The Wild Geese and that Richard Burton was wrong for the part.  (The Warhawks series mentioned a Wild Geese mission and the manga Hellsing has a team called the Wild Geese but as I learnt Wild Geese has become a bit of generic term for mercenaries)

But do you think I could find a copy of The Wild Geese II or The Square Circle or The Return of the Wild Geese to give the novel all the titles it's known by.  To call the novel a sequel to The Wild Geese in really a misnomer.  In the novel there are no characters or references to The Wild Geese.  The novel follows a Lebanese mercenary John Haddad in his attempt to free Rudolph Hess from Spandau prison, Haddad is joined by several of his men from the Beirut Civil War. 

The movie changes one of his men to Alex Faulkner (Edward Fox) the brother of Alan Faulkner (Richard Burton) from the first movie.  The original plan was for Burton to reprise his role but his death forced the recasting,

The book deals with Haddad scouting the rescue and then playing all of the interested parties off of each other - the irony is that he is successful getting Hess out of Spandau but after being locked up for over thirty years all Hess wants to do is return to the cell that has been his home.

I'm glad I found a copy of the book and enjoyed reading it.

Now Available - Poker Pulp.

          

Aces and Eights, a Dead Man’s Hand. Life and Death dealt over a shuffle of a deck. Stakes from dollar bills to souls tossed into the center of the table. And sitting around, waiting for the turn of a card, to raise, check, bet, or fold, are rogues, scoundrels, dames, and sharps. Every single one betting their last breath on the hand they hold. Pro Se Productions presents Poker Pulp, an anthology centered around the storied, legendary game of cards and chance. Authors J. H. Fleming, Michael Krog, and Brad Mengel deal three tales that up the ante, taking Poker to an all new level of Pulp. Action, adventure, and intrigue are the game of choice in Pro Se Productions’ Poker Pulp.

My story "Strip Poker: A Risqué Story" introduces the new pulp heroine Risqué.  She prowls the mean streets of 1920s Sydney where Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine rule the criminal fraternity.  In this adventure she bets her life on a game of strip poker with the vicious razor gang that attacked her cousin.

Poker Pulp is now available from Amazon and Smashwords.

2014 - a year in writing

Oddly for a year where I did a fair bit of writing the only thing published was "The Roads not Taken." in More Blood: A Sinanju Anthology - available in paperback now from Amazon!  Subtle Plug I know.  What's it about?  The basic idea is that while in Viet Nam, Remo first hears the legends of the Masters of Sinanju and what he thinks they are like.  I manage to include references to several other paperback vigilante series, TV shows and movies  I actually wrote this back in 2005 for the New Blood Anthology So it's interesting to see how much I've grown in the decade or so between then and now.

So what did I write this year?

For DREAMER'S SYNDROME: NEW WORLD NAVIGATION  edited by Mark Bousquet, I wrote "The Case of the Hooded Shark".  This is set in the same universe as Mark's DREAMER
S SYNDROME novels and short stories/  The basic premise is that God gave an order that everyone got to live out their dreams of what they wanted to be at ten years old.  Naturally Mark's stories only cover a small part of the world and this anthology opened up for other stories taking place around the world.  My starting point was at ten I was obsessed with teen detectives, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Three Investigators, The Dana Girls and Trixie Belden, so I created a character who wanted to be a detective. I gave him a "Watson" an ex-military man, the idea for him was he had dreamt of being in the army at ten - joined at 18 served around the world and came back from Afghanistan with PTSD and found a new dream job.    Then the world changed and he finds himself back in the army.  I played with a lot of Holmesian tropes as well as the nature and perception of Australia. Part of my inspiration was the Taiwanese news coverage of The Buxom Bandit

 

 

The idea that she would ride a kangaroo to a robbery just made me laugh.

 

 

Next up was "The Adventure of the Empty Throne" for Chris Sequera's SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR WHAT?  which had Sherlock Holmes working with a Doctor other than Watson.  I had Holmes working with Guy Boothby's Doctor Nikola to investigate a plot to destroy the British Empire.  I used another Boothby creation as the villain and referenced some EW Hornung.  Thankfully The Hooded Shark got the Study in Scarlet references out of my system and I was able to craft a different take on the Holmes/Nikola fused universe.  Nikola is a great character and I will return to him one day, as I will with  Sherlock Holmes.

 

I'm not sure if I can share Paul Mason's awesome and amazing artwork for the story. (but I got the original for Christmas and there's a picture on my Facebook page.

 

I also wrote "The Domino Lady's Triple Threat" for Airship 27 which looks like it will appear in Domino Lady volume 2.  Domino Lady versus the American-German Bund who are keen to kidnap an old friend of Ellen Patrick's father.  I took inspiration from the opening of the Sydney Harbour bridge in 1932.  I slipped a few classic and new pulp references into the story and some ancestors of my favourite characters.

 

 

 

 

That brings us to the final three and a bit stories which form my own shared universe that I call "Australis Incognito"  (Above is the awesome cover painting by Jeffrey Hayes a print can be bought here.

 

The first story that I wrote (mostly in 2013) was Risqué: Strip Poker which introduced my 1920s Sydney vigilante Risqué.  A lot of the inspiration for her and this story came from Underbelly: Razor true crime series that ran on the Nine Network here in Australia.  (I recommend watching if you get the chance, Sydney in the 20s feels so pulpy - it's also an odd time where the two big criminal gangs were run by women Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine.)  Think of this as a prequel to the main Australis Incognito series.  I subtly foreshadowed a couple of things that will become important in the main series.  This story will be published in POKER PULP by Pro Se Productions

 

(As an aside I also wrote a short comic story featuring Risque's daughter Jasmine who works as a spy in the 1960s under the code name Risqué Brent with her partner codenamed "Flynn" as a homage to Modesty Blaise.  I submitted the story to Ashcan, a Brisbane based comic book anthology but it didn't find an artist.)

 

The first contemporary Australis Incognito story I wrote was Bus Bait Blues starring The Question Mark.  The Question Mark is a young woman who investigates why a Russian mob boss would be in a bar picking up a girl fresh off the bus.  Of course she discovers a much larger criminal conspiracy.

 

The Second story "Thunderstruck" features the third generation Risqué facing against an opponent who can appear anywhere at will.  the only way you know you've been hit is the sound of thunder and a calling card that reads "You've been Thunderstruck".

 

 

The third Australis Incognito story "The Rusting Death" is currently being written.  The title came from the misreading of a Doc Savage adventure The Rustling Death.

 

These are part of Pro Se's Single Shot line of stories and will be published in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) novel by PD James

After reviewing the TV adaptation I was asked if the story fit with Wold Newton Continuity.  I said yes but I'd want to read the novel first.  So off to the library I go and borrow a copy of the novel.

Not surprisingly the TV by and large follows the plot of the novel with some changes.  For example the novel has two doctors present at the examination of the body where the TV has just one.  The Darcys have one son on TV (Fitzwilliam) and two in the book (Fitzwilliam and Charles with Elizabeth announcing that she is again pregnant at the end of the novel)

James sets the novel in 1803 - 1804 and states that in 1803 Darcy and Elizabeth had been married for six years making the events of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in 1797.  According to Win's Crossover Chronology P&P takes place in 1793.  The dating is irrelevant to the plot offers no problem in adding the story to the Wold Newton continuity. 

I've previously mentioned Magistrate Selwyn Hardcastle from the TV adaptation and the likelihood that he may be an ancestor to Judge Milton C Hardcastle .  The novel adds a coroner name Makepeace (his role was taken by Hardcastle in the TV adaptation)   one wonders if he was an ancestor to Sgt Harriet Makepeace from the 1980s British TV Series Dempsey and Makepeace.

Both are speculative and can be ignored if so desired.

However James does make references to the Elliot Family from Persuasion and Mrs Knightley from Emma both other novels by Jane Austen.

The book is a good read and I wouldn't object to more of  the Darcys as investigators, James sets this ups nicely as Mr Darcy is a local magistrate (it is only due to his connection to the crime that Darcy did not investigate this crime) and the TV series gives Elizabeth more involvement in the investigation.