Short Stories Frisco Ho The Strange Case of C. Hodgson Fell Some of my heroes are the old pulp fiction writers, authors who pumped out thrilling and lurid tales in magazines such as AMAZING STORIES, SPICY WESTERN STORIES, and THE BLACK MASK. Many of these writers did much to define what it is to be an American, whether on the frontier, on the playing field, or in class stratified urban centers where crime lords mixed with high society. It's hard, really, to talk about an American style without mentioning writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Paul Gallico, Max Brand, James M. Cain, the inimitable Robert E. Howard, and of course the two giants of American detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. If you look at the old pictures of the BLACK MASK dinners, if you look past the haggard visage of Hammett or the scholarly presence of Chandler, you might notice a figure in the back, with a high forehead, narrow eyes, and his ubiquitous pipe. His name is C. Hodgson Fell, and of all the pulp writers he is the one whom I read as a child and whose writing had the most effect on me. Fell is best known for his hard-boiled detective Rex Salmon, who appeared in Fell's most popular novel THE BLOOD STONE OF RANGOON. The Blood Stone was an ancient jewel that granted it's bearer any wish, but at a horrific cost. When it came ashore in San Francisco, off a freighter from the Orient, Rex Salmon was on its trail. I can still remember reading an old copy I found in a box in the attic, flashlight under the blankets, following Rex's trail as he moved ever closer to grabbing the terrible Blood Stone for himself. The book was bought by MGM for one of their rising stars, but the star mysteriously died in the middle of filming and production was halted and never completed. None of Fell's other stories were ever turned into films. Just before the Second World War, Fell's stories disappeared from the pulp magazine world. Rumors circulated that he had dedicated himself to some great literary project and was now feverishly at work on completing the Great American Novel. Those lucky few who had seen glimpses of the work, a paragraph here, a chapter there, had declared it brilliant and revolutionary. It was going to change the entire direction of American fiction. But, tragically, C. Hodgson Fell died in 1954, from the effects of the chronic alcoholism that plagued his later years, without ever having published the book. The manuscript, to this day, has not been found. A few years back I was able to purchase the copyrights to some of Fell's classic short stories and every few months or so I'll put one up on the website for you to enjoy. The first, "Frisco Ho," is a western that is typical of his work. Fell would take an archetypal pulp situations and then tell it with an atypical slant. Here, a gunfight is told from the point of view of a waitress in a second rate restaurant in a second rate boomtown, but Fell was also writing about the price he himself was paying by turning his back on his more literary dreams to make a living writing for the pulps.