Retrospective: Pulp And Dagger Webzine

I have remarked on this site before about how I prefer handling hard-copies rather than reading off of a compu-screen. Ironic, I know, since my Greywater Chronicles are only available (for now) on the compu-screen.

But when I first started getting on the web circa 2000 – a bit late, I know – I enjoyed devouring all the resources that were newly available to me. Reading off a screen was yet to be a mild irritant, so I relished all the information and websites that I came across.

One of the most interesting to me was Pulp and Dagger, a pulp-style fiction webzine run by Jeffrey Blair Latta.

The stories spanned time and space, as if from the multitude of pulp magazines from the 1930s and 1940s. There were a half-dozen fictional “hosts” for each genre, such as space, fantasy, horror, or pirate fiction. They would occasionally do an intro for the stories that fell under their domain.

There were both short stories and serials. Some were written by Blair or his brother D.K., but most were written by other people who submitted them to the website. The prose was mostly passable, and occasionally very good. There were some recurring characters that would show up over the years.

Fukitso the Unpredictable and Neekin were two characters the brothers created. I remember a couple of stories by another author about an Emergency Response Team from Miskatonic University. Kind of a silly premise to mash-up Cthulhu horror and small unit firepower, but it was cool. And there are others that will make me say, “Oh, yeah…” as I start to read them again.

Blair was Canadian, and he wrote a book on the Franklin Expedition that I got from Amazon and read about 2005. The Franklin Conspiracy was pretty good in assembling a lot of facts and details, but went off the rails into Royal Navy and supernatural conspiracy, which he never quite put together and defined. Still, an interesting read.

Blair died on January 19, 2006. His brother carried on Pulp And Dagger, and Blair’s other websites, for a while but they stopped updating a year or so later.

I had kind of forgotten about Pulp And Dagger, until when I was going through some of my old links, I found it again. I was pleasantly surprised to see the site is still up and running. I guess D.K. is keeping it going.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for reading off of a computer, I am looking forward to going over the old website again, garish colors and all.

You might want to check it out, as well. Some good stuff lies just under the surface there.

Pulp And Dagger