The Forest of the Hanged E-Book

The Forest of the Hanged

by Richard Blakemore

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2019 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover image by © Melkor3D via Dreamstime

Cover design by Cora Buhlert

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Introduction

by Cora Buhlert

Nowadays, pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore (1900 — 1994) is best remembered for creating the Silencer, a masked vigilante in the vein of the Shadow or the Spider, during the hero pulp boom of the 1930s.

What is more, Richard Blakemore is also remembered, because he may or may not have been the real life Silencer, who stalked the streets of Depression era New York City, fighting crime, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty just like his pulp counterpart.

The mystery surrounding the Silencer has long overshadowed Richard Blakemore’s other works. For like most pulp writers, Blakemore was extremely prolific and wrote dozens of stories in a variety of genres for Jakob Levonsky’s pulp publishing empire. Blakemore’s work spans the wide range of the pulps, from crime stories via westerns, war and adventure stories via romance to science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, the sheer amount of stories Richard Blakemore wrote during the 1930s refutes the theory that he was the Silencer, for when would he have found the time?

Of the many non-Silencer stories Richard Blakemore wrote, the most interesting is a series of heroic fantasy adventures that Blakemore penned between 1936 and 1939, making him one of the pioneers of the genre now known as sword and sorcery.

Richard Blakemore was a big fan of Weird Tales and particularly admired the work of Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore. And so, when Jakob Levonsky started up his own Weird Tales competitor called Tales of the Bizarre, Blakemore immediately jumped at the chance to write for the magazine and created Thurvok, a warrior hero in the mould of Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn.

Thurvok first appeared in the story “The Valley of the Man Vultures” in the first issue of Tales of the Bizarre in 1936. He started out as a lone adventurer, but quickly gained a companion in Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, whom he encountered towards the end of “The Valley of the Man Vultures”. Not long thereafter, the duo of adventurers became a trio with the addition of Sharenna, a formidable sorceress Thurvok and Meldom save from execution in their third adventure.

During their first few adventures, Thurvok, Meldom and Sharenna are quite thinly sketched. All we learn about them are their names, professions and a brief physical description. With “The Forest of the Hanged”, the fourth Thurvok story, this changes, as the story delves into Meldom’s youth with the introduction of Lysha, his childhood sweetheart. Alas, Thurvok himself remains as mysterious as ever and readers will have to wait for a while longer, before we learn anything more about him.

By this point, certain recurring themes of the Thurvok series emerge. As in Richard Blakemore’s Silencer stories, there are a lot of damsels in distress to be saved, but then this is a motif which can be found all across the pulps. The Thurvok stories also have an uncommon fascination with undead corpses — what would now be called zombies — who avenge themselves on those who wronged them in life. Finally, both the regulars as well as various guest characters are frequently threatened with execution or human sacrifice, usually to be snatched from the jaws of death at the very last second.

Of course, last minute rescues are common in pulp fiction, but the focus on executions in the Thurvok stories is somewhat unusual. One wonders whether this theme was not inspired by Richard Blakemore’s own close brush with the electric chair in 1936, when the police briefly found proof, later discredited, that Blakemore was indeed the Silencer and responsible for the murder of a mobster called Antonio Tortelli. Blakemore himself never spoke about his arrest, trial and near execution and whenever he was asked about it, he only replied, “I was acquitted and the real killer was brought to justice.” Though it is notable that Blakemore began working on the Thurvok series shortly after his release from the death house of Sing Sing.

Though normally considered a masculine genre, sword and sorcery actually has quite a few remarkably female characters. There is C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, of course, as well as Robert E. Howard’s various female characters such as Red Sonja, Bêlit and Dark Agnes de Chastillon. But even though early heroic fantasy stories feature several female characters, there usually is only one per story.

The Thurvok series is remarkable in that it has more than one major female character, all of whom are different from each other and formidable in their own way. There is reason to believe that the strong women of the Thurvok series were at least partly inspired by Richard Blakemore’s fiancée and future wife, Constance Allen. What is more, most of the latter stories in the series pass what is now known as the Bechdel test, almost fifty years before the test was introduced.

While Thurvok’s first few adventures were quite similar to the exploits of the characters who inspired him, the introduction of female characters like Sharenna and Lysha changes the tone of the series in more ways than one. For what sets Thurvok and his companions apart from most other sword and sorcery heroes and heroines is that they share the Silencer’s zeal for justice and spend a lot of time fighting dragons, monsters and unjust rulers, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty. It’s not that Thurvok and his companions aren’t interested in gold and treasure — they absolutely are. But when given the choice between looting a tomb or saving a life, they’ll usually opt for the latter.

Richard Blakemore’s crime stories, including the Silencer series, often featured “ripped from the headlines” plots and indeed we know that Blakemore based many of these tales upon news stories of the day, particularly those involving the real life Silencer.

However, little is known about how Richard Blakemore came up with the plots for his fantasy stories, including the Thurvok series. And so all we know about the background of “The Forest of the Hanged” is that it was originally intended as a historical adventure tale for Swashbuckling Stories, most likely inspired by the legend of the burghers of Calais, before Blakemore rewrote it as a Thurvok story.

Pegasus Pulp Publishing is proud to present to you the adventures of Thurvok and his companions, for the first time in print since 1930s. So buckle up and prepare to accompany Thurvok, Meldom and Sharenna, as they venture into…

…the Forest of the Hanged.