When much younger (a long, long time ago), the reviewer – yours truly – and his brothers lived vicarious lives through so-called pulp fiction. The authors of pulp fiction were referred to – by the hoity-toity, high literary types (a phrase that has to be spoken with minimal enunciation, using the nasal passages) – as “hacks.” Some of these snobs dignified such authors by appending the term ‘writer’ to the term ‘hack’ – hackwriters.
The implication of either expression was definitely derogatory.
The Brothers Radic paid no attention to such literary fastidiousness. Essentially, the Brothers Radic considered the tastes and preferences of the intellectual elite to be false, doctrinaire, artificial, shrill, shallow, uncertain, eclectic, jejune, and insincere. In other words, the Brothers Radic believed that the literary aristocrats were missing out on a whole bunch of fun by eschewing such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and Robert E. Howard.
For example, Robert E. Howard conceived Bran Mak Morn, who was a warrior-hero of the Picts, and Solomon Kane, who was a combination of Bruce Lee and Snake Slipkin (Escape from New York). These swashbuckling adventurers lived and breathed danger, dark intrigue, and exhilarating combat. Put simply, they saved the day by kicking butt and annihilating legions of bad guys, who were responsible for putting ‘evil’ in the word devil. The damsels they saved were frail and vulnerable and beautiful.
In hindsight, Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn were the worst stereotypes of macho, imperialist males. Which goes a long way toward explaining why they were so much fun to read. Pulp fiction was and is so much fun for one simple reason. It’s pure, unadulterated Darwinism: only the strong survive!
Happily, this kind of writing is still around. One purveyor of action-packed, rock-em-sock-em, macho tales is Wade J. Halverson, who himself has lived a most unusual life. Halverson was a super-heavyweight Thai boxer, holds multiple black belts in various martial art disciplines, and worked as a bodyguard for the rich and famous.
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