Trail of Cthulhu

I've written a few things for Trail in the last year or so. Not So Quiet is already in electronic print, and is now one of the scenarios in Pelgrane's Out of Time compilation. Other Pelgrane projects are in playtest stage, including a few Great War scenarios and a historical piece set just before the American Revolution. The Unspeakable Oath has published another Trail scenario, The Brick Kiln. I also helped with the map indexing for Bookhounds of London, a suppliment I very much admire.I've been discussing other projects with Pelgrane and those may come to fruition; if they do, they'll probably see print next year, as I haven't finished writing the most recent one. What with playtesting, layout, editing and other issues, I don't see that getting done before Christmas.

I suppose I ought to discuss Trail as a system, and say why I've grown to like it more than its parent RPG system, Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium). As this is where I discuss books, I'll treat Trail to the Bookshelf format. So, here goes!

My copy is the 2008 hardback edition, with Jerome Huguenin's evocative artwork on the cover. I think I bought this at Dragonmeet in London, which would mean I had it the same year it came out. I remember being a little reluctant. Not that I didn't like it - I did - but I was between jobs then and I was money conscious. For some reason the Yankee Dollar price and the GBP price for RPG stuff tends to be roughly the same, which means the book cost me forty quid, roundabout. That was about thirty nine quid more than I really wanted to spend on anything, leave alone a system I knew little about beyond a few favourable words on Yog-Sothoth. However I bit the bullet, though when the fella behind the counter tried to persuade me to buy something else I declined. I suppose I ought to regret that, since whatever it was is certainly out of print by now. I don't. I've never been very good at impulse buying. I tend to keep my hand on my wallet and smile politely.

Though I suppose if you want to look at it in crude money terms then the cash I've earned from scenario sales by now outweighs the initial investment by at least a hundred to one. So there's that. If only everything I invested in had the same result!

The book is well put together and sturdy, which is saying something for the RPG market. The binding is stitch, not glue, and it stands up to hard wear. I've owned hardback suppliments that collapsed after three or four months, shedding pages like a dog does fleas. In fact, the only other time in my recollection that I've bought a hardback RPG book which actually took punishment was when I bought the AD&D DMG, Player's Handbook and Monster Manuals. I've still got those in a box somewhere. The pages may be yellowed, but they never once fell apart, despite the hundreds of hours they spent being knocked around at school or dragged from house to house. Hopefully this book will last as long.

The rules are based on Robin Laws' GUMSHOE system, which tends to emphasise roleplay over dice rolling. In GUMSHOE each player character has a certain number of points spread over several investigative abilities. When an ability is used, the player is supposed to spend a point and describe how he's going about the investigation. So if it's a situation where X is in a shady part of town trying to track down a hired gunman, he might say something like: "I go to my usual haunts, chasing up snitches. I spread a little payola around, because what else are you going to do? Whisper sweet nothings in their ears?" Then a Streetwise point is spent (representing the character's known interest in snitches and shady places), and the result of his investigations is adjudicated by the Keeper. It's a fairly simple system which doesn't need dice to make it work, most of the time. The key thing is, it lends itself to player control. It was the player who decided to have a point in Streetwise, the player who decided, not just to spend it, but how it was spent.

That's the key issue for me. I prefer a roleplay style of game. Anything that promotes roleplay is aces in my book, and leaving the responsibility in the hands of the player makes things very interesting. The Keeper has to think of more eventualities, anticipate players' responses to the ongoing plot. The players have to take responsibility for their characters' actions; it isn't just a roll of the dice any more. If anything, the GUMSHOE design reminds me not a little of the old Troupe style of play popularised by Ars Magica. In that game, everyone had responsibility for world design as well as character design. Building a covenant of magi was a group activity, based on point spend with a set budget. The group had to decide what they had and did not have, and in the process they ended up describing a fair part of the world they lived in. So too here with Trail, except that now the group is de-emphasised and the individual has control.

Take the Streetwise example. The player only spent one point, enough to get the information. If the player had spent two points, they could have had the information and also bought themselves an additional asset - the Black Cat Club, for example, and its owner Jack Quimper, half-French former crook turned solid citizen, who passes the player the information and also says that the gunman will be in the Black Cat later on, as he always shows up when Lola's singing. The player gets the Black Cat, which he can return to again and again in future scenarios. The game world gets a new location, which the Keeper can then  plan around for his own nefarious purposes. It's a brilliant idea, and one I wish more players were courageous enough to use.

The other standout for me is the game's treatment of its bestiary. The Cthulhu universe is well populated, and by now veteran players will have worked out what most of the creatures can and cannot do. Trail specifically encourages the Keeper to "rework the creature to suit the setting or the scenario, keeping their basic nature the same. Should ghouls be albino, almost insectoid creatures like Morlocks, and attack subway trains instead of grave robbers? Should byakhee emerge from deep wells or simply assemble themselves out of trace metals and corpses in the vicinity? How does the Colour work as the Sound out of Space?"

This is giving the Keeper carte blanche to do as they like. Of course, Keepers have always had that power, but they battled against player expecation. If the players know that X is X, then they're justifiably suspicious when X suddenly resembles Y, or Z. For much the same reason rolling dice behind the Keeper's screen is perilous, as is fudging die rolls. The fudge itself isn't the problem. The issue is the Keeper's basic sense of fairness. If the players get even a whiff of an idea that the Keeper isn't playing by the same rules they are, they'll start wondering whether the result of the last few dice rolls had more to do with a personal vendetta than good game play. Once that idea gets into people's heads it's impossible to dislodge, and can ruin a long-running game. This way, both sides know ahead of time that the Keeper may change things to suit the situation and the rules allow for that to happen. The fairness issue is taken off the table.

Moreover the statistics are streamlined. There's just enough here to be useful and not enough to be cumbersome, while some entities have no statistics at all, on the understanding that the Keeper has the final word as to what it can and cannot do. This speeds things along while keeping the player in control, since the existing stats are less 'what It can do' as modifiers to the player's dice roll. The Stealth Modifier affects the player's chance to Sense Trouble, its Alertness Modifier affects the player's chance to Sneak. That and a small scattering of abilities and armour is the sum total of most creatures' write-up.

Now, pros and cons.

Pro One: This is a well-designed roleplay system which puts emphasis on player's actions and responses, as well as encouraging more Role (and less Roll) play. People looking for a less dice-heavy game should look no further.

Pro Two: It's a very faithful adaptation of Cthulhu mythology. I haven't discussed the Sanity and Stability mechanics in any detail, but they do work well in a Purist setting, where the assumption is that everyone is doomed from the outset as the Horrors reveal themselves. It also lends itself nicely to a more Pulp style game, particularly if the Bookhounds of London suppliment is used.

Pro Three: The emphasis on storytelling and scenes rather than dungeon crawling is a welcome change. Veterans of CoC may remember some of the older scenarios with their vast, mapped-out locations crawling with unspeakable things, and shudder as I do not at the horror but at the prospect of working through the bloody thing room by room and corridor by corridor, changing characters every third or forth chamber as the previous ones get et. This isn't that sort of game.

Con One: While not strictly diceless, it is remarkably dice free. That will be a turn-off to some gamers.

Con Two: The players may be overwhelmed at first by the amount of responsibility put on their shoulders. Gamers are used to the Keeper doing most of the work. They sometimes seem afraid to spend points, or reluctant to embrace the challenge. This can be a stumbling block at first, though overcoming it (provided everyone's willing) isn't impossible.

That's it from me! Have a good one. 

Spring Cleaning in Winter

I own a lot of stuff.

Bought, received, collected, whichever term best applies: there's heaped mounds of it in the unlikliest of places. Much of it is books, and some of it is old board games. The rest is an eclectic grouping of 'things' which you'd think nobody in their right mind would keep and yet we all seem to have. Old papers from when I was an A level student, yearbooks, notes (I seem to be addicted to notebooks and cue cards), old extension cords and electrical gear, dead beard trimmers, batteries: all of them things that can easily be shoved in a drawer and forgotten about, which is precisely what happened to them.

It's so easy to let these things take over your life. Some of them have sentimental value, but most are just junk. At first they were in my rooms, then they got boxed and put somewhere else, and a lot are still at my parent's house including Tintins and Asterix, old toys and long forgotten memorabilia.

I've been slowly getting rid of it. I started with the books, all the ones I didn't think I'd read again or knew I could get electronic versions of. So while I do like Agatha Christie and Wodehouse, they went out the door in plain brown bags on their way to the charity market. One day I'll have the lot on kindle or the equivalent. I kept a few back on cover art grounds - the old White Circle paperbacks that date back to the 40s or 50s, practically worthless but fun to have around, things like that.

Oddly I've been less eager to tackle the real junk. All those piles of tat, old papers and school yearbooks, which by rights should be in the bin. I suppose it's because sorting through those won't be nearly as much fun as going through the book collection. When it's pure donkey work, motivation is hard to come by.

Today I went for board games. If I was still in the UK I might be tempted to save these for the next gaming convention and flog them at the bring and buy. I'm not, and the cost of shipping these things far outweighs their value even for the ebay crowd. So the old Judge Dredd RPG, Squad Leader, Cross of Iron and Richtofen's War among others are going the way of all things: off to the charity market, and thank heaven for Christmas. I loved these things once, but now the memories are distant and I doubt very much whether there's a local market for them here in Bermuda.

I suppose I ought to feel more sentimental about this, but I've seen too many people - hell, my brother's one of them - keep every single scrap of their lives like some kind of shrine to their past. The past is another country, and far away; there's no getting back to it, not even with a Tardis made out of faded school reports and half a board game you used to play when you were twelve.

So out the door it goes, and while it isn't quite good riddance, I shan't be sorry to see the back of it. Bon voyage, stuff! I hope you make someone else as happy as I was, once upon a time.

Scenario Ideas, Bookhounds of London

This time out I'm going to talk about scenario seeds. Most Keepers, whatever the system, are going to need at least a scattering of these to keep their players occupied in between major events. Some Keepers opt for a more freestyle form of play and provide nothing but seeds, allowing the players to pick and choose the ones they want to follow up. Others prefer more scripted campaigns, but still need to keep some unscripted events in their arsenal for those times when the players go off-book. Perhaps a key player couldn't make the session, or perhaps they need to account for a period of downtime while someone heals or reads the all-important grimoire. After all, the other characters don't just sit on their backsides while Protagonist X rests in bed eating grapes.

Scenario seeds are very useful. They allow the players a chance to indulge their personal whimsies, without departing too much from whatever the Keeper has planned as the overarching story. They also provide the protagonists a chance to gain new skills, abilities, items or even just an amusing anecdote or two. Finally, they help establish the consistent reality of the game world by introducing the characters to new and interesting bits of it.

There's no set length for this sort of thing, but I find that if I've gone on for longer than a page A4, I've gone too far. After all, this is meant to be a seed, not a full-blown story.

With that in mind, let's talk about the Midland Grand Hotel, at St Pancras, London, and its mysterious room 113.

This room does not officially exist. It is not on any hotel layout map, and none of the servants acknowledge its existence. Inquirers after it are told that Room 113 is ‘booked’; ‘for the foreseeable future’ is added for the benefit of those persistent enough to enquire further. The only official record of it can be found amongst the plans and papers of Sir George Gilbert Scott, the architect. The plans don’t seem to indicate anything unusual about 113; it’s a midsize East Wing room, not particularly luxurious, but with all the standard accoutrements of the Midland Grand, including a fireplace. It also lacks a bathroom and toilet, in common with the rest of the hotel. Chamber pots and copper baths are carried to and from all the rooms by a small army of servants, without whom the Midland Grand would not function.

Tracking down room 113 is a difficult task, almost as if the room itself doesn’t want to be found. Naturally seekers after it will not be encouraged by the hotel staff, and as there are so very many of them circulating at all times throughout the hotel, those with low Credit Rating may find it difficult to pass unnoticed. Those determined enough to wander the halls armed with a map of some sort soon discover that 113 simply does not exist during the day, though it can be found at night. It is much easier to find when the moon is waxing crescent, and more difficult when the moon is waning crescent.

Room 113 is, like the rest of the Midland Grand, the absolute last word in Victorian comfort, including gold leaf walls, elaborately carved wainscoting, and expensive furnishings and artwork, none of which have so much as a speck of dust. The main reception room has as its centrepiece a fascinating and somewhat disturbing pre-Raphaelite painting of a medieval hawking scene. The subject is conventional enough, but the brilliant and somewhat over-vivid colouring gives it a feverish quality, as though the viewer were seeing the scene through a heat haze.

Unlike the other rooms of the Midland Grand, 113 has a copper tub permanently installed; or at least, it is there, and nobody has ever tried to take it away. During a waxing crescent the tub is filled with a liquid very like blood, while when waning crescent there is only a very shallow pool of the same substance.

Staying the night there may awaken Magic potential in susceptible persons, or grant an increased Magic pool, though nobody is on record as having slept there or, braver still, having a bath. That might grant further power, of course, but the price might be more than most are willing to pay.

Now, let's talk about this from a Keeper's perspective.

First, the section is rules-lite. Only one investigative ability, Credit Rating, is mentioned, and even then there's no question of Difficulty numbers or potential tests. That sort of detail ought to be left up to the Keeper, to be elaborated at the the time the detail becomes relevant. There's no point scattering dozens of potential tests in a seed when the players may only ever use two or three of them. This isn't meant to be a dungeon, with traps around every corner. This is a hotel. People live and work there. A general description is useful, a sense of who might be there is handy, but anything beyond that is a waste of your time.

It does help that the Midland Grand is wiki-able, as is its architect. You can't expect the players not to look up historical background. Some of them may have iPads or laptops at the ready during the game session. This way, they'll naturally gravitate to information that might be as useful to you as it will be to them, and the pictures provided with the description is an added bonus.

Second, there's just enough creepy here to keep the players intrigued, and not so much that they avoid the place altogether. You don't want them thinking that this is beyond their ability. There's an obvious mystery here, but it's solveable. Also, it's not a dragon's cave: there are no bones scattered everywhere, warning them that a very painful death awaits. True, the seed might be fatal. There are facts the players don't know. That said, there's no need to hang a sign over the seed that reads Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here. The players ought to believe, at least to begin with, that the place isn't a deathtrap.

Third, there's a reward; the potential Magic increase. Magic is an ability introduced in Rough Magicks, a sourcebook that I personally find indispensible. Magic is a pool that would-be occultists use to power spells; in the main book, this function is covered by Stability. A Keeper who didn't use Rough Magicks would have to find another reward, but that shouldn't be too difficult. There's always something the players want badly enough to put themselves at risk, so long as the risk is survivable.

Now I'm going to elaborate a little further on the seed:

Potential clues:   Architecture, Art History. While strolling through the halls, an experienced architect may be able to deduce the whereabouts of 113 by noting where things have not happened. Everything suffers wear and tear, particularly over fifty-odd years (the Grand opened in 1876), yet there are portions of the Grand that seem as fresh as the day they were built. A student of art history may notice the same thing, or work out the approximate position by the odd lack of proportion that a particular corridor has, when compared with other corridors in the same wing.

                                Library Use, Occult. Sir George Gilbert Scott wrote his Personal and Professional Recollections, published 1879 by Sampson Low & Co. Though there isn’t a great deal on the Midland Grand, there’s supposed to be a mention of room 113 in the very first printing, which was cut from all subsequent editions. Occultists claim that a few drops of blood, smeared on the cover during a waxing crescent moon, can reveal the missing section in all extant copies of the Recollections. According to Sir George, ‘demands occasioned by the cemetery works forced an unpleasant compromise, which I solved by dedicating one of the rooms to private use. Naturally this meant that the room in question had to be kept effectively in quarantine, since to allow it to be used by an unsuspecting guest would be callous in the extreme. Fortunately soon after construction completed the room in question solved the problem in its own way, since which time I have not been made aware of any difficulties. Nodens will have his due.’ There is a sketch of a Green Man next to this paragraph, which sketch has also been cut from all but the very first printing.

Potential antagonist: Nightgaunt, which is only present during a waxing crescent. It tries to carry intruders out through the window and drop them to their deaths several hundred feet below. It can be dissuaded by occultists who can somehow prove their fealty to Nodens. Abilities: Athletics 6/12, Health 7, Scuffling 10. Hit Threshold: 4. Alertness: +1. Stealth: +2 (flying) +3 (flying in darkness). Weapon: success in Scuffling contest means victim is immobilized by unpleasant tickling attack. Armour: +2 vs Any (skin). Stability: +0

A Keeper is never going to be able to cover all the bases, particularly in a seed. The players will always have more ideas than the Keeper can account for. Many of those ideas will stink, but that's the nature of the beast: players are inventive, but not always sensible.

That said, there's no excuse for not covering some of the bases. The Keeper ought to have a few clues pre-written, if only to account for the most obvious contingencies. The above lists four potential abilities: Architecture, Art History, Occult and Library Use, as well as introducing a book, written by the architect. Now, the book is deliberately included; this is Bookhounds of London, after all. The protagonists are expected to be looking for books. It wouldn't be in the spirit of the campaign setting to not have the characters bury themselves in antiquarian bookshops seeking clues. The other abilities are more general, things that anyone might do in order to plumb the depths of the mystery. Architecture and Art History cover the two most obvious bases. Yes, there are other abilities that could be used, but some are more likely than others. Very few players are going to want to use Law or Chemistry to solve this one. Naturally if I knew in advance the skill list that the players had access to, I'd write the seed with them in mind. However it's probably more useful to talk in generalities at this point. Apart from anything else I might use a seed like this again and again, with several different groups of players. I can't know which skills they'll all have.

The antagonist is included to throw a little danger into the mix. Nightgaunts are creatures of Nodens, and that particular entity has been mentioned in the clue list. The protagonists ought to be taking some precautions anyway; there's been enough hints that this mystery might have an element of danger in it. If they choose not to, that's their look-out. A nightgaunt is a fairly scary antagonist, but it's not a lethal killing machine, and it won't necessarily be encountered all of the time. Moreover as noted in the text this one is special. The protagonists may be able to talk themselves out of trouble by proving their fealty to Nodens. This could be bluff or it could be the real deal. That's up to the player and the Keeper at the moment of truth.

Note that, even now, the section is rules-lite. I haven't included a list of potential Stability tests, or elaborated on the potential benefits. Those are things that ought to be determined during play, not written in stone beforehand. After all, the players may surprise you. Rather than take a bath in that fluid, they may drink it, or try to take it with them out of the room. Or they may fixate on that painting as the important item. Or they may try to move in to room 113 permanently, using it as a base of operations. Or, or, or . . . and so on. Best to leave that sort of thing up to chance. You could try to list every possibility and its consequences, but that would be a backbreaking labour, and nobody would thank you for it, or even know that you'd ever done it. Better to spend your time on the things your players will appreciate, than waste it on long lists that nobody will ever read.

I hope you've found this useful! Best of luck to all you Keepers out there.

Bush League

Extra Credits has been an excellent video series about the game industry, which I've followed since its debut on the Escapist. Recently EC left the Escapist due to a dispute over money. I'm not going to rehash that argument here. I don't have all the facts at my disposal and I doubt it would matter if I did, since both sides are burning with righteous indignation right now and neither willing to concede a yard of ground. Trench warfare didn't work out so well the last time it was used, but every time lawyers get involved it seems both sides start digging.

However it intrigues me (in a morbid look-at-the-car-wreck way) that the dispute is over non-payment of money owed. Judging by some of the twitter responses this may not be the first time that's been a problem. Now, I have a dog in this fight, as I've written for the Escapist before and hope to do so again. That dog may be small and puny, but it has four legs and fleas: it's a dog.

They're not the only company I've written for. I've done a little for Ars Magica and a lot more for Call and Trail of Cthulhu, among others. No, I'm not going to tell you who pays late and who on time. That'd be wrong of me, and childish to boot. Any discussion along those lines is between me, the other fella, and my bank account.

However the Escapist debacle reminded me of a forum discussion I had on YSDC about NDAs and their use by pen-and-paper RPG companies. My position was, I didn't see the point in anything as official or as restrictive as an NDA when the subject of the agreement was as trivial, in the grand scheme of things, as an RPG product. A licensed property, perhaps; something technologically complex, perhaps; something worth a lot of money, perhaps. The average monograph fits none of those categories. At that rate of pay, you're looking at just a touch over $0.01/word. You don't pay rent with that cheque. The Horror Writers Association suggests (in their membership requirements) that the minimum professional rate is $0.05/word, which is not a rate that all of the RPG companies I have done business with have paid. Of course Chaosium's a bit unique in that their monograph system has the contributor doing all the work, and there's always the chance they might get more if the thing 'goes gold', to borrow a term from a different gaming industry. But low pay is a fact of life in the RPG biz. The one piece of advice everyone involved repeats again and again is 'don't give up the day job.'

A few things came out of the NDA discussion, some of which I agreed with and some I did not. Yet some of them seemed to suggest a mentality I've come across a couple times before: "if you want to play in the big leagues, you have to play by our rules."

I'm pretty sure the big leagues can afford to pay more than $0.01/word. I'm also pretty sure the big leagues can afford to pay on time. The Penguins, the Pan MacMillans, the Times, they're the ones in the big leagues. Even they screw up, but I doubt they make a habit of it. Down here in the dirt, we play bush league stuff.

Now, I don't mind the minors. I see it as a proving ground. I expect one day to move up to the majors, if I'm good enough, and I constantly work towards that goal. I like the Escapist. The people I've done business with there, particularly Susan Arendt, are good people. I'm sorry to see them in this mess, and I'm sorrier still that it had to be Extra Credits, a series I admire. I think this is a situation that could have been avoided.

However I do wish one thing: that we all stopped pretending this is the big time. It's not. This is scrabbling in the dirt, praying that the ump is cross-eyed enough not to notice our screw-ups. That can still be a hell of a game, and it demands skill, but it is not the majors.

Maybe it never will be, but that shouldn't stop anyone from trying to be professional. From bush to big isn't an impossible gap, but it demands a certain commitment to standards, on both sides.

Again, I'm sorry it had to be Extra Credits, and I'm sorry it had to be the Escapist. I wish everyone concerned the best of luck.   

Guilty Pleasures: Doll

There are times when all you want to do is curl up with a bad book. Not a blindingly awful one, not the kind you fling at the wall and scream obscenities at; I'm talking about the books you sometimes don't want to admit you enjoy. I re-read McBain's 87th Precinct thriller Doll today. It's one of that tribe.

I almost want to defend it, but I can't. It's formulaic, pulp, the characters are cardboard, the situation is at best odd, and none of that matters. I enjoyed it anyway. Mind you, it helps that it's the kind of novel that only takes an hour or two to read.

McBain is the best known pseudonym of Salvatore Lombino, a native New Yorker and former Navy man who found fame in the 50s as a writer of pulps. His 87th Precinct stories, set in the fictional city of Isola (New York with the serial numbers filed off), are the ones I enjoy the most. I know he's written other stuff, and I keep meaning to watch The Blackboard Jungle, but his police procedurals are the ones I find interesting. As a series, they start with a bang, and if they'd kept on in that vein I'd have called it one of the greatest police procedural collections going. Every little detail, from the vomit green paint on the precinct walls to the bitching of the bulls as they slowly work their way through another case, seems authentic. The characters, at least at the start, are fleshed out nicely, and have their own story arcs, something that many procedurals don't bother with. McBain was young then, and it shows.

As he gets older, the precinct goes to the dogs.

It's the little things that start to annoy. Steve Carella, probably McBain's fictionalized Lombino, is the first to get fuzzy around the edges. He starts as a tough detective with a deaf mute girlfriend, who he meets while on a case, and his ongoing relationship with her and his friends at the precinct holds the setting together. That's all well and good. He gets married, even better. Then there are kids, and the wife's husband gifts them with an Irish housekeeper, Fanny. Not so good. Though Fanny is on a contract, when the contract's up she declares she'll stay anyway. Even worse. McBain handwaves 'how can they afford a housekeeper, even one who doesn't want a salary', much the same way he handwaves the mansion that Steve Carella eventually moves into. It was bought cheap, apparently. I don't know who was running Internal Affairs, but they ought to have given Steve a closer look. Even cheap mansions cost more than a detective makes, and throughout the series neither Steve nor anyone else gets promoted. Suddenly the tough, plausible Italian cop is Dick Tracy, foiling master criminals by day and going home each night to his wife and twin kids, neither of whom seem to be in any hurry to grow up.

Did I say Dick Tracy? Perhaps it ought to have been Princess Peach. Steve has a nasty habit of getting shot / kidnapped / knocked on the head, and Doll kicks off when Carella's taken hostage by the killers of Tinka Sachs, a glamorous fashion model with a suspiciously empty bank account. The murderer's moll, a busty femme fatale, stuffs Steve full of heroin, trying to make him tell them how he almost caught them. Meanwhile his friends at the precinct think Steve's been murdered, and his buddy Bert Kling is on the verge of being kicked off the force because he wasn't watching Steve's back at the psychological moment. It's a race against time to rescue Steve before the murderer finally twigs that sticking around is a monumentally stupid idea, and keeping a cop hostage slightly more so.

It's pretty standard pulp, and if this was the only 87th Precinct novel I'd ever read, the plot wouldn't seem that formulaic to me, though I'd probably wonder whether this was written before or after The French Connection II. However it isn't the only one, and by now I'm starting to recognize the signs. There's Bert, unlucky in love, mourning over his dead girlfiend. He's Cupid's version of Dirty Harry; none of his relationships end well, and the murder of his latest is the reason why he's on edge and fighting with Steve when the story starts. There's Steve, the hero of the precinct, going down like a glass jaw champeen yet again, allowing all his buddies a chance to say how sorry they are he's dead. Not, and I think this would be more likely, a chance to start a betting pool on how Steve's going to get out of his fix this time. There's the murderer, dumb as a sackful of rocks, who does all the wrong things and then obligingly stays in Isola long enough for Steve's buddies to track him down and fill him full of lead. All the old favourites show up: Myer Myer, Artie Brown, Byrnes, Andy Parker. It's what would happen if someone gave the cast of As the World Turns guns and badges.

I suppose if you put a pistol to my head and demanded answers, I'd say I like Doll - and the other 87th Precinct novels - because they're soap operas. There's a reason why those things are popular. They don't demand much of your attention and entertain you just enough to keep you happy. They're not supposed to make you think. They're not supposed to be good for you. They're just fun.

That's good enough, on a lazy, sunny afternoon.

The Beetle

I first discussed this on Yog Radio; those wanting the audio can listen to that here.

Richard Marsh is one of those unlucky authors who seem to vanish from the scene through no fault of their own. Here he's created an Orientalist Victorian melodrama on a par with Dracula, which was published in the same year. Initially The Beetle was more popular than Stoker's bloodsucker, yet it's Stoker that gets remembered while Marsh languishes in obscurity.

I don't think that can be blamed on quality of output. Marsh and Stoker were equally prolific, more or less, and neither of them seem to have been successful with anything other than their 'name' works. Yes, Stoker's Lair of the White Worm and Jewel of the Seven Stars occasionally turns up in print, but I doubt that anyone reads those for fun. They're the sort of thing that a hard-core Stoker fan will devour just to say they've done it, but nobody else can stomach.

I also don't think Vampires can be blamed for this. Yes, Stoker kicked off the bloodsucker industry, with all the shlock that goes with it. Yet before Stoker there wasn't a vampire market; they turn up now and again, in Byron's (Polidori's?) poetry and Wuthering Heights, but to me that seems less an unstoppable tide and more a slight splash. Vampires, as we've come to know them, weren't inevitable.

No, I think Bela Lugosi's got a lot to answer for. 

Well, him and Hollywood. The very first was, of course, Nosferatu, which wasn't a Dracula movie, honest luv, now stop trying to set fire to the film reels there's a good gel. That was just a teaser: the main event came in 1931, when Universal suddenly realized there was good money to be made in horror. Then followed a host of other shockers, some of which caught the audience's imagination, while others quietly died. Universal was willing to raid almost any crypt for inspiration, and it's not as though they were the only movie studio who saw the potential in chills. Film kicked the vampire up from the minors to the majors. So why was there no Beetle, to go with those invisible men and lupine horrors?

Well, there's the rub. It could have been The Beetle, but for one thing: it's not a cinematic property. Anyone who reads fantastic literature knows the problem. There are some stories that practically glow with genius, but when it comes to the big screen, they die on their feet. Moving pictures, by definition, move; there has to be action, and if most of the fun stuff is happening in the character's head, translating that to the silver screen will be a thankless task. Psychological portraits are extremely difficult to do, and the Beetle is one of those thorny subjects in which, bar one train crash, there isn't much action. Plenty of chills and gothic horror galore, but no screen shocks to go with it.

Yet it could be done, and perhaps will be done, one day. I can but hope!

The Bookshelf

Now I want to talk about the book review segment I contribute to Yog Radio.

I started doing it because I thought it would be fun, which is probably the motivating factor behind most of the things I do. At that time Yog Radio didn't have many contributors, and those it did have only occasionally sent in stuff. I thought it shouldn't be difficult to produce regular content, particularly since Paul of Cthulhu preferred segments that were no more than six minutes long.

I decided on book recommendations because I'm a voracious reader. I always want to tell people about good books, particularly if they're horror or horror-related. I'm a huge fan of ghost stories, especially Jamesian ghoulishness, and whenever I get the chance I infest second hand shops and antiquarian stores looking for material. I personally find the older stories far more enjoyable than the ones written today, possibly because contemporary authors tend to explain too much and are addicted to gore. I don't mind bloodshed, but I'm not in this for the ketchup; I'm in it for the chills.

I see The Bookshelf as a series of recommendations, rather than reviews. I'd never talk about a book (or a series) I didn't like. There'd be no fun in that. However I acknowledge that my tastes don't suit everyone, which is why I always include a short list of negative points: the cons, to be weighed against the pros. Hopefully people find them useful.

I also tend to avoid talking about books other people recommend to me. I've had a few Yog Radio listeners try to persuade me to talk about their favorite novels, and while I don't mind doing it if I like the book, I'm always a little wary because there's every chance I might hate it. I don't want to upset a listener by ragging on an author or story that they love. That doesn't seem fun at all.  

So, that's what I do and why I do it. Next post, I'll be talking about an old favorite of mine: The Beetle