"The Golden Snare" -- Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (ADVENTURE, April 18, 1918)

A while back I picked up a big, luxurious collected volume of adventure stories, fittingly titled The Big Book of Adventure Stories, edited by Otto Penzler and published by Random House under their "Vintage Crime/Black Lizard" imprint.  It looked like it would be a good read, the cover illustration by Rafael DeSoto had topless Hawaiian women menacing a couple of white sailors (how'd they get those panthers to Hawaii?) and the price was right - plus, I'd previously read The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, similarly edited by Penzler and published under the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint when my father bought it a couple years back, and enjoyed that book immensely.

Since I'm not really 100% sure what I intend to do with this blog, I figured a good start would be just going through this book, re-reading the stories contained therein, and talking about them.  While a number of the stories in this book are from before the "Pulp Era" is generally reckoned, I figure "Pulp" is as much an attitude as it is a cheap grade of paper.  If a story from 1880 or from 1980 has the right swaggering moxie to it, I'm willing to reckon it as Pulp.

The first story in the book is "The Golden Snare," by Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, originally published in the April 18th, 1918 issue of Adventure magazine.  Bishop was best known for writing non-fiction books on the Mexican-American War and the development of the submarine, but in conjunction with Brodeur, a professor at Berkeley, he penned The Altar of the Legion, a novel set in Roman Britain, as well as a series of stories about Lady Fulvia, a young noblewoman at the time of the Second Crusade.  Her father, Count Arnulfo, rules the city of Rocca Forte in Sicily and her hand in marriage is highly sought-after.

In "The Golden Snare," Fulvia is aboard a galley returning to Rocca Forte following a successful pilgrimage to the shrine of Santa Lucia di Celsi.  At dawn, Fulvia's ship is rammed and sunk by another ship; much to her outrage, as the coast was to be patrolled by her father's vassals while he was fighting in the Crusades.  Thrown clear of the sinking ship, Fulvia swiftly realizes that these pirates are in fact two of her father's vassals and their supporters.

Unsure whether the two traitors intend to take her hostage to force concessions from her father or to force her to choose one of them to marry, Fulvia swims to shore and takes refuge as best she can while she considers her options.  Naked, alone and unarmed, she has nothing but her wits with which to protect her virtue and her father's sovereignty.

I haven't read too much strictly-historical pulp fiction, and most of what I've read in that subgenre has been the work of Robert E. Howard.  While "The Golden Snare" lacks some of Howard's trademark blood and thunder, it's no slouch either.  There's a sequence in which Fulvia lures one of her pursuers into a trap and drowns him that gets the pulse pounding.

More interestingly, Lady Fulvia is an early example of a female protagonist in the Pulps, and as such she's a clear predecessor to the likes of Jirel of Joiry and Red Sonya of Rogatino.  Given how manly-man macho the pulps generally were, it's really interesting to see these really powerful, independent female figures who not only don't need a man to save them from peril, but openly dismisses the role of Holly Homemaker to go her own way.  In a time when women didn't even have the vote yet, women like Fulvia, Jirel and Sonya are beyond astonishing.