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    The Forest of the Hanged: Thurvok, #4
    The Forest of the Hanged: Thurvok, #4
    The Forest of the Hanged: Thurvok, #4
    Ebook52 pages34 minutes

    The Forest of the Hanged: Thurvok, #4

    By Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert

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    According to the laws of the Rhadur, whenever one of their own is killed in one of the cities they have conquered, twelve citizens chosen at random must die in turn. Now the Rhadur governor of Greyvault has been murdered and in retaliation, his successor plans to hang twelve innocent maidens.

    One of the women to be hanged is Lysha, the childhood sweetheart of Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin. When Meldom learns of Lysha's fate, he immediately sets out to rescue her, accompanied by his friends Thurvok, the sellsword, and the sorceress Sharenna…

    This is a short story of 6500 words or 24 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPegasus Pulp Publishing
    Release dateMar 6, 2019
    ISBN9781386606079
    The Forest of the Hanged: Thurvok, #4

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      Book preview

      The Forest of the Hanged - Richard Blakemore

      Introduction

      by Cora Buhlert

      sword

      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

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