When Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai launched the Gabriel Hunt pulp adventure series last year (www.huntforadventure.com), I thought that the timing was absolutely perfect. In an era that has seen a marked increase in the number (and quality) of cross-pollinated genre fiction releases – futuristic mysteries, paranormal romances, post-apocalyptic fantasy, etc. – what better time to begin a neo-pulp saga that blends the audacious, over-the-top style of Golden Age pulps with this contemporary appetite for limitless storylines!
For those of you old enough to remember life without cable television, the Internet and cellphones, these novels – which feature millionaire adventurer Gabriel Hunt – will remind you of iconic pulp sagas like Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Shadow and John Carter of Mars. And, like those pulp classics, reading a Gabriel Hunt novel is like experiencing literary crystal meth – the storyline is insanely pedal-to-the-medal throughout. Imagine being a passenger in an NHRA dragster and going 200 miles per hour from beginning to end. It’s a breathtaking, adrenaline-inducing – and highly addictive – reading experience. Buckle yourself in (to a comfy chair) and enjoy the ride…
Take the newest Gabriel Hunt novel, Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire – written by the incomparable Christa Faust (Money Shot). The storyline of this novel makes Indiana Jones seem like a mega-nerd with travel anxiety and a spastic colon. Virtually every single sentence in this 207-page barnburner of an adventure is supersaturated with action. The novel begins with Gabriel in some Moldovan hole-in-the-wall trying to reacquire a legendary Russian dagger from double-crossing femme fatale Dr. Fiona Rush, an archeology professor from Cambridge University. After avoiding an all-out bar brawl and almost being killed in the back alley, he and his Gypsy driver Djordji pursue a gang of Cossacks on horseback who have abducted Fiona and hightailed it through the wilderness for the Transdniestrian border. After tracking them to an old fortress, and a short but brutal conflict involving AK-47s, cratefuls of explosives and a burning jeep, Gabriel and his trusted driver descend a staircase to find Fiona bound to a wooden pillar – “her dress was torn nearly to her waist and her shapely legs were scratched and bruised, but she held her small, defiant chin high, eyes blazing” – with an enraged ruffian throwing knives at her!
And that’s just the prelude to the main story, in which Gabriel agrees to help a beautiful young woman named Velda Silver find her father, 75-year old Lawrence Silver, a scientist who disappeared somewhere near the South Pole while studying the effects of global warming. After falling down into a vertical fissure in the ice, Dr. Silver’s last transmission was “I see… trees.”
What Gabriel and his team eventually find at the bottom of the world could be humankind’s most significant discovery – or it could be the end of the civilization as we know it...
Here’s just a taste: “…a young woman burst from a cluster of thick ferns. A second and a third, and then a half dozen more. Each woman carried a spear, except for the first, who’d already thrown hers. They looked alike as sisters, each with dirty blonde hair and pale blue eyes, each tawny and young, nubile, their deeply tanned, honey-colored skin and lithe bodies glossy with sweat from the exertion of the hunt…”
And even though pulp fiction lovers are consciously prepared going into a book like Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire to expect anything to happen, readers will be slack-jawed at the amount of plot twists and bombshells that Faust throws into the mix.
Fans of classic adventure science fiction à la Jules Verne and pulpy action/adventure as well as contemporary noir fiction (authors like Duane Swierczynski, Megan Abbott, Ken Bruen, etc.) will become instant disciples of Gabriel Hunt after reading any one of the releases available (Hunt at the Well of Eternity, Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear, etc.), each of which is written by a different author.
Bored with life? Bored with the books you’re reading? Pick up a Gabriel Hunt paperback – and for an hour or two sit back and enjoy some armchair amphetamine.
