Gabriel Hunt to the rescue!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Ah, the slow summer afternoons of adolescence, my twelve-year-old self whiling away the hours with an adventure novel and desperately wishing that my life was more like this:

He had a vintage Zippo lighter in his jacket pocket. He didn't smoke, but he'd found it handy to carry a lighter anyway. There was always a chance you might come across a beautiful woman who needed a light--or a Molotov cocktail.

That's from Hunt at the Well of Eternity, the first volume in a new series edited by Charles Ardai. Five years ago, Ardai started Hard Case Crime, with the aim of revitalizing the pulp crime novel; now he's launched a new series of adventure novels starring swashbuckling adventurer Gabriel Hunt, who, supported by the vast funds of the Hunt Foundation, travels the globe to keep mysterious artifacts--and beautiful women--out of the clutches of a gallery of evildoers.

Seemingly inspired in equal parts by Indiana Jones, Doc Savage, and Allan Quatermain, the books are aimed squarely at that summer afternoon kid in all of us; this sort of moment is typical:

For an instant, as he fell through the air, Gabriel found himself thinking about how much of his adult life he'd spent jumping from high places with people who wanted to kill him close behind. It was a topic, he decided, that might reward reflection sometime, when he could think about it at his leisure.

Reading these novels makes clear how far the adventure genre is from noir. A true hard-boiled novel is usually at least as much about the conditions of life that drive people to desperate acts as it is about the desperate actors themselves; it's a commentary, social and moral, on our times and the mess we've made of them. A true adventure novel, on the other hand, is interested in none of that; it's interested in the girl and the treasure, period, though not always in that order. In serious crime novels, killing always has consequences, not the least of them emotional, while in Gabriel Hunt's world, bad guys are dispatched without a second thought. From noir we may learn, and we may even emerge changed; from an adventure novel, we simply get a few hours of relatively mindless pleasure. I wouldn't want my whole library to be like that, but at times that sort of escapism is just what's called for.

As in the new novels he's selected over the years to go alongside his reprints at Hard Case Crime, Ardai isn't approaching the genre with irony--no winking or playing with genre conventions here. These are true adventure novels, not ironic updatings, and they're retro only insofar as they reflect new steps in an old tradition--here, swords and ziplines exist side-by-side with GPS devices and laptops. As with noir, Ardai takes his genre seriously, and it pays off; we're never worried that our investment in an action scene will be undercut by a lapse into parody.

That's not to say that these books are always serious: Hunt, like Indiana Jones (and some incarnations of James Bond), is fully willing to acknowledge the absurdity of the situations in which he frequently finds himself--though that doesn't lessen his determination to come through them alive despite. (That humor is a stark contrast to the grim determination of Doc Savage, one of the reasons that Indiana Jones has always felt more like an immortal character than Savage does--and one of the reasons that Philip Jose Farmer's odd biography of Savage, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, is so much fun: by pretending to take Savage fully seriously, Farmer reveals just how bizarre and even unsettling his relentless pursuit of perfection can be.) Gabriel Hunt is, after all, the good guy, and if we can't count on the good guy to have a way with a quip, what kind of world are we living in?

The first two installments are out now, both credited to Gabriel Hunt himself: Hunt at the Well of Eternity, ghosted by James Reasoner, and Hunt through the Cradle of Fear, by Ardai. They're a good start, revealing key bits of Hunt's complicated back story amid the action and surprises, as well as quests of sufficient scope to hold our interest. The Reasoner volume starts off strong, with a party straight out of Bruce Wayne's nightlife, and features nice nods to Doc Savage (a Mayan connection) and Indiana Jones (bullwhips), though it flags a bit later on, the prose sometimes slipping into a pedestrianism that seems inadequate to the action being described.

Hunt through the Cradle of Fear, however, is written with exactly the brio and panache that Hunt's adventures should have: you get the sense that Hunt is having just as good a time as we are as his adventure hurtles along to a final showdown of unexpectedly breathtaking stakes. If that's the standard for the series, this is going to be a lot of fun, and the quarterly publication schedule seems about right: who couldn't use a perfect popcorn book every three months?

"You have no right to be tired!" or, why I'm not an intrepid explorer

{Photos by rocketlass.}

As will not surprise regular readers of this blog, I'm about as much of a quiet, stay-at-home person as you're likely to find. Given a choice between, on one hand, fame and adventure, and on the other, a quiet chair with a martini and a Barbara Pym novel in easy reach, and I'll soon be happily chuckling at the vicissitudes of English spinsters.

That said, a passage like this does go a long way towards reviving the twelve-year-old boy in me:

We, the undersigned, forming an expedition about to explore the interior of _________, under Mr. A., consent to place ourselves (horses and equipment) entirely and unreservedly under his orders for the above purpose, from the date hereof until our return to _______, or, on failure in this respect, to abide all consequences that may result.

It's taken from a sample agreement that the Royal Geographic Society, back in its Victorian and Edwardian heyday, recommended every expedition leader use; I love the "entirely and unreservedly," and the myriad possible horrible fates that "all consequences" might cover.

And while it doesn't convince me that I want to leave my house, it does remind me of why I'm still such a sucker for explorers' tales: my mind positively boggles at the thought that real people actually subjected themselves to the dangers and deprivations of these expeditions--willingly, and, in some cases, repeatedly. Reading the best of these books--such as Apsley Cherry-Garard's account of the Scott expedition, The Worst Journey in the World (1922)--I find myself veering from astonishment to admiration to horror, all of which eventually give way to a simply gratitude that I'm here and not there.

The book in which I found that Royal Geographic Society agreement, David Gann's The Lost City of Z (2008), is an honorable entrant in that genre, telling of Percy Fawcett's early twentieth-century Amazon explorations, from the last of which, in 1925, Fawcett never returned. In the ensuing decades, Fawcett's disappearance led countless explorers of all levels of experience to plunge into the jungle in an attempt to find him--including Peter Fleming, whose wonderfully wry Brazilian Adventure (1933) tells of his failed (and, to be fair, somewhat desultory) search. Gann himself even eventually felt compelled to enter the jungle; his trek, though aided by all that modern technology can offer, from high-clearance off-road vehicles to satellite phones, only confirmed me in my preference for the couch.

But what if you've never read Brazilian Adventure or The Lost City of Z, and therefore you're not convinced? What if you're still thinking of curing that winter-long case of cabin fever with a little adventure? Methinks a look at the realities of jungle medicine might do the trick. Here's the Royal Geographical Society again, courtesy of Gann:

Disease and injury could devastate a party, and Fawcett received some basic medical tips. He learned, for instance, how to remove a decaying tooth by "constantly pushing and pulling." If he ingested poison, he was taught to immediately make himself throw up: "Use soap-suds or gunpowder if proper emetics are not at hand." Fo a venomous snakebite, Fawcett would have to ignite gunpowder in the wound or cut away the infected flesh with a knife. "Afterwards burn out [the area around the bite] with the end of your iron ramrod, heated as near a white heat as you can readily get," Galton advised. "The arteries lie deep, and as much flesh may, without danger, be cut or burnt into, as the fingers can pinch up." . . . The treatment for hemorrhaging wound--say, from an arrow--was equally "barbarous": "Pour boiling grease into the wound."

I thought that would do it. I recommend you trade your pith helmet for a copy of The Lost City of Z and settle in on the couch here with the cats. Me, I'll be making the drinks and anxiously awaiting the first Gabriel Hunt novel. That should be enough adventure for me for the foreseeable future.