About Us
Tom Roberts, Publisher
For over 20 years This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it has been providing illustrations and designs for a wide diversity of clients. His paintings have appeared as covers and interiors for hardcover and paperback books, magazines, comic books, young adult paperbacks, textbooks, television storyboards and advertising art. As well, Tom has instructed art classes at several institutions. He has designed more than 120 hardcover and paperback books.
Tom appeared on A&E's Biography, and has been featured in newspaper articles and Internet interviews. His art has been shown in exhibits across the country, in addition to appearing as a guest at conventions.
When not painting or designing, Tom writes articles on illustrators of the past. He is the author of the award-winning, Alex Raymond: His Life and Art. He recently provided an introduction for volume 1 of the series Rip Kirby: The First Modern Detective, and is a Contributing Editor for the Rip Kirby reprint set from IDW.
Tom has written essays on artists such as Walter M. Baumhofer, Tom Lovell, Graves Gladney and George Rozen, and contributed to periodicals and books including Illustration Magazine, Al Williamson: Hidden Lands, Walter M. Baumhofer: Pulp Art Masters, Belarski: Pulp Art Masters and Rough Stuff among others. He is currently at work on a book about illustrator John Richard Flanagan, best remembered for his elaborate pen and ink drawings that accompanied the serialized Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer during the 1920s and '30s.
He founded Black Dog Books in 1997 in an effort to bring awareness to the significance on popular culture that characters originating in the pulp magazines have had, and keep adventure-based fiction available to the reading public. In 2008 Tom was presented the Lamont Award, "for outstanding work in keeping the spirit of the pulp era alive."
Recently Tom has been working with This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it publisher of Sanctum Books, helping to bring new publications of the Street & Smith characters The Avenger and The Whisperer into print.
Gene Christie, Associate Editor
Gene Christie has been a researcher of fantasy, science fiction, mystery and adventure fiction for nearly fifty years. For the past two decades he has extensively studied and indexed magazines of the pulp era, especially those published by the Frank A. Munsey Company.
In conjunction with Black Dog Books, he has edited a number of rare and previously unreprinted works, including Cornell Woolrich's romance stories, collected under the title The Good Die Young, several collections by Sax Rohmer, George Allan England's The Empire in the Air and The Nebula of Death, Seabury Quinn's Demons of the Night, and The Space Annihilator, an anthology of early science fiction stories published in The Argosy between 1896 and 1910.
He also serves as series editor for Black Dog Books' multi-volume Talbot Mundy Library.
Our Contributors
Doug Ellis (introductions to The Decree of Allah, The Black Death, The Dragoman's Revenge)
A practicing attorney, Doug Ellis is one of the foremost researchers and collectors of pulps magazines in the world. A 1996 recipient of the Lamont Award, he is the founder of Tattered Pages Press, a small publishing house devoted to the study and reprint of pulp-era material; and is the publisher of Pulp Vault, a scholarly journal devoted to the all-fiction magazines.
Doug is also the author of Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps (Adventure House, 2004), the first in-depth study of the girlie magazines, and the co-author of The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps.
Robert Weinberg (introductions to City of Corpses, Thirty Pieces of Silver)
In a career spanning more than forty years, Robert Weinberg has worked as a freelance newspaper journalist, college instructor, and freelance writer, contributed hundreds of articles for books and magazines on topics ranging from mathematics to collecting art. Along the way he has written sixteen novels, sixteen non-fiction books, and edited over a hundred anthologies. His work has been published in hardcover and softcover all over the world.
An authority on genre fiction, Bob Weinberg has edited over a hundred and fifty books in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, young adult, and western fields. He has written columns on all these branches of fiction and is a well-known lecturer at conventions and seminars. He has acted as consultant on genre fiction for a number of paperback publishers and is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on horror and dark fantasy fiction in the world.
Bob is a two-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award. In 2007, Bob won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.
You may learn more about Bob at www.robertweinberg.net. He can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Will Murray (introductions to Dead Men's Bones, The Skull Squadron, Hell's Hoofprints, The Adventurers, etc.)
Will Murray is the author of over 50 novels, including several posthumous Doc Savage collaborations with Lester Dent under the name Kenneth Robeson, and 40 books in the long-running Destroyer series. His 2000 book, Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Empyre, reads like a blueprint for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So does his 1996 Destroyer novel, Angry White Mailmen, in which a terrorist group allied with the Taliban attempt to topple the World Trade Center in New York.
A contributor to many anthologies, Murray has written stories about such classic characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, The Hulk, The Spider, The Avenger, and Lee Falk's immortal Ghost Who Walks, The Phantom. Other stories have appeared in anthologies such as: 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories, 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, The Cthulhu Cycle, Miskatonic University, Disciples of Cthulhu II, The Shub-Niggurath Cycle, 365 Scary Stories, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, 100 Clever Little Cat Crimes, 100 Clever Little Cat Crimes, The Yig Cycle, Weird Trails, The UFO Files, Future Crime, Rehearsals for Oblivion, Mammoth Book of Roaring 20s Whodunnits, Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries, Tales of Masks and Mayhem, and Astounding Hero Tales.
He wrote the entire contents of Spicy Zeppelin Stories under various pen names, scripted two incarnations of Marvel Comics version of the Destroyer, and adapted "The Thousand-Headed Man" as a six-part serial for The Adventures of Doc Savage, which aired over National Public radio in 1985.
With artist Steve Ditko, he co-created Squirrel Girl, the most powerful character in the Marvel Universe.
A longtime contributing editor to Starlog magazine, Murray could often be found on movie sets and locations all over the world, interviewing the cast and crews of Hollywood's latest genre films, such as Watchmen.
As the Literary Agent for the estate of Lester Dent, Murray is dedicated to keeping the Missouri author's works in print.
Peter Bereford Ellis (introduction to In a Righteous Cause)
Peter Berresford Ellis has authored more than eighty books of fiction and scholarly studies. Under the nom de plume Peter Tremayne, he is responsible for the international best-selling Sister Fidelma series of mystery novels. Visit www.sisterfidelma.com to learn more about this remarkable series.
An expert on Celtic history, some of his many works on the subject include The Cornish Language and Its Literature (1974), The Druids (1994), The Ancient World of the Celts (1999) and Ceasar's Invasion of Britain (1980, 1994).
Among Peter's literary biographies are H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (1978) and The Last Adventurer—The Life of Talbot Mundy (1984), as well as essays of other popular fiction authors.
Ron Goulart (introduction to Bodyguard)
Ron Goulart has been a fiction writer and a popular culture historian for several decades. He has authored more than one hundred novels in the mystery, science fiction and fantasy fields in addition to hundreds of short stories and articles.
The author of a popular series of mystery novels in recent years featuring Groucho Marx as a detective, Ron has been nominated twice for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and once for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America.
His nonfiction critical studies include: Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972), The Hardboiled Dicks: An Anthology and Study of Pulp Detective Fiction (1967), The Dime Detectives: A Comprehensive History of the Detective Fiction Pulps (1988), The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the 1930s (1975, revised edition 2006), Comic Book Culture (2000), The Comic Book Encyclopedia (2004), Good Girl Art (2008). He is currently writing the introductions to the Hermes Press reprint collections of the Buck Rogers comic strip and will be doing the same for the forthcoming series of reprint books of The Phantom comic strip.
Goulart ghost wrote the popular TekWar series of books for actor William Shatner. He has also ghosted novels featuring The Avenger, The Phantom, and Flash Gordon. In addition, he has written scripts for a number of Marvel comic books as well as the comic strip Star Hawks in the late 1970s, which he co-created with artist Gil Kane. He and his wife, Frances Sheridan Goulart, also a writer, live a life of rural splendor in Connecticut.
James Reasoner (Introduction to Lust of the Lawless)
Spur Award nominee James Reasoner is one of the most prolific and in-demand Western writers working today, with more than 200 novels to his credit in the Western and historical fiction fields, both under his own name and under various pen-names, including books in the Longarm, Trailsman, and Lone Star series, among others.
A long-time pulp fan, he has authored many detective/mystery short stories. Recent contributions to anthologies include tales of The Avenger, The Green Hornet, and Kolchak, the Night Stalker. For several years, early in his career, he wrote the Mike Shayne novellas in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, under the famous pseudonym Brett Halliday.
He lives in Texas with his wife, award-winning mystery novelist Livia J. Washburn.
His website, with an extensive list of his work, can be found at: www.jamesreasoner.net, and he blogs at: http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com.
James can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .