Showing results by narrator "Finn J. D. John" in All Categories

Race Williams - the classic hard-boiled detective from the pages of Black Mask Magazine - takes on the biggest blackmailing scheme of his career. Plus a bonus Daly hard-boiled classic: Paying an Old Debt. Story number two in the Race Williams series. Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) was the creator of the first hard-boiled private eye story, predating Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op story by several months.

What started as a lighthearted flirtation with a beautiful, strangely dressed maiden under the New Orleans moonlight ended with young Ned Minton pledged to eternal love with a girl who had died a century before - a promise enforced by the all-too-real fangs of the demon-serpent who guarded her.

A gutsy dame, a surly smuggler, a deep and sinister river. It's February of 1928 - late summer in the Amazon. Prudence McMarion, a film editor at Walter Disney's animation studio in Los Angeles, has taken a leave of absence to travel deep into the Amazon Rainforest with her best friend, Brazilian native Eleanor Martins, to make an independent movie in Eleanor's home village. Along the way, they meet members of the seedy, disreputable "expat community" there. None are to be trusted.

This particularly chilling short story was inspired by a trip that Lovecraft made with Rheinhart Kleiner to the 18th-century Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn - and to its adjacent graveyard, full of grave markers dating from the mid-1700s. While there, Lovecraft pocketed a piece of one of the grave markers; and it set him to thinking about the possibilities of a story plot in which a vengeful tomb-denizen, resenting a similar act of souvenir-taking, claws its way out of the grave to track down the desecrator.

This is the same reading of The Whisperer in Darkness that you'll find in Pulp-Lit Productions' 82-hour flagship omnibus collection, The Complete Weird-Fiction Works of H.P. Lovecraft. We've packaged it as an individual file for listeners who just want this story. This deeply unsettling cosmic-horror story blurs the line between and among weird fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction, and arguably makes better use of its scholarly-but-a-little-thick professorial narrator to evoke subtextual horror than any previous work.

This is the same reading of The Shadow Over Innsmouth that you'll find in Pulp-Lit Productions' 82-hour flagship omnibus collection, The Complete Weird-Fiction Works of H. P. Lovecraft. We've packaged it as an individual file for listeners who just want this story, to save them the expense of buying the whole collection and the trouble of sifting through hundreds of titles. This novella was inspired by a journey to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which in 1931 was much faded from its glory years as a shipbuilding, fishing, and trading center.

In later years, this was H.P. Lovecraft's favorite among his own stories, and many of the most serious H.P. Lovecraft fans readily agree that it's his best work. It is one of his most truly cosmic horror stories, trading not at all on supernatural elements, relying for all its power on the idea of real forces and entities that humans are simply not equipped to fully perceive or understand.

This is the same reading of The Call of Cthulhu that you'll find in Pulp-Lit Productions' 82-hour flagship omnibus collection, The Complete Weird-Fiction Works of H.P. Lovecraft. We've packaged it as an individual file for listeners who just want this story. This legendary 11,000-word novelette is the first piece of writing to come off H.P. Lovecraft’s pen after settling into his new home in his old home town of Providence, after his failed attempt to establish himself in New York the previous year.

"Mr. Cardigan...if we come to terms, I'll go and fetch your daughter back. I don't want to be considered a killer, but if your son-in-law is as quick as you say, why - I'll bring your daughter home a widow!" Race Williams travels to Mexico in another hard-boiled classic from the pages of Black Mask Magazine. Story number four in the Race Williams series.

For the first time, Race Williams encounters the mysterious masked Red Peril in the biggest case of his hard-boiled career thus far. Story number three in the Race Williams series.

In its youth, Portland, Oregon, was a bit like a rough-and-ready logging camp with a gritty, hard-punching deep-water port. Lusty lads dallied with hard-eyed beauties in dark alleys, and captains forked over “blood money” to buy men for their crews from shanghai operators. From the seedy waterfront to the notorious North End, Portland's sin sector offered vices packaged in pint glasses and perfumed corsets.