Spring 2007 (3 page)

So I went to my typewriter—this was back in the
pre-computer days—and wrote down the most oft-abused African stories that
one was likely to find in old pulp magazines and B movies: the elephants’
graveyard, Tarzan, lost races, mummies, white goddesses, slave-trading,
what-have-you. When I got up to twelve, I figured I had enough for a book…but I
needed a unifying factor.

Enter Lucifer Jones.

Africa today isn’t so much a dark and mysterious
continent as it is an impoverished and hungry one, so I decided to set the book
back in the 1920s, when things were wilder and most of the romantic legends of
the pulps and B movies hadn’t been thoroughly disproved.

Who was the most likely kind of character to roam to all
points of Africa’s compass? A missionary.

What was funny about a missionary? Nothing. So Lucifer
became a con man who presented himself as a missionary. (As he is fond of
explaining it, his religion is “a little something me and God whipped up
betwixt ourselves of a Sunday afternoon”.)

Now, the stories themselves were easy enough to plot:
just take a traditional pulp tale and stand it on its ear. But anyone could do
that: I decided to add a little texture by having Lucifer narrate the book in
the first person, and to make his language a cross between the almost-poetry of
Trader Horn
and the fractured English of
Pogo Possum,
and in
truth I think there is more humor embedded in the language than in the plots.

Who but Lucifer, upon seeing Lord Carnavon’s caravan
bringing the contents of King Tut’s 3,000-year-old-tomb to Cairo, could ask,
“Just settling the estate now, are they?”

Who but Lucifer could lose a sporting wager in quite
this manner: “My money held out just fine until I got to Durban, which had a
mule track, horses being too expensive for that part of the country. I picked
out a likely-looking one named Saint Andrew, placed my money down, and watched
him go into the final turn leading by two lengths when a pride of lions raced
out of the bush and attacked the field. The jockeys, most of whom were faster
than their mounts anyway, jumped off and raced to safety, but none of the mules
made it as far as the homestretch. The track, claiming that this was an act of
God, refused to refund the bets, even though I, representing God, pointed out
that what it mostly was was an act of lions.”

Who but Lucifer could describe the African wilderness
thus: “Well, we walked and we walked and then we walked some more. I kept
assuming that Cairo or Marrakech would pop into view any second, but she
assured me that we were still in South Africa, and that we weren’t heading no
farther than Nyasaland, which I hadn’t never heard of before, and which I now
began picturing as a great huge field of grass with a bunch of baby nyasas
hopping around on it.”

Because this was a labor of love, I also started putting
in a bunch of references that would be clear only to a tiny segment of the
audience. For example, in Adventures Tarzan is Lord Bloomstoke, the name Edgar
Rice Burroughs originally chose for him before changing it to Lord Greystoke;
every character in Casablanca is named after a car, in honor of Claude Rains
(Lt. Renault) and Sydney Greenstreet (Signore Ferrari), and so on. A number of
the details were historically accurate: Bousbir really was the biggest
whorehouse in the world in 1925, there really was a nude painting of Nellie
Willoughby hanging over the Long Bar in the New Stanley Hotel in the 1920s, the
Mangbetu really were cannibals.

Then, since I had leaned rather heavily on the pulps for
my plotlines, I started borrowing characters from the B movies: The Rodent is
Peter Lorre, Major Dobbins is Sydney Greenstreet, the

Dutchman is Walter Slezak, and so on; every one of my
favorite scoundrels made it intact from the screen to the page.

Finally, I needed a con man who was even better at his
job than Lucifer, lest the book end too soon, and so I came up with Erich von
Horst, who makes very few appearances—everyone else in a Lucifer Jones
book keeps showing up time and again in the oddest places—but lays a
number of economic time bombs across the continent that Lucifer keeps
encountering at the least opportune moments.

The most fun I ever had in my life was the two months
that I sat at the typewriter working on
Adventures.
I’ve done books of
more lasting import, and I’ve created characters of far more depth and
complexity, but during that period I fell, hopelessly and eternally, in love
with Lucifer Jones.

I sold the book to Signet, which was publishing all my
science fiction novels at the time. They didn’t quite know what to do with it,
so they sat on it for a couple of years and finally released it in 1985,
labeling it Science Fiction, which it most decidedly is not, and implying on
the cover that Doctor Lucifer Jones (they left out the Honorable Right Reverend
that comes before the Doctor) was just another adventurous version of Doctor
Indiana Jones, which he most certainly is not.

The book came out, never found its audience, and died a
silent death. Oh, a few mainstream newspapers found it—one New York
reviewer called it the greatest parody of the adventure novel ever
written—but for the most part it sank without a trace.

I had plotted out four more Lucifer Jones books, one on
each continent (each, like
Adventures,
would end with the various
national governments acting in concert to kick him off the continent).
Exploits
would take place in Asia from 1926 to 1931, and would include an Insidious
Oriental Dentist, a Chinese detective with too many sons, a hidden kingdom
where no one grows old, an abominable snowman, a poker game for the ownership
of the Great Wall, and the like;
Encounters
would take place in Europe
from 1931 to 1934, and would boast vampires, werewolves, the theft of the Crown
Jewels, the discovery of Atlantis, the Clubfoot of Notre Dame, and similar
incidents;
Hazards
would take place in South America from 1934 to 1938,
amid all its lost cities, tropical jungles, and strange religious rites; and
Intrigues
would take place in the South Pacific and Australia just before—and
possibly a few months after—Pearl Harbor (for which I imagine Lucifer was
probably inadvertently responsible). If I needed still more, Lucifer’s
grandfather, Nicodemus Jones, could have willed him a manuscript, describing
his adventures in our own Wild West; and after 15 years of roaming the world,
Lucifer could be forgiven for taking a second shot at making his fortune in
Africa.

Oh, I had it all planned out, all right—except
that Signet didn’t want anything but true-blue science fiction, and at the time
I had no other publishers. Over the next few years I moved over to Tor and Ace,
and while I still longed to get back to Lucifer Jones, I was turning out
serious, prestigious, award-winning stuff at all lengths, and it never occurred
to me to ask if anyone was interested in him. In point of fact, I thought I was
the only person who even remembered Lucifer Jones.

Until 1991, when Brian Thomsen of Warners asked me to
write a book for him. I explained that I would love to—Brian and I had
been friends for years, and I’d always wanted to work with him—but I was
under contract to both Tor and Ace, and between them they held options for all
my science fiction.

Then I paused. “Well, I’m free to sell Lucifer Jones,” I
added, half expecting him to ask who the hell Lucifer Jones was.

“I
loved Adventures
!” exclaimed Brian, and we
were in business.

Sort of.

First, Warners decreed that for the price they were
paying me, they needed more than a dozen of Lucifer’s adventures. So I
suggested to Brian that I give them a super-thick book: I would

(minimally) revise and polish the original
Adventures
,
add
Exploits
and
Encounters
, hand in 225,000 words, and call it
The
Chronicles of Lucifer Jones.
He cleared it with his higher-ups and the
response was positive.

Then I contacted Signet, which had reverted all twelve
of my serious science fiction novels to me, and asked them to revert
Adventures
.
They refused, declaring that they planned to reprint it.

So I told Brian, okay, we’ll just go with 140,000 words
of all-new stuff. He went back to the contract department, explained the new
scheme, and got me a contract a week later.

And on the day he delivered the contract, Signet decided
to revert
Adventures
after all.

Okay, I said, let’s go back to our original concept.

I can’t, said Brian. I just spent a week telling them
why going with all-new material was
better
than going with the original
idea; I can’t walk right back in and tell them I’ve changed my mind.

And by the way, he added, we need a dragon.

A dragon, I asked.

You and I may know that Lucifer is in the spirit of the
old Pulps and B-movies, explained Brian, but the publisher wants something
fantastic on the cover. The deal only goes down if we can run an illo of a
dragon.

I had my doubts, but I took a shot at it, and gave my
Oriental dentist a block-long fire-breathing dragon named Cuddles. And you know
what? It didn’t make a bit of difference to the book; Lucifer is such a liar
anyway that one more lie just adds flavor to the story. And if you want to
believe in the dragon, more power to you.

So now I had
Exploits
and
Encounters
coming out in one volume from Warners, which would be entitled
Lucifer Jones
.
But when we still thought that the book would include Adventures, I had sold
Brian a few other reverted titles, and now he was bought up for the year, and
it looked like my spruced-up, revised
Adventures
would never see
print—or at least, not anytime soon.

John Betancourt and Dean Wesley Smith to the rescue.

John, one of Lucifer’s most fervent admirers, said his
Wildside Press would love to publish
Adventures
in hardcover, and before
the dust had cleared he had agreed to publish matching signed, numbered, luxury
hardcover editions of
Exploits
and
Encounters
as well. The
revised
Adventures
came out in June of 1992,
Exploits
in February
of 1993, and
Encounters
in October of 1994.

As for Dean, he had asked to serialize
The Oracle
Trilogy
when he began
Pulphouse Weekly
…but as time dragged on and it
became
Pulphouse Monthly
, he missed one deadline after another for
beating the book versions out. Finally he asked if I had anything I could
substitute for them. I suggested that every one of Lucifer’s chapters would
make a stand-alone short story, found that Dean was another die-hard Lucifer
fan, and we were in business: he agreed to run a Lucifer Jones story every
month until all three books’ worth of them—33 stories in all—were
used up. When all of them have been published, I’ll be writing a new Lucifer
Jones tale for each issue, Dean will print them, and John will put them out in
a limited edition that matches the first three before they go to mass market.

So there you have it: thanks to some editorial friends I
never knew he had, Lucifer lives again. And this time he’s going to stick
around awhile.

###

The above was written about 13 years ago, for
Pulphouse.
And it didn’t quite come to pass.
Pulphouse
did manage to print most of
the stories from
Adventures
before going belly-up. At the time I was
contracted six or seven books ahead, and I
stayed
contracted years
ahead, and though he was far and away my favorite of my creations, Lucifer went
onto the back burner and stayed there for ten long years.

Then in 2004, Lou Anders began editing the reborn
Argosy
and agreed to run a Lucifer story every other issue. So though it took him a
decade to cross the Atlantic, Lucifer Jones finally set foot on the South
American continent. Then, like
Pulphouse
before it,
Argosy
folded.

But another Lucifer fan, Chris Roberson, offered to run
the second story I had sold to
Argosy
, “The Island of Annoyed Souls”, in
his anthology
Adventure.
Finally Bill Schafer got in touch with me and
offered to start running Lucifer regularly in
Subterranean.
He published
“Chartreuse Mansions” a couple of issues back, and now Lucifer’s appearing in
the same venue twice in a row for the first time in 13 years.

With a little luck, he’ll
stick around long enough to get thrown off still another continent.

Fiction:
A Plain Tale from Our Hills by Bruce Sterling

Little Flora ate straw as other children eat bread.

No matter how poor our harvests, we never lacked for
straw. So Flora feasted every day, and outgrew every boy and girl her age. In
summer, when the dust-storms off the plains scourge our hills, the children
sicken. Flora thrived. Always munching, the tot was as round as a barrel and
scarcely seemed to sweat.

It was Captain Kusak and his young wife Baratiya who had
volunteered to breed her. Baratiya was as proud of her little prodigy as if she
had given birth to the moon. Bold strokes of this kind are frequently discussed
in Government, yet rarely crowned with success. No one should have resented
Baratiya’s excellent luck in the venture. Still, certain women in our Hill
Station took her attitude badly.