Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige

Cops & Roburs

Tales Of The
Shadowmen 17
Noblesse Oblige
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier
& Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 97816493202478

Okay, it’s that time of the year again when I do a very small shout out of a review to what has now become my third Christmas reading ritual over the years, following the latest Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs novels (okay, don’t panic, I’ve not read the latest Reichs yet for various reasons but that review will hopefully be coming in a couple of months). That ritual is the devouring of the ‘second from latest’ Tales Of The Shadowmen collection from Black Coat Press... never quite up to date for a Christmas present because the latest one is never published until the middle of each December of the year.

So, December 2020’s collection is Volume 17 in the series, subtitled Noblesse Oblige and, like all the others before it, it contains a collection of short stories with the common thread of each writer taking two or more famous literary pulp or comic book characters and having them cross paths in a new tale. Because of the huge amount of different characters, many of them French, I don’t always get all of the references but, as in previous editions, there’s a handy guide to the origins of all the characters, objects and place names in a kind of index at the back for each story, which attributes these various appearances to the original writer who created them.

This volume has the usual interesting kinds of ‘mash ups’ (in the common, current parlance) and so you have characters like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty or Jules Verne’s Robur The Conqueror (you know, The Master Of The World) cropping up or at least mentioned in more than one of these tales. There are also, again as in previous volumes, the next story in ongoing arcs from various authors, acting as sequel segments to their stories in various editions of the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections. So, for example, The Revolution Begins Tonight by Nigel Malcom, which has people like Sexton Blake, The Nyctalope, Una Persson, Doctor Omega, Zenith and Judex fighting a corrupt government, transplanted into the future world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, is the fourth and final installment of this story arc.

And, while some of the combinations of characters are not as odd as they’ve sometimes been in the past... there are still some really nice homages to both the literary and certain cinematic variations of characters. For example, there’s a nice short tale called Only One... by Frank Schildiner about Boysie Oakes (aka The Liquidator, Rod Taylor played him in the movie version of the first book) being brought, by Elke Sommers’ character from the Bulldog Drummond movie Deadlier Than The Male, face to face with the Jean Marais 1960s cinematic incarnation of Fantômas. Or another in which ‘that woman’ from Sherlock Holmes, aka Irene Adler, brings about the downfall of the latest scheme by Robur... in a story called Master Of The Six Gun by Nathan Cabannis.

Perhaps my favourite stories this time around were the more involved and longer tales which spent a while building up the characters. For instance, John Peel’s The Child That Time Forgot, where the inhabitants of Verne’s travelling, mechanical island get caught on Skull Island in the late Nineteenth Century and one of those left behind ensures the survival of baby Kong. But I even enjoyed the ones where I really didn’t know the characters so well. Such as Randy Lofficier’s The Phantom Angel And The Dwarves Of Death, which has Sleeping Beauty, who is now living in the modern world with a fairyland community often hidden from human eyes, helping out a lady detective from a French police procedural TV series called Spiral, as they work to uncover the murderer of one of the seven dwarves.

Plus, as per usual, all kinds of appearances by the likes of Dr. Moreau, The Morlocks, The Liliputians, Dr. Fu Manchu, Rip Kirby, Maigret, Arsene Lupin and also, a brilliant little tale called Doctor’s Note by Matthew Dennion, in which Eric (aka The Phantom Of The Opera) seeks to have his deformity cured, seen first through the diary of Dr. Van Helsing and subsequently through the notes of Dr. Jekyll.

So, yeah, it’s all just delightful business as usual and, once again, I can do nothing else but recommend Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige to any readers who have a penchant for stories where old characters from different kinds of fiction and walks of life encounter each other. As always, these collections can be a bit hit and miss depending on your tastes, due to the wide variety of different writing styles and, I would say start from the first volume because there are often multi-part stories running through the various collections.