Part of Series
Doctor Francis Ardan, intrepid explorer and polymath, was created in the 1920s by French writer Guy d'Armen for the French pulp magazine, L'IntrEpide. After publishing three of his novel-length adventures in English, we offer here four original short stories taken from the pages of L'IntrEpide, in which see the fearless hero tackle a Yeti, a Witch Doctor, a vampire and a giant bat. In addition, this collection contains twelve other stories, including four written especially for this volume, in which Doc Ardan faces such exotic threats as the Beast of Gevaudan, the Queen of Atlantis, Natas the Devil Doctor, the Morlocks and more. The book also includes a new listing of Ardan stories and "Before the Bronze Age," an article revealing the connections between Ardan and a world-famous bronze hero.
Authors
WIN SCOTT ECKERT is a novelist, editor, essayist, and author of short fiction. He is steeped in the works of famed science fiction writer Philip José Farmer, particularly Farmer's shared universe literary-crossover Wold Newton cycle and the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban series. He has a deep interest in studying fictional biographies, creating detailed chronologies of fictional characters and universes, and exploring the metafictional connections between seemingly unrelated works, which resulted in MYTHS FOR THE MODERN AGE: PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER'S WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE (MonkeyBrain Books), a 2007 Locus Awards finalist, and the critically acclaimed, encyclopedic CROSSOVERS: A SECRET CHRONOLOGY OF THE WORLD 1 & 2 (Black Coat Press, 2010). Eckert is also an expert on many of the authors and characters who inspired Farmer—such as Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, Pellucidar, John Carter of Mars, and more), the pulp heroes (Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger, etc.), Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Ian Fleming's James Bond, and Sax Rohmer's Denis Nayland Smith, Fu Manchu, and Sumuru—as well as other heroic characters whose adventures Eckert has chronicled, including Zorro, Sexton Blake, the Phantom, Honey West, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Domino Lady, and the Green Hornet, all of which can be found in the pages of anthologies from Moonstone Books, Meteor House (THE WORLDS OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER), Black Coat Press (TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN), and Titan Books (TALES OF THE WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE). An accomplished essayist, Eckert contributed a new foreword the 2006 edition of Farmer's well-known fictional biography, TARZAN ALIVE: A DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GREYSTOKE (University of Nebraska/Bison Books), as well as several forewords and afterwords to Titan Books' reissues of Farmer's novels. As Executive Editor for Meteor House, he played a key role in reissuing definitive editions of Farmer's fictional biography DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE (2013), and Farmer's authorized Burroughs novel, TARZAN AND THE DARK HEART OF TIME (2018). Eckert is the authorized legacy author of Farmer's Patricia Wildman series (THE EVIL IN PEMBERLEY HOUSE, THE SCARLET JAGUAR), as well as the coauthor with Farmer of the upcoming fourth novel in Farmer's Secrets of the Nine series, THE MONSTER ON HOLD, furthering the titanic saga of Doc Caliban's battle against the dark manipulators who hold the secret to eternal life, the Nine. His latest release is an authorized Avenger book from Moonstone, HUNT THE AVENGER, while forthcoming in 2020 is an authorized novel in the new Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe, TARZAN: BATTLE FOR PELLUCIDAR. Find him online at www.winscotteckert.com and @woldnewton (Twitter).
