The Night Court: Thurvok, #7

By Cora Buhlert and Richard Blakemore

The city of Vanadur suffers under the thumb of the Night Court, whose bailiffs snatch random people off the streets and whose masked judges know only one verdict: guilty.

Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, is one of those who are snatched off the streets and put on trial by the Night Court. The accusation: murder. But while Meldom may have done many questionable things in the past, he knows that he did not commit this particular murder.

However, the Night Court is not inclined to believe him and so it's up to Thurvok, Sharenna and Lysha to save him from the gallows.

This is a short story of 7100 words or 25 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Pulp Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393426462

Cora Buhlert

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD. Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. When she is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

Book preview

Introduction

by Cora Buhlert

sword

Nowadays, pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore (1900 — 1994) is best remembered for creating the Silencer, a masked vigilante in the style of the Shadow or the Spider, during the hero pulp boom of the 1930s.

What is more, Richard Blakemore is also remembered, because he may or may not have been the real life Silencer, who stalked the streets of Depression era New York City, fighting crime, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty just like his pulp counterpart.

The mystery surrounding the Silencer has long overshadowed Richard Blakemore’s other works. For like most pulp writers, Blakemore was extremely prolific and wrote dozens of stories in a variety of genres for Jakob Levonsky’s pulp publishing empire. Blakemore’s work spans the wide range of the pulps, from crime stories via westerns, war and adventure stories via romance to science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, the sheer amount of stories Richard Blakemore wrote during the 1930s refutes the theory that he was the Silencer, for when would he have found the time?

Of the many non-Silencer stories Richard Blakemore wrote, the most fascinating is a series of heroic fantasy adventures that Blakemore penned between 1936 and 1939, making him one of the pioneers of the genre now known as sword and sorcery.

Richard Blakemore was a big fan of Weird Tales and particularly admired the work of Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore. And so, when Jakob Levonsky started up his own Weird Tales competitor called Tales of the Bizarre, Blakemore immediately jumped at the chance to write for the magazine and created Thurvok, a warrior hero in the mould of Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn.

Thurvok first appeared in the story The Valley of the Man Vultures in the first issue of Tales of the Bizarre in 1936. He started out as a lone adventurer, but quickly gained a companion in Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, whom he encountered towards the end of The Valley of the Man Vultures. Not long thereafter, the duo of adventurers became a quartet with the addition of Sharenna, a formidable sorceress, and Lysha, Meldom’s childhood sweetheart.

No sooner had Blakemore established the quartet of adventurers, that he threatens to break it apart again in The Night Court, when Meldom finds himself captured and put on trial for murder. And though Meldom is a man of grey morality and has definitely killed people, he claims to be innocent of this particular murder. It is up to Thurvok, Sharenna and Lysha to save him from the gallows.

The Night Court is an unusual story for the Thurvok series, since it is more courtroom drama than sword and sorcery, even though sorcery does unmask the real killer in the end.

Nonetheless, The Night Court contains themes that recur throughout the Thurvok series. As in Richard Blakemore’s Silencer stories, there are a lot of damsels in distress to be saved, though The Night Court inverts this trope by making Meldom the one who needs rescuing. The Thurvok