Two-Sentence Tuesday

Taking a cue from The Women of Mystery and David Cranmer's The Education of a Pulp Writer, I playing along with the fun project.

After the response from my post yesterday about old-school pulp fiction, I started reading my copy of the first Doc Savage story, The Man of Bronze. Boy, I have to tell you, there are quite a few couplets I could have picked. I think these two, from Chapter 1 no less, will do nicely. The "forest" in question consist of the girders from an unfinished skyscraper.

"It was in this forest that Death prowled. Death was a man."

I'll say more when I review the book but I love Kenneth Robeson's use of catchy, action-oriented "Pulp Verbs." Death didn't just hang out, he "Prowled." It really moves the story along quickly, which, of course, was the point.

My own two-fer is from a story I'm aiming to submit to Cranmer's Beat to a Pulp ezine later this month. It's from my first western story.

The man shuffled forward a pace or two, limping, the dust curling around the man’s feet. Carved into the dirt street behind the man, in a sort of Morse code repeating the same feeble refrain, Prescott saw the man’s footsteps—one longer, ragged rut where the man dragged his left foot for every clean boot print of his right—trailing away back across the street.

Can't help but note the irony of this story, a western. It goes like this: I grew up a SF geek so naturally, the first novel I write is a historical mystery. Having fixed on crime fiction as my medium of choice, the first short story I write is a western. Go figure.

If anyone else want to play, contact The Women of Mystery and get your name thrown in the hat.