HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY -- A Tall & Uncharted Peaks Reek-View

Here’s Tomb Gabriel Hunt, Adventurer, Explorer & Archaeology Whiz Kid!

Hunt At the Well of Eternity -- A Tall & Uncharted Peaks Reek-View

by

The Keeper of the Pit

Ah yes, so yet an udder, I SAID another day ghouls “B,” dangit, goes by as I sit in reektirement down here on the beach in Boo!-muda, trying to hide out from the mold lady. What, fear reader, you never knew the Keep even HAD a mold lady, or that there ever was such a scumly creature? Yeah, smell, glad to slay, there is undead a Keeper-eccch! And there’s tombs, er, times I wish I never even nude her.

Big butt, it’s a boo!-tiful day: cloudy, rainy, the eeek!-caisonal scream of some stuPit tourist Snarky, my trained shark, is putting the bite on before he drags it down to the big fin-ish.

And spooking of big finishes, howl about a big begin ish? The reason? Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime has come up with a new line of books, a continuing adventure series he invented his own self, called “Hunt For Adventure.” I have the first one, Hunt At the Well of Eternity, fright here in sandy hand. Promised paperbacks will be ghost hosted under the Gabriel Hunt house name, and actually, definitely not hackually, written by such fine creative typers as, for starters, James Reasoner, Nicholas Kaufmann and Raymond Benson. Not to mention Hard Case Crimette Christa Faust giving it the ole Money Shot, meaning of curse David J. Schow can’t be too far behind in Gun Work-ing one up of eeek!-qually high calibre. Way I get it, Charles created the swashbuckly treasure-Hunter, outlined the way in, and found the awe-prose-priate authors who more than know what it means to do Ardai.

Then again, maybe I shoulda said “awe prose pirates.” What we have here is a return to the glory days of pulp adventurers like Doc Savage taking on mortal villains, such as pirates to be Pacific, and/gore sinister supernatural types, often Oriental, working their Majii eck, or fighting off The Monsters by finding lost lands of terror full of gigantic prehistoric beasts made to set any young boy’s adventurous heart to dinosauring…


In fact, the Keep himself was there when Bantam Books of the ‘60’s began reprinting the original Doc run. Still got ‘em all, and believe me, I haunt going political atall when I look at those covers and go “Oh, Bama!”


As to covers, all’s Well with Hunt’s first adventure, with art by Hard Case Crimer Glen Orbik, and the GH website features his work on the next six, check ‘em out. Then run to yer loco bookstore and pick up GH #1. The cover, in true pulp fashion, has: a) aeorodynamically towering cliffs in the distance, b) jungle below through witch to bungle, see!) a scantily clad babe surely to be at some point, ahem, bound for adventure, d) a river below to witch our e) f)ighting hero wishes to send our bad guy by two fistily cuffing the g)oonly villain gazing down fearfully at said river from on h)igh. All this, naturally, is happening upon a i) yi yi! chasmly rope bridge. Butte of curse there is, cuz in this kinda tale, be it manned byDoc Savage, Indy Jones or Edgar Rice jungle heroes who’d never live in mere burrows, there’s gotta be a rope bridge. It’s, like, a pulp or pulp Weird Hero impersonator’s major hang-up!

Okay, so I was wuh-wuh-wrong about our hero being two-fisted. He is that, but as scene here and throughout, he’s also tomb-fisted. Guy loves smashing into tombs like he loved his very Mummy. Plus, like Doc Savage, he is also independently wealthy, in that young Gabe is of the globe-hoppin’ Hunt Foundation in a family way. As of this book, though, we have of as yet no idea if said big buck$ has led Hunt, like some of his illustrious fellow adventurers, to build himself this huge money bin that he can dive into and throw golden plunder up in the air and watch it rain upon his head as he savagely cries “Mayan, all Mayan!”

As opposed to Clark Savage, Jr., our man Hunt is not only an international man of mystery but also a feller who knows his way aROWLnd women. And they seem to like him, lick thighs. Hey, so what if he’s a Doc S. in modern garb or naughty, who sez Gabe Hunt has to live like a Monk? Bedsides, he’s a man of the Double O’decade, and he dresses to the nines.

This tomb out, Gabe’s adventure is ghosted by James Reasoner, he of many a Mike Shayne mystery, Westerns and Civil War histories, and that’s a shy low count, I’ll Grant you. Have no fear, though, for lack of leers…by page four a menacing waiter is, uh, pointing his, er, pistol directly between a girl’s “ample breasts,” and any perv who thought along those lines back in Doc’s day woulda soon found himself in a little establishment in upstate New York. Although afterward it might only be as a citizen he’d be UP standing.

Book one, page one we have Hunt at a swanky function in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wherein he spies one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen heading his way. Or, at lust, he thinks his way. Turns out she’s beaming in on Gabe’s more timidly-inclined brother. Okay, Gabe’s new to us all. But his brother? We’ve all hung with him. Oh no? Wait till I tell ya his name. It’s Hunt, Michael Hunt. Yep, Mike Hunt, the hairy guy we all knew in thigh drool. And despite the unfurtunate name, the guy could come in handy in, say, Adventure #8 if it’s the “Hunt Fur The Golden Fleece.”


One thing ‘bout the Hunt boys, round them things happen fast. ‘Pears the gal in quest-in’ bares, I SAID bears a wrapped bundle that quickly becomes the McGuffin for a pitchered battle between ruffians in waiterly disguise and our forces of good and true. Woman’s named Mariella Montez, she looks the parts, and what she’s got on her formation for the Hunts’ Foundation is really a mysterious whiskey bottle wrapped in rather old cloth. Bad guys, of curse, know hexactly howl old it all is, it’s from the American War between the States, and they intend to treat its bearer none too Civil Lee. Meaning in no short time there’s fights and gunplay and the subsequent kidnapping of Maria M. before either of the Hunt boys ever get to know her, hardly. And it haunt just their hearts, it’s also the bottle that gets shattered.

Whatever reekmains in the broken bottle isn’t whiskey, and that’s the alcohol truth. Fact, it doesn’t seem to be much of anything. About here’s where we learn Mike H. lives up and down to his name: he’s there for scientific explanation AND X position.. As in, he’ll do the research while Gabe does the dames in danger bit. And sure enough, unlike the “whiskey,” Gabe in no squirt odor:

Has a car crash and burnfest on the Queensboro Bridge, witch doesn’t cause him all that much spanic. Guess he already knows traffic to the airport can be just plane terrible.

Has a down in Flori-DUH airboat ride become a blast of a gun battle, if that’s alright bayou.

Engages in even more gun blazing once he gets to the site of a Civil War battlefield. You see, that cloth of Maria’s? It’s going to eeek!-ventually be seen as what it is, a map to untold wonders of, perhaps, plunder. And it will be worthy of much rebel yellin’, of that any civil or uncivil warrior can be Sher, man!

Along the lay, Hunt comes upon a museumly maiden named Cierra, and about the time they’ve started to, uh, figure things out the violence gets even more Cierra-ous. Oh, and there’s more chases. And romance leading to places wild and forbidden as if on thigh Sierra’s. Hunt may be a man of his and our time, but I get the feeling he has this sordid thing down to a fine Bogart, X-actly.

Where do Hunt and Cierra moistly, uh, end up? Guatemala, as pursued by the master villain who arranged Maria’s kidnapping and knows what that bottle Kongtained, and he has the divine, perhaps never dyin’ Miss MM to help him find the source before Hunt does. And while the villain’s rich, he’s the mad ass Midas type wants to be richer than Goldfinger, by gold and sonny Croesus. Ah, gunbutt does he reckon with the mighty Hunt’s Colt finger? And what does all this have to hoodoo witch a batcha Civil War hold-outs who fled from Georgia to south of the border and whatever they discovered in the gorges, ya? Hey, I gotta hold some stuff back, ya don’t wanna know everything that happens all that approximately, I SAID Appomattox Lee!

So here’s hoping Hunt At the Well is but the first of many trips down time-lost trails to unknown, now found lands. Book was simply purr fit fur on such a fine lay on the beach day. Why, fright now, even as we spook, I’m watchin’ sweet and lovely beachbathers every bite as lovely as Maria and Cierra stroll by with a thong in their parts. Find myself thinkin’ upon finding myself my own lust land full’a Shamballadies all bustin’ out with treasured chests and….

Oh hell, I know that yell! Howl did she ever find me? It’s the friggin’ Keeper-eccch charging down the beach at me, scattering babes every witch way, ground trembling as sandcastles fall like forbidden temples in far off lands of rich and plenty to her bitchin’ plenty! Bitch reekminds me, fear reader, I gotta Hunt anudder place to hide! Just my Shangri-luck, dammit, the ole Keep’s gotta fly from She Who Must Be Ugggggh Splayed. (She? IT! Even those time-tossed Civil War guys would rather say the H. with it than ride her haggard!)

Gabriel Hunt will return in...