Me and Lucifer

Lucifer Jones was born one evening back in the late 1970s. I was trading videotapes with a number of other people—stores hadn’t started renting them yet, and this was the only way to increase your collection at anything above a snail’s pace—and one of my correspondents asked for a copy of H. Rider Haggard’s African adventure classic She, with Ursula Andress, which happened to be playing on Cincinnati television.

I looked in my Maltin Guide and found that She ran 117 minutes. Now, this was back in the dear dead days when everyone knew that Beta was a better format than VHS, and it just so happened that the longest Beta tape in existence at the time was two hours. So I realized that I couldn’t just put the tape on and record the movie, commercials and all, because the tape wasn’t long enough. Therefore, like a good correspondent/trader, I sat down, controls in hand, to dub the movie (which I had never seen before) and edit out the commercials as they showed up.

About fifteen minutes into the film Carol entered the video room, absolutely certain from my peals of wild laughter that I was watching a Marx Brothers festival that I had neglected to tell her about. Wrong. I was simply watching one of the more inept films ever made.

And after it was over, I got to thinking: if they could be that funny by accident, what if somebody took those same tried- and-true pulp themes and tried to be funny on purpose?

So I went to my typewriter—this was back in the pre-computer days—and wrote down the most oft-abused African stories that one was likely to find in old pulp magazines and B movies: the elephants’ graveyard, Tarzan, lost races, mummies, white goddesses, slave-trading, what-have-you. When I got up to twelve, I figured I had enough for a book…but I needed a unifying factor.

Enter Lucifer Jones.

Africa today isn’t so much a dark and mysterious continent as it is an impoverished and hungry one, so I decided to set the book back in the 1920s, when things were wilder and most of the romantic legends of the pulps and B movies hadn’t been thoroughly disproved.

Who was the most likely kind of character to roam to all points of Africa’s compass? A missionary.

What was funny about a missionary? Nothing. So Lucifer became a con man who presented himself as a missionary. (As he is fond of explaining it, his religion is “a little something me and God whipped up betwixt ourselves of a Sunday afternoon.”)

Now, the stories themselves were easy enough to plot: just take a traditional pulp tale and stand it on its ear. But anyone could do that: I decided to add a little texture by having Lucifer narrate the book in the first person, and to make his language a cross between the almost-poetry of Trader Horn and the totally fractured English of Pogo Possum, and in truth I think there is more humor embedded in the language than in the plots. (And as the series extended to more books, his language became a little more fractured too.)

Lucifer, bless him, isn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp. Upon seeing Lord Carnavon’s caravan bringing the contents of King Tut’s 3,000-year-old-tomb to Cairo, only he could ask, “Just settling the estate now, are they?”

Because this was a labor of love, I also started putting in a bunch of references that would be clear only to a tiny segment of the audience. For example, in Adventures Tarzan is Lord Bloomstoke, the name Edgar Rice Burroughs originally chose for him before changing it to Lord Greystoke. Every character in Casablanca is named after a car, in honor of Claude Rains (Lt. Renault) and Sydney Greenstreet (Signore Ferrari) from the movie Casablanca. A number of the details were historically accurate: Bousbir really was the biggest whorehouse in the world in 1925, there really was a nude painting of Nellie Willoughby hanging over the Long Bar in the New Stanley Hotel in the 1920s, the Mangbetu really were cannibals, and so on.

Then, since I had leaned rather heavily on the pulps for my plotlines, I started borrowing characters from the B movies: The Rodent is a thinly-disguised Peter Lorre, Major Dobbins is Sydney Greenstreet, the Dutchman is Walter Slezak, and so on; every one of my favorite 1940s scoundrels made it from the screen to the page.

Finally, I needed a con man who was even better at his job than Lucifer, lest the book end too soon, and so I came up with Erich von Horst, who makes very few appearances—everyone else in a Lucifer Jones book keeps showing up time and again in the oddest places—but lays a number of economic time bombs across the continent that Lucifer keeps encountering at the least opportune moments. In fact, halfway through the fifth book (where I am as I write this), von Horst has made more appearances than any other character.

The most fun I ever had in my life was the two months that I sat at the typewriter working on Adventures. I’ve done books of more lasting import, and I’ve created characters of far more depth and complexity, but during that period I fell, hopelessly and eternally, in love with Lucifer Jones.

I sat on it until I was well-established at Signet, which was publishing all my science fiction novels at the time. They didn’t quite know what to do with it, so they sat on it for a couple of years and finally released it in 1985, labeling it Science Fiction, which it most decidedly is not, and implying on the cover that the Honorable Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones was just another adventurous version of Doctor Indiana Jones, which he most certainly is not.

The book came out, did all right but never really found its audience, and vanished a year or two later. A few mainstream newspapers found it—one New York reviewer called it the greatest parody of the adventure novel ever written—but for the most part it didn’t make any waves.

I had plotted out five more Lucifer Jones books, one on each continent (each, like Adventures, would end with the various national governments acting in concert to kick him off that particular land mass). Exploits takes place in Asia from 1926 to 1931, and includes an Insidious Oriental Dentist, a Chinese detective with too many sons, a hidden kingdom where no one grows old, an abominable snowman, a seductive criminal known as The Scorpion Lady, and the like. Encounters takes place in Europe from 1931 to 1934, and boasts vampires, werewolves, the theft of the Crown Jewels, the discovery of Atlantis, the Clubfoot of Notre Dame, and similar. Hazards takes place in South America from 1934 to 1938, amid all its lost cities, tropical jungles, and strange religious rites. Voyages has Lucifer island-hop from South America to Australia, finding lost treasures, a giant ape, naked goddesses along the way, and he also gets to explain why it’s not really his fault that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And finally there will be Intrigues, set in Australia and Antarctica, at the end of which he will have been barred from every land mass in the world.

I had it all planned out when I finished Adventures—except that Signet decided they didn’t want anything but true-blue science fiction, and at the time I had no other publishers. Over the next few years I moved over to Tor and Ace, and while I still longed to get back to Lucifer Jones, I was turning out serious, prestigious, award-winning stuff at all lengths, and it never occurred to me to ask if anyone was interested in him. In point of fact, I thought I was the only person who even remembered Lucifer Jones.

Until 1991, when Brian Thomsen of Warners asked me to write a book for him. I explained that I would love to—Brian and I had been friends for years, and I’d always wanted to work with him—but I was under contract to both Tor and Ace, and between them they held options for all my science fiction.

“But I’m free to sell Lucifer Jones,” I added, half expecting him to ask who the hell Lucifer Jones was.

“I loved Adventures!” exclaimed Brian, and we were in business.

Warners decreed that for the price they were paying me—I was considerably more valuable then when I’d written Adventures they needed considerably more than a dozen of Lucifer’s adventures. So I wrote Exploits and Encounters, handed them in, and called it The Chronicles of Lucifer Jones.

And that was it for eleven years. Then Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press asked for me to resurrect Lucifer, and he’s been running him in almost every issue of Subterranean Magazine. When I’d finished a dozen South American episodes, he collected them as Hazards, and as I write these words I’ve done seven of the episodes for Voyages.

I’ve received more acclaim for other things I’ve written. I’ve won five Hugos, and I have more than one hundred trophies, scrolls, certificates and the like in my trophy room. And if someone told me I could keep them or keep writing Lucifer Jones stories but not both, I’d kiss them all good-bye without a second thought.

Lucifer remains my favorite of all my characters. I love him, and I hope after reading this book you will too.