The Texas-Siberia Trail

Book excerpt: Major Malcolm-Wheeler Nicholson is best remembered as the man who invented the modern comic book, founded DC Comics, and brought SUPERMAN, hero of heroes, to the public. But before all of that the Major wrote adventure tales for the great pulp magazines-and no run-of-the-mill pulp fiction was it. The Major served as a cavalry officer on the southwest border during the Mexican Revolution. While the First World War raged in Europe, he fought the Moro insurgency in the southern Philippines. Then followed his strangest assignment, conducting espionage in legendarily hostile Siberia. After the war he was stationed in Western Europe. These places became the settings for the majority of his hardboiled adventure stories. His use of authentic detail, combined with his superior storytelling ability, make his stories difficult to put down. You read one of the Major's entrancing tales-and your imagination is transported back to those real places of danger and daring! This inaugural collection of the Major's fiction includes stories set in all four of his real-life arenas, originally published in top adventure pulps: ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. It is time for the Major to receive his due-as one of the great adventure writers of the pulps. Included is an introduction by Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, the Major's granddaughter.