Spring 2007 Read Online Free

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.
    Sort of.
    First, Warners decreed that for the price they were
paying me, they needed more than a dozen of Lucifer’s adventures. So I
suggested to Brian that I give them a super-thick book: I would
    (minimally) revise and polish the original Adventures ,
add Exploits and Encounters , hand in 225,000 words, and call it The
Chronicles of Lucifer Jones. He cleared it with his higher-ups and the
response was positive.
    Then I contacted Signet, which had reverted all twelve
of my serious science fiction novels to me, and asked them to revert Adventures .
They refused, declaring that they planned to reprint it.
    So I told Brian, okay, we’ll just go with 140,000 words
of all-new stuff. He went back to the contract department, explained the new
scheme, and got me a contract a week later.
    And on the day he delivered the contract, Signet decided
to revert Adventures after all.
    Okay, I said, let’s go back to our original concept.
    I can’t, said Brian. I just spent a week telling them
why going with all-new material was better than going with the original
idea; I can’t walk right back in and tell them I’ve changed my mind.
    And by the way, he added, we need a dragon.
    A dragon, I asked.
    You and I may know that Lucifer is in the spirit of the
old Pulps and B-movies, explained Brian, but the publisher wants something
fantastic on the cover. The deal only goes down if we can run an illo of a
dragon.
    I had my doubts, but I took a shot at it, and gave my
Oriental dentist a block-long fire-breathing dragon named Cuddles. And you know
what? It didn’t make a bit of difference to the book; Lucifer is such a liar
anyway that one more lie just adds flavor to the story. And if you want to
believe in the dragon, more power to you.
    So now I had Exploits and Encounters coming out in one volume from Warners, which would be entitled Lucifer Jones .
But when we still thought that the book would include Adventures, I had sold
Brian a few other reverted titles, and now he was bought up for the year, and
it looked like my spruced-up, revised Adventures would never see
print—or at least, not anytime soon.
    John Betancourt and Dean Wesley Smith to the rescue.
    John, one of Lucifer’s most fervent admirers, said his
Wildside Press would love to publish Adventures in hardcover, and before
the dust had cleared he had agreed to publish matching signed, numbered, luxury
hardcover editions of Exploits and Encounters as well. The
revised Adventures came out in June of 1992, Exploits in February
of 1993, and Encounters in October of 1994.
    As for Dean, he had asked to serialize The Oracle
Trilogy when he began Pulphouse Weekly …but as time dragged on and it
became Pulphouse Monthly , he missed one deadline after another for
beating the book versions out. Finally he asked if I had anything I could
substitute for them. I suggested that every one of Lucifer’s chapters would
make a stand-alone short story, found that Dean was another die-hard Lucifer
fan, and we were in business: he agreed to run a Lucifer Jones story every
month until all three books’ worth of them—33 stories in all—were
used up. When all of them have been published, I’ll be writing a new Lucifer
Jones tale for each issue, Dean will print them, and John will put them out in
a limited edition that matches the first three before they go to mass market.
    So there you have it: thanks to some editorial friends I
never knew he had, Lucifer lives again. And this time he’s going to stick
around awhile.
    ###
    The above was written about 13 years ago, for Pulphouse. And it didn’t quite come to pass. Pulphouse did manage to print most of
the stories from Adventures before going belly-up. At the time I was
contracted six or seven books ahead, and I stayed contracted years
ahead, and though he was far and away my favorite of my