The Enchanted Hill

Before he wrote about the wild places, he had traveled them himself. These four tales from the golden age of the adventure pulps carry the unmistakable conviction of a man who made the journey.

In The Enchanted Hill, a chance meeting on a Mexico City sidewalk pulls two Americans up into the high back country, toward a hill the local people will not climb — and whatever it is that guards its secret. Hell Diver opens with a wisecracking fugitive slipping under the Rio Grande a jump ahead of the guns, only to surface into far worse trouble on the Mexican shore. Clay John returns to the Brazilian Amazon, where a riverman’s quiet story about a little clay-building bird darkens into something far stranger in the shadow of the rain forest. And in Air Trail, the intrigues of a Venezuelan revolution collide with the roar of an aircraft engine above the mighty Orinoco.

Desert highlands and border guns, jungle sorcery and the drowned green world of the Amazon — vintage pulp adventure from a writer who earned every mile of it, and who counted a young Robert E. Howard among his admirers.