Haffner Press is to publish The Complete Ivy Frost by Lovecraft correspondent and one-time protege Donald Wandrei. A $50 hardcover with 700 pages of mystery-science-detective stories…

Rather than following the usual hard-drinking, trench-coated style of many of his contemporaries, [Wandrei’s] strategy was to mix the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with the technology of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage.

I’d never heard of Ivy Frost before, but I like the sound of him. These gun-blazing mystery-science stories all appeared in Clues Detective Stories magazine from 1934-37 (not on Archive.org), so one assumes that Lovecraft was aware of them. One wonders how may ‘little nods to Lovecraft’ Wandrei might have snuck into the stories.

Let’s hope for a Kindle ebook version in due course. In the meantime there’s also I.V. Frost: Tales of Mystery & Scientific Investigation which is a 270-page collection of pastiche stories by later writers, available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as a paperback from Moonstone.

In other news on Wandrei, S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated and he notes that the Lovecraft letters book…

Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja is soon to appear from Hippocampus Press.