Crossover Cover: Four Bullets for Dillon

This collection of stories by Derrick Ferguson featuring his New Pulp hero Dillon includes two stories with crossovers. The first is "Dead Beat in La Esca," coauthored with Joel Jenkins. Dillon and rock star/mercenary Sly Gantlet manage to evade a group of would-be killers despite having downed several drugged drinks. Sly has partied in the fleshpots of cities such as Morocco, Cairo, Isthmus City, and Casablanca. When Sly challenges Dillon to an arm-wrestling contest, Sly’s date suggests they rent the best room at the Cobalt Club after he wins to celebrate. Isthmus City is from the James Bond film Licence to Kill. The Cobalt Club is from Walter Gibson's pulp novels about a vigilante who knows the evil lurking in men's hearts. This crossover also brings in Jenkins’ Gantlet Brothers, sibling musicians who moonlight as mercenaries, who appear in the novel The Nuclear Suitcase and the collections The Gantlet Brothers’ Greatest Hits and The Gantlet Brothers: Sold Out. John Velvet from the Dillon series appears in The Nuclear Suitcase. This story was originally published in the anthology Thrilling Tales, and was reprinted again in The Gantlet Brothers' Greatest Hits. Dillon and Sly worked together again in three novellas by Ferguson and Jenkins collected as The Specialists. I covered the first story, "Dead Beat in Khusra," in a previous post. The other story in Four Bullets for Dillon with crossovers is "Dillon and the Judas Chalice." Dillon, being chased by police through the city of Denbrook, tells his ally Wyatt Hyatt he took some training from a French race car driver named Vaillant. A potential client, Diogenes Morales, tells Dillon his former best friend, Cornelius Spoto, is plotting to overthrow the Caribbean island republic of San Monique. Dillon’s comrade Reynard Hansen claims to have been trained by the Thieves Guild of Seville. Morales’ daughter Fiesta attended the Higgins School of Higher Learning for Girls. Spoto worked with Dillon’s enemy Cecil Henshaw in Parmistan. The city of Denbrook, created by Mike McGee, was the setting of nine serialized novels by various authors on the online fiction site Frontier Publishing. The French race car driver is the title character of Jean Graton’s comic book series Michel Vaillant. San Monique is from the film version of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Live and Let Die; since most of the Bond movies take place in an alternate universe to the CU, the San Monique mentioned in this story and Frank Schildiner’s “The True Cost of Doing Business” must be the CU version of the island. The Thieves Guild of Seville is a reference to Miguel de Cervantes’ short story “Rinconete and Cortadillo.” The Higgins School of Higher Learning for Girls is named after Professor Henry Higgins from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, adapted as the stage musical My Fair Lady. Parmistan is a fictional country from the movie Gymkata.