Crossover of the Week

Winter 1940; Summer 2011

A PLAGUE ON THE LAND

Moran’s Pub, owned by Seamus Moran, is frequented by vigilantes. Seamus pours the owner of a fire opal another large Bushmill’s, and thinks of his cousin Paddy and his bar uptown. Seamus thinks most of the vigilantes are killers, with two exceptions: “the green one was a man of peace, the pink one killed when she had to but mostly avoided it.” Seamus, a leprechaun, asks the Nightmare to deal with trouble in his homeland, Eire, the spiritual plane of Ireland. In the 21st century, Detective Sergeant Bianca Jones of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide division talks to Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, at Paddy’s. Bianca thinks the Nightmare is “a character, like the Spider or the Pink Reaper,” but Nemesis says he was real, and persuades Bianca to go back into the past to help the hero in Eire.

Short story by John L. French in Apocalypse 13, Diane Raetz, ed., Padwolf Publishing, 2012. The vigilante with the fire opal is the shadowy hero of the pulps. Paddy Moran and Nemesis are from Patrick Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series. “The green one” is the Green Lama, while “the pink one” is the Pink Reaper, another character from the Murphy’s Lore series. The Nightmare is a pulp-era vigilante created by French. The Nightmare became romantically involved with Nemesis in Thomas and French’s book From the Shadows. Bianca Jones appears in her own series of stories by French. Bianca is wrong about the Nightmare and the Pink Reaper being fictional, and she is also wrong about the Spider’s nonexistence.

Crossover Cover: Bullets & Brimstone

Negral, a Sumerian fire god turned Hell’s chief of security, meets Baltimore Police Detective Bianca Jones, who regularly combats the occult. The Department of Mystic Affairs told Bianca about Negral. Negral doubts Hex or Paddy Moran are very fond of him. French’s Bianca Jones is already in the CU, as is Thomas’ Paddy Moran from his Murphy’s Lore series. Negral (aka Hell’s Detective), the Department of Mystic Affairs, and Hex have also appeared in the Murphy’s Lore novels, as well as in spin-off books of their own, thus establishing that Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore Universe is a subset of the CU.

Crossover Cover: Rites of Passage

Bianca Jones’ captain in the Baltimore Police Department sends her to the Department of Mystic Affairs’ academy to receive further training in battling supernatural menaces. While there, she begins a rivalry with a fellow cadet named Karver, who is secretly a former demonically possessed serial killer called the Carver that Bianca brought to justice early in her career. This story is a crossover between French’s monster-fighting cop Bianca Jones and Agent Karver of the DMA, who first appeared in Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series before spinning off into tales of his own. Since Bianca Jones is in the CU, so are Agent Karver and the other characters in the Murphy’s Lore books and their various spin-offs.