SNEAK PREVIEW! New Hiram Grange Art!

Here a couple of full color Hiram Grange illustrations for the upcoming series. The artists is the uber talented MALCOLM MCCLINTON!

The Webley MK VI Revolver

The Webley Revolver (also known as the Webley Break-Top Revolver or Webley Self-Extracting Revolver) was, in variousmarks, the standard issue service pistol for the armed forces of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth from 1887 until 1963.

The Webley is a top-break revolver with automatic extraction; breaking the revolver open for reloading also operates the extractor, removing the spent cartridges from the cylinder. The Webley Mk I service revolver was adopted in 1887, but it was a later version, the Mk IV, which rose to prominence during the Boer War of 1899–1902. The Mk VI, introduced in 1915 duringWorld War I, is perhaps the best-known model.

Webley service revolvers are among the most powerful top-break revolvers ever produced, firing the .455 Webley cartridge. Although the .455 calibre Webley is no longer in military service, the .38/200 Webley Mk IV variant is still in use as a police sidearm in a number of countries.

On May 24, 1915, the Webley Mk VI was adopted as the standard sidearm for British and Commonwealth troops and remained so for the duration of World War I, being issued to officers, airmen, naval crews, boarding parties, trench raiders, machine-gun teams, and tank crews. The Mk VI proved to be a very reliable and hardy weapon, well suited to the mud and adverse conditions of trench warfare, and several accessories were developed for the Mk VI, including a bayonet (made from a converted French Pritchard bayonet), a speedloader device ("Prideaux Device"), and a stock allowing for the revolver to be converted into a carbine.

The Mission Oak chair...

Hiram spares a glance at the heavy Mission Oak chair in the corner of his dusty, tobacco-infused study. In it now, a schoolgirl. Bound and gagged, tied securely---she bats her long lashes provocatively at him and screams Do me! Do me! Do me! with her eyes.
Hiram blinks. Another wave of intoxification washes over him and he swigs another gulp of Glenfiddich straight from the bottle, washing the acrid bite of the pills from under his tongue and down his throat, replacing bitterness with fire. He’s headed for a dark place---the roller coaster is nearing the top of its run, and it’s soon to be a
long, hard fall for Hiram Grange… a long fall and loop-de-loop. But he’ll pull out just before hitting rock bottom. He always does. But for now, the Binge.

--Scott Carr, Hiram Grange and the Hitler Gene

Hiram and the homeless thing...

Pigeons pecked at frozen vomit on the asphalt. The February air burned his skin, each breath a chill razor that made his lungs ache. The asphalt was salted white, but the mounded snowbanks were gray and hard, cold tumors impregnated with shopping carts and the bent, ridiculous spines of umbrellas waiting for late May to give them up in the amniotic thaw. Everything broke free eventually, Hiram Grange knew, feeling the burning clean oblivion of the opium and whiskey fading. Memories, dreams, forgotten beasts--nothing stayed locked up forever. 

Grange looked up to see a homeless thing, genderless beneath the grimy layers of a Red Sox jersey and a Member's Only jacket, shuffle toward him, one foot on the sidewalk, one on the street, its head weighted down with a head of gray, filthy, dreadlocked hair that threatened to snap its spine. It paused before the Art Deco church with a vast verdigrised Jesus crowned in thorns of bird shit splayed across a mondrian of opaque, discolored windows, and turned to Hiram Grange, its toothless mouth wide and leering.

"He is coming for you," it said. "He is coming for us all."

-Rob Davies, Hiram Grange and the Digital Eucharist

Mrs. Bothwell and containment...

     Mrs Bothwell waited politely for the still screaming cinema audience to trample one another onto the street, wondering how much they had seen in the gloom of the auditorium.  Hiram had been fast, arresting the beast's attention before it could decide on a victim, and drawing it away.  She doubted that any two witnesses would give the same story to the authorities, if any of them could manage a coherent account at all, and that suited her to perfection.  Reliable witnesses would need to be attended to carefully, for fear of setting panic free in the streets.  Her people called it containment.  The world was not ready to know of the shadow things that flitted in and out of it, or the struggles that waged on the edge of a reality for more fragile than most of mankind could accept.

-Richard Wright, Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow