Friday's Favority OTR

Richard Diamond, Private Eye: “The Gray Man” 2/16/51

Richard Powell’s acting career took an interesting turn in 1944. He’d been a song-and-dance man, appearing in musical comedies. But in ’44, he took the part of P.I. Philip Marlowe, starring in the excellent film noir Murder, My Sweet. He was really, really good at the tough guy role and this opened new acting opportunities for him.


One of those opportunities was taking the tough private eye role to radio. Richard Diamond, Private Eye was an entertaining and affable show. It was a nice balance between playing straight with the stories and parodying the genre. Powell, playing the title role, narrated the stories in the traditional private eye manner, with the writers supplying him with snappy, funny dialogue and some sharp one-liners. Powell’s amiable line-readings were a perfect fit for the scripts. Often, he got to show off his ability to carry a tune at the end of an episode, when he would sit down at the piano at his girlfriend’s home and treat her to a song. Powell exuded just enough charm to make these potentially corny endings seem appropriate.


On top of this, the stories were very well-constructed in terms of plot, with Diamond following up clues in a logical manner to get to the bottom each case. In “The Gray Man,” Diamond is hired by a dying man to find a missing college professor. This soon expands outward to involve murder and blackmail, leading Diamond to question the motivations of his client. It all leads up to a really nice twist at the denouement. The case is resolved satisfactorily, with all the plot elements being properly explained. And we get to listen to a lot of snappy dialogue along the way. That’s a very pleasant way to spend a half-hour.

Listen or download HERE.

Voodoo Planet

Read/Watch 'em In Order #79


Andre Norton returned to the crew of the interstellar freighter Solar Queen for the 3rd time in 1959, with the short novel Voodoo Planet.  Though this time, the Queen and most of the crew aren't involved.

While the ship is being refitted for the mail run it was given at the end of the last novel, Captain Jellicoe and Tau, the ship's medic, are invited to the planet Khatka, a planet that was settled by humans of African descent some centuries earlier. The colonists had been fleeing an atomic race war and had stumbled across a planet on which the flora and fauna parallels Africa.

Dane Thorson--our point-of-view character in the series--also comes along. But its Medic Tau who takes the lead in this story. He's an expert in "magic"--the often ceremonial powers wielded by priests and witch-doctors on many planets.

This is a science fiction novel, not a fantasy, so its made clear that Magic is the term given for things that are done through a combination of cultural conditioning and mass hypnosis. On Khatka, one of the leaders (Chief Ranger Asaki) is concerned that the witch doctor Lumbrilo has dramatically increased his ability to perform magic and might have plans to stage a coup.


Soon after arriving, though, the three merchants, along with Asaki and another Ranger, are in an air ship accident that leaves them stranded in the jungle without a working radio. Now they must face both the natural dangers of the jungle and the so-real-they-can-kill illusions of Lumbrilo in order to get back to safety. Along the way, they run into an off-world gang of poachers, making their journey even more interesting.

Voodoo Planet is essentially a traditional jungle adventure given a science fiction slant, which is fine with me because it is a really fun jungle adventure, full of dangerous treks through deadly swamps, unique monsters to fight and a criminal conspiracy to unravel.

It feels a little bit like a "time-out" from the rest of the series, since the action takes place away from the Solar Queen and doesn't involve their usual business as traders and merchants. But that's okay to, not just because it is a fun adventure and because it gives Dane yet more experience in dealing with odd situations. In fact, though Tau gets to do the awesome hero stuff, Dane handles himself well and this is the first of the Solar Queen adventures where he doesn't make a serious mistake because of inexperience. That is significant.

These first three Queen novels were the ones easily available as ebooks. The fourth one--the last written entirely by Andre Norton--is winging its way to me in the form of a used paperback, so we will revisit the crew at least one more time.  The remaining three in the series were co-written by other authors and my understanding is that Norton's input was limited. Fan reactions to these later novels were mixed. I'm enjoying the series enough to where I will read these as well, but I will wait until I do to decide whether to include them in the "In Order" series or move on to something else after the next one.

Don't Mess with the Pig, Man!

It starts with Porky Pig giving an elephant a bath in his girlfriend's living room and ends with a medieval-style jousting match against a mysterious Black Knight. And it all makes sense.

Well, it makes cartoon sense. "The Kingdom of Nowhere" was first published in Dell's Four Color #284 (1950), though I own it as a reprint in Gold Key's Porky Pig #4 (November 1965). The writer is unknown and the fun, energetic art is by Roger Armstrong.

Like most of the comic book adaptations of the Looney Tunes universe, this story is more structured in terms of plot than the cartoons generally were, though this does not prevent the story from being hilarious. Most great comedies have structure to them. Even the Looney Tunes shorts, as anarchic as they were, usually had some sort of structure or rules to them. (The Road Runner always stays on the road, for instance--though that rule was briefly broken in a couple of the shorts.)

Each event in the story follows a bizarre but consistent logic to lead into the next. Porky is washing an elephant in Petunia's living room to impress her by winning a contest held by a soap company--whoever uses the soap in the most unusual manner wins.

But Petunia is just fed up with Porky because he's been obsessively entering contests for some time now and she's just sick of it.  She also doesn't care for having an elephant in her living room.

After taking the elephant back to the zoo (how cool would it be if you could go to the zoo and just ask to borrow an elephant?), Porky and Sylvester find a case of money. Unfortunately, this turns out to counterfeit money from a country that doesn't actually exist.

But wait! A small country with no name is holding a contest to choose a name. Sylvester wants to submit the name Boovaria--the name on the worthless cash--so that the cash would then be legal tender.

Porky thinks this is unethical, but submits a name of his own in a desperate attempt to impress Petunia. He soon finds out that he is tied for first and is flown over the the Kingdom of Nowhere for the tie-breaker.

He doesn't realize that the tie-breaker involves fighting a duel.

The duel is wonderful drawn and choreographed, with Porky and his mysterious opponent using glue and a magnet respectively to stay in their saddles. Porky actually handles himself quite well and, eventually, the battle ends in a tie. When the two opponents find out the winner has to marry the king's daughter, both immediately flee the country.

Porky finds out that the Black Knight was Petunia, who had entered the contest to show up Porky and get him to stop entering contests.

The king and queen decide to just choose a name themselves--going with Boovaria. This makes that counterfeit cash (which Sylvester had stashed away-just in case) into real money. So Sylvester stays in Boovaria to live a life of wealth and ease--until he finds out it's illegal to buy fish. That ruins everything--if you can't buy your favorite food, what's the sense in having money? Though I always thought Sylvester's favorite food was Tweety Bird.

The story ends with Sylvester traveling home by the only route open to him.

The story really is a model of how to structure a comedy, following its own logic and with each event eventually leading to a payoff. Someone (DC, perhaps, now that Warner Brothers owns both them and the Looney Tunes) needs to collect the best of the Dell/Gold Key stories and reprint them.

That's it for this week. Next week--riding dinosaurs--IN SPACE!

Cover Cavalcade

From 1941. This creepily fun cover is tentatively credited to Nick Cardy.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: "The Picture Postcard Matter," 10/1/56 to 10/5/56

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was one of old-time radio's longest running shows, beginning its run in 1948 and continuing until network radio drama came to an ignoble end in 1962.

It was a quality show with a fun gimmick. Johnny Dollar was a freelance insurance investigator. The show was structured around his first-person narration in the form of his expense account: "Item 1, $342.13: air fare and incidentals from Hartford to L.A." he would tell us, then begin recounting the details of the case as he investigated upon his arrival. All throughout the episode, he would drop in yet another expense ("Item 3: $1.40, cab fare from my hotel to the waterfront"; "Item 11: $10.00 slipped to the bartender to 'encourage his memory'"; and so on.) When the case was wrapped up, he'd total his account and sign the report "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar."

Of course, a clever gimmick is meaningless unless backed up by good storytelling. Johnny Dollar definitely had good stories, with solid plots and often excellent characterizations.

For most of its run, Johnny Dollar was a half-hour show. But for a little over a year in 1955/56, it became a 15-minute per day serial. One story would begin Monday and conclude on Friday.

With Bob Bailey playing Dollar with an easy combination of intelligence and toughness, the show was at its peak during this time. With 75 minutes rather than 30 minutes to tell the story, there was plenty of time for both character and plot development.

"The Picture Postcard Matter" is a typically strong entry from this time. $100,000 dollars in diamonds were stolen from a messenger in Zurich. The insurance company receives a letter from a guy offering to sell them information on the whereabouts of the diamonds.

Dollar is hired to follow up and flies to Zurich. He's almost immediately beaten up by thugs who think he has the diamonds. His contact in the city is murdered, but a picture postcard leads him to a sky lodge in the mountains. Someone tries to off him and Dollar has reason to suspect several different people.

The plot moves along logically, with enough action and suspense seeded into it to make sure things stay interesting. The reasons for both suspecting certain people AND the reasons for thinking those same people may be innocent after all are nicely balanced, leading to a good twist at the end. It is, all things considered, a very nice way to spend 75 minutes.

[The best way to listen to a OTR serial, by the way, is to limit yourself to one part a day. Give yourself the pleasure of the suspense of a cliffhanger.]

These episodes can be downloaded HERE.

Solving a Murder 16 Years Late

   I love the way Agatha Christie constructs her 1942 Hercule Poirot mystery Five Little Pigs.

It's all very methodical, with the book divided into three parts.  The first part has Poirot asked to investigate a murder. There's nothing unusual about this in of itself--but this particular murder was committed 16 years earlier. A well-known artist had been poisoned. His wife was convicted of the crime and then soon died in prison.  The evidence pointing to her guilt seems conclusive.

But now the couple's daughter--a 5-year-old at the time of the crime, but now an adult, wants Poirot to look into the case. Based on a letter written to her just before her mom died, the daughter is convinced of her mother's innocence.

Poirot interviews the lawyers and cops who were involved in the case and concludes that there are five other possible suspects. If the mother didn't do it (and if it wasn't suicide, which was the mom's defense at her trial), then one of the other five present in the home where the killing took place must be guilty.

The first part of the novel concludes as Poirot visits each of the suspects in turn. He thinks of them as the "five little pigs," metaphorically assigning each of them an equivalent to one of the pigs in the nursery rhyme.

Poirot gets each of them to write an account of the day the murder happened, though he appreciates that so much time has elapsed that there will inevitably be gaps in their statements. This is Part 2 of the novel.

It's all very methodical, but Christie uses this structure to both paint us a picture of what happened on the day of the murder AND to give us a sense of the personalities involved. I'm not sure Christie gets enough credit for her skill at characterization. Her ability to populate her novels with people we can think of as real is one of the reasons they are so good and still popular today.

Of course, another important reason she's still popular today is her ability to create magnificent fair play puzzles. We hardly ever figure out whodunnit before Poirot or Miss Marple does, but when its all explained to us, we always have to admit the clues were there for us to see.

In this case, some of the clues involve understanding the psychology of those involved in the case, but conclusions made about that are all reasonable and do nothing to distract from the "fair play" aspect of the story.








The last part of the novel is Poiret visiting each of the suspects in turn, asking each of them one additional question. Then he brings them all together to explain what REALLY happened on that fateful day.  The fate of the real killer is an interesting and atypical one, but dramatically satisfying.

Whenever I read a great murder mystery, it always brings back my desire to one day use brilliant deductive reasoning to solve a murder, then do a melodramatic summation with all the suspects listening. But, as I've written before, I have sadly boring friends who regularly fail to get murdered or (at least) get falsely accused of murder so I can save them by finding the real killer. This is a source of unending disappointment for me.

From Indian Captive to Indian Scout

Charlton Comics gave the Comic Book Universe a lot of great characters that (except for the superheroes resurrected by DC Comics) have largely been forgotten.  That's too bad--these are characters that provided us with fun stories and deserve to be remembered.

The Cheyenne Kid began his adventures in Wild Frontier #7 (April 1957). The book was retitled Cheyenne Kid starting with the next issue and ran through issue #99, published in 1973. He also appeared as a back-up feature in several issues of Charlton's Billy the Kid. That's not a bad run at all. But when Charlton finally closed up shop, the Kid was among many characters that vanished into limbo.

The Kid's back story was something that had been done before. As a boy, he's captured by the Cheyenne after his family is killed when their wagon train is attacked. Spared because he put up such a brave fight, he's raised by the Indians and, as an adult, considers himself one of them.

But when he comes along on a raid against another wagon train, he rebels when a mean-spirited Cheyenne (Silent Otter) attempt to defeat the wagon train by burning everyone to death.  He switches sides, though he is reluctant to kill his former friends.

But, though this sort of basic plot has been done multiple times, a strong script (tentatively credited to Joe Gill) and Dick Giordano's art make it work. The Kid rejoins white society.  He's offered a job as a scout for the military, but initially refuses and takes a job in a general store. He simply does not want to have to fight the Indians he grew up with.

But he clashes with the store owner when the owner mistreats Indian customers. That soon leaves him unemployed, so he takes the scouting job, often leading the military into clashes with the Cheyenne and the Sioux, but always looking for ways to win a fight without having to kill someone.

It's this attitude that gives the Cheyenne Kid a distinctive personality and the series as a whole its own uniqueness. The Kid wants everyone treated fairly and--though he will fight when he has to--deadly force will always be a last resort for him.

This premiere story brings the Kid into conflict again with the dishonest store owner (who is selling guns to the Sioux) and his old nemesis Silent Otter, eventually bringing the tale to a satisfying conclusion.

So begins the 93-issue odyssey of the Cheyenne Kid. Like Charlton's Billy the Kid or the wild horse Black Fury, the Kid provided us with some excellent storytelling and really does deserve to be better rememebered.

This story is available online HERE.

That's if for this week. Next time, we tag along with Porky and Sylvester as they go on yet another epic adventure.

Cover Cavalcade

One of my favorite aspects of the original "Buck Rogers" novel (though he wasn't yet nicknamed Buck) is the clever ways the rebels used their disintegrator-proof metal in combat.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Suspense: “The Light Switch” 5/12/49

Claire Trevor plays a woman who thinks her husband just might be stepping out on her. She hires a down-and-out private eye to follow him and find out one way or another.


When the shamus reports the husband is indeed playing around, the wife plots murder. It all seems pretty straightforward, but all is not as it seems. Structured in a series of flashbacks while the wife is setting up a booby-trapped light switch, the story builds up a lot of tension before hitting us with a very effective twist ending.


Trevor had won an Oscar recently for her portrayal of an aging and boozy gun moll in Key Largo--in which she gets tossed aside by Edward G. Robinson. Here, she’s playing an aging wife who no longer trusts her husband. Poor Claire--her fictional relationships just weren’t working out at all. But, by golly, she was providing us with a lot of good entertainment.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Superman and the Mole Men

Some things are such an integral part of my DNA that I no longer remember when I first learned about them. I don't remember NOT knowing who Superman, the Lone Ranger and Captain Kirk are.

There wasn't an outlet for getting comic books around before we moved to Florida when I was 10, so I suppose that--when I wasn't busy being significantly more awesome than my siblings--I was probably introduced to Superman via either reruns of The Adventures of Superman show starring George Reeves or the Saturday morning cartoons produced by Filmation.

I do definitely remember watching Superman and the Mole Men on TV, because the visuals involving the little Mole people were quite striking to my 7-year-old mind.

Heck, they are still striking to my adult mind. The movie was made in 1951, filmed in 12 days on a shoestring budget to test the viability of a Superman TV series. It succeeded in that goal, with George Reeves and Phyllis Coates bringing Clark/Superman & Lois Lane to the small screen to make what is still the most technically primitive but consistently entertaining & satisfying version of the Man of Steel every brought to a live-action medium.

Clark and Lois have traveled to the western town of Silsby, which has drilled the world's deepest oil well. So deep, in fact, that they discover the Earth is hollow. Soon, a couple of denizens from an underworld civilization climb up the drill shaft and pay us a visit.

The look of the Mole Men is effective. As a grown-up, I can see that the make-up work was pretty cheap, but they still manage to give the little person actors an odd, alien appearance. The movie then plays this up, leaving the Mole Men intentions uncertain in our minds for a time, before it becomes apparent that they are just exploring a new world and have no ill-intent.

But most of the townspeople are in a panic, forming a lynch mob and siccing a pack of dogs on the Mole Men. Only Superman's intervention saves the life of one Mole Man after the little guy takes a bullet to his chest. The other Mole Man barely gets away, returning to the drill shaft.

But just as Superman gets the mob calmed down (mostly by bending their guns out of shape), the
escaped Mole Man returns with a couple of friends and a whopping big ray gun (a prop made from a a vacuum cleaner--but it still looks cool).

It really is amazing what skilled storytellers can do even when their time and budget is limited. Aside from just looking cool, the script is straightforward and has the wit to seed the population of Silsby with a few fair-minded people to balance out the fear-crazed mob. Add to this George Reeves' friendly but authoritative performance as Superman, as well as an obvious but still effective moral about McCarthy-style hysteria,  and you have one really nifty way to spend an hour.

The movie was, by the way, edited down by a few minutes and shown as a two-parter at the end of The Adventures of Superman's first season. It was pretty much just as good as a TV show as it was a movie.