Friday's Favorite OTR

 Gangbusters: "The Case of the Mound City Safecracker." 3/13/48

The story of a "safecracker who found that a flask of liquer is more dangerous to handle than a vial of nitroglycerin."

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Solving Crimes While Drunk

 

Craig Rice's real name was Georgiana Ann Randolph Walker Craig. When she began publishing prose fiction in 1939 (after working as a writer in radio), she began using the pen name.

Her stuff is wonderful--a witty combination of hard-boiled detective stories and screwball comedy. Her most successful character was alcoholic lawyer John J. Malone, who acting more like a P.I. than a lawyer, only took cases with the upmost reluctance, and solved them without ever bothering to sober up.

To quote his entry on the Thrilling Detective website: Despite being billed as “Chicago’s noisiest and most noted criminal lawyer,” Malone acts more like a private eye than a member of the court. And a particularly hard-drinking and frequent drunk private eye at that. Despite a rep for courtroom pyrotechniques, he’s far more likely to be found carousing around the city looking for clues (or a drink), perstering suspects (or witnesses), or holding court at Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar than in any court of law.

Rice died all too young in 1957. Three years later, in the first issue of the short-lived digest Ed McBain's Mystery Book (1960), one last John J. Malone story appeared. It was ghost-written by Lawrence Block, but I can't find any indication as to whether Block was finishing an incomplete story or writing an original Malone story on his own. Anyway, Block does a great job of emulating Rice's style. If I hadn't done a modicum of research for this post, I would have assumed "Hard Sell" was a Rice story without questioning this.

Malone is hired by the owner of a company that sends out salesmen to peddle magazine subscriptions. Someone has murdered four of those salemen. The first three could have been accidents, but the last guy got a bullet in the head. Malone is tasked with figuring out whodunit.

The investigation proceeds along logical lines, but the story is dripping with humor. Malone does indeed solve the crime, but there's an interesting twist at the end in what he does with that solution. Read it yourself HERE. 

I found out while writing this that Rice teamed up with Stuart Palmer (creater of mystery-solving schoolteacher Hildegard Withers) to write an anthology worth of stories in which Hildegard and Malone team up. I have GOT to read those!

Dirigible of Doom!

 

cover art by Bob Kane

Detective Comics #33 (November 1939) is significant in that it includes a two-page origin for Batman, written by Bill Finger. We, though, are going to jump ahead to the entertaining (if clumsily titled) story "The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom," written by Gardner Fox. The art is credited to Bob Kane, with Sheldon Moldoff drawing the backgrounds.

Gotham City has always seemed like a dangerous place to live, but it becomes a particularly unpleasant locale when a scarlet dirigible flies overhead, hitting the city with a death ray that crumbles buildings and kills thousands.

Batman checks his files and discovers a mad scientist named Kruger was recently released from an asylum. He heads for Kruger's home and overhears the madman making plans to conquer the world with his three lieutenants. They plan another attack on Gotham, in which they'll loot banks to get the funds to build more dirigibles.

It's a nice touch to have Kruger--a man with a Napoleon Complex--resemble Napoleon.

Batman steps in, but gets knocked out. He escapes just before Kruger blows up the house. Having overheard the names of Krugar's lieutenants, he finds and confronts one of them, panicking the guy into heading to Kruger's secret airbase.

Hiding the Batplane in an artificially generated cloud, Batman sneaks into the base. With gas bombs and a pistol (Golden Age Batman had no problem with packing a gat), he knocks out a lot of the bad guys and destroys all but one of the death rays. But then he's apparently shot and killed by Kruger, who plans to disintegrate the body with his death ray.

But Batman was wearing a bullet-proof vest and is faking death. He knocks out a guard and switches places with him. So Kruger disintegrates the guard thinking he's Batman. (Golden Age Batman not only packed a gat--he could be pretty ruthless when necessary.)

Batman heads home and whips up a chemical that will protect the Batplane from the death ray. When Kruger attacks Gotham, he's ready for a dogfight. He eventually rams the dirigible with his plane, bailing out in the nick of time. 

Kruger tries to get away in small plane, but Batman hits him with a gas pellet. The plane crashes and Kruger is killed. 

It's a fun story--loosely plotted but flowing along at a pace that overlooks its lack of storytelling logic. Over the past three weeks, I think we've found that Golden Age, Silver Age and Bronze Age Batman were all skilled detectives, unfazed when bizarre dangers (death rays, robot monsters or sudden teleportation to another planet) hits, and able to plan or improvise as needed. G.A. Batman was willing to use deadly force; S.A. Batman is the most easy-going;  and B.A. Batman is arguably the most well-rounded in terms of characterization, but all of them justify their existence by starring in entertaining SF/Detective stories.

Next week, Blackhawk tangles with a band of brutal outlaws.

Cover Cavalcade

 August is Trains and Railroads Month!!!

A 1965 cover by Jack Kirby.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Our Miss Brooks: "The Burglar" 3/12/50

Miss Brooks discovers she may have misjudged the honesty of the man she recommended for the job of school custodian.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Grenades for the Colonel

 

cover art by Paul Stahr

This might be my favorite J.D. Newsom Foreign Legion story.

"Grenades for the Colonel" was published in the February 16, 1935 issue of Argosy. In French-controlled Moracco, a chiefton named Mulay is rebelling. Colonel Dubosquet is given the job of crushing the rebellion. The battle sequence that follows includes this evocative paragraph:

"The Colonel was on top of him all the way. Not the colonel in person, naturally, but his men. There is a slight difference. He carried out his orders to the letter: regardless of cost, he hammered Mulay, and in his wake wooden crosses made from ammunition boxes and packing crates bloomed by the wayside. Crosses surmounted by the sweaty, blood-smeared caps of the dead of half-a-dozen regiments. Crosses sacred to the memory of Jean-Baptiste Durand of the Signal Corps; sacred to the memory of Fritz Sturmer of the Foreign Legion; sacred to the eternal memory of some poor devil, slumped down among the boulders on a nameless hillside, coughing up his life blood through a hole in his throat; sacred to the everlasting memory of all those whom the jackels will disinter when silence comes again, and the stars shine, and the battle has rolled on to the next ridge. Crosses lopsided in the windblown sand: firewood for the next migratory tribe drifting down the valley..."

Eventually, Mulay and his bodyguard of 500 warriors appear to be cornered. They make a run for it, galloping past a Foreign Legion company. That company has lost all its officers and was commanded by an American sergeant named Kilburn. They kill half of Mulay's men, but their flank is open because a troop of Senegalese soldiers hadn't moved up to their assigned position. Mulay escapes.

Colonel Dubosquet lays the blame on the Legionnaires. Kilburn is busted to private and the entire unit spends a year as prisoners in all but name, building a road through rough terrain. They are guarded by the Senegalese, which produces a lot of anomosity between the two units. This evenually leads to a riot, which gets the Legionnaires imprisoned--once again guarded by the Senegalese.

In the meantime, an Intelligence officer is trying to convince the colonel that Mulay is back and is talking the Senegalese troops into mutiny. But Colonel Dubosquet won't listen. He's rebuilt Mulay's home town and is having a party--with officials from Morocco and France--to show off his accomplishments. He has complete faith that none of his troops will cause trouble.

Not surprisingly, his troops cause trouble. But Kilburn and his men have staged a jailbreak and... well, that might be a good thing for the French.

The climatic battle scene is a match in intensity to the beginning. Strong characters, a great plot, an authority figure just BEGGING for a comuppance, and an occasional dollop of humor make this story a winner. Newsom's Foreign Legion tales are all great, but this one might indeed be my favorite.

Click HERE to read it for yourself. 

A Movie-Sabotaging Monster

 

cover art by Sheldon Moldoff

Detective Comics #252 (February 1958) gives us the story "The Creature from the Green Lagoon"--a prime example of Silver Age fun. Written by Dave Wood and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, it's a tale that remembers Batman is a skilled detective while still throwing him into a wild science-fiction adventure. 

Though the story is actually a little less science-fictiony than many Batman tales from this era. There's no aliens, space travel or inter-dimensional travel. Just a giant monster that turns out to be a robot.

We begin with Batman and Robin travelling to Skull Island. (Despite the title, the story keys off of King Kong more than The Creature from the Black Lagoon.) A friend of Batman is producing a monster movie there, but his production keeps getting interrupted by what is apparently a real monster.

I do wonder how someone who is friends with Batman (as opposed to Bruce Wayne) is able to contact him. But that's a side issue. The story itself flows along nicely. The Dynamic Duo sees footage of the monster. When the monster attacks again, Batman nearly captures it, but one of the film's technical advisors ruins this because he wants to preserve the monster for SCIENCE!

Batman lays an trap in the form of an electric net, but the monster turns out to have non-conducting sea sponges attached to its feet. Also, the movie's other technical advisor gets in the way. Of course, this means both advisors are definite suspects when we find out a human being is behind it all. They are red herrings and arguably a little too obvious as red herrings, but the set-up for solving the mystery behind it all is still fun.

By now, Batman realizes the monster is acting with human intelligence and is probably a robot being controlled by someone. When it attacks again, Batman is able to temporarily discombobulate it with electricity.

It ducks under the water. Batman puts on diving gear and follows. This leads to a deadly game of hide-and-seek around a sunken pirate ship until Robin identifies the bad guy, knocks him out and uses the control devise he finds to shut down the monster.

Batman had noticed a valuable bed of pearls under the water, so its no surprise that the bad guy is the producer's assistant, who had scouted the island before the film crew arrived. He wanted to scare them off and keep the pearls for himself. 

It's actually a fair-play mystery, in that it was mentioned earlier in the story that the guy had scouted the island, thus was the only one who could have known about the pearls. 

So we get a fun SF adventure with a giant robot, Batman getting to show his detective skills and Robin taking initiative to save the day.  

So last week we looked at a Bronze Age Batman story. This week was the Silver Age. Next week, we'll jump still further back in time to examine a Golden Age Batman story. 

Cover Cavalcade

 AUGUST IS TRAINS AND RAILROADS MONTH!!!

This nifty Civil War-themed cover was painted by Emmett Watson.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Lone Ranger: "King of the County" 4/18/38

Zeke Parsons is the largest ranch owner in the county--as well as owner of the general store, postmaster and sheriff. He uses a combination of these roles to establish a despotic rule of the county.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Ice, Whales and Ghosts

 Two fun facts about Arthur Conan Doyle:

1. In 1880, not long after finishing his medical training, Conan Doyle served as surgeon on the whaling vessel Hope. Young and eager for adventure, he also directly participated in whale and seal hunts.

2. Conan Doyle was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and considered Poe to be a major influence on his later writing. Whenever Conan Doyle dipped his pen into gothic horror, you can see this. This is a good thing--by the time Conan Doyle found his own voice as a writer, he could be influenced without being imitative and thus turn out some awesome stories.

You can definitely see Poe's shadow in the short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star," first published in the January 1883 issue of Temple Bay magazine. It was afterwards anthologized a zillian times, most commonly in Conan Doyle's oft-reprinted short story collection The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Stories.

It's an early story and perhaps not quite as polished as his later stuff, but it's still a lot of fun to read. It obviously draws on Conan Doyle's own experience on a whaler, but effectively tosses in a ghost while effectively building a sense of tension and horror.

The narrator is the ship's doctor. We join the action with the ship trapped in ice and the crew soon going on half-rations. That's bad enough, but there is also the problem of a captain who might be insane and crewmen who keep claiming to see a strange figure wandering the ice near the ship. A few of the crew also claim to have heard unearthly screams.

The doctor is a rational man, so discounts this as superstition acting on the nerves of the crew. But the captain spends a lot of time starring out over the ice and seems to be waiting for someone. 

But then the doctor personally hears the screams: 

I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.

The next day, the captain... well, read the story yourself HERE. Take a young new writer with burgeoning talent, add in some E.A. Poe and the memory of a whaling voyage and you get a delightfully creepy short story out of the mix.