I Was a Communist for the FBI: "Double Exposure" 7/15/53
Matt is assigned by the Communists to recover film of political prisoners being held in Russia. He has to figure out a way to fail in this assignment while keeping his cover intact.
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Of the four We Were There books dealing with the American Revolution, We Were There at the Battle of Lesxington and Concord (1958), by Felix Sutton, is my favorite. Of course, there's a nostalgia factor involved in that. Lexington and Concord was in my elementary school library. I read it and loved it as a second grader.
It holds up when re-reading it as an adult. As was standard with the series, the main character is a 15-year-old boy (this time named Rob Gordon) and a 13-year-old girl. Often, the two are siblings. In this case, Rob is the adopted son of a tavern keeper in Lexington (John Buckman--a real-life character) and Sary Williams is the daughter of Buckman's housekeeper.
In one of the earlier entries on this series, I commented on how the We Were There books shied away from portraying young puppy love or crushes. Here, though, the book ends with a subtle and sweet implication that Rob and Sary might some day be married. I guess the authors weren't always worried about alienating their younger readers who might still think girls are yucky. Heck, I'm thinking that maybe I'll even stop giving myself anti-cootie shots after kissing my wife!
Anyway, the book begins with Rob and Sary sneaking a wagon-load of food into Boston, which is currently occupied by British troops following the Boston Tea Party. Before long, Rob overhears several British soldiers talking about a possible military expedition to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams (currently hiding out in Lexington) and seizing weapons & gunpowder.
The soldiers spot Rob, who has to lay one out with a fireplace poker before making a getaway. He and Sary barely manage to get out of Boston and warn Hancock.
A few days later, Paul Revere makes his midnight ride to warn the Minute Men that the British are indeed coming. Rob participates in part of this ride, then he and Sary do some scouting for the Minute Men. When the Shot Heard Round the World is fired in Lexington, Rob is riding to Concord with a message. Sary, though, witnesses the battle. Afterwards, despite being horrified at the sight of dead and wounded, she pulls herself together and aids the wounded.
Rob joins the Minute Men at Concord, taking part in the charge at the Concord Bridge and participating in the exhausting day-long battle that ensues. Going into this, Rob sees the upcoming battle as a chance for glory. Instead, though he performs bravely, he learns that battle is terror, watching friends die and taking the lives of fellow human beings.
This is what gives the book its strong backbone. The battle scenes are described vividly and with historical accuracy. The cause of liberty and the necessity of fighting for it are upheld. But the actually dirty business of fighting is not sanitized or glorified. Rob learns what war is, so when he continues to fight (joining the Continental Army at the book's conclusion) we see the bravery and determination behind that decision.
It's still a young adult book, so the violence isn't overly graphic. But the author still brings across a sense of spilled blood and intense fear intermingled with true courage. It's a great book.
A back-up story in Detective Comics #355 (1966), written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Carmine Infantino, starred Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man.
Ralph is driving along one evening when he sees a strange sight--two men who just robbed a jewelry store are flying through the air over him.
Ralph grabs them. The crooks, terrified, confess to their crimes and explain that they have no idea what is pulling the through the air. Then that same force begins to make them fight back. Even after Ralph knocks them unconscious, they continue to throw punches, knocking out the hero.
Ralph wakes up to see that they left their bag of loot behind. The pearls inside the bag are glowing with energy--perhaps, deduces Ralph--the same energy that was controlling the thieves. He uses one of the pearl as a direction finder to track them down.
The thieves have been brought to a prop store by Zatanna, who is looking for a tripod the two men had stolen at another time. The thieves hadn't known it, but the tripod is magical and Zatanna needs it in her continuing search to find her father.
The prop shop owner overhears this and, learning that the tripod is valuable, decides he wants to recover it from the thieves for himself. Also, he's carrying a book of black magic in his back pocket, which nullifies Zatanna's white magic. Usually, it's a bad idea to bring a gun to a magic fight, but it works out this time.
Well, it WOULD have worked out for him. Ralph shows up, disarmes the store owner and knocks out the thieves. Zatanna has a chance to toss the magic book into another room, allowing her to use her magic and subdue the store owner.
With the book and the tripod, Zatanna is now able to travel to the dimension where she believes her dad is being held. Ralph, in the meantime, buys the stolen pears and gives them to his wife.
Infantino's art is great, especially his use of long, vertical panels during the fight with the "flying" thieves. The story follows a thread of Comic Book Logic quite nicely, though it's a little exposition-heavy for its short length. Also, though I accept Zatanna bringing the thieves to her by magic, causing them to fight another superhero to clear the path for them seems a tad unethical. Even if this was a general part of the spell rather than a specific command to fight Ralph, it wasn't well-thought-out.
But that's a nitpick. It is indeed a fun story.
Next week, we return to the Lonely War of Willy Schultz.
Dimension X: "Almost Human" 5/13/50
A criminal gains control of a powerful robot with a child-like mind. He teaches the robot to commit crimes, assuming that it will always follow orders without qualm. But the robot might be more human than anybody thinks.
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Jim Kipp (Randolph Scott) is a ruthless bounty hunter and the titular character in 1954's The Bounty Hunter. One person he meets says his reputation is that he'd bring his own grandmother in for the reward. Kipp doesn't deny this, but what makes him an interesting protagonist are the hints that he's not completely ruthless. At one point during the movie, he's shot at by a young man who incorrectly thinks Kipp is after him. Kipp disarms the man, then lets him go.
Later, a woman with a shotgun threatens him, incorrectly thinking Kipp had killed her outlaw son. Kipp talks her down, shows compassion and, once again, lets her go.
It's a bit of a stretch that two different people independantly jump to wrong conclusions about Kipp, but they are important scenes. Kipp does promote a ruthless veneer, so it's important to let us peek behind that veneer a few times.
Anyway, the main plot of the movie has Kipp chasing three outlaws who robbed a train of $100,000 a year earlier. There's no description of the outlaws available, but the serial numbers of the money are on record, so it's known they haven't yet spent the cash.
Kipp intelligently follows an old trail, discoveirng that the outlaws visited a remote trading post after the robbery, but only stocked up on a few days worth of water. That allows Kipp to narrow the search to the only nearby town.
Entering the town, he at first uses an alias, but his real identity soon becomes known. He's pretty certain the bad guys are living in town and that the money is hidden nearby. But he also knows the local doctor lied to him about whether he treated a wounded man a year earlier. He plays a psychological game, gradually making the townspeople nervous and hoping that one or more of the outlaws might give themselves away. Eventually, he runs a bluff to force the outlaws' hands.
All this makes for a strong story with some great characters thrown into the mix. There's also a great twist at the movie's violent climax regarding the identity of one of the outlaws. Several bursts of action throughout the film keep the pacing fast and Scott brings his usual sense of toughness and quiet authority to the role of the bounty hunter.
I especially like a couple of instances where he's in a running gunfight with someone, cornering that person in an alley or other confined space, then firing a lot of near-misses to terrify his opponent into talking. I also like that he reloads frequently when doing this--The Bounty Hunter is one of those rare westerns that actually remembers a six-shooter carries six shots.
The Bounty Hunter isn't quite a classic, but it's a better-than-average Western.
Dragnet: "Big Pill" 10/19/52
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A couple of Marines on leave are slipped a rather deadly mickey. Friday and Smith work to find out who did the slipping.
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In the 1960s and '70s, novelizations of TV shows or tie-in novels (featuring original stories based on shows) were very popular. In a time before recording, streaming and DVD sets, this was the only way (outside of reruns) to visit with characters you liked after the episodes had aired.
I don't know how publishers decided when to go with novelizations of episodes or when to commission original stories. Last year, I reviewed a couple of Starsky & Hutch novelizations, which featured stories adapting and expertly expanding hour-long episodes.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. went with original stories. Different authors contributed to the 23 novels eventually published. Often, a common pseudonym would be used for each novel's byline. But in this case, each author is credited by his own name.
Apparently, the Man from U.N.C.L.E. books sold like hotcakes. Not many TV series, regardless of their popularity, racked up nearly two dozen tie-in novels.
I think one reason they sold was quality. The second book in the series was The Doomsday Affair, written by the prolific Harry Whittington. Whittington churned out scores of paperback originals throughout his career. Most of them are good and a lot of them are great. He worked in a number of different genres, with his hard-boiled crime novels and his Westerns being among his best works. Desert Stake-Out (1961), for instance, is one of the best Westerns I've ever read.
[SIDENOTE: The Doomsday Affair was one of the best-selling paperback originals of 1965-66 and went through multiple printings. Whittington was paid $1500 for the novel by the publishers and never saw a cent more. I'm very pro-capitalism and have no problem with a work-for-hire arrangements. But, for gosh sakes, if a book generates a fortune for your company, toss a nice bonus at the author!]
When he turned to U.N.C.L.E., he had Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin racing to save the world. A bad guy known only as Tixe Ylno is planning on setting off an atomic bomb, starting World War 3, and then rising from the ashes to take over whatever is left.
I doubt there is a connection, but this was published two years before Ernst Stravo Blofield tried the same thing in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
The action picks up in Hawaii and Whittington starts out the novel with one of the best opening lines ever: "An instant before, she had been alive."
Solo had made contact with a woman defected from THRUSH, the evil organization that Tixe Ylno works with. But before she can tell him anything, a small bomb hidden in the lei around her neck explodes, killing her.
Solo is soon tracking down the person who gave the now-dead woman the lei. Illya is there as well, but the bad guys manage to arrange for him to be suspected of the murder, necessitating a jail break and an escape from both the cops and from THRUSH assassins.
Illya trails a villain to Mexico, while Solo tracks down a friend of the dead woman in San Francisco. Both end up getting captured. Illya's situation is particularly creepy. He's given a drug that causes him to move in spasmodic jerks and prevents him from speaking in anything other than inarticulate grunts. THRUSH agents walk him out of a hotel on the pretext that he's mentally disabled.
The climax of the book involves two failed attempts to escape from an insane asylum that's actually a THRUSH base, then one final effort to break out while the atom bomb is being loaded aboard a bomb. This last attempt is hampered by a fellow prisoner who has been brainwashed into killing Solo.
Whittington's prose is clear and the action scenes are exciting. The villains do grab hold of the Idiot Ball a few times--their justification for not simply killing the U.N.C.L.E. agents after capturing them is a little weak.
But those villains are otherwise top-notch in their villainy. Tixe Ylno's insanity is downright frightening. His top henchman is a sadist who deludes himself into thinking he's a scholar and an idealist. Both are great characters and legitimately scary at times.
Whittington effectly injects a hard-boiled edge into a novel based on a relatively light-hearted TV series. It is one of the best tie-in novels I've ever read.
Are they doomed? We'll look at the next issue next week.
This issue is great. I love the idea of Quincy Harker (the only character from the original novel who can believably still be alive) becoming a key protagonist in the series. Frank Drake is a good character in his own right, but by himself I don't think he would have been a strong enough hero to balance out Dracula. The Quincy/Rachel/Frank/Taj team (occasionally joined by Blade or other guest stars) gave the book more variety and more... well, more pure coolness.
Gunsmoke: "Claustrophobia" 6/26/54
Dillon and Chester discover a murdered man in a remote cabin. This event cascades into a situation involving more deaths and a singular tragedy.
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I had family visiting lately. I'm afraid the result of this is that I need to skip a week. No Wednesday or Thursday posts this week. For those of you whose lives revolve around my blog--my apologies.
JUNE IS BATROC THE LEAPER MONTH!
A 1968 cover by Jack Kirby, with some alterations by John Romita.
Abbott and Costello: "Lou the Fireman" 12/6/1945
Lou joins the fire department. That works out about as well as you would expect.
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Richard Dix really should be better known as an actor. A few years ago, I reviewed a series of movies based on The Whistler radio show. All but one of these starred Dix as the main character--sometimes a good guy, sometimes a villain. And he was very effective in each of those roles.
In 1943, he starred in one of the series of superb horror movies produced by Val Lewton for RKO studios. In The Ghost Ship, his character is Will Stone, the captain of the merchant ship Altair, which sails to ports in the Caribbean. A newly-qualified young officer named Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) comes aboard and soon proves himself capable.
In fact, when one of the crew suffers from appendicitis while the Altair is at sea, it's Merriam who performs a life-saving operation while instructions are sent by radio. This happens after Captain Stone tries to operate but freezes up. Merriam, concerned about hurting the captain's image with the crew, allows Stone to take the credit.
But, in the meanwhile, the movie begin to give us hints that all isn't well with Captain Stone. Aside from his self-serving explanation to Merriam about why he couldn't perform the operation, there are other indications that he might not always be rational.
Then things come to a head. A sailor comes to the captain to complain about the crew being short-handed. The next day, the sailor dies in an "accident" in the ship's chain locker.
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