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.

Solving Murders on Two Planets

 

cover art by Jim Aparo

I was getting ready to write this review when I thought that it might be fun to have a three-week series--reviews of Batman stories from the Golden Age, Silver Age and Bronze Age. I could do the same with Superman.

But, heck, I've already written the Batman Bronze Age review! Well, the obvious solution to this is to do the Batman reviews in reserve chronological order. I'll leave it to future historians to decide whether this was a wise move.

In The Brave and the Bold #181 (April 1980), writer Gerry Conway and artist Jim Aparo manage to pull off a team-up story in which the two superheroes involved never actually meet. 

This actually isn't the only example of this. I'm pretty sure there's at least one World's Finest in which Batman and Superman avert a crisis without ever being in the same place. But I can't for the life of me remember which story that was. There may be other examples I'm not thinking of.  I recognize this to be a Level 7 Nerd Failure and will report myself to the authorities and spend time in the Agony Chamber as soon as I'm done writing this post.

Anyway, Batman is on the way to see Commissioner Gordon (in regards to a serial killer case) when he's hit by a Zeta Beam. He's transported to the planet Rann while Adam Strange appears in his place.

This was done on purpose. On Rann, Adam Strange has been framed for murder. Rann and his wife Alanna have decided that Batman is needed to prove Adam's innocence.

The story shifts back and forth between Rann and Earth--where Adam gets involved in catching the Gotham City killer. This is done very effectively and used to build suspense in both storylines, but I'll handle them one-by-one in my review.

On Rann, Alanna fills Batman in on what's going on. Adam was tricked into a locked room and there is camera footage of him apparently commiting the murder, though the image of his face in the footage is not clear. Before Batman can decide on his next move, an obnoxious local cop bursts in to arrest everyone for being accessories. Batman, of course, gets away.

He later breaks into the police records room and sees the footage. He notices something off about the partial image of the man who is supposed to be Adam. That man is pale, while Adam and Alanna had just returned from vacation with deep tans. 

The obnoxious cop bursts in on him, but one clue leads to another and Batman is able to prove Adam's innocence in front of Rann's robot judges, demonstrating that the real killer is the cop, whose motive was xenophobia against aliens.

Back on Earth, Adam Strange realizes he's obligated to fill in for Batman on the serial killer case. He goes to Gordon, who has heard enough weird stuff in his career to accept Adam's story. He lets Adam examine the murder victims and the superhero notices each of them has a fresh tattoo.

Adam finds out a new tattoo parlor opened not long before the killings started. He stakes the place out and is soon able to nab the tattoo artist before the guy can knife his next victims.

The two switch back just as the two cases are resolved, though that does mean that Batman finds himself hanging in midair over the water holding a serial killer. But he's Batman--that's not really a problem for him.

This really is a fun story that plays effectively off Batman's skill as a detective. Neither case is that hard to solve. In Batman's case, his intervention is probably needed because the cop in charge was the actually killer. In Adam Strange's case, you can argue that the cops should have noticed the tattoos on the victims without Adam's help. But what the hey--Conway and Aparo had only 17 pages to tell what is essentially two different stories, so the mysteries needed to be pretty basic. And that's a nitpick anyways. It doesn't effect the quality of the story. It's still fun.

Next week, we jump back to the Silver Age to watch Batman and Robin battle a giant monster.

Cover Cavalcade

 AUGUST IS TRAINS AND RAILROADS MONTH!!!

A 1932 cover by Emmett Watson.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "A Gun for Dinosaur" 3/7/56

Stories of Ray Bradbury: "A Sound of Thunder"  9/6/2010

I've featured "A Gun for Dinosaur" before, but I thought it would be fun to pair it up with a BBC adaptation of Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." Two classic short stories highlighting the various dangers of time travel. Dangers we would all ignore, of course, for a chance to see live dinosaurs. Same reason we'd go to a real-life Jurassic Park if we could. 

Click HERE for "A Gun for Dinosaur"

Click HERE for "A Sound of Thunder."

Community Service

 

I'm pausing from regular posts this week to alert you to something I stumbled across on the Internet Archive. You can get the original tie-in novels from a number of classic TV series  from the 1960s and 1970s and Marvel Comics as ebooks for FREE.  The Internet Archive is a legit site and I've downloaded from them often without any trouble from viruses or malware. Make your own decisions about computer safety and please note I am NOT an expert in such things, but I do think these are safe to download.

Here's the links:

Man from U.N.C.L.E novels (original stories)

Marvel Novel Series (original stories) 

U.F.O. novels (adaptations of episodes)

Invaders novels (original stories)

Thunderbirds novels (original stories)

Planet of the Apes novels (adaptations of episodes from the TV series)

Space 1999 novels (adaptations of episodes)

Science vs Sorcery!

 

cover art by George Wilson

The Enterprise once got captured by a giant disembodied hand controlled by the Greek god Apollo. So the crew really shouldn't have been surprised when a giant genie takes his turn capturing the ship. That sort of thing happens all the time.

In Gold Key's Star Trek #10 (May 1971), both George Wilson's cover and Alberto Giolitti's interior art capture this moment beautifully. And the script by Len Wein is a lot of fun as well. 

Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty are teleported to a nearby planet, where they are confronted by a sorcerer named Chang. Chang explains that a rival sorcerer is holding his (Chang's) city hostage by suspending a giant flaming sword above it. Chang can only defeat his rival if Kirk and crew fetch him a magic wand called the Sceptre of the Sun. 

Since Chang threatens to crush the Enterprise unless they help, Kirk agrees. With a pretty girl as a guide, the four Federation officers march across a wilderness towards the location where the sceptre is kept. 

Along the way, they encounter rock giants who are resistant to phaser fire. Kirk outsmarts the giants and gets them to destroy each other, but then the group is captured by sword-wielding warriors.

These guys, though, are able to give Kirk more background information. They are part of a group that fled Earth in 1997, at the height of the Eugenics Wars. They were in suspended animation for a few centuries while their ship brought them here. They began a happy and peaceful existance, only for one of their members--Chang--to mysteriously gain enormous powers and set himself up as dictator.

Kirk and his men team up with these guys. Spock defeats a giant robot, allowing them to get the spectre and return to Chang. The sorcerer shows his gratitude by trying to kill everyone after explaining he's going to use the Enterprise to fly him around the galaxy on a journey of conquest. Spock foils this by demonstrating that Chang's conjurations are all illusions--he wields no actual magic. The point of the quest was to get the command officers of the Enterprise killed so Chang could take over. Kirk fights Chang, who gets killed. 

It's a fun story, though not without a few logical gaps in the plot. There's no real explanation for how Chang got his illusion powers and his plan to kill Kirk and company seems unnecessarily complicated. Since he was forcing them to go on the quest by threatening to destroy the starship, why create a backstory about a rival sorcerer threatening his city? (Though this does give Alberto Giolitti a chance to draw an awesome panel depicting this.)

Still, these are all the sort of plot holes that can be filled in via fan theories, so what the hey. Also, Len Wein puts in a subtle call back to an original TV episode with the story title "Spectre of the Sun." It's a call back to the episode "Spectre of the Gun," in which an alien race uses illusion to attempt to kill Kirk and his men. 

Years ago, I wrote  critical post of Gold Key's Star Trek comics. I've since realized I was wrong. Though silly moments and occasional plot holes are sprinkled throughout the comics, the same was true of the TV series. And,though Gold Key never produced a story as good as the classic TV episodes, they did give us entertaining tales and great art. This issue is a prime example of this.

Next week, Batman travels to another planet to solve a crime.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #38: The Lad and the Lion

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #38: The Lad and the Lion:   Scott, Jess and Tim are joined by guest Jim Goodwin for a discussion of the 1917 novel "The Lad and the Lion." Click HERE to li...

Cover Cavalcade

 AUGUST IS TRAINS AND RAILROADS MONTH!!!

This 1932 cover is uncredited.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Inner Sanctum: "The Meek Die Slowly" 9/7/52

The caretaker of a cemetery murders a young woman on the same day each year to mark the anniversary of the day his wife disappeared.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Bullet Scars (1942)

 

Whether it was an A-film with Bogie, Cagney or Edward G.--or a B-movie with solid character actors who knew how to give life to a role--... well, if it was from Warner Brothers, it was likely to be good.

1942's Bullet Scars is a fine example. Made on a small budget, it has a nifty story backed up by two actors expertly playing off each other.

Howard da Silva is bank robber Frank Dillon (the similarity in last name to Dillinger is probably on purpose). When a robbery turns violent, one of Frank's men is badly wounded. The wounded man (named Joe) is Frank's best friend, so he'll do whatever is necessary to keep Joe alive.

A clever pre-prepared trick gets Frank and his men past a police roadblock and they soon arrive at their ranch hide-out. Frank then hires a doctor named Steven Bishop (Regis Toomey) to care for Joe, telling the doctor that the gunshot wounds were from a hunting accident. He also drafts Joe's sister Nora, a nurse, into the set-up. Nora knows Frank and her brother are crooks, but family loyalty motivates her to come along.

Much of the movie at this point is Frank trying to keep the Bishop from tumbling to the truth. The two actors do indeed play well against each other. Frank is often subtly threatening, while Bishop is slowly putting two and two together. 

When the situation comes to a head, Bishop uses a clever trick of his own to get a message to the police. This leads to him and Nora beseiged in a room in the ranch, though fortunately Bishop proves to be as adept with a pistol as he is with a scapel. When the police show up, the scale of the gun battle widens to include tear gas bombs and lots of stuff catching fire. It's a fun, well-directed action scene that brings the movie to a satisfying conclusion.

The movie is in the public domain. Here it is on YouTube: