Friday's Favorite OTR

Philo Vance: "The Green Girls Murder Case" 4/12/49

The police are baffled when two sisters are murdered at different times but by exactly the same method. But for some reason, the District Attorney refuses to call in Philo Vance to help.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Battleships and Dinosaurs

In recent posts, I've mentioned that one of the nifty side effects of ereaders is the increasing availability of fiction from the Golden Age of Pulps. In fact, you don't necessarily have to go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to buy classic fiction. A lot of it is available for free from sites such as Project Gutenberg or archive.org.

For instance, the pulp story "The Lost Warship," by Robin Moore Williams, was published in the January 1943 issue of Amazing Stories, but has since fallen into the public domain. So you can find it at Project Gutenberg.

The warship that gets lost is the battleship Idaho. And, boy, does it ever get lost! During an air attack on the ship by some Japanese planes, a freak accident sends it and its crew a million years into the past.

Fortunately, when the main character (ex-Navy man Winston Craig) was earlier rescued from a drifting life boat, one of his fellow castaways was a world-renowned physicist. This scientist--who apparently has a PhD in Plot Exposition-- figures out what has happened to the ship.

Unfortunately, he soon figures out that there's no way to return to 1943. The Idaho and its crew are stuck in the distant past.

The ship is menaced by pterodactyls, but the anti-aircraft guns take care of that. Not long after that, though, the Idaho is being followed by high-altitude jet aircraft.

Well, dinosaurs and futuristic aircraft (futuristic from a 1943 perspective) don't normally go together. Not even the scientist can explain this. Nor can he explain the acid that is coated over the sea by the airplane guys, eating away at the Idaho's hull.

The Idaho has to be beached, never to sail again. While Winston Craig, the scientist and a landing party are scouting a jungle, the aircraft attack and zap the bulk of the crew with sleep gas. The villains then haul their prisoners off to an unknown location.

The landing party gets some new information from a cave man they save from a dinosaur--his language is so simple the scientist learns it almost instantly. The bad guys are a not-quite-human race called the Orgums, who capture humans and sacrifice them to the "monster who is always hungry." The Orgums are largely primitive, but inexplicably have some elements of advanced technology.

Now Craig has to quickly plan a way to rescue the crew. This basically means overthrowing an entire civilization with a few men, some tommy guns and a supply of hand grenades. But it just might be possible to turn some of the local dinosaurs into weapons of mass destruction, thus making the odds a bit more even.

"The Lost Warship" is a fun, fast-moving story with a lot of great action. Also, its got dinosaurs in it--something that automatically kicks it up two full points on the Bogart/Karloff Coolness Scale.

It's not without its flaws, of course. There's a few contrived moments that exist merely to move the plot along. The scientist being able to learn the cave man language in something under a minute is the most notable. And the eventual explanation for why the Ogrums have such a bizarre mixture of primitive culture and advanced technology doesn't quite hold up under its own logic.

But the story does have dinosaurs and the action scenes are exciting, so we can afford to be forgiving. Also, one of the biggest "problems" with the story is something I don't consider a problem at all.

Remember that the Idaho has been sent one million years into the past. There they find dinosaurs co-existing with humans. No matter what one's views of how the Earth got started (evolution, creationism or a mixture of the two), this makes no sense at all.

It's something that probably violates the suspension of disbelief for many readers, thus spoiling the story. But it doesn't bother me at all.

Because a few decades later, the great Ray Harryhausen would give us a movie set in one million BC and also populate the world of that time with both dinosaurs and humans.

So I maintain that "The Lost Warship" is simply set in the same universe as 1966's One Million Years BC. While the Ogrums were terrorizing mankind in one part of the world, humans were developing a stronger tribal culture in another part of the world. (Also, judging by Raquel Welch, humans untouched by the Ogrums were developing advanced hair styling techniques.)

For me, that solves any suspension of disbelief problems I might otherwise have had. A connection with a Ray Harryhausen movie, no matter how tenuous (and no matter that I just made that connection up out of mist and moon beams), makes "The Lost Warship" all the more cool.

How Many Haunted Tanks Does it Take to Win a War?

When writer Bob Kanigher first created the Haunted Tank in G.I. Combat #87 (1961), he came up with a pretty nifty idea. A guy named Jeb Stuart, the namesake of the famous Civil War cavalry general, is placed in command of a Stuart tank during World War II. Soon, he discovers that his tank is actually haunted by Gen. Stuart. Only Jeb can see and hear the general, who provides him with cryptic advice that Jeb usually interprets in the nick of time to pull himself and his tank out of the fire.

For a dozen years, this formula worked well. The art was nearly always provided by either Joe Kubert or Russ Heath, giving the stories the strong visual backbone they needed. Kanigher didn’t worry a lot about character development or historical continuity. He just told good stories, giving Kubert and Heath the opportunity to provide wonderful imagery.

But in 1973, things changed for Jeb and his crew. I’ve already reviewed  G.I. Combat#150, in which the Stuart is destroyed and  the crew goes to a tank graveyard and builds a bigger, better tank out of a mish-mash of parts from destroyed tanks.

For three years, the series played on the irony of the Haunted Tank being built Frankenstein-like from the wrecks of dead tanks. But in G.I. Combat #185 (December 1975), that tank was destroyed when a

German fighter plane, shot out of the sky by the Jeb’s crew, smashed into it.

Jeb and his men find their way to a nearby village. There they see that a small Stuart Tank—the twin of the original Haunted Tank—has been captured by the Germans. Taking over the Stuart, they engage in a dogfight against a huge Tiger Tank through the streets of the village. Jeb wins by taking advantage of his tank’s smaller size, using the narrow alleys to get behind the Tiger and blast it to pieces. It’s another fine issue, with Sam Glanzman doing a particularly good job of depicting the tank vs. tank fight. We always understand the situation as we follow the action—Glanzman is able to ensure that we can always see where the two opposing tanks are in relation to each other.

So they were back to using a Stuart. But that lasted less than a year. In G.I. Combat #194 (September 1976), the Stuart takes out two enemy tanks, but is itself fatally damaged. The crew bails out only to be captured and sent to a nearby concentration camp.

Meanwhile, the commander of one of the German tanks, himself badly wounded, is taken to a base holiday. The commander is a particularly brilliant tactician. Rather than lose his skill, the German doctors rebuild his body, turning him into a robot.

When the Americans escape (in a grisly scene in which they hid in the truck taking bodies to a mass grave, then knife the truck drivers once out of the camp), they run across a Sherman tank whose crew was killed. They take this for their own. General Stuart is enraged—how dare they use a tank named after “that Union firebrand who set fire to my beloved South!”

When the Sherman goes up against a Tiger tank commanded by the robotic commander, they end up in a fight for their lives that they only barely win. The issue ends with Gen. Stuart returning to them, having realized he is the guardian of men, not a “hunk of steel.”

The story here strays perhaps a little bit too far into science-fiction territory to really work as effectively as it could, but Glanzman’s art is still strong and, in the end, a robot Nazi tank commander is no more unlikely than a ghostly Confederate cavalryman who gets into a snit over the name of a tank.

Anyways, Jeb and his crew stayed in a Sherman until the series eventually ended. (Though not the same Sherman the whole time—they lost a few along the way.) Regardless of which tank they were using—each of which had its own little bit of irony behind it—the stories were always fun to read. General Stuart was right—it was the fighting hearts of Jeb Stuart, Arch, Slim, Rick and Gus that were really important.

Cover Cavalcade

I like this cover a lot--very atmospheric. But I'm not sure who the artist is. If anyone has a guess, please post a comment.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Hunters: "You Take Ballistics" 11/29/48

This is an audition episode for the show that would eventually be titled Pursuit.

A Scotland Yard inspector is convinced he knows who committed a murder, even though the ballistic report indicates that the suspect's gun could not have been the murder weapon.

Click HERE to listen or download.

"He loved the Moon, but it had tried to kill him."

When I wrote about one of Robert Heinlein's early novels a few months back, I mentioned that one of his strengths was that Heinlein never forgot just how wondrous outer space is.

Arthur C. Clarke kept that in mind as well in many of his hard science fiction novels. A good example is one of A Fall of Moondust, first published in 1961. This takes place almost entirely on the moon (though there are a few scenes set in a space station at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points). The moon's been colonized and one of the tourist attractions is the Sea of Thirst, a shallow "ocean" of extremely fine and dry dust that flows almost like water. 

There's a "boat" called the Selene that skims across the lake carrying a score of tourists each trip. But when a freak accident cripples the boat, it sinks down into the dust to a depth of about 10 meters.

The Selene still has power and enough food and water to last awhile. They should also have about a week's worth of air, but several problems soon arise. The temperature begins to rise because the dust acts as in insulator and prevents excess heat from radiating away. The rising heat then causes the air purifiers to malfunction, so carbon dioxide begins to slowly build up to lethal levels.

While those trapped on the boat deal with that, the rescue crew has several challenges to overcome. First, they have to find the Selene. Then they have to figure out how to retrieve those aboard while working in an airless and otherwise completely hostile environment. There's no standard rescue equipment in existence for this bizarre situation, so everyone involved has to improvise constantly.

Basically, the novel is presented as a series of problems in engineering. But phrasing it that way makes the

story sound dry. Clarke brings a very high level of excitement to the tale, as he first explains the problems encountered in clear language so all us lay-people can grasp it, then progress the action in such a way as to keep the suspense high. Problems are solved, but new problems arise, causing potentially fatal delays in the rescue operations. And there's one particular danger that no one realizes even exists until it suddenly rears its head and bites everyone in the proverbial butt.

Adding to the story's verisimilitude is Clarke (like Heinlein) periodically reminding us just how hostile and alien to human life the rest of the universe can be. Once we leave Earth, we take our life in our hands no matter how good our technology may be. But (also like Heinlein), Clarke remembers that outer space is also a wonderfully awesome place, full of majestic beauty and an infinity of new things to learn. It may be dangerous, but it's worth going there.

Who's Faster?

We’ve got one more post coming to end our methodical look at Weisinger-era Superman stories. But before we get to that, let’s jump ahead a few years to examine a particularly entertaining story from Julius Schwartz’ tenure as editor.

I once read an interview with 1970s/80s-era Superman writer Elliot S! Maggin in which he says that Denny O'Neil used to "whine" about how powerful Superman was and how much he hated writing about the cosmic-level characters.

I can believe that. Before O'Neil finally established himself as one of the perfect writers for Batman, he messed around with Superman and Wonder Woman in some bizarre ways. He de-powered Wonder Woman, turning her into a martial arts expert who (if memory serves) ran a flower shop. He tried to tone Superman down by cutting his power in half, which didn't really do any good since infinity divided by two is still infinity.


But all the same, he did do some very worthwhile stuff with Superman and other truly powerful Justice Leaguers. In World's Finest 198 & 199 (November & December 1970), strange creatures called Anarchronids are zipping across the universe at several times light speed, which is causing the universe to unravel.

The Guardians of the Universe recruit Superman and Flash, the two fastest beings in existence, to run just as fast in the opposite direction to cancel out this effect. They give Flash a medallion that will provide life support and form a roadway in front of him as he runs.

Aside from the apparently minor issue of saving all of Creation, Superman and Flash also look at this as an opportunity to finally find out which of them is faster. They had raced twice before, once for charity and once when forced to do so by alien gamblers. Neither of those events produced a clear winner. Now they would know for sure.

So they take off, running head-to-head across light years. They are attacked by the Anarchronids, run into
trouble with an exploding star and briefly get stuck in a pocket dimension, but they overcome all this and keep going.

In the meantime, the whole universe-unraveling thing has thrown a pajama-clad Jimmy Olsen back through time, giving him some adventurous moments both in ancient Rome and at the Salem witch trials.

Eventually, Superman and Flash discover the Anarchronids were created by General Zod and some other Phantom Zone criminals, who will use the destruction of the Universe to create a portal that will allow them to escape from the Zone. In the end, Superman and Flash, both paralyzed from the hips down, crawl together towards the switch that will destroy the Anarchronids before the Universe falls apart. Which of them will reach the switch first?

It's a really fun story, casually throwing out one cosmic-level idea after another. It never gives in to its basic silliness or otherwise places tongue-in-cheek. Instead, it takes itself seriously--as most comic book stories of this sort should. It doesn't try to come up with faux scientific explanations for all the wild events taking place--it simply creates a world where such events are possible; a world where "run really fast in the opposite direction of the Anarchronids" is a reasonable thing to do. Because of this (and because of Dick Dillon's solid art), it produces a nice amount of honest drama. It was a good balance of characterization and fantasy storytelling that fit just fine into a superhero universe.

Back in Print!

I'm posting this in part for very selfish reasons. The first of the Timewars novels--a series of 12 novels first published in the 1980s/90s--has come back into print both in paperback and electronically. I've wanted these books for my Kindle, so I'm happy to see it.

The author has written that if this one sells well enough to pay for the expense of publishing it, he'll make others available, so I'm going to plug it here in hopes of generating a sale. (Or an ebook loan if you are an Amazon Prime member.)

The Ivanhoe Gambit is an excellent book--clever plot, intelligent characterizations, great action. If you want some good SF, it's worth trying.

Cover Cavalcade

Michael Whelan is another of my favorite paperback cover artists. When paperbacks were less expensive (even factoring in inflation) and more of an impulse buy than they are now, I think publishers paid more attention to including eye-catching covers than they do nowadays.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Philip Marlowe: "Torch Carriers" 1/7/50

Several cases of unrequited love intertwine in a case that eventually leads to Marlowe being held at gunpoint by a ruthless thug.

Click HERE to listen or download.