Peter Gunn again

 

Last week, we looked at the first of two stories in Four Color #1087 (April-June 1960).  Today, we'll examine the second story, also written by Paul S. Newman and drawn by Mike Sekowsky.

"The Purple Clue" is also a well-written detective tale. One the way to meet a potential client, Pete's car is run off the road by a purple car that then speeds away. Soon after, a paint factory burns to the ground--it's later discovered to be a professional arson job. Pete's client was to be the owner of that factory.

The owner has an old enemy--a man who did time for embezzeling from the company and had sworn vengence for being sent to the slammer. But he'd been a model prisoner before being recently parolled and there's no hard evidence against him for the arson job.

Pete goes to the suspect's home and, after an encounter with a mean-tempered dog, gets a look at the guy's car. It's green--not purple. And the suspect, though openly happy about the fire, claims innocence. Also, the job was done by a pro--and this guy is an embezzler, not a fire bug.

Pete, though, takes a sample of clay from a tire before leaving. A lot of legwork follows, in which Pete eventually discovers that the suspect had learned the tricks of the arson trade from a fellow prisoner while in jail.

Remembering the clay from the tire, Pete finds a clay-covered side road and evidence that purple paint was wiped from a car using solvent while parked there. Using a cat to lure away the dog from the suspect's garage, he finds a streak of purple paint under the hood that hadn't been washed off. The guy catches Pete and tries to get the drop on him, but it's not easy to get the drop on Peter Gunn.

So both stories are solidly written detective stories that flow along logically, with clues and plot twists that make sense. Without the jazz music and Craig Stevens' laid-back but still tough portrayal of Gunn, the comic inevitably feels a little different that the TV show. But either story would have fit into the TV show lineup with no trouble at all.

Next week, we'll leave the mean streets of L.A. and head to outer space, where we'll once again join the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Cover Cavalcade

 JULY IS BRAINIAC AND LUTHOR MONTH!!!

A cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez from 1977.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Whistler: "The Blank Wall" 6/26/43

A man is tasked with coming up with an airtight murder plot and only has a few hours in which to do it.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Shag and Bones

 

cover by Norman Saunders

Shaughnessy Roberts and Bones McPherson are investigators who work for a small-loan company. You wouldn't think that this line of work would toss Shag and Bones into the middle of murder investigations on a regular basis. But you'd be wrong. It happens to them all the time.

Shag is a "tough guy with a baby face," while Bones is described as "tall, skinny and with a lot of freckles; but his dress was Broadway, and he was neat, well-groomed." The two appeared in seven novellas published in Ten Mystery Aces in 1938 and 1939, all written by Russell Bender. Their premiere adventure--"Murderers' Rebellion"--ran in the March 1938 issue.

It's a fun, well-constructed mystery. A man and woman have been stealing identities of people on vacation, using those identities to take out loans from the National Finance company, then essentially disappearing with the money. They've finally been identified, but the man has been murdered. The woman disappears.  Shag and Bones are tasked with finding her and getting the money back in exchange for not prosecuting her for the theft. She'd be on her own in the murder investigation.

Because the job does involve a murder and might be dangerous, Shag and Bones are told the assignment is voluntary. But Shag respects his boss enough to give it a go.

He and Bones use a clever trick on the woman's brother to get the address of her hide-out, though this in turn gets them shot at by someone. When they arrive at that hide-out, they find her, her stepdaughter and a guy with a rifle. This requires some fast talking and a few punches to come out on top. But then someone unexpected walks through the door and upsets everyone's calculations...

It really is a fun story. Shag is the narrator and the character who Sherlocks his way to the solution, while Bones also has opportunities to demonstrate that he's a skilled investigator in his own right. The mystery is a good one and the ending combines a summation by Shag with some gunfire to bring the case to a satisfying conclusion. I haven't read the other Shag and Bones stories yet, but I've put an anthology containing their adventures on my birthday list and I'm looking foward to eventually diving into them.

"Murderers' Rebellion" is available online HERE.

Peter Gunn

 

Peter Gunn ran for three seasons on TV, from 1958 to 1961. He came back for a feature film in 1967. The TV series was a well-written noir-ish private eye show, though its probably best remembered today for its magnificent opening music, written by Henry Mancini. 

Peter had one comic book appearance--in Dell's Four Color #1087 (April-June 1960). It had two 16-page original stories, each written by the stalwart Paul S. Newman and drawn by Mike Sekowsky. Today, we'll look at "Harmless Hobby." Next week, we'll look at the second tale from this issue.

The man with the "Harmless Hobby" is retired medical Dr. Clipp. He forges rare stamps, but does so just for fun. He has no intention of putting them on the market or cheating anyone.

Peter is commissioned by the Stamp Dealers Association to offer the good doctor a nice sum of money to stop making fake stamps. But Dr. Clipp declines the offer. It keeps him busy in his retirement and what harm does it do?

Well, poor Dr. Clipp is in a private eye story, so naturally there will be harm. He's kidnapped by thugs who want him to forge stamps for them to sell.

Peter heads for Dr. Clipp's home, hoping to find a clue. He runs into the cops there--they are responding to a call about a prowler. Peter and the cops briefly fight in the dark before they identify each other. Then they search the apartment for Clipp's engraving tools, figuring that's what the prowler was looking for. 

When they find nothing, they figure the prowler got away with the tools. Peter stays behind to search again, though, and eventually finds the tools hidden in a false book.

But the bad guys spot him coming out. They snatch Pete and bring him to their hideout (making him lie on the floor of the car so he can't see where they are going). They get the tools and the head of the gang realizes they don't need Pete. So he's taken to a remote location and dumped. They don't kill him, but he doesn't know where they are hiding anyways.

But Pete comes up with a plan and educating the readers on the details of stamp forging becomes necessary. The hardest part is matching the paper that was used on the original stamp, while also making it look properly aged. The best way to do this is buy less valuable stamps of lesser value and bleach those clean, using the paper to replicate the valuable stamp. Dr. Clipp had mentioned working on a valuable Swedish stamp. So the cops put the word out to the dealers to let them know if anyone is buying other stamps from that issue.

Paul S. Newman was a great writer. His story construction so far has been sound and he manages to fit in this information in just a few panels, so the potentially complicated exposition is clear and doesn't slow the story down at all.

Anyway, the plan works. A bad guy buys the stamps and is trailed back to the hideout. Peter and the cops save Dr. Clipp, who agrees to give up forging stamps and, in fact, takes a job with the Stamp Dealers Association to detect forgeries.

It really is a well-told detective story, moving along swifty, giving Pete a chance to throw punches at bad guys on several occassions, and unfolding plot points in a logical manner.

Next week, we'll see if Newman and Sekowski manage to succeed with the second Peter Gunn tale.

Cover Cavalcade

 JULY IS BRAINIAC AND LUTHOR MONTH!!!!

The Man of Steel needs to file an appeal right away! This 1962 cover is by Curt Swan.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Dimension X: "Pebble in the Sky" 6/17/51

An archeologist visits Earth to investigate his wild theory that mankind originated on the primitive and irradiated planet. He soon finds more danger and adventure than he expected.

Click HERE to listen or download.

A Bit of Red Ribbon

 

cover art by Hubert Rogers

I've written about J.D. Newsom's Foreign Legion stories a number of times now. I read another one last night and, as usual, enjoyed it enormously. I have yet to run across a Newsom story I didn't like.

"A Bit of Red Ribbon" was first published in Adventure's June 15, 1931 issue. In it, we meet meek, henpecked John Jefferson Forbes-Smith, who has been waiting in the rain for an hour and a half for his wife to come out of a store.  She had said "I shan't be a minute," but Forbes-Smith is used to her minutes stretching into hours.

In a rare fit of mild rebellion, he goes into a bar. He intends to order a coffee, but he's soon downing whiskey sours with a new friend. 

When he wakes up the next morning, he's been arrested for public drunkenness. He is wearing different cloths and carrying the ID of a man named Smith who joined the Foreign Legion the day before. The cops won't believe his story and ship him off to the Legion.

So poor henpecked Forbes-Smith soon finds himself in North Africa, being drilled until he's exhausted and punished whenever he tries to point out that he doesn't belong in the Legion. He soon decides that he can't ever go home anyways--his wife would reject him because of the shame he would be bringing to her. 

At the same time, he does toughen up a little. So, when he spots his wife in a nearby town--certainly there in search of him--he immediately volunteers to accompany a column marching into battle. His sergeant agrees to let him go: "I don't blame you. I'd rather take my chance [in battle] any day rather than face some women!"

Newsom strikes a fine balance in this story. There's a dark humor underlaying Forbes-Smith's plight, but Newsom's description of life in the Legion, the desert heat and--eventually--the chaos of battle are all vivid and without irony. Forbes-Smith's character growth is realistic. Some men, after all, are manned-up by military life. But, though Forbes-Smith does man up, he does so in fits and starts, with the deliberate intension of getting killed when he volunteers for combat. It's a realistic depiction of gradual character growth that meshes well with Newsom's realistic description of desert combat and serving in the Foreign Legion. 

So when Forbes-Smith has a chance to perform a dangerous mission, he may prove to himself that he's more of a man than he thought.

You can read the story for yourself HERE.

The Red Ghost is a Jerk!

 

cover by:

Rich Buckler (according to the Grand Comics Database)

or

Ron Wilson (according to the Marvel Wiki)

In the last issue, Tony Stark was kidnapped by the Super Apes and brought to the Red Ghost, who is currently stuck in intangible ghost form. (Though he's still able to walk without drifting down through the floor. Sometimes Comic Book Science is inexplicable.)

Tony was kidnapped while Happy Hogan was wearing the suit. So in this issue (Iron Man #83--February 1976) we get some scenes with the injured Happy, establishing that he survived the encounter. Though he will collapse at the end of the issue, triggering the events of the following two issues.

But for us, we'll concentrate on Tony, the Red Ghost and the Apes. R.G. wants to be cured of his permanent ghostiness and demands Tony help him in exchange for Tony's life.

Tony in turn convinces R.G. that he needs a piece of equipment back at his labs to do the job. This is a double-edged ploy--he does indeed need the equipment there, but it also puts him in the same room with a spare Iron Man suit.

The most fun aspect of this issue is the various clever ways the Super Apes use their powers. We see that when they smuggle Tony into the Stark International labs. We see it later on during their inevitable fight with Iron Man. Writer Len Wein and artist Herb Trimpe consistently give us cool moments throughout the issue. 

Tony macgyvers what he needs to cure the Ghost and does so. Predictably, the Red Ghost proves to be a jerk of monumental proportions. He immediately orders the Super Apes to kill Tony.

Tony, though, had rigged up a smoke screen, which he now activates, giving him time to put on the spare Iron Man suit.

As I mentioned, the fight gives us the Apes using their powers cleverly. I especially enjoy the baboon's transformation into a flying buzzsaw. Tony responds with equally clever tactics. It's always fun to see the Super Apes and they're used particularly well here.

After the apes are defeated, the Red Ghost ignores Tony's warning not to turn intanglible. The cure was a one-way proposition and R.G. destroys himself when he tries to use his power again. (Of course, he isn't permanently dead. He'll be re-integrated in an FF issue a few years later.)

A fun issue, pitting Iron Man against a foe he doesn't normally battle in a well-choreographed fight.

Next week, we'll look at one of the comic book adventures of TV private eye Peter Gunn.

Cover Cavalcade

 JULY IS BRAINIAC AND LUTHOR MONTH!!!

This 1983 cover introduced us to the new look for both villains. New or old look? Which is better?