Friday's Favorite OTR

Philo Vance: "The Hurdy-Gurdy Murder Case" 5/24/49

How did the murderer identify his victim in an almost pitch-dark alley? And why was the only potential eyewitness later killed--when that "eyewitness" was completely blind?

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Power of the Press

Read/Watch 'em In Order #71

"Close Call," (Black Mask, January 1933) the third of the Ken Corning stories, starts off with a bang and doesn't stop sprinting until the final sentence. Corning is still butting heads against the corrupt city administration and this tale opens with a dirty cop trying to badger Corning into giving away information about the lawyer's latest client.

The client is accused of murdering a newspaperman who was working for reform. The accused man is also a reformer, but the cops have come up with a vague motive for the murder and have a supposed witness to the murder stashed away.

Corning is not a man to be badgered or intimidated. He gives the cop a verbal beat-down and immediately starts looking for a witness of his own who can demonstrate his client's innocence. He accomplishes this without too much trouble, but the cops are right behind him and quickly start their intimidation tactics again.

Corning also finds out where the prosecution witness is hidden and tries to speak with him.

He's tossed out before he can do so, but he gets a look at the witness AND has arranged for a press photographer to get a picture of him (Corning) being forcibly ejected from the hotel room. The resultant publicity gives him a slight advantage.

But then Corning's witness is bribed to leave town. Putting everything he learns together, Corning realizes the prosecution's fake witness is actually the real killer. He might not be able to prove this, but he can once again use the power of the press to force the D.A. to drop the charges against his client. It means pulling a stunt that requires Helen Vail, his loyal secretary, to arrange a fender bender with a cop car AND it comes uncomfortably close to suborning perjury. But if it works, an innocent man will walk out of prison.

The dynamic between Corning and Vail grows even closer to the one Erle Stanley Gardner was building in his Perry Mason stories, but it's a dynamic that Gardner handles well, so there is no objection to it. The story is perhaps the fastest moving and most purely entertaining of the first three Ken Corning stories.

The first three stories were published in consecutive issues of Black Mask. There would be a five-month gap before the final three stories appeared, but Ken Corning will be back. There's still a lot of corruption in New York City that needs cleaning up.

Just Another Mission

I think the short back-up features that appeared in DC's war comics during the 1970s easily rival 1950s EC in using comics to tell short but gripping stories.

G.I. Combat #167 (December 1973) gives us a fine example of this. The back-up story is "Just Another Mission," written by Steve Mitchell and drawn by Ken Barr.

It's about a British Long Range Desert Group team, given the job of travelling behind enemy lines just before a big push and capturing an airfield that will be needed for flying in supplies. Lt. Steed, the unit's commander, is assured that resistance will be light and that there is no enemy armor present.

The story immediately earns points by featuring British soldiers, though actually DC's war books were very good overall about acknowledging the accomplishments of our Allies as well American soldiers. It earns more points when we find out the airfield is held by Italians. In World War 2 fiction, Rommel's Afrika Korps get so much attention, we forgot that Mussolini's soldiers were there first.

Mitchell's concise script moves the story along quickly and Barr's art really shines when the attack on the base commences. We're able to follow the action, but Barr also infuses it with a sense of chaos and real danger. When the Italians turn out to have a tank--despite what Steed had been told--the British end up taking quite a few casualties before they take the airfield.

The next day, Steed learns that it had all been for nothing. The British attack had been called off. Steed is told he might get a medal and that his lost men and equipment will be replaced, but that doesn't really help all those dead men, does it?

The entire story runs just seven pages--and one page is given over to a magnificent splash panel that immediately establishes the pure terror and randomness of combat. But the story is not rushed at all. It has a coherent plot-line and a terse but effective character arc for Lt. Steed, including a few hints along the way that he's probably already been in combat far too long. And this is only one of many excellent short stories found in the back pages of G.I. Combat, Our Army at War and Our Fighting Forces. There really needs to be a trade paperback reprint featuring the best of these tales.

Next week, a giant alien hand reaches through a dimensional rift and wrecks havoc in Gotham city. Some days, it doesn't pay to leave the Bat Cave.

Cover Cavalcade

I haven't read this one, but the Mike Grell cover does its job well in making me want to read it. GL and his arch-enemy both captured by a night in armor--how the heck did that happen?

Friday's Favorite OTR

Gunsmoke: "Wagon Show" 5/24/59

The circus comes to Dodge City! You'd think this would be a good thing, but Marshall Dillon is very uhappy. He knows the last two cities at which this particular circus played had deadly riots.

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PT Boats from My Childhood, Part 1

It's finally over. My life-long quest--a quest for which I would have spent my fortune and gladly betrayed friends and family--has at last been fulfilled.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I have been trying to identify and re-read a particular book I originally read when I was about 11-years old. It was one of two young adult novels involving PT boats during World War II. For years, my search was confused by the fact that I didn't remember that there were indeed two different PT boat novels and I was mixing together plot points when I searched for it.

But finally, I discovered one of them: Torpedo Run in Iron Bottomed Bay, by John Clagett. I'll actually be reviewing that one soon in a second "PT Boats from My Childhood" post.  It was reading Clagett's book that convinced me there was a second young adult PT novel out there, containing the plot points I remembered (the first name of one of the characters and a general memory of several of the battle scenes) which weren't in the Clagett book.

With a vital clue recently provided from Goodreads "What's the Name of That Book" forum, I was finally able to find the other PT boat novel. This is actually the second in a series of six books featuring young sailors Bob Dunbar and Gary Lunt, who end up serving on different types of vessels over the course of the series.

The Hostile Beaches (1964), by Gordon D. Shirreffs, is further proof that I had impeccable taste in reading materials and films when I was a kid. Whether it was a TV series novelization, my first comic book, or a movie that I enjoyed as a child, when I revisit them as an adult decades later, they always turn out to be great.

Bob and Gary start out the novel on a destroyer during the Solomon Islands campaign. After a night action,  in which their ship and two other destroyers attack and sink some Japanese vessels, their ship hits a mine and also sinks.

Circumstances lead to Bob and Gary being reassigned to a PT boat. Bob is a signalman, but also has a lot of experience handling small craft. Gary is known for running off at his mouth when he should shut up and does something incredibly stupid from time to time, but is one of the best Gunner's Mates in the Navy. In fact, he convinces the PT boat's commander that he's worthwhile when he uses one of the boat's twin-barreled .50 caliber machine guns to shoot down a Japanese bomber.

This leads to the action scene I still remembered vividly years later. During the Solomon campaign, the Japanese would use barges to sneak reinforcements and supplies to contested islands at night. PT Boats were often assigned to "barge-bopping," which meant finding and sinking these small craft before they reached their destination. This was made dangerous by the fact that the barges were armor-plated and equipped with cannon and machine guns.

So when the American boat attacks what turns out to be eight barges, they have a fight on their hands. And it is an exciting, suspenseful fight in which the PT boat takes damage and loses a man, but sinks five of the barges and drives the others into the hands of other PTs.

The next job involves sailing into enemy waters, hiding out in a small river on an island during the day and barely avoiding discovery by Japanese troops. They are delivering radio equipment to an Australian coast watcher, but bad luck leaves Bob and Gary stranded on the island with the coast watcher. They begin to help out, taking over the job completely when the coast watcher grows too sick from a bullet wound to keep working. And, since the Japanese are building a large base on the island, getting a steady stream of information out to the Allies is vital--even if this means dodging enemy soldiers & guard dogs, working with an unreliable radio and risking attacks by various poisonous animals that live in the thick jungle. These last few chapters are incredibly tense.

The Hostile Beaches also includes technical accuracy in terms of equipment and weapons, an understanding of realistic military tactics, likable characters and just the right amount of humor seeded throughout the story to make it seem real.

I really did have great taste in stuff as a kid.

Shogun Warriors, Part 6: Giant Robots vs. the Yakuza

Shogun Warriors #15 (April 1980)  is a filler issue, with Steven Grant (writer) and Mike Vosburg (artist) taking over for Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe. (Trimpe still did the cover.) But it's a really good filler issue, telling a truly exciting story.

The Shogun pilots are all back in Japan, getting in some training together. But all three of them are awkward in their control of the robots.

There's a good reason for this. Richard Carson isn't really Richard Carson. He's a member of the Yakuza--the Japanese mafia--wearing a Carson mask. The real Carson has been kidnapped.

The fake Carson has been slipping neurotoxins into Savage's and Genji's food, which is making those two groggy and uncertain when they pilot their Shogun Warriors.

The plan, of course, is for the Yakuza to gain control of the robots, since heavily-armed giant robots can be an enormous benefit to a criminal organization. If the local shopkeeper isn't paying his protection money, a visit from a 300-foot tall metal monster will probably get him to cooperate pretty quickly.

This story, by the way, is apparently a flashback, as the next issue will pick up right after the end of the Dr. Demonicus story arc.

The Yakuza plan begins to unravel when they decide to tie Carson to the seat of a car and drive the car off a cliff to crash on top of the Shogun base. Carson, remember, is a stunt driver. So, even though it means driving with his feet, he manages to steer the car away from the cliff and down a road.

I really enjoy that scene. Vosberg does a great job choreographing the action and it shows Carson being clever as well as having fast reflexes.

Carson's escape blows his double's cover, which leads to a straight-on fight between the robots. Unfortunately, the two good guy pilots are still groggy from the toxins they've been fed. The Yakuza begins to wipe the floor with them.

But if the good guys can't win the fight on their own, they can at least distract the villain. This allows Carson to get on board Raydeen and, after getting punched around himself for a few panels, finally get the drop on the Yakuza. After that, it's pretty easy to catch the remainder of the gang.

So Shogun Warriors #15 is indeed a filler issue--a break from the usual robot vs. monster stories with guest writers/artists stepping up to the plate. But it's what a filler issue should be--telling an exciting story in its own right that remains true to the characters and spirit of the book.

Next week, we'll travel with British commandos through the Sahara desert.

My Ebooks

Cover Cavalcade

During the Silver Age, Superman's friends used to go insane with disturbing frequency. Fortunately, they usually got better.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Lone Ranger: "Lennie's Locket" 11/23/42

Everyone wonders why Lennie--a big, burly man--wears a locket and values it so highly. Oddly, the answer might involve outlaws who are apparently black-mailing the owner of the ranch at which Lennie works.

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