1941
1936
1846
1941
1952
1950
Poster Gallery: BILLY THE KID
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Pulp Gallery: AMAZING STORIES 7, 8 & 9 (1926)
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SHADOW COMICS 13, 14 & 15 (1941-42)
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Overlooked Films: St. George and the Dragonet (from the record by Stan Freberg)
Stan Freberg's record "St. George and the Dragonet" was a number one hit in 1953, and he followed later that year with "Christmas Dragnet" (aka "Yulenet"). I can't find any info on where this cartoon came from. Anybody know?
Keep an eye on the chief's desk in the police station. You'll see two Marx plastic flintlock pistols. Most of those were marketed with Davy Crockett's name etched on the barrel.
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Pulp Gallery: THRILLING MYSTERY
1935 - Rafael DeSoto
1936 - Rudolph Belarski
1943
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Comic Gallery: ANNIE OAKLEY (1948)
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Forgotten Stories: "The Man in the Silver Mask" - a complete Pulp Hero novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner
In a recent Facebook comment, Jeffrey Marks mentioned he was working on a new bio of Erle Stanley Gardner, which led to our exchanging a few words about Gardner's wacky vigilante, The Man in the Silver Mask. This is the only ESG character I know who is firmly in the Hero Pulp mode of The Shadow, The Spider and Doc Savage.
The "Man" starred in at least three novelettes in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1935. This story, which I'm pretty sure is the first, is from July 13. I have another, "The Man Who Talked," from September 7, and Jeffrey tipped me to a third, "The Silver Mask Murders," in the November 23 ish. If there were others, I'd sure like to hear about them.
Check out this week's fine Forgotten Books at Sweet Freedom.
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Mugshots from the Willamette Writers Conference
Today, as I was yesterday, and as I'll be again tomorrow, I'm at the Willamette Writers Conference helping wannabe authors hone and deliver their pitches. For several of us this has become a yearly ritual, and, aside from being strenuous mental exercise, it's a heck of a lot of fun.
Under the able leadership of Jackie Blain, the Savvy Scribe, we listen to pitches for just about every kind of book and film you can imagine (yes, even that kind), assimilate the info, and assist folks in crafting it into a concise, coherent, and hopefully catchy message. Sometimes it's easy. Other times it's like one of the Labors of Hercules. Either way, we do it in about fifteen minutes, send our customer off to face the agents, and start all over with someone else.
Here's a pictorial tribute to some of the members of this year's Pitch Practice team, complete with links to more info. Note the looks of intense concentration, wide-eyed wonder, utter astonishment or unutterable horror, as they case may be.
The Right Reverend Cap'n Bob Napier
Yours Truly (gesturing hypnotically)
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Paperback Gallery: THE AVENGER 7, 8 & 9 (1972-73)
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Tarzan of the Comics (1943-44)
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Overlooked Films: Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)
At one time or another I acquired, read and enjoyed all six of John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto novels. And I believe I saw most, if not all, of Peter Lorre’s eight Moto films. Heck, I think I even saw the ninth Moto movie, starring Henry Silva. But I honestly can’t remember much about any of them, so this film - the first in the series - was almost like a new introduction to the character. And it's a good one.
This is not the quirky Peter Lorre I remember from The Maltese Falcon, All Through the Night, Casablanca or Passage to Marseille. Or the offbeat Lorre from films like Arsenic and Old Lace and My Favorite Brunette. And he's a far cry from the over-the-tip Lorre of Hammer films like The Raven, Tales of Terror and A Comedy of Terrors.
Pulling a knife on Moto is a sure way to get thrown overboard.
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This is Peter Lorre in the hero’s role - with all the fighting, sleuthing and romancing that goes with it. It was a shock to see him dive into a fight, displaying all the acrobatic skill of Douglas Fairbanks, and kick his opponent’s butt. (The featurette on the DVD reveals that the action scenes were handled by his longtime stuntman Harvey Parry, but it looked to me like Lorre was doing it himself).
Moto foils a gang of would-be assassins.
It’s hard to resist comparing Lorre’s Moto with his chief film rival, the Charlie Chan portrayed by Warner Oland and Sidney Toler. So I won’t try. While Chan is always self-deprecating and sometimes polite beyond endurance, Moto is a take-charge and take-no-shit kind of guy. As a result - judging solely by this movie - Moto is a far more intriguing and compelling character. I look forward to rediscovering the second film the series, Thank You, Mr. Moto, and if I can find one of my Marquand books, I'll probably reread that too.
Moto undercover, doing his John Rhys-Davies impression.
More Overlooked Films at Sweet Freedom.
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Pulp Gallery: SPICY WESTERN (1937)
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Comic Gallery: Alex Schomburg's WONDER COMICS (1946-47)
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Forgotten Jack Vance Books: Lyonesse - aka Suldrun's Garden (1983)
This ain't really a review. It’s more like 1/8 of a review, because this book has 434 pages, and I’ve only read 58 of them. Will I read more? Chances are slim.
Suldrun's Garden was described as historical high fantasy, so I expected to like it. I’ve read a fair amount of historical fiction and some standout high fantasy, so a combo seemed a pretty cool concept. But five chapters into the book, I’ve yet to see the point.
Magic still works here. We see very little of it in the first 54 pages, but mention is made of mermaids, mermen, fawns and fairies. The heroine encounters semi-anthropomorphic chairs, and has actual face-time with a two-headed goblin and a magic mirror.
OK for purposes of a fantasy novel I can accept the notion that magic once existed and mythical beings roamed the earth. That’s Suspension of Disbelief 101. My problem is that Vance’s history is every bit as fanciful as his fantasy. This series (yes, it’s the first book of a trilogy) is set not long before the advent of King Arthur. If such a person actually existed - and that’s not impossible - it would have likely been around 700 A.D.
As I’m sure you know, the tales of King Arthur were put to paper sometime in the 12th Century, and portrayed the society of the 12th rather than the 6th Century. That’s a huge historical anachronism, and for purposes of Arthurian legend that‘s fine. But the Lyonesse series takes it a step further, giving us a 12th Century lost world before Arthurian times. I admire an author who plays games with history, but games upon games can get a little silly, and I find it distracting. I’d have preferred a straight fantasy.
The same can be said of the story. So far it’s all set-up. We’re still being introduced to some of the world and some of the players, and getting hints of some of the possible conflict to come. But at this point the only storyline revolves around who, if anyone, Suldrun will be forced to marry. Ho hum. There‘s nothing to make me care what happens to Suldrun or her father the king or her mother or maids or goblins or magic chairs.
And yeah, there’s a garden, the one the book’s named after. But there’s nothing interesting about it, and nothing interesting has happened there. Jack Vance is a fine writer, as I know from other works, but do I really want to spend another 376 pages with this tiresome girl and her impossible world? And another 800-odd pages to complete the trilogy? The prospect holds little appeal.
Maybe it’s just me. In search of something different, I recently read The Sun Also Rises. It was OK, but seemed about 50% mundane narration, 30% travelogue, 10% bullfighting and 10% sexual frustration. I failed to see what all the fuss was about. I’m now twenty chapters into Anna Karenina, hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time. It’s OK too, but just that. It would seem I’m suffering from a major case of the literary blahs.
More Forgotten Vance Books (and others) at In Reference to Murder.
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Louie Armstrong sings "The Ballad of Davy Crockett"
My apologies for the saccharin Disney imagery. It couldn't be helped. Don't look, just listen.
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The BLACK MASK Art of Arthur Rodman Bowker
I've been looking at Arthur Rodman Bowker's interior illos in Black Mask for a great many years, but wasn't particularly impressed by them until recently, when I separated a few from the magazine. Standing alone, in black and white, they have a power I had never noticed. These three illustrations were scanned from the August 1936 issue. More coming soon.
"Homicide Cue" by Nels Leroy Jorgensen
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"Border Blockade" by Roger Torrey
See more Bowker illos HERE.
Keith Deutsch has asked me to say that this artwork is copyright © Keith Alan Deutsch as successor to Popular Publications, Inc. Here you go, Keith!
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Comic Gallery: THE CISCO KID (1951)
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Overlooked Films: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936)
The Popeye of the Fleischer (and later Paramount) cartoons was far less interesting - and less adventurous - than the E.C. Segar character of the 1930s comic strips, but he had his moments. His supreme moment came in this 17-minute film from 1936. Fleischer pulled out all the stops on this one, applying glorious Technicolor, and introducing new techniques to produce 3D effects without glasses. Enjoy!
More Overlooked Films at SWEET FREEDOM.
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Pulp Gallery: DOC SAVAGE 13, 14 & 15 (1934)
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WORDSLINGERS: An Epitaph for the Western by Will Murray
Will Murray's new book from Altus Press is not technically a history of the Western pulp magazine. Though Wordslingers contains enough info for someone to assemble a traditional history, it's much more than that. Actually, it might be a whole new breed of book. I’m not sure there’s ever been anything like it before.
Will spent years searching the pages of Writer’s Digest and similar magazines for letters and articles that tell the story—as it was happening—in the words of the writers and editors who made the pulp westerns happen, then put it all into historical context.
In his Introduction, Will describes it thusly: What follows is a species of oral history, employing found quotes, developed so that the author recedes into the role of omniscient organizer, sometimes disappearing altogether, in order to allow the participants of the past to spin the sage of their literary labors.
That sounds a bit too modest to me. Will has obviously devoted an incredible amount of time and effort to this book, and much of his own personality is evident on its pages.
What emerges in the course of the book’s 453 pages is the rarely-mentioned truth that the Western pulps were largely responsible for creating the mythic West we still hold dear. The early Western pulps, taking a cue from the dime novels, focused almost exclusively on gunfighters, sheriffs, outlaws and shootouts. While those were all genuine elements of the Old West, they were, in the great scheme of things, of miniscule importance. But those were the characters and events that captured the public’s imagination and sold magazines. Hollywood jumped on the same bandwagon, and side-by-side the pulps and the movies fed the American appetite for The West That Never Was.
The Western pulps, like other magazines, were hit hard by circumstances beyond their control—particularly wartime paper shortages and the Depression—but the insiders seemed oblivious to such forces. At every decline in sales, they were quick to blame the quality of the stories, and fought wars of words over whether the editors or the writers were most to blame.
Much of the blame was heaped upon the head of the one-dimensional “gun dummy” who ruled the roost during the first big boom of the Western pulp market. No one (except apparently the readers) liked the gun dummy and all agreed his time had passed. But no matter what new twists the writers and editors came up with, the gun dummy had been ingrained in the American psyche and he never stopped selling magazines.
Wordslingers has it all: The economic factors. The impact of world events. The changing face (and mind) of the reading public. The editors who helped widen the field, and those who strove to keep it narrow. The never-ending rivalry between writers who walked the real West versus those who'd never been west of New York.
The death of the Western pulps was foretold many times, but it always bounced back--always, that is, until paperbacks and television cornered the Western market in the 1950s. Though the magazines are gone, their legacy lives on in the American consciousness, and will never be fully separated from our less prosaic history.
Wordslingers captures the joy and the sadness of the 50-year saga of these history making (and history remaking) magazines. It’s much more than a good read—it’s an experience. Experience it yourself!
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More Pages to Explore .....
