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Yikes, what a great book! PLASTER CITY by Johnny Shaw!
Yikes, what a great book! Johnny Shaw is a writer who keeps getting better, and if he gets any better than this it’ll be downright scary.Johnny Shaw’s debut novel Dove Season (the firstJimmy Veeder...
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Forgotten Books: GOD SAVE THE CHILD by Robert B. Parker (1974)
Some notes on my umpteenth reading of the second novel in the Spenser series, published forty years ago:In a recent post on the series premiere, The Godwulf Manuscript (HERE), I noted that Spenser...
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Toy Soldier Saturday: MARX VIKINGS
These guys are 54mm (about 2 inches tall) and usually showed up in Marx playsets as the bad guys. The good guys were Marx knights, who were kept busy preventing these guys from storming their Marx...
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Cap Gun Monday: HUBLEY ARMY .45
Yeah, the great majority of my cap guns are cowboy pistols (and I'm guessing the great majority of cap guns made before 1970 were too). But kids liked to play army and detective and secret agent, too,...
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Forgotten Books: The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books (1989)
When this two-volume set was published back in '89, you couldn't just jump on the Internet and hunt up a photo of dang near every Golden Age comic ever published. So The Photo-Journal Guide was a...
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Toy Soldier Saturday: ANDYGUARD CIVIL WAR (Part 1)
Some folks used to think these 60mm Civil Warriors were made by Ideal, because the sculpting is so fine. Nowadays they're identified as Andyguard (whoever they were). Not sure I've seen any other...
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Cap Gun Monday: HUBLEY TEX
The TEX is a slightly smaller, skinnier, younger brother of Hubley's original cast-iron TEXAN and the various incarnations of the more common TEXAN JR. At 7 3/4 inches, it's designed for smaller hands,...
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Overlooked Films: PHILIP MARLOWE, PRIVATE EYE - "The Pencil"
I watched (and recorded) all eleven episodes of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye when it ran on HBO back in 1983. In fact, I'm pretty sure I coughed up the dough for HBO solely for that reason, and...
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Forgotten Books: RING AROUND ROSA (aka Murder in the Raw) by William Campbell...
This is the book I planned to re-read and review a month or so back for the FFB '50s Extravaganza. Due to brain fade, that didn't happen. But the book remained on my desk, eyeing me accusingly, until I...
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Toy Soldier Saturday: MARX SPORTS FIGURES (part 1)
Marx made a whole series of these 60mm (2 1/2") sports figures in the '50s, but (poor me) I have only these three, and ain't likely to be getting any more. So in honor of World Cup (to which I have...
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Cap Gun Monday: NICHOLS DERRINGER
This derringer was one of very few Nichols "shell firing" guns - sort of their answer to Mattel's Shootin' Shell line. This one came with three-piece bullets (a shell, a casing, and a red "pellet"...
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Overlooked Films: HERE'S FLASH CASEY (1937)
No Black Mask hero had more success in more forms of media than George Harmon Coxe's Flashgun Casey. His radio show ran from 1943 to 1950, he had a short-lived comic book published by Marvel, and a TV...
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