NO FFB TODAY

Even though I am a technophobe and a Luddite, I do not hate computers.  On the other hand, computers hate me.  More specifically, my computer hates me.  Big time.

So there I was.  Getting ready to write a Forgotten Book review in my usual urbane, literate, and pithy style when my computer suddenly went psycho ex-girlfriend on me.  Passages were deleted with o hope of getting them back, phrases and full sentences suddenly moved to the middle of the wrong paragraphs, the page would suddenly hopscotch back and forth to a 440% magnification, stopping at every magnification in between, sentences would mysteriously capitalize, my screen would refuse to continue down the draft I was writing , and it would take about five efforts to correct a typo or misspelling (and I do tend to make a lot of them), the computer kept switching over without warning to Netflix or Facebook or Kindle, and so on and so on and so on in a purely demonic fashion.  After four hours and three repeated tries to rewrite the post, I finally gave up.

So no post today.

The book I was going to review was The Birds of a Feather Affair, the second of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. paperback originals by Michael Avallone.  A shame, because Avo started it off with a kick-ass paragraph.

Oh, well.

For those interested, there's the link to the book from Luminist Archives:

https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/A/Avallone%20-%20The%20Birds-of-a-Feather%20Affair.pdf

Maybe I'll have better luck next week.  I'm thinking of bringing in an exorcist.

DRAGNET: ERIC KELBY -- BODY BURIED IN NURSERY (SEPTEMBER 3, 1949)

The story you about to hear is true.

Only the names have been changed to protect then innocent...

You're a detective sergeant.  You're assigned to homicide detail...

"My partner's Ben Romaro.  The boss is Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives.  My name's Friday."

Kelby called the police a couple of days ago.  His wife was missing.  He thinks she left him.  There's something strange going on here.  If she left him, why didn't she take her clothes, her handbag, her money?  Why did she leave without saying a thing to her son, whom she adored?  And why is Kelby so nonchalant about his missing wife?

Stick with Joe Friday to find out the truth of the matter.

Sit back.  Relax.  Enjoy this "documented drama."  And learn the story from beginning to end, from crime to punishment...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MThDxQd1qIc

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: BLACK STUFF

 "Black Stuff" by Ken Bruen (from Bruen's anthology Dublin Noir, 2006)

We lost one of the truly greats this last Saturday with the passing of Irish crime writer Ken Bruen at the age of 74.  Bruen, who held a doctorate in metaphysics, was a unique voice in the field -- wise, literate, compassionate, whose works were a skillful blend of tragedy, comedy, violence, horror, and humanity, told against a unflinching view of Irish society and economics.  His most popular character, Jack Teylor, an ex-Guarda, manages to maintain his dignity despite a lifetime of horrific happenings.  I first encountered Taylor and Bruen in the 2003 novel  The Magdalene Martyrs, and was stunned by the quality of his work.  Since then I have eagerly read as many of his novels and stories I could get my hands on, ending with last month's Galway's Edge, the 18th (and now last) novel in the Taylor series, which I inhaled just yesterday.  Still, I needed more Bruen, and I came across "Black Stuff" late kast night.

It's a brief story, merely twelve pages long, more of a character sketch embedded in a heist caper.  The protagonist, Phil, is Black Irish.  Not the Black Irish term which was once used to describe Irish refugees of the Great Famine, but the more modern usage describing people of Irish descent with dark colored hair and dark coloring -- more specifically, Irish of African descent.  When Phil, who had a white mother and a one-night-stand father, Dublin was essentially a small town before the wakening of the short-lived Celtic Tiger economy; Phil did not really realize he was Black until he was fourteen; previous to that, then other kids made fun of him because he was shit at hurling.  His mother, whom he loved, spent her life "broke, impoverished, sullen, ill;" but she had instilled one survival tip: "Never, and I mean never, let them know how smart you are."  (After she died, Phil had a mason carve on her gravestone

I

DIDN'T

LET

 THEM

KNOW

Phil has led a ow-level life of crime, keeping himself to himself.  He worked out and it shows.  He has two ruined fingers from an early encounter with a criminal gang from the north.  And he never lets them know how smart he is.

So, one day in a bar, this man enters, pretending somewhat effectively to be an American, calling himself Bowman.  He strikes up a conversation with Phil and, over the next month, meets with him a number of times.  Phil doesn't know what this man's game is but he plays along.  Bowman finally reveals that he is planning to steal a famous painting and wants Phil's assistance; they would split the money they get from it fifty-fifty.  The painting?  Arrangement in Gray and Black, more commonly known as Whistler's Mother, now on a six-month loan to a Dublin museum.  The theft will be timed when there is a window in the security -- "the patrol will be switched, the CCTV is to be revamped, there'll only be two guard on actual watch.  Can you ____ believe it?" 

The heist goes perfectly.  Bowman and Phil are dressed as maintenance men to help them blend in.  Especially in Phil's case: a "sign of the new Ireland, black guy riding am mop, no one blinked an eye.  We'd become America."  The guards are disarmed, the painting stolen, but as they were almost out of the building a soldier came out of nowhere with a gun.  Bowman shot him in the gut, then shot him twice more, just because.

That's when things got hot and Bowman and Phil had to stay below the radar for a month.  Finally, Bowman calls Phil to his apartment: he had received thirty thousand as a down payment on the painting.  Phil finally got a good look at the portrait of Whistler's mother.  'The old lady did indeed look...old.  She was nothing like my mother -- my mother had never sat down in her wretched life,"  Bowman, it turns out has a gun and is a member of an Irish branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

But Phil never let Bowman know how smart he was...

A great story. 

BITS & PIECES

Openers:

TERROR FROM THE SKIES

As the rate of disappearances increase to epidemic

proportions, New Yorkers look to the skies in fear

"Stay indoors" is the advice from the police department as the recent spate of missing persons reaches an all-time high.  There are now over fifty reported disappearances on Manhattan Island, spanning the entire festive season, and this reporter has been told that the police department is in a state of panic, and has already run out of leads.

It is understood that each of the missing persons disappeared in what's thought to be identical circumstances -- whilst walking the streets of the city -- and eyewitness accounts refer to "terrible flying creatures" that pluck their victims indiscriminately from the sidewalk, dragging them away into the sky, never to be seen or heard from again.

These creatures are said to resemble human skeletons with "bat-like wings and glowing red eyes.  They swoop silently out from the shadows to abduct the good people of New York and carry them away for nefarious purposes that are not yet clear.

Committed

This, however, offers little comfort to the families of the fifty missing people, of whom nothing whatsoever has been heard since their abductions.  There have been no ransom notes, no demands, and no bodies.  mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives all over the city are holding constant vigil in the hope that news will come soon and that their loved ones will be returned safely.

-- The Ghosts of War by George Mann, 2011

The time is January, 1927.  The place, an alternate steampunk New York City, complete with coal-powered automobiles, self-igniting cigarettes, and dirigibles.  a lot of dirigibles.  Gabriel Cross, a wealthy socialite, is the angst-ridden costumed hero known as the Ghost, who has taken it upon himself to protect the city.  While trying to get a lead on the abductions, he comes across two of the bat creatures swooping down to grab prey.  One of the creatures gets away, carrying his male victim.  The Ghost manages to grab the other creature as it has a young woman in its talons.  The bat-creature turns out to be some of sentient robot, constructed of brass, with some sort of large, translucent material covering its wings, and razor sharp deadly talons; there are two propellers attached to its back to allow it speed in its flight.  He wounds the creature but has to let it get away in order to save the female victim it had dropped from the sky.

The Ghost has an ally in police inspector Felix Donovan, the one person outside of Gabriel's butler who knew his secret identity -- every other cop in the city wants to arrest the Ghost as a vigilante..  Donovan, however, soon has his hands full trying to track down a British spy who supposedly had knowledge that could start a war between America and the British Empire.  (In this reality, the two superpowers are engaged in a cold war.)  In reality, the British spy has information the he must get back to his government in order to prevent a war, but an evil Senator with with an agenda of his own is using every resource available to stop him, as well as stopping any investigation into the multiple disappearances.

And there's a mad scientist who is replacing his own leprosy-ridden body parts with mechanical limbs and organs.  And the giant interdimensional blood sucking squid monsters that would decimate life on Earth.  And, surprise! surprise!, Gideon's fomrer girlfreind shows up after years of being away and is now a raging alcohiolic.

Just your typical fun times in an alternate New York City...

This is the second of four pulp-inspired novels Mann wrote about the Ghost.  Mann is also the author of Newbury & Hobbes Investigation urban fantasy series, the Wychwood series, and numerous entries in the Dr. Who, Warhammer, Sherlock Holmes, and other franchises.  He ;provides a lot of fun reading.

Incoming: 

•  Edward S. Aarons, Assignment Silver Scorpion.  A Sam Durrell spy-guy novel, the 35th in the series (of the original 42 by the author; six additional titles were ghost-written and published under the name of the author's brother, Will B. Aarons).  "Sam Durrell had survived oin this business by taking no one for granted.  Long ago he had learned to live alone, hunt alone, depend on himself alone.  Now hw wasn't alone and he wished her were.  For the presence of Georgette Finch, an attractive young woman agent for K Section, complicated the job of recovering a stolen three hundred million in American money.  It was hidden somewhere behind the smoke curtain of civil was in Boganda, a newly emerged African nation.  Sam figured he was better off without Finch, until he ran into a couple of deadly female pirates who were out to increase their fortune by -- you guessed it -- three hundred million.  And since they had an army, Sam decided he needed all the help he could get.  but trusting Finch was a bit more than he counted on."
• "Piers Anthony" (Piers Anthony Jacob), Pornucopia.  Humorous erotic fantasy.  "Pornucopia is a picaresque black comedy that transgresses all bounds of everyday good taste.  It begins in a near-future world where sex-vending machines  and genital transplants are taken for granted.  Prior Gross, the hero and sex object of this wild adventure, thinks his fantasies have all come true when a beautiful young woman seduces him on a public beach.  she turns out to be a succubus, beginning his initiation in a realm populated by demons that are not merely horned, but horny.  He encounters a perverse cast of characters that includes a satyr, a vampire, and a pair of luscious sisters, one of whom tricks him out of his manhood.  So Prior Gross sets out on a perverse odyssey, taking him to a distant planet where discovers the key to the return of his property and, ultimately, the origin of the universe itself."  In an afterword, Anthony explains that he had begun the novel in 1969 for Essex House, a softcover publisher of literate sexual fantasy (they published Philip Jose Farmer and Michael Perkins, among others), but his editor was fired and the line was shut down, leaving him with a completed book with no market.  Fifteen years passed and Charles Platt liked the book and set up a publishing company to produce, but he could not get a printer to print it, so the publishing company died aborning.  Later, the book was published by another new publisher, Tafford, and ran through three printings, despite not being available for anyone under 21.  But Tafford then bite the dust.  Then another prospective published shut down.  By this time used copies of the book were selling for $150...and there was also a pirated edition.  Finally, the book was published by another new outfit, Mundania Press, which is where my copy came from.  And Anthony wrote a sequel, titled (Lord help us) The Magic Fart.  I have made no secret that Anthony is not one of my favorite fantasy and Science fiction authors, but I do have to give him credit for his stick-to-it-iveness.
• Fred Blosser, Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail.  Robert E. Howard-influenced Lovecraftian weird western.  (Blame George for this one.)  "Treachery and violence in the Old West as a mysterious gunfighter and two dangerous, desirable women pursue a treasure deep in Apache country.  But Apaches and bandits may be the least of their dangers as they face grisly horror at a lost mission."    Surprisingly, this was never considered for the Booker Prize.  Go figure.
• Lin Carter, The City Outside the World.  Carter playing with Edgar rice Burroughs-Leigh Brackett-Jack Williamson tropes.  "Mars:  A skull of a planet picked clean by the wind of time.  North.  Beyond the desert of Meroe:  past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept  into the unmapped waste called 'Jmbra.  It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had hidden -- and vanished -- in a time beyond memory.  It was here that the outworlde Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valaroa and found the Child of the Stars."  Fanboy Carter writes this sort of thing as well as anyone else.
• Gardner Dozois, editor, the Year's Best Science Fiction:  Fourteenth Annual Collection.  Year's best selection covering 28 stories from 1996.  Authors include Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, James P. Blaylock, John Kessel, Paul Park Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling, Mike Resnick, Charles Sheffield, Robert Reed, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, and Stephen Baxter.  As always with these collections, Dozois provides a varied and literate selection.
• Simon R. Green, Ghost of a Smile.  Fantasy, the second novel of six in the Ghostfinders series.  "Meet the operatives of the Carnacki Institute -- JC Chance:  the team leader, brave, charming, and almost unbearably arrogant; Melody Chambers:  the science geek who keeps the antisupernatural equipment running; and Happy Jack Palmer: the terminally gloomy telepath.  Their mission:  Do Something About Ghosts.  Lay them to rest, send them packing, or just kick their nasty ectoplasmic arses...A distress call was received from the private research centre of one of the biggest drug companies in the world.  The police went in -- and never came out.  A national security team stormed the place.  No-one's heard anything further from them, either.  Now it's in the hands of the Carnacki Institute's rising stars.  They have the wrong equipment.  They have no idea what awaits.  And they have the clock ticking in the background.  But they also have a secret weapon:  JC's very lovely -- and very dead -- girlfriend."  No urging needed; they grabbed my attention with Carnacki Institute.
• Donald Hamilton, five Matt Helm spy thrillers:  The Silencers.  Number 4 in the series.  "The undercover agent with a killer instinct  and a weakness for the wrong woman takes a long day's journey into the New Mexico mountains and finds -- god help us all -- crumbling ghost-town church which conceals one of the most ungodly devices ever conceived for man's destruction."  The Ambushers.  Number 6 in the series.  "A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for Matt Helm -- till the man whose special talent is killing suddenly has to play God to a beautiful, beat-up girl, tortured half out of her mind in the Costa Verde jungle...Until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of northern Mexico...Until a Russian missile smuggled out of Cuba falls into the hands of a political fanatic -- very, very close to home..."  The Ravagers.  Number 8 in the series.  "It was not a peaceful way to die -- but there was nothing Helm could do for him now.  Scratch one agent.  Cross off the pretty boy with the face women just couldn't resist.  The poor bastard was lying dead in a Canadian motel room, with no face at all.  It had been eaten away with acid, corroded beyond all recognition.  And the most likely patsy was a woman Helm had orders to protect -- no matter what the cost."   The Devastators.  Number 9 in the series.   "On a bleak and lonely heath in northern Scotland they recovered the body of the third agent sent out on this mission.  He had died -- been murdered -- of bubonic plague.  m to take it from there.  For somewhere among those desolate Scottish moors was a half-crazed scientific genius who could devastate entire populations with one hideous, raging plague.  It was Helm's job to get him...with the help of a beautiful American operative who was supposed to be his wife, and a beautiful Russian operative made it clear she was his deadly enemy."  And, The Interlopers.    Number 12 in the series.  "Matt Helm finds out just how fatal blond hair can be when he takes over another man's identity, fiancee, and fate.  I  this mixed doubles counter-espionage mission, Helm plays decoy an assassin's dream.. to kill next President of the United States."  This is not your Dean Martin movie abomination Matt Helm.
• E. Hoffmann Price, six e-books collections of public domain pulp stories:  E. Hoffmann Price's Exotic Adventures MEGAPACK, 11 short stories and novelettes, mostly from 1935-1945, "full-blooded, two-fisted tales of warriors throughout the ages, seeking glory and triumph"; E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin, 19 stories from Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and other pulps about a Kurdish holy man -- a "darvish," or dervish -- who is half-crazed, a master swordsman, and good at stirring up trouble;  MEGAPACK, E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre D'Atrois Occult Detective & Associates MEGAPACK:  20 Classic Stories, most, if not all, from Weird Tales, so they would be available online in the individual issues, but it's nice to have them all in one collection; The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure MEGAPACK:  14 Tales from the "Spicy" Pulp Magazines, the stories here cover multiple genres and multiple decades --detective, western, adventure, and fantasy; E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives MEGAPACK: 19 Classic Stories, stories feature Honest John Carmody, Cliff Cragin, and Pawang Ali, among others, and includes two collaborations with "Ralph Milne Farley"; and E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action MEGAPACK:  19 Classic Stories, which came with the warning that "this volume, as with much of pulp fiction of the era, is not politically correct by modern standards."  Price (1898-1988) was a West Point graduate.  "real-life soldier of fortune," a champion fencer and boxer, an orientalist and linguist, an astrologer, a Theosophist, and a practicing Buddhist who published hundreds and hundreds of stories in his 64-year career.  He was the only pulp writer who meet Robert E. Howard in person, and also knew and met H.P. Lovecraft (with whom he collaborated) and Clark Ashton Smith.  If my math is correct this haul gives me 92 stories by Price, just a drop in the bucket compared to his total output.
• Elizabeth Walter, The Spirit of the Place & Other Strange Tales:  The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Walter.  Collection of 31 supernatural stories, first published in five volumes:  Snowfall & Other Chilling Events (1965), The Sin Eater & Other Scientific Impossibilities (1968), Davy Jones's Tale & Other Supernatural Stories (1971), Come and Get Me & Other Uncanny Invitations (1973), and Dead Woman & Other Haunting Experiences (1975).  Amazing stories from one of the best writers in the genre.  The author was also the editor of the Collins Crime Club from 1961 to 1991.
• Leonard Wibberley, Feast of Freedom.  Satire.  "A new nation's primitive dietary habits make trouble for everyone from the Prime Minister of Great Britain to the President of the U.S.A."  What happens when the Vice President visits a tribe of cannibals on a small south Pacific island and ends up in a stew -- literally.  In my mind, I'm filing this one under wishful thinking.

Sometimes You Need a Little Joy in Your Life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yNewNtXahk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQBr2Vxvg0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzhFqG-gJTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1QtEC5oBX4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQBr2Vxvg0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_hlvRNgGOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qHClLZVc6k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2rG9joNzmE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xctzp0dp9uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9YvB9FmR3E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRNrgDIJfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRNrgDIJfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9doHKq4F3o

[and I can't let Christine Lavin go without some baton twirling} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98JnAxGZi0s

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCSiAJaJVNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5MrBGqWZg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQADcAm3lqU&list=RDEMhVCyaMIEsVdI1V4yKF3Ulg&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es3Vsfzdr14

Eiffel:  Today marks the one hundred thirty-sixth anniversary of the official opening of the Eiffel Tower.  Let's celebrate with our old friend Inspector Maigret with the 1950 film The Man on the Eiffel Tower, based on Georges Simeon's 1931 novel La tete d'un homme (A Man's Head, also published as A Battle of Nerves. The Patience of Maigret, and Maigret's War of Nerves).

Maigret investigates the murder of a rich Paris widow and ends up chasing the killer up the Eiffel Tower's girders. 

Charles Laughton plays Maigret.  Also featured are Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, Robert Hutton, Jean Wallace, Wilfred Hyde-White, and the city of Paris.  Directed with Burgess Meredith, with an uncredited assist from Laughton.  Screenplay by Harry Brown.  Co-produced by Franchot Tone and Irving Allen.

The movie received mixed reviews.  It was made in Anscocolor, aa experimental German color process  that made it seem as if you were watching through yellow cellophane -- which may have something to do with the reviews.

What do you think?

https://archive.org/details/1949-the-man-on-the-eiffel-tower-burgess-meredith-vose

Today Is International Transgender Day of Visibility:  A good time to mention the online auction now taking place:  Crime Writers for Trans Rights, to benefit the Transgender Law Center.  Over 250 noted crime writers are donating such great things as signed books, character names, professional research assistance, fun crafts, conference registrations, audiobook narration, manuscript review, book club visits, zoom calls, and much much more.  Check it out, but hurry: the auction ends tomorrow, April 1. Here's the link:   https://www.32auctions.com/writers4transrights

  

These are perilous and turbulent times and we all need to support out shared humanity

I've already been outbid (twice!) on one item I am interested in.  Time will tell if I win it.  (Fingers crossed.)

Everyone's a Critic:  Today is also the anniversary of the infamous Skandalkoncert held by the Vienna Concert Society in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna in 1913.  The concert -- perhaps inadvisedly -- consisted of music by composers of the Second Viennese School and was conducted by Arnold Schoenberg. The audience did not appreciate the expressionism or the experimentation of the concert...and began rioting!  The performance ended prematurely.

In the confusion, concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck was said to have slapped a concertgoer, leading to both a lawsuit and another name for the concert -- the Watschenkoncert, or the "Slap Concert."  One witness to the alleged assault was operetta composer Oscar Straus, who said the slap had been "the most harmonious sound of the evening."

The fourth item on the program was Alton Berg: two of the Five Orchestra Songs on the Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 Nos. 2 and 3.  This performance led to the audience calling for both the composer and the poet to be committed-- despite the fact that it was common knowledge that Altenberg had already been committed to an insane asylum.  It was during Berg's performance that the riot began  Berg's songs were not performed again for 49 years, and the full score did not appear in print until 1966.

The final piece on the program -- Mahler's Kindertotenleider -- was not performed.

Two months later, the famous fracas at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring took place in Paris.

Ha-Ha  (Fine Print Dept.):  My brother bought a shirt the other day and when he got home, discovered a huge tear in it.  He went back the next day and demanded his money back.  The storekeeper said, "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't give refunds."  My brother pointed to a sign on the counter:  "money refunded if not satisfactory."  "And we stand by that, sir," he was told, "There was nothing wrong with your money."

  in the back.

Today's Poem:

Wind, Water, Stone

Water hollows stone, 

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind.

-- Octavio Paz

(translated by Eliot Weinberger)

 

(for Roger Caillois)

HYMN TIME

 From 1926, Arizona Dranes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MngzNKMiJHg&list=PLDk7G86Bj50GyNG-vNruZvWwJu6I0tgC0

JOHNNY DYNAMITE #10 (JUNE 1955)

 Johnny Dynamite was a tough-as-nails comic book private eye, created by Ken Fitch and Pete Morisi and debuting in Comic Media's Dynamite #3 (September 1953); he appeared in seven further issues before being picked up by Charleton Comics and retitled Johnny Dynamite, beginning with issue #10, and lasting only three issues.  He also appeared (somewhat beefier) in three issues of Charleton's Foreign Intrigues (#13-15).  (All relevant issues of Dynamite and Johnny Dynamite, as well as two of the three Foreign Intrigues issues are available at Comic Book Plus.) 

In 1987 Max Allan Collins acquired the character from Charleton, reprinting stories in Ms. Tree.  Collins and Terry Beatty gave the character a new lease on life with a four-issue limited series from Dark Horse Comics.

In issue #10, Frank Cole, Johnny's buddy from the war days, managed to survive the pest holes of the Pacific and the torture camps of the Germans only to be shot down at home by a man with a limp who had been Hitler's personal envoy of death during the war.  Of course Johnny vows vengeance in the aptly titled story "Vengeance Is Mine!"

"The King of Blackmail" appears to be a generic mystery stories that was adapted to a Johnny /dynamite tale by adding a couple of splash pages and making Johnny the narrator for the story.  Ho-hum.

There's also three one-page generic stories and a two-page typeset story (have to keep the postal authorities happy, after all).

Read it for the atmospheric, convoluted first story and see close the the edge of the Comics Code  Morini pushed the envelope 

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=62023

FORGOTTEN BOOK: DRUG OF CHOICE

 Drug of Choice by Michael Crichton writing as "John Lange"  (1970)

While studying at Harvard Medical School, Crichton began writing thrillers "for furniture and groceries. The first, Odds On, was published in 1965 under the pen name "John Lange."  Crichton eventually wrote eight John Lange novels, Drug of Choice was the sixth of these.  Although most of these novels had interesting concepts, they were written in a facile style, meant to be the equivalent of an in-flight movie -- something to pass a hew hours by.  In addition, Many of them had the distinguishing marks of an early novel:  rushed plotting, stereotype characterization (often a reliance on familiar brands to define a character), and wild (some might call it uncontrolled) leaps of the imagination.  As a result the books were readable, fun, and slightly inconsequential.

Halfway through writing these early efforts, Crichton published two other books.  A Case of Need, under the pen name "Jeffrey Hudson" won an Edgar Award for Best Novel.  (Sometimes the Edgars gets it horribly wrong, as in this case, IMHO.)  The Andromeda Strain, the first book published under Crichton's own name, was a best-seller, a major motion picture, and established Crichton as a major author..  The rest is history.

Drug of Choice has Roger Clark, a resident in internal medicine at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, has a patient admitted in a coma after a motorcycle accident.  Problem is, there are no symptoms of a coma, and the patient has no injuries that would be consistent with a motorcycle crash.  Also, the patient's urine is a bright blue color -- something completely unexplainable.  The patient eventually comes out of his "coma," completely healthy, unaware that he had been in an accident, and with his urine back to a normal color.   A few weeks later, a young actress is admitted with a "coma," leaving bright blue stains on the hospital sheets.  She, too revives, perfectly healthy and with no knowledge of what has happened.  She, however, takes an interest in Roger, and they go out.  He wakes up the next morning in her bed, unable to remember what had happened the night before.

Roger gets pulled into a web of intrigue.  He is specifically targeted (for specious reasons that are never made clear) and is hired by a nefarious international corporation which is experimenting with a mind-altering drug that can control people's thought and reactions.  Roger spends a month working against his will at a posh (and Secret) Caribbean island resort that turns out to be all smoke and mirrors.  Through a number of pot twists and turns, he finds that he, too, is an experiment, and he becomes hunted and threatened with institutionalization (and eventually) murder.  Outgunned and outfoxed at every turn, Roger must somehow single-handedly bring down the most powerful corporation in the world...

There is enough lack of internal logic here to satisfy the most blase of television scripts and the book reads like a Hollywood idea gone horribly wrong.  Still, the action is interesting and the ideas behind the plot intriguing,  Just about perfect for ion in-flight movie.

All of the Crichton's "John Lange" novels have been reprinted by Hard Case Crime. and are interesting for anyone who wishes to view the growth of Crichton as a writer.