FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE MOUSE ON THE MOON

The Mouse on the Moon by Leonard Wibberly (1962; filmed in 1963 and directed  by Richard Lester)

I seldom re-read books, but, by coincidence, I recently read several science fiction books about the early days of the Space Race and I felt an overwhelming urge to revisit one of my favorites.

If you ask me what country, aside from my own, I most respect, the answer, hands down, would be thee Duchy of Grand Fenwick.  I say this merely because I am a rational man and have a great love for humanity,

For over six centuries, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick lay nestled in the northern Alps, snugly located between France and Switzerland.  It is the smallest country in the world with a population of  just over five thousand people.  Proud of its ancient heritage, Grand Fenwick disdains almost all modern appurtenances -- there no phones, no cars, no telegraph, and -- to the ire of the Count of Mountjoy, the country's prime minister -- no indoor plumbing.  (The count really wished he could take a warm bath.)  It's army carries only longbows as weapons, through both tradition and inclination; the only other weapon in its arsenal is a dusty, unused Q-bomb -- a powerful device invited by the Grand Fenwick's sole scientist, the absent-minded Dr. Kokintz, whose experiments are often interrupted by bird watching excursions   Grand Fenwick's feeble economy is supplied by sheep and wine (specifically, Pinot Grand Fenwick, a superb wine).  The country is ruled by the regnant Duchess, Gloriana XII, "a somewhat young willful lady of twenty-three," but nonetheless truly loved by all.

The trouble began when Gloriana decided she wanted a full-length Russian ermine coat, one more suitable for her position than her regular cloth coat.  The coat Gloriana wanted would cost $50,000, equal to or perhaps more than the country's entire budget.  She tasked Mountejoy with the problem of getting her the coat.  Mountejoy had for years been unable to convince the Council to provide funds for indoor plumbing; how can he convince them the spring for such an expensive coat?  At the same time, two bobolinks were spotted in the Duchy's national forest, which was about twenty acres smaller than Winnie-the-Pooh's hundred acre wood...

In the first book in the series, The Mouse That Roared, Mountejpy had devised a plan to increase the Duchy's coffers.  He declared war on America and invaded the country with Grand Fenwick's standing army (all twelve of them, armed with long bows).  The plan:  invade on Monday, lose on Tuesday, and America will provide funding to rebuild Grand Fenwick's war-torn economy by Friday.  That plan did not work out because Grand Fenwick somehow won the war.  Still, Mountjoy -- who had been hearing of th space race between America and Russia to be the first to reach the moon -- decided to try again.  He wrote a letter to the Secretary of State requesting a loan of $5,050,000 -- five  million for the Duchy's non-existent space program and $50,000 for a fur coat.  The State Department rightly believed that the five million would actually be spent on plumbing (and were a little confused on the fur coat part), but decided a gesture would make for good publicity over the Russians.  But five million was an embarrassing sum, so they upped to fifty million for the supposed space program, and made the entire amount a gift, rather than a loan.

Mounntejoy was a politician and believed in deception rather than honesty.  The people of Gran Fenwick, however, were not politicians and believed in honesty.  If the money was not used for a rocket to the moon, they would return it.  After much haggling it was agreed that the original five million would be spent on plumbing and the rest on the as yet non-existent space program.  

About those bobolinks, which are native to northeastern North America and have never been seen in Europe...  Dr. Kokintz went out and took some photographs to show to the Audubon Society  but, when developed, the photographs were blurred, which led to the discovery of the startling properties of Pinot Grand Fenwick.  In short, the wine was the key to atomic rocket power.  There was now no reason Gran Fenwick could not start its own moon landing project.

The problem was the rest of the world did not believe Grand Fenwick was serious.  Not, that is, until the rocket launched carrying Dr. Kokintz and Vincent Mountjoy to the moon at a leisurely pace of a thousand miles an hour.  Russia and American scramble to launch their own rockets to get to the moon first and declare it in the name of their own countries...

A truly funny, truly biting satire on world politics.  Like me, you'll be rooting for little Grand Fenwick.  And, yes, the bobolinks filled their nest with four eggs, and four tiny bobolinks were added to the world at the book's end.  Yay!

Here's a clip from the 1963 film.  (Sorry, the full movie is behind a paywall.)  The film stars Margaret Rutherford, Ron Moody, Bernard Cribbins, David Kossof, Terry-Thomas, and June Ritchie. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yqZzPV5V7k

THE ADVENTURES OF SAM SPADE: SAM AND THE PSYCHE (THE CASE OF DR. DENOFF) (AUGUST 2, 1946)

Currently reading The Return of the Maltese Falcon by Max Allan Collins, so I thought it would be fun to check out Sam from radio's Golden Age, with Howard Duff as Spade and Lurene Tuttle as Effie.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbeDuJKqeHo&t=3s+

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: KID CARDULA

"Kid Cardula" by Jack Ritchie (first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 1976; reprinted in Alfred Hitchock's Anthology #2, Spring/Summer 1978, also published in hardcover as Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Take Your Breath Way, 1977; in Fantastic Creatures, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, & Charles G. Waugh, 1981; in Alfred Hitchcock Tales of Terror, edited by Eleanor Sullivan, 1986; in Fantasy Stories, edited by Andrew Goodwyn, 1991; and in Ritchie's collection Cardula and the Locked Rooms, 2026.

Okay, so the guy's a vampire but neither he nor the author nor Cardula's loyal servant Josef ever mention it directly; neither, it seems do any of Cardula's clients -- and no mention= was ever made about any possible anagrams of Cardula's name.  Ritchie wrote nine stories about Cardula, who becme a private investigator in the second story, with office hours from 8 PM to 4 AM, depending on the solstice.

"Kid Cardula" was the first story in the series.  Cardula is broke and needs rent money.  (Later in the series we learn that he was once very rich but most of his monies were invested in extensive holdings in such countries as Cuba, the Belgian Congo, Lebanon, Angola, and Bangladesh...areas that turned nout to be very poor investments at the time.)  Through reading the sports pages, he learned that there was a great deal of money to bade in boxing for very little (for him) effort.  Cardula, pale skinned, of an uncertain age, and dressed all in black, went to Manny, a local gym owner and boxing manager and offered his services.  

The easiest way to get rid of this guy was to put Cardula in the ring against a professional boxer who would make short work of him.  The boxer hit Cardula with a couple of powerful punches to no effect.  Then Cardula struck out with a left  that was so fast one could hardly see it, and with  that one punch knocked his opponent unconscious.  Manny began to see dollar signs.  Cardula had one condition, however:  he would only fight at night, claiming he suffered from a case of photophobia.  

Cardula's first professional fight was against a rising fighter named McCardle.  McCardle was just a few matches shy of the big time and his scheduled opponent was scratched due to illness.  McCardle needed an easy opponent at the last minute and Cardula appeared to fir the bill.  When the fight weas held, however, Cardula knocked McCardle out.  The fight lasted nineteen seconds, including the count.

After that, Manny convinced Cardula to stretch his matches out and not to go for the knockout so early ion the game.  He even talked Cardula into faking being knocked down a couple of times before wining a match.  Things were going good.  Cardula's rent was paid, he kept winning matches, began to get  a local reputation, and even attracted the interest of a  number of curious women -- none of whom he paid much attention to.  Until...

Cardula told Manny he was quitting the ring and was marrying a very rich lady who had expressed more than an interest in him.  Since she had money, he no longer needed to earn money boxing.  What really happened, though, was that Cardula's distant overseas relatives learned of his boxing career and his growing reputation and advised him to stop.  It was always best for Cardula to "fly" under the radar.

Poor Manny.  His dream of riches managing Cardula had vanished.  But in leaving, Cardula left Manny one final gift in appreciation...

Jack Richie was a master of the criminous short story with never an extraneous word or a word lout of place.  His stories often have a slight humorous bent and an unexpected ending.  I have mentioned before that I feel he was second only to Edward D. Hoch in ingenuity, plot, and originality.  Cardula and the Locked Rooms -- which contains all nine Cardula stories, plus six additional "impossible" crime stories -- is only the sixth Ritchie collection to appear; he wrote over 500 stories so there are still a lot of gold nuggets to be mined.  As you go through life, a simple rule of thumb is never pass up a Jack Ritchie story.

Th June 1976 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (also including stories by Lawrence Block, Nelson DeMille, Kay Nolte Smith, Joyce Harrington, and others) can be found here:

https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/PU/AHMM_1976_06.pdf

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: BAD ACTOR (JANUARY 9, 1962)

We lost one of America's greatest actors this week.  Even before his noted portrayal of Boo Radley in his first film, To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall was giving some great performances on television, as in this 1962 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Directed  by John Newland from a "Max Franklin" (Richard Deming) story adapted by Robert Bloch, Duvall plays Bart Collins, a struggling actor who accidently kills a rival for a part.  Now what can he do with the body -- especially that pesky head?  Charles Robinson plays the unlucky victim; Carole Eastman plays Duvall's girlfriend; and William Schallert is the cop who investigates.

Enjoy.

https://archive.org/details/alfred-hitchcock-presents-s-7e-1-colorized-sd/alfred+hitchcock+presents-s7e14shrt-colorized-sd.mkv

PRESIDENTS' DAY...PLUS

When I was a kid, February was a cool month, and not only because my childhood was spent in New England.  Every four years the month would fatten to include an extra day -- a neat trick for the shortest day of the year..  And we had Groundhog Day and Valentine Day and two  no-school holidays:  Lincoln's Birthday (February 12) and Washington's Birthday (February 22; February 11, old style).  Lincoln's Birthday was not a federal holiday but Massachusetts and many other states celebrated it; Washington's Birthday had been a federal holiday since 1879 for offices in Washington, and 1885 for all federal offices, and was celebrated under the Gregorian calendar on February 22.  In 1971, the Uniform Federal Holiday Act shifted the holiday to the third Monday in February.   The day soon became known as Presidents' Day as a way to honor all presidents; it was placed between Lincoln's and Washington's birthday as both a nod to those two great men,  but also to avoid any single president of choice.  Officially, however, the day is still recognized  by the federal government as Washington's Birthday.  (For those who do not wish to honor our 45th and 47th president on this day, there's your out.)

Needless to say, all of our presidents have been flawed in one way or another, but several -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelt come to  mind -- have far more chalks in  the plus column than in  the negative; others (Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, for example) have come close.  Historian are constantly changing their rankings of American presidents, but over the years we as a country have moved ever closer to the ideas that make us distinctly Americans.

Today is a day to reflect on our past, our present, and our possible futures.

Today is also the day that, 103 years ago, Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of the Pharoah Tutankhamun.  I think that should also be celebrated, of sorts.  So here's a link to the 1964 Hammer horror film The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, starring Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard, George Pastell, Fred Clark, and Jeanne Roland, with Dickie Owen as Ra-Antef the Mummy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0akpPDBEQcs

HYMN TIME

 Johnny Cash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp70V6a8r00

BIG TEX #1 (JUNE 1953)

 Alas, Big Tex wasn;t big enough to make past its first issue.

Tex White is new to the town of Gambler's Gulch, which is under the thrall of a murderous snake named Blackjack Wells, who has a habit of shooting people in the back for no reason.  Wells, just to show how much he likes killing, has ;painted his gun red.  Tex enters the town just after Wells has shot Clem Watkins from behind.  This gets the townspeople mad; the most vocal is local gambler Jeb Sykes, who is accusing the old sheriff of not getting his job done.  We soon learn, long before everyone else in town does, that Sykes is in the pay of Wells, who wants him to rally the townspeople against the sheriff and force him out of his job.  Seems the sheriff is just too honest for Wells and his gang.  The sheriff's feisty daughter , Miss Val, is the local school marm and she calls Sykes nothing but a tinhorn gambler.   Sykes calls Miss Val a little she-cat and grabs her.  Well, grabbing a school marm is against the code of the West -- especially if the school marm is a pretty blonde who wears very tight shirts over some very pneumatic assets -- so Big Tex clocks him.  That's enough for the sheriff to ask Tex to be his deputy because he is short-staffed, especially after Wells killed the last deputy.

A little later, after Tex is all sworn in, some school kids playing hooky overhear Blackjack and his gang plan to rustle the longhorns in the valley while one of Balckjack's gang shoots up the dance hall in town to distract the sheriff.  The kids go running to Miss Val, who% goes running to her father and Big Tex.  The three of them set up an ambush for the gang but it is spoiled when a mountain lion attacks Big Tex and the sheriff shoots it, warning the bad guys.  The cattle stampede and the gang is about to be crushed under their hooves when Big Tex takes aim and shoot the lead cow.  The gang is caught, but Tex decides to fight Blackjack himself.  Turns out Tex has been hunting Blackjack since the owlhoot killed his buddy Jack Dean back in Arizona City.  Blackjack fights dirty but it turns out that the code of the West says that dirty fighti8ng don't mean blip when you are going against a man named Tex.  There's a neat  bit of banter during the fight.  Blackjack:  "Better start sayin' yore prayers, White!"  Big Tex:  "I'll save my prayers for Sunday church, Wells -- and today is only Friday!"  Then, after Tex beats the blip out of Blackjack, the Sheriff:  "Today might be Friday, Son, but I  still think that you hit him with your Sunday punch!"  You just don't get that sort of dialog from an episode of The Lone Ranger.

Anyway, the bad guys are in jail, the newspaper is calling the sheriff a hero, and Big Tex and Miss Val are getting friendly.

I have no idea how old Tex Wells is supposed to be, but he is drawn old, with tired, crinkled eyes.  also, it turns out that this issue reprints stories from the publisher's John Wayne Adventure Comics, which ran from 1949 to 1955, with the name of the character changed to Big Tex.  Go figure.

Tex has two more adventures in this issue:  "Sudden Death at Dragon's Peak" (in which we meet Barney Betts, a grizzled old coot who is Tex's oldest friend) and "The Mysterious Valley of Violence" (in which Tex comes across a outlaw hideout fashioned as in old Rome, complete with a coliseum, and a fat madman in a toga who considers himself Nero).  Those interested in Miss Val and her tight shirts (and what young b oy in 1953 wouldn't be?) will be disappoint to learn that she does not appear in either story.  Evidently, like the comic book itself, she was one-and-done.  But the story about Nero is pretty interesting in a what-were-they-thinking? kind of way, though.

Enjoy.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=97622&comicpage=&b=i