HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KURT WEILL!

Kurt Weill (1900-1959), the German-American composer who% collaborated with Bertold Brecht to produce The Threepenny Opera, was born on this day 126 years ago.  The World of Kurt Weill in Song premiered off-Broadway on June 6, 1963, featuring Martha Schlamme and will Holt; it was revised as A Kurt Weill Cabaret for Broadway with Schlamme and Alvin  Epstein in 1979.

MGM Records released a cast recording of the 0ff-Broadway performance in 1963, featuring songs from The Threepenny Opera, Marie Gallante, Der Silbersee, Lady in the Dark, Knickerbocker Holiday, Happy End, and Lost in the Stars.  I literally wore out my copy of the record, it was so perfect  The link takes you to all fourteen songs; unfortunately, there are a number of irritating ads between each song -- fell free to skip over them.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkkXfgsscE&list=PLbsqz0QMw2y7oVag4GOAx5pr_IrX7MMFR&index=1

HYMN TIME

Gryphon Hall (Hal Guerrero).  

Happy Women's History Month:  Words and music by Clara H. Scott (1841-1897), noted 19th century woman gospel poet and the first woman to published a book of anthems.  This hymn was inspired by Psalm 119, verse 18.  Sadly she died after being thrown from a carriage when her horse was spoked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFjo6E6KU4c

BUSTER CRABBE #3 (MARCH 1952)

 Clarence Linden "Buster" Crabbe (1908-1983) was a 1932 gold medial Olympian swimmer in the 400-meter freestyle who parlayed his win into a film and television career, playing at various times Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers.  He appeared in more than 100 films, often playing a "jungle man;"  he also starred as a good-guy version of Billy the Kid in thirteen movies and cowboy hero Billy Carson in twenty-three movies.  On television, footage from his films were shown on The Gabby Hayes show, and later on his own The Buster Crabbe Show, a New-York City-based series; from 1955 to 1957 he starred in Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, with his real-life son Cullen playing the child role of Cuffy Sanders.

Two comic books series were named after him:  the twelve-issue Buster Crabbe Comics ("Your Television All-American Cowboy") from 1953 to 1955, and four issues of The amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe in 1954.

In "Buster Crabbe and the Mankiller," Treasury Agent Jim Winters is sent to investigate a bank robbery that netted the crooks nearly half a million dollars.  There he meets his old friend Buster, who happens to have roamed into town with his sidekick whiskers (picture Al "Fuzzy" St. John).  Buster and Whiskers are deputized  to help Winters.  Meanwhile, a wild animal show has come to town -- that's "wild animal" singular; the only animal is a caged, very gentle tiger.  Walton, the tiger's owner, wakes up the next morning to discover the cage door open and the tiger missing.  Then Jim Winters' mangle and clawed body is discovered.  While the sheriff and the rest of the town go on a hunt for the tiger, Buster and Whiskers stay behind to investigate the robbery.  you know and I know -- and Buster suspects -- that the bank president and the sheriff are in cahoots for the robbery.  buster and Whiskers confront the gang and thew four outlaws are no match for Buster's lightning fast draw and accurate aim.  Later that day, the tiger wanders back into town and goes into his cage on his own.  Good artwork from Allen Ulmer.

Al Williamson drew the next story, "The Ogre," as well as providing the superb and interesting cover at fo=r the comic.  A couple of hunters are camping out getting ready for the opening  of the season, when a large, ugly, man-like, furred monster comes out of the woods and confronts them.  Could this be the ancient Indian legend of "Kagagak" come to life?  The hunters run into town to warn the townspeople,  but are no believed (the hunters are Easterners, so who would believe them?),  but white /wing, an ancient Indian, tells of the equally ancient myth of Kagagak.  Buster decides that he and Whiskers would go investigate.   At the abandoned campsite, Buster finds a large footprint that could not have been made by either man or animal.  It leads them to an extinct volcano and a cave at the bottom of the crater where they are attacked by the creatures.  Buster frightens them off with gunfire -- the noise scares them..  He figure these primitive monsters mean no harm and decides to keep their existence a secret, later telling the hunters that what they saw was a hermit dressed up to scare them.

Whiskers takes the stage in the next story, "Whiskers and the Ghoul Gang."  Whiskers is spinning tall tales of his brave exploits against outlaws, when the sheriff and his friends decide to pull a joke on him, telling him about the murderous "Ghoul Gang."  Before the sheriff leaves town on an errand, he deputizes Whiskers "in case" the Ghoul Gang show up (he also manages to swap the bullets in Whiskers' gun with blanks).  Suddenly the Ghoul Gang -- six men in ghostly sheets -- "rob" the bank.  whiskers shoots at them to no effect and they ride off, supposedly  to the cemetery.  in the end, the last laugh is Whiskers'.  The artwork by Bob Powell and Howard Nostrand has the desired comic effect.

The rest of the issue is taken up by various fillers:  a two-page text story about Black Bart, a one-page humor story in which homer on the Range is frightened of cactus at night, a one-page telling of the history of Rawhide in the West, a five-page story in which Buster narrates the true story of the 1887 "Showdown" between Sheriff Commodore R. Owens and the notorious Blevins Brothers, and a wordless one-page humor story about "Whiskers' Nag."  The back cover carries ads for items that might appeal to a youngster in 1952:  saddlebags for your bicycle ($2.69 a pair),  western ensemble for your bicycle (a bar blanket with two holsters, a saddle skirt, a tail streamer and two handlebar streamers -- all for just #3.25),  an 18-inch brown and yellow plush stuffed "Jackie Rabbit" ($3.95), a giant piggy bank that can hold over $2,000 in silver ($3.95), two pounds of hard candy (Black Walnut Flakes and Chicken Bones -- just $1.50), and a two-way electronic walkie-talkie telephone ($3.00 each)  -- what kid wouldn't want all of these? 

Enjoy.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=97663&comicpage=&b=i

FORGOTTEN BOOK: ALPHA CENTAURI -- OR DIE!

Alpha Centauri -- Or Die!   by Leigh Brackett  (first published in paperback as half of an Ace Double with Legend of Lost Earth by G. McDonald Wallis [perhaps better known as actress and romance writer "Hope Campbell"], 1963; published separately in 1976; included in Brackett's e-Book omnibus The Solar System, 2008; the book was a fix-up of two previously published stories:  "The Ark of Mars C" [Planet Stories, Winter 1954-1955] and "Teleportress of Alpha C" [Planet Stories, September 1953] )

More straight science fiction than the lyrical space opera/adventure fantasy Bracket is more noted for, Alpha Centauri -- Or Die! begins on Mars.  Robots have taken over all space flight an6d mankind is not allowed to pilot rocket ships any more; in fact, mankind lives in a rigidly proscribe utopia where  most wants are met but freedom of movement is limited.  Kirby, who had traveled the solar system, was one of the last human space pilots before automation took over space flight.  Now he lives in a compound on Mars with his second wife, the Martian Shari, a mild telepath.  He is a number of men who are resentful of the limitations played on them by the government.  A few years ago, the government sent a robotic ship outside the solar system, where it discovered a habitable world in Alpha Centauri.  Now Kirby and other have built a spaceship capable of taking families to that planet -- a journey that would last five years.  Fearful of losing their hold on the populace, the government sends deadly robotic ships -- faster and much better armed than Kirby's ship -- after the would-be colonists.  That's perhaps the most exciting part of the story.

After years of hardship, danger, and near revolt, the ship finally arrives at their new home in Alpha Centauri= -- only to find it occupied by a race of creatures with teleporting powers.  Can the two races learn to get together?  And can they fend off the deadly robotic ships that have followed Kirby all the way from Mars?

In reviewing this book, Rich Horton wrote, "Mediocre stuff, really, though Bracket is never unreadable, and I did enjoy the book."  As did I.

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was a pioneering science fiction writer who also worked in other fields, including crime and western fiction.  Her  novel Follow the Free Wind won a Spur Award.  She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2014, received a Retro Hugo for The Nemesis from Terra,  and was the recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.  She was also noted for her screen writing (The Big Sleep -- with William Faulkner; The Long Goodbye; Rio Bravo; Hatari, and others, including an early treatment for The Empire Strikes Back -- she passes away while working on the draft).  She was married to science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton; Ray Bradbury was their best man.

THE GREEN HORNET: THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN (MAY 24, 1938)

Here's all the buzz:

From Old Time Radio Downloads:  "The daughter of a crusading reformer is kidnapped to silence him...James Conway meets Brit Reid on a plane home from Chicago.  He promises Brit a scoop on his expose of a gambling ring and a crooked sheriff and his deputies providing Brit gives him all he knows on the Green Hornet.  Meanwhile Conway's daughter Polly who is meeting him at the airport receives a phoney message that her father has missed his plane and is arriving by rail.  As she leaves the airport she is kidnapped.  James Conway is forced not to expose what he knows and asks Brit if he can forget everything he told him on the plane.  Looks like a job for the Green Hornet!"

Featuring Al Hodge as Brit Reid/the Green Hornet and Raymond Toyo (Tokutaro Hayashi) as Kato.  (At the time this episode aired, Kato was Brit Read's "Japanese valet;" by 1941, he became a Filipino valet"; in the movie serials he became Korean.)  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0wT6u2R_hg

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE THREE DRUGS

 "The Three Drugs"  by E. (Edith) Nesbit  (originally published as "the Third Drug" by Edith Bland, The Strand Magazine, February 1908, and in The Strand Magazine (US), March 1908, as  b y E. Bland; reprinted as "The Three Drugs" as by E. Nesbit in her collection Fear, 1910;  the story has also been reprinted under one title mor the other in Before Armageddon, edited by Michael Moorcock, 1975; in Stories of the Occult, edited by Denys Val Baker, 1978; in E. Nesbit's Tales of Terror, 1983; in her collection In the Dark, 1988, and in an expanded edition, 2000; in Great Tales of Terror, edited by S. T. Joshi, 2002; in Edith Nesbit:  The Power of Darkness -- Tales of Terror, 2006; and in her collection Horror Stories, 2016; in From the Dead:  The Complete Weird Stories of E. Nesbit, 2018; in The Darker Sex:  Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Woman Writers, edited by Mike Ashley, 2009; in The Feminine Future:  Early Science Fiction by Women Writers [as by Edith Nesbit], edited by Mike Ashley, 2015; in Man-Size in Marble and Other Horrors:  The Best Horror & Ghost Stories of Edith Nesbit, 2015; in Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Women Writers, 1852-1923, edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Lisa Moton, 2020; in More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2023; and in Trapped!, edited by Charles G. Waugh, Ph.D. & M. Grant Kellermeyer, M.A., 2023)

Edith Nesbit Bland (1858-1924) was, among other things, a prolific writer of children's books and has been described as the first modern writer for children and credited with inventing the children's adventure story.  Many of her works remain in print, including volumes of her popular children's series about the Bastable children (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, et al.), and the Five Children (The Five Children and It, et al.); among her standalones were The Railway Children and Wet Magic.  During her lifetime she published 109 books, plus 6 plays, and edited a further 10 volumes.   An active Socialist, she was a political activist and a co-founder of the Fabian Society.  (Interestingly, she opposed women's suffrage because she feared that, had women gotten the vote, they more likely support the Tories rather than the Socialists.  She dies at age 65, most like from lung cancer because she "smoked excessively."

To many modern readers, she also known for her more than twenty stories of the weird, many of which have gone on to become classics of the genre, including "Man-Size in Marble," "John Charrington's Wedding," "Uncle Abraham's Romance," "The Ebony Frame," "The Haunted House," "The Head," "In9 the Dark," "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached," and "The Three Drugs."

Roger Wroxham was despondent -- the reason or reasons do not matter,  but he could not find a way out.  One evening he started walking through the deserted Paris streets, where he found himself headed toward the Seine with a vague idea of throwing himself in.  Suddenly he was accosted by three thugs -- Apaches armed with knives.  They fell on him and, when they wounded him severely on the arm, he decided that what he most wanted to do was live.  He managed to get away but they chased him through the dark, lonely streets until he found a large old house with an unlocked door. He rushed into the house and closed and bolted the door; eventually he heard the Apaches move away.  His wound left him weak.  The large house was silent and seemed empty until he heard footsteps coming from a distance.  The sole occupant of the house turned out to be a doctor who took him into another room,  but before the doctor was ab le to begin to treat the wound, Roger passed out.

When he awoke with his arm bandaged, Roger felt remarkably well and invigorated.  The doctor insisted that Roger needed to rest and could spend the night in the house.  Placing Roger on a bed, he left wile keeping the door to the room open.  But Roger felt too alert to rest.  And there was this odd odor permeating the room, something of flowers and camphor.  A second door in the room was locked and the odor seemed to come from there -- an odor that reminded him of death.  Suddenly roger's vigor faded and he felt very weak.  The doctor brought him to his laboratory and mixed a strange concoction and told him to drink it, otherwise he would soon be dead.  Roger drank it and again passed out.  When he woke, the doctor told him a strange story.

The doctor had been experimenting with creating a sort of super life, taking one beyond the normal limits of humanity.  His experiments seemed to work well with lower life forms -- animals -- but not with humans, probably because the humans he could find were degenerates, criminals, and Apaches.  All had dies and were stored in the locked room.  Roger, however, was a superb specimen, far superior to his previous experiments.  For his part, Roger seemed complacent and willing to follow whatever the doctor said.  Then he suddenly became weaker, which indicate that it was time to go to the third part of the experiment...to issue the third drug.  The doctor bound Roger hand and foot, then carved a wound on his temple, which he then sealed with a bandage covered with some sort of unguent.  Again Roger passed out.

When Roger awoken, he found he had strange powers and a memory of all that happened in the world in the past.  He could evince a memory of an ancient pharaoh, for example, and he knew that the doctor's one true love was a woman  named Constansia, whom the doctor had buried under the lilacs in the back yard.  The doctor refused to unbind Roger because Roger in his present condition was far more powerful than he.  It was now time for the doctor to experiment on himself:  "You know -- all things.  It was not a dream, this, the dream of my life.  It is true.  It is a fact accomplished.  Now I, too, will know all things.  I will be as the gods."   with that he wounded himself and applied the first drug, an unguent like the one he had smeared over the bandages when he first treated Roger.

The euphoria hit the doctor, then slowly died off, bringing the doctor almost to the point of death, when it time to drink the elixir he had prepared -- the second drug.  The doctor collapsed after taking the second drug and appeared to be dead.  Roger feared the doctor would not wake up.  Eventually he did but after a while he became weak and appeared to be approaching actual death, which meant it was time to administer the third drug --  but to do that, Roger had to help him and Roger was still bound and the doctor was too weak to unloose Roger.  Slowly, the doctor faded into death while Roger remained in that silent house, completely unable to move.  In the meantime the amazing effects of the third drug began to abate...

How was Roger able to escape from his solitary prison?  Or was he?

A strange, fantastical tale of the quest for knowledge gone horribly wrong, a tale as old as Frankenstein, as old as Faust...

THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET: THE FALL GUY (OCTOBER 24, 1952)

Ozzie Nelson formed the Ozzie Nelson Band in 1930.  It had limited success until the New York Daily Mirror polled tis readers to determine their favorite band.  Reportedly, Nelson had band members stuff the ballot box and his band came out the winner, beating Paul Whiteman's band.  Over the next two decades the band --  now Ozzie Nelson and His Orchestra -- recorded for a number of labels and had several hits.  Around 1932 Harriet Hilliard joined the band as its primary vocalist; she and Nelson were married in 1935.  The pair began appearing regularly on radio, first on The Baker's Broadcast, then on The Red Skelton Show.  When Skelton was drafted in 1944, Nelson crated his own family radio comedy show, using his own family as the characters, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.  Child actors played the Nelson's real-life children, David and Ricky, until 1949, when the real-life Nelson kids -- now aged 12 and 8 -- took over the roles.  The show moved to television on October 10, 1952, and lasted until April 23, 1966 -- making it the longest lasting live-action television sitcom at the time.  Exterior shots of the Nelson's actual house were used in the television show; interior shots were filmed in a studio  but were designed to look like the actual interior rooms of the Nelson home.  In total, 435 episodes were filmed over the show's fourteen seasons.

Understand that what follows is my personal opinion; your mileage may vary.  The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet set the standard for television family sitcoms in the fifties -- bland, innocuous, and un challenging.  I liken it to the television equivalent of mashed potatoes.  Even Father Knows Best was edgier, and at least Leave It to Beaver had its Eddie Haskell.  But Ozzie, with his laid-back personality and his gee-whiz conversations with his neighbor Thorny, could not be more monotonous or more like milk toast.  I'm sure there were some family misunderstandings and minor crises over the fourteen seasons,  but none stick out in my mind.   Indeed, the most exciting action that I remember was Harriet searching for the last evening's newspaper to give to a neighborhood paper drive.  **sigh**  I also do not remember either Ozzie of Harriet singing in any of the episodes.

What we do have is Ricky singing, beginning in 1957, marking the start of a successful singing career, which lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1985.  Ricky -- later, Rick -- also had a successful film and television career. Older brother David went on to  career in acting, directing, and producing. 

From the show's first season, "The Fall Guy," Ozzie tells David not to allow people to take advantage of his good nature, then regrets it.  Directed by Ozzie and written by Bill Davenport, Ben Gershman, and Don Nelson (Ozzie's brother), the episode also features Don DeFore as Thorny and Carl Greyson as the show's announcer.

As I said, your  mileage may be different from mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hylGndkt4mE

INCOMING

New books are beginning to overwhelm me.  Abibliophobia -- the fear of running out of books to read -- will never be a part of my life.  

Incoming:

• Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged.  Epic Fantasy; Book Two of The First Law.   Superior Glokta has a problem.  How do you defend a city surrounded by enemies an8d riddled with traitors when your allies can by no means be trusted and your predecessor vanished without a trace?  It's enough to make a torturer want to run -- if he could even walk without a stick.  Northmen have spilled over the border of Angland and are spreading fire and death across the frozen country.  Crown Prince Ladisla is poised to drive them back and win undying glory.  There is only one problem -- he commands the worst-armed, worst-led army in the world.  And Bayaz, the Frist of the Magi, is leading a party of bold adventurers on a perilous mission through the ruins of the past.  The most hated woman in the South, the most feared man in the North, and the most selfish  boy in the Union make a strange alliance, bit a deadly one.  They might even stand a chance of saving mankind from the Eaters.  If they didn't hate each other quite so much."
• Joseph Chadwick, A Town to Tame.  Western.  "Palisade /city was a wide open town when Madigan= took over as the law.  He had been on=e of the toughest of a tough crew -- the Texas Rangers, and their reputation had rubbed off on him.  But had the magic of his gunhand left him?  It was only a matter of time until some hardcase took it on himself to find out..."
• Joan Aiken, Bridle the Wind.  Young adult fantasy, the second book in the Felix trilogy.  "Shipwrecked, knocked unconscious, and imprisoned!  To some this may seem like a streak of mighty bad luck, but Felix Brooke can't help but believe there is a reason for all his suffering.  When Felix finds an injured boy on the grounds of the remote monastery where he is being held captive, it seems his premonition may be right.  Felix rescues the strange boy, Juan, from certain death, and together they escape the monastery and head for Spain.  In their hazardous journey across the Pyrenees, Felix and Juan share many adventures.  But there is a shadow over their happy times:  Someone -- or something -- utterly terrifying is following their every move.  Will they escape the evil that pursue them?"  Aiken, who died in 2004, is rapidly becoming a "forgotten" author; in a just world that would never happen.
• Piers Anthony, Double Exposure.   Omnibus volume of the first three volumes in the "Apprentice Adept" series:  Split Infinity, Blue Adept, and Juxtaposition.   Stile and his beautiful robot protector escape an unknown assailant and enter the fantastical world of Phaze, where magic works and science is powerless.  Also, Triple Detente.  Science fiction.  "Conqueror Richard Henrys leads the human forces controlling the planet Kazo.  Overlord Bitool is the chief Kazo managing the occupation of earth [sic].  Henrys' son, Richard. Jr., is involved in a plot to overthrow Bitool.  Fomina, Bitool's beloved mate, is conqueror Henrys' trusted house-servant.  And nothing is really complicated until humans and Kazo discover a third intelligent race in the galaxy, and try to  bring them into the newly developing peace."
• Piers Anthony & Robert E. Margroff, The Adventures of Kelvin of Rud:  Final Magic.  Omnibus of the final two volumes in the series:  Orc's Opal and Mouvar's Magic.  Though Kelvin Knig6ht Hackleberry had gone far toward fulfilling the Prophecy of Mouvar, he and his allies had yet to face the gratest threat fo the peace of all the worlds."
• S. A. Cosby, King of Ashes.  Crime novel.  "Roman Carruthers left the smoke and fire of his family's crematory business behind him in his hometown of Jefferson Run, Virginia,  He is enjoying a life of shallow excess as a financial advisor in Atlanta until he gets a call from his sister, Nevaeh, telling him their father is in a coma after a hit-and-run accident.  When Roman goes home, he learns the accident may not be what it seems.  His brother, Dante, is deeply in debt to dangerous, ruthless criminals.  And Roman is willing to do anything to protect his family.  Anything.  A financial whiz with a head for  numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, Roman must use all his skills to try to save his family while dealing with a shadow that has haunted them all for twenty years:  the disappearance of their mother when Roman and his siblings were teenagers.  It's a  mystery that Neveah, who has sacrificed so much of her life to hold her family together, is determined to solve once and for all.  As fate and chance and heartache ignite their lives, the Carruthers family must pull together to survive or see their lives turn to ash.  Because, as their father counseled them from birth, nothing lasts forever.  Everything burns."
• John Creasey writing as Kyle Hunt,  The Man Who Not Himself.  Mystery.  "He awoke in a strange bed and made love to a wife he had never seen before.   She responded warmly, made him breakfast, and sent him off to catch the 9:27 to town where he found he was employed as a minor civil servant.  Not so surprising -- except that yesterday Hugh Buckingh8am had been a globe-trotting millionaire with a mistress in every city he visited regularly.  Why did he suddenly find himself/ in the shoes of a man named Neil Powell?   The answer came with a bullet that narrowly missed Buckingham's head:  somebody wanted Neil Powell dead.  It was suddenly much more than a case of mistaken identity."
• Jere Cunningham, Hunter's Blood.  Suspense.  "They were excited, filled with the anticipation of the hunt.  Shooting the prized white-tail deer would be no simple task.  It would take all their skill and cunning.  But something else was waiting for them deep in that Arkansas wilderness.  Strange, savage men, primitive and brutal creatures who seemed to come from the past.  The sheriff's men called them poachers.  They hid themselves in the dark forest shadows and waited until the five men made their camp.   Then in the dead of night they struck..."  A first novel, filmed in 1986 featuring Sam Bottoms, Joey Travolta, and Kim Delany; co-star Clu Gulager received a Saturn nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
• Mignon G. Eberhart, Escape the Night.  Suspense novel.  "Before she came home, Serena had been warned to expect surprises.  Something strange had happened to the people she had k own so well, something monstrous was haunting their lives.  Firs the feeling was vague, then it was definite -- as definite as a woman thrown from a cliff, and a brutally strangle\d corpse.  But the most grisly surprise was yet to come, as Serena turned in terror to the one person she thought she could trust..."  Eberhart was the author of 59 mystery novels and three story collections; she was a MWA Grand Master and also received an Anthony Lifetime Achievement Award-
• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.  "Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive.  Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.  Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs.  With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption."
• Loren D. Estleman, The Branch and the Scaffold.  Western historical novel about Judge Parker.  "When Judge Isaac Parker arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the town had thirty saloons and one bank.  As the sole law on the untamed frontier, Parker's severe judgments scandalized Washington and the Eastern press.  Never flinching from his duty, Parker, along with his marshals, dubbed 'Parker's Men,' ran up against some of the most colorful and dangerous outlaws the West had to offer, including the notorious Dalton Gang, Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen, the murderous Cherokee Bill, and Ned Christie, who carried on a private was against the U.S. government for seven years."
• John Farris, Catacombs.  Horror novel.  "Blood red diamonds.  The world's rarest gemstones...worth countless millions on the market and far more to those who can decipher the message etched on their flaming surface...a message that offers the key to global mastery and bears witness to a vanished civilization far superior to -- and more technicologically advanced than -- our own.  They come to the catacombs -- crystaline burial caves of unparalleled splendor hidden in the volcanic depths of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Their discovery sets the stage for a duel of superpowers that will be fought with a terrible vengeance...a race against time -- and morality -- for a terrifying, earth-shattering prize."
• Alan Dean Foster, Flinx in Flux.  Science fiction, the sixth in the Pip & Flinx series, a sunset of Foster's Humanx Commonwealth Universe series.  "Flinx and his amazing minidrag Pip were always finding themselves in the middle of danger and galactic intrigue, so when they found an unconscious young woman on a riverbank deep in the jungles of Alaspin, Flinx wasn't surprised.  nor was he shocked to learn that the woman, Clarity Held, was a brilliant scientist, abducted from a remote outpost on inhospitable Longtunnel by a group of fanatic assassins.  Flinx could see no harm in returning Clarity to her home base before continuing on his way, but he was tired of solving other people's problems.  He had his own life to get back to.  So he was unprepared for the emotional effect the beautiful Clarity had on him.  But while Flinx fought to del with his unexpected dilemma, the assassins were still at work.  They would do anything to stop the research on Longtunnel and would kill anyone or anything that got in their way..."  Also, Greenthieves.  A futuristic whodunnit.  "The Grandest Theft in the Galaxy!  No one could get in.  The shipments of high-tech pharmaceuticals were locked inside an impenetrable metal shed -- guarded by three security teams and dozens of alarms.  No one could stay in.  Cameras and motion detectors monitored the shed around the clock.  And an airtight vacuum sealed off the room.  No one could get lout.  Anyone leaving the area was scanned for stolen goods.  Automatic doors ensured that no one could escape without notice.  But someone did.  Not just once,  bug three times.  And they had to be brought to justice.  That's why the case was turned lover to Detective Manz.  And his two robot assistants..."  And, Mad Amos.  A collection of ten folk fantasy tales with dragons, jackalopes, snake-oil salesmen, iron horses, and more.  "Strange things lurk up in the  mountains and out in the plains and deserts of the West, but few are as strange as the giant mountain man named Amos Malone, the man some call Mad Amos, though not to his face.  But when the world gets weird, there's no one better to have on your side.  Is a renegade dragon harassing the men laying the =rails of the great railroad?  Are heartless Indian spirits driving you from your land?  Is that volcano threatening to destroy your settlement?  Then Mad Amos is the man for you."  Not to be confused with the much later Mad Amos Malone:  The Complete Stories, which added a further eight stories.
• Craig Shaw Gardner, The Wanderings of Wuntvor.  Fantasy, an omnibus of the three novels in the series, a subset of the Ebenezum series:  A Difficulty with Dwarves, An Excess of Enchantment, and A Disagreement with Death.  Wuntvor, an apprentice to the magician Ebenezum, is sent by his master to seek an alliance with Mother Duck to forestall the demons of the Netherhells and their new tactic, Conquest by Committee.  Along the way he encounters Death (who tries to reach for him), an army of devoted pet ferrets, a relentlessly cheerful Brownie, Brax the Salesdemon, the rhyming demon Guxx Unfufadoo, the vaudeville tem of Damsel and Dragon and Henrix the warrior with the enchanted club, and the Seven Other Dwarves (Nasty, Touchy, Snooty, Spacey, Dumpy, Noisy, Sickly and Smarmy -- yeah, I know that's right).Perhaps things will work out in the end.  Perhaps.
• Simon R. Green, Agents of Light and Darkness.  Urban fantasy, the second book in the Nightside series.  "I'm John Tyler.  I work in the Nightside -- the gaudy, neon noir, secret heart of London, where it's always three in the morning, where gods and monsters make deals and seek pleasures they won't find anywhere else.  I have a gift for finding things.  And sometimes what I'm hired to locate can be very, very dangerous indeed.  Right now, for example, I'm searching for the Unholy Grail, the cup that Judas drank from at the Last Supper.  It corrupts all who touch it --  but it also gives enormous power.  So I'm not the only one hunting.  Angels, devils, sinners and saints -- they're all out there, tearing apart the Nightside, seeking the dark goblet.  And it's only a matter of time until they realize that the famous John Taylor, the man with the gift for finding things, can lead them straight to it..."  Also, The Man with the Golden Torc.  The first book in the Eddie Drood/Secret Histories series.  "The name's Bond.  Shaman Bond.  Actually, that's just my cover.  I'm Eddie Drood.  But when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can.  For centuries, my family has been the secret guardian of humanity, all that  stands between all of you and all of the many really nasty things that go bump in the night.  As a Drood field agent I wore the golden torc.  I killed monsters, and I protected the world.  I loved my job.  Right up to the point when my own family declared me rogue for no reason, and I was forced to go on my own.  Now the only people who can help me prove my innocence are the people I used to consider my enemies.  I'm Shaman bond, very secret agent.  And I'm going to prove to everyone that no one does it better than me."
• Elly Griffiths, The House at Sea's End.  A Ruth Galloway mystery.  "Just back from maternity leave, forensic pathologist Ruth Galloway is struggling to juggle motherhood and work when she is called in to investigate human  bones that have surfaced on a remote Norfolk beach.  The presence of DCI Harry Nelson, th9e married father of her daughter, does not help.  The bones, six men with their arms bound, date back to World War II, a desperate time in this stretch of coastline.  As Ruth and Nelson investigate, Home Guard veteran Archie Whitcliffe reveals a secret the old soldiers had vowed to protect with their lives.  But then Archie is killed and a German journalist arrives, asking questions about Operation Lucifer, a plan to stop a German invasion, and a possible British war crime.  What was Operation Lucifer?  And who is prepared to kill to keep its secret?"  
• "Cyril Hare" (Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark), Death Is No Sportsman.   A Golden Age mystery featuring Inspector Mallett.  "The setting:  a small resort hotel in rural England.  The cast:  a group of dedicated fly fishermen.  The crime:  murder.  Inspector Mallett's shrewd resolution of the case includes the clever use of fishing lure and practice.  Vintage detection from a master."  Gordon Clark was an English barrister and County Court judge who published several classic mysteries, including Tragedy-at-Law, Suicide Excepted, and Untimely Death.
• L. Ron Hubbard, The Headhunters.  Adventure novelette first published in Five-Novels Monthly, August 1936; packaged here with the typical Hubbard fluff to pad out this Galaxy Press book; Galaxy Press is an arm of the Church of Scientology.
• Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door.  Suspense.   "Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all -- a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora.  But one  night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed.  suspicion immediately falls on the parents.  But the truth is much more complicated.  what follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family.  Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something inside their curtained house.  Anna and Marco both soon discover that thee other is keeping secrets, secrets they've kept for years.  The shocking truth will leave you breathless."
• Richard Laymon, four horror novels.  The Beast House.  The second in the Beast House Chronicles.  "The Beast House has become a museum of the  most twisted and macabre kind.  On display inside are the wax figures of the victims, their bodies mangled and chewed, mutilated beyond recognition.  The tourists who come to Beast House can only wonder what sort of terrifying creature could be responsible for such atrocities.  But some people are convinced Beast House is a hoax.  Nora and her friends are determined to learn the truth for themselves.  They will dare to enter the house at night.  When the tourists have gone.  When the beast is rumored to come out.  They will learn, all right."  The Midnight Tour.  The third novel in the Beast House chronicles.  "For years  morbid tourists have flocked to the Beast Hose, eager to see the infamous site of so many unspeakable atrocities, to hear tales of the beast said to prowl the hallways.  they can listen to the audio tour on their headphones as they stroll from room to room, looking= at the realistic recreations of the blood-drenched corpses...  But the audio tour only gives the sanitized version of the horrors of the Beast House.  there are some facts too gruesome for the average thrill seekers.  If you want the full story, you have to take the Midnight Tour, a very special event strictly limited to =]thirteen brave visitors.  It begins at the stroke of midnight.  You may never live to see the end..."  Friday Night in Beast House.  The forth and final book in the series.  "The legendary Beast House, once home to unspeakable acts of agony and murder, is now a decrepit tourist attraction where the curious go for cheap thrills and daily tours.  These days few actually believe the stories of slaughter and sexual torture are true, or that the beast rally exists.  But in the silence of the night, the cellar door of the Beast House opens once again... Mark and Alison snuck into Beast House after the tours were over for a midnight rendezvous.  Mark hopes to get lucky but Alison seems more interested in the gruesome legends.  But if the beast is only a legend, who's responsible for the mutilated carcass of a dog outside?  And why is the padlock missing from the cellar door?  Will this be the date of a lifetime or a date with death?"  Midnight's Lair.  Originally published as by "Richard Kelly."  "Murdock's Cave is one of the spectacular wonders of the world, a place where thousands of sightseers every year take an awe-inspiring boat trip on a lake beneath the earth's surfaces to marvel at Nature's handiwork.  Bu the darkness is also the home of things Nature never intended -- things violent, bestial, and obscenely evil.  When a sudden power failure incapacitates the elevator to the surface, a group of tourists is tapped in the underground depths.  Cold and scared, without lights or food, their only hope is to find an escape route through the sealed-off end of the cavern.  But their explorations uncover a nest of horrors that has lain hidden for generations, and their idyllic underground journey becomes a nightmare trip through hell, as the find themselves banding for survival against the creatures of the abyss..."  The Midnight Tour.
• Iain McIntyre & Andrew Nette, editors, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats:  Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980.  For those who just couldn't get enough of the popular juvenile delinquent paperback novels of that era, stretching back to the The Amboy Dukes and The Blackboard Jungle to the novels of Hall Ellson and Edward DeRoo and beyond.  "Girl Gangs features approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never reprinted before.  With 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles from more than 20 popular culture critics and scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, the book goes behind the scenes to look a the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspirations and -- often overlooked -- the actual words they wrote.  Books by well-known authors such as Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block are discussed alongside neglected obscurities and former bestsellers ripe for rediscovery.  It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture."  It's as if they heard me salivating among the shelves of second-hand bookstores and created this volume just for me.
• John James Minster, The Undertaker's Daughter.  YA horror novel.  "Anna Dingel is an introverted, socially inept 18-year-old raised in the family funeral home.  And for some reason, her classmate Timmy -- the one with the band -- likes her too.  After a makeover from her best friend Naomi, Anna breaks away to see him perform live,  but a leader of a bad school clique attempts to assault Anna in the parking lot.  Once the leader is released from jail, so begins an ever-widening maelstrom of cruel retribution, turning Anna and Timmy's summer of love into a nightmare.  In an attempt to frighten the bullies into peace, Anna and Nami experiment with recently revealed old Jewish magic.  But this ancient Abrahamic ritual doesn't go as planned=.  The eldritch power Anna has unleashed takes dark and unexpected turns, endangering those she love and forcing her to decide who% she is and who she wants to be."
• Andre Norton, The Gate of the Cat.  A Witch World novel.  "Come.  Step through an ancient arch in the Scottish highlands -- and into a world beyond all earthly possibilities...Where fearsome creatures abound and witches reign supreme.  Where a sparkling jewel carries a strange and awesome poser.  Where the terrifying forces of the Dark ravage the countryside.  And where a young earth woman named Kelsie McBlair holds the key to Witch World's future.  Trapped in a bizarre web of science and sorcery, she alone can pierce the savage heart of evil...by confronting the lord of the Dark himself!"
• Andre Norton & Martin H. Greenberg, editors, Catfantastic IV.  This penultimate volume in the fantasy series of anthologies has eighteen stories by authors such as Norton, Mercedes Lackey, Jayge Carr, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Charles L. Fontenay.  For the feline lover in all of us.
• Seabury Quinn, Black,White and Ivory.  Collection of seventeen adventure stories about Hiji (Captain Sir Haddingway Ingraham Jameson Ingraham) of His Majesty's Royal Frontier Houssa Police, the enforcer of law and justice in the Congo.  The tales appeared in Short Stories, a companion magazine to Weird Tales (where Quinn published his better-known Jules de Grandin stories) from 1940 to 1947, and contain some off-putting racial and social stereotypes typical of the period.  Hiji himself began as an occasional supporting character in the de Grandin stories beginning in 1932 before graduating to his own series.
• Kathy Reichs, Fatal Voyage.  The fourth (of thus far twenty-five) novel featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan; the character was the basis of the television series Bones.  "A commercial airline disaster has  brought Tempe Brennan to the North Carolina mountians as a member of the investigating agency DMORT.  As bomb theories abound, Tempe soon discovers a jarring piece of evidence that raises dangerous questions -- and gets her thrown from the DMORT team.  Relentless in her pursuit of its significance, Tempe uncovers a shocking, mutlilayered tale of deceit and depravity as she probes her way into frightening territory -- where someone wants her stopped in her tracks."  
• Jack Ritchie, Cardula and the Locked Rooms.  Collection of 15 mystery stories, nine featuring Ritchie's vampire private detective Cardula, plus six locked room mysteries.  For my money, Ritchie was one of the greatest writer of crime and mystery stories, second only to Edward D. Hoch.  It's estimated that Ritchie wrote about 500 short stories; this is only the fifth collection of Ritchie short stories ever published -- there's plenty of worthwhile material out there for additional collections.
• James Sallis, Salt River.  A John Turner mystery.  John Turner is an ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran, and former therapist, now serving as a deputy sheriff in a small town somewhere near Memphis.  "Two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. 'Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left,' Val had told him, and that becomes Turner's mantra.  Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes plowing down Main street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car.  And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle. 'They think I killed someone,' he says.  Turner asks, 'Did you?'  And Eldon responds, 'I don't know.' "  Sallis, who died last month at age 81, was one of the great writers of our time.
• Olaf Stapledon, Odd John and Sirius.  Omnibus of two classic science fiction novels.  "Odd John is the definitive fictionalization of the mutated superman.  After a strange birth and childhood, John  is suddenly compelled to accept the fact that he is different.  What is more, he has to decide what to do with his gifts.  Sirius, although the logical successor to Odd John, deals with quite another being -- an alien intelligence, artificially produced, a dog with superhuman mentality, who is not only superior to his own kind, but rejected by those with whom he has the most in common.  Stapledon uses his powers -- intellectual, imaginative, and observant -- to detail the conflict in its very 'human' form."
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time.  Science fiction, the first book in his eponymous continuing series.  "The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home.  Following  their ancestors' star maps, they discovered the greatest treasure of the past age -- a world terraformed and prepared for human life.  But all is not right in this new Eden.  The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied.  New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.  Now two civilizations are on a collision course and must fight to survive.  As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?"  Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
• Anthony Trollope, Marion Fay.  A lesser-known novel from Trollip[e, published six months before his death.  "[O]ne of Trollope's most cynical novels, making a biting attack on% the snobbery  of the titled class and the immorality of the church.  Lord Hampstead and his sister Frances both intend to marry beneath their rank.  Frances is betrothed to a Post Office clerk, George Roden, and her brother has fallen in love with% Marion, a Quaker.  As their stepmother, the Marchioness, schemes with the Reverend Mr. Greenwood to remove Lord Hampstead from his father's affections -- even if it means his death -- Trollope depicts a ruthless aristocracy and a hypocritical clergy."
• Robert van Gulik, Murder in Canton.  A Judge Dee mystery.  "At the height of his professional career, the master detective of ancient China is called to Canton to secretly investigate a mysterious disappearance, and finds himself entangled in a baffling web of political intrigue and vicious murder."  
• "Barbara Vine"  (Ruth Rendell), The House of Stairs.  Mystery.  "The beautiful, elusive Christobel Sanger is a murderer just released from prison.  But whom has she killed?  Elizabeth Vetch will never forget what happened fourteen years ago in the grand old house on Notting Hill called the House of Stairs,  in that large, oddly built residence, Elizabeth was living with her recently widowed cousin, Cosette, and with a long, unending party of fascinating people and hangers-on who came in and out of their lives.  And in that dwelling, a terrible, cruel plot would unfold and climax in betrayal and murder.  But who was killed...and what is the mystery in this  chilling novel of psychological suspense -- which twists and turns with the deadly desires of the human heart...?"  For some reason I prefer Rendell's work under her own name over her Barbara Vine novels.  Time will tell if that holds true for this book also.

HYMN TIME, CAJUN STYLE

 Jo-El Sonnier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y9H3kKWkeM

SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE #2 (CANADIAN EDITION) (MAY 1938; BUT DON'T BELIEVE IT)

This one gets a bit confusing, and not just because the contents description at the link is for an entirely different comic book.  And, although the link says the issue is from May 1938, this actually seems to b=e a reprint of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle #6 from Spring 1950.

Sheena was basically a female version of Tarzan.  Sheena is the young daughter of Cardwell Rivington, an African explorer who died after accidentally drinking a magic potion.  she was then raised by the witch doctor Kobo, who taught her the ways of the jungle and several African languages.  Sheena is skilled with knives, bows, and spears, and is able to communicate with animals.  As an adult, she becomes the Queen of the Jungle and acquires a pet monkey named Chim.  Sheena's "mate" is white safari guide Bob Reynolds (his last name changes over the years).  According to comics historian Jess Nevins, over the years Sheena has battled "hostile natives, hostile animals, giants, a super-ape, the 
Green Terror, saber-tooth tigers, voodoo cultists, gorilla-men, devil-apes,  blood cults, devil queens, dinosaurs, army ants, lion men, lost races, leopard-birds, cavemen, serpent gods, vampire-apes, etc."  Suffice it to say, Sheena is one tough lady.

Sheena is modeled in part on Rima, the Jungle Girl, from William Henry Hudson's 1904 novel Green Mansions.  According to Will Einsner, who has been credited with creating the character with Jerry Iger, Sheen=a's name was derived in part from H. Rider Haggard's novel She; Iger disputed this, saying that Eisner was not involved in the character's and that he got the idea from the word "sheenie," a derogatory term for Jews.  (Eisner and Iger had a sometimes contentious relationship.)  Iger's Universal Phoenix Features, which created various comics for syndication, came up with the character (drawn by Mort Mesklin) for Editors Press Service, which sold the first Sheena story to the British comic book Wags, where it appeared in issue #46, January 1938.  To disguise the fact that Universal Phoenix Features consisted only of Iger and Eisner, the pseudonym "W. Morgan Thomas."

In America, Sheena first appeared in Jumbo Comics #1, September 1938, from Fiction House.  the feature appeared in every issue of Jumbo Comics, ending with the April 1953 issue.  She gained her own title in 1941 with the first issue (of eighteen) of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, dated Spring 1942 -- making her the first female comic book character with her own title -- edging out Wonder Woman, who first appeared in a Summer 1942 issue.

Later on, Sheena would be rebooted and reimagined and given supernatural powers, as well as the iconic two-piece leopard outfit many associated with her.  But, for now, she is still wearing the one-piece skimpy leopard skin dress that has served her well for many adventures (I should note that in  the original story, the character wore a red dress, but a red dress does not a jungle queen make).

This issue gives us three adventures of Sheena, two apparently original and one reprinted from Jumbo Comics #63.  In the first, Sheena rescues Kazembe, the chief of the peaceful Basuto tribe.  An evil white man, Kessler, and the fierce Dango tribe have overpowered the Basuto.  Kessler is not afraid of sheena because his magic fire spear (rifle) never  misses.  silly man.

In the second episode, Bobtail, the king of f6ang and claw and a tawny terror, has been terrorizing the territory so Sheena has set a trap for the killer lion.  In the meantime, an Egyptian prince has started a hunt for a lion, unaware that several of his servants plan to kill him so a rival can come to power.  Sheena puts a halt to that plan -- actually bobtail does, by killing the man bad guy who was about to kill Sheena.  Then, simply because there are more pages to go in the story, Sheena stumbles upon a safari under attack by normally peaceful Cheetahs.  Turns out the great white hunter of the safari had killed a cheetah just for fun and that peeved off the other cheetahs.  Turns out the bad hunter is in search of a pygmy tribe that can magically change the size of animals, either larger or smaller -- power like that could be worth a fortune in the right unscrupulous hands.  Sheena and Bob are captured, left to die, escape, fight a giant warthog, chase the bad guys down the river, capture all but the bad hunter, who escapes and then is caught in a bear trap that Bob set for Bobtail.  Bobtail lives to fight another day.  this is the story that was a reprint.

In a two-page text story, Lady Beddington-Smythe, a noted sports huntress tries to shoot Chim.  Sheena warns the huntress off, but as an Englishwoman, Lady Beddington-Smythe does not take orders from a...a savage!  Sheena has to call in Simba the lion to convince her otherwise.

The final story sheen=a comes across a wounded man who is under attack by a pack of gorillas.  The man, who had been shot, mutters something about the lost city of the Portuguese before he slips into unconsciousness.  The evil Taluki has captured Bob and will kill him unless Sheena leads him through the swamps to the lost city.  The lost city is actually an ancient castle with a treasure room of gold along with the long-dead bodies of ancient Portuguese soldiers.  Bob reappears and he and Sheena defeat Taluki's men.  Taluki escapes with some gold, but without Sheena to lead him back through the swamp, he falls into quicksand and gets sucked up.  Once again there is peace in the jungle.

Better than many of the other comic books of its time.  BTW, the cover has absolutely nothing to do with any of the stories within,

Enjoy.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=97636&comicpage=&b=i

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

A FORGOTTEN BOOK TWOFER

 Mike Mars Flies the X-15 by Donald A. Wollheim  (1961)

Air Force!  by Frank Harvey (1959)

Two books celebrating the early years of the space program, both considered "near-future" science fiction at the time.

Mike Mars was the hero of a series eight juveniles by SF mainstay Donald A. Wollheim, who noted for his his editing and publishing far more than his writing.  Mars, real name Michael Robert Alfred Sampson, is a lieutenant in the Air Force, a pilot who longs to become an astronaut.  In the first book of the series, he and six other young pilots are chosen for Project Quicksilver, a secret program that ran alongside the publicized Project Mercury.   Because America is in a competition with another power -- it's interesting that Russia is never mentioned by name -- for a toehold into space, Project Quicksilver is kept a secret as an ace up America's sleeve.  (No, it doesn't make much sense to me, either.)  The seven astronauts chosen for Quicksilver are younger than those in Project Mercury (again for a reason that m makes little sense) but are receiving the same intense training.  Four of them -- Mike Mars, the full-blooded Cherokee Johnny Bluehawk, Navy pilot Jack Lannigan, and talented, well-connected Rod Harger, Jr. -- are training at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mohave Desert to fly the experimental X-15 rocket plane; the other three Quicksilver astronauts are elsewhere, training for a different task.  The X-15 has been designed to take man beyond Earth's atmosphere, into space -- the first step to landing on the moon, and eventually Mars and Venus.  (Yeah, it still wasn't known that Venus was the impossible hellhole it is; some scientists suspected, but did not know.)  As per the nickname he had carried all his life, Mike's ultimate goal was to land on Mars.

Rod Harper, Sr., is an unscrupulous industrialist who made his money and his influence as a war profiteer.  He is determined that his son be the one to fly the X-15 and eventually be the first on the moon.  To that end, he arranged for some sabotage in the first book as the Quicksilver astronauts were chosen.  Now he is back at it again to give his son his shot, whether deserved or not.   The agent he sent to disrupt the space program also happened to be  a man who has vowed to get back at Mike and Johnny Bluehawk for foiling his plans in the first book.  Rod, Jr., has no loyalty to  the Air Force, the space program, or his fellow astronauts; his one overriding goal is to be the first man on the moon, and thus gain fame and riches.  Compare this to Mike and the other to astronauts who are approaching the program as a team and fully support each other.

Mike is a goody two-shoes.  Actually, too good to be believed.  Mike had long ago formed three rules of personal conduct:

"The first had been to maintain his good health,  by avoiding laziness, overindulgence, by respect for his body and his muscles, and  by refusing to allow his system to be poisoned by heavy smoking or drinking.

"The second had been to keep his brain firmly disciplined to study and understanding.  Proficiency in his lessons, the ability to learn new things fast and accurately -- these were the keys to the mastery of the world around him.

"The third was to keep his faith, never to allow doubt to cause him to waver from his ambition or to lose confidence in his own ability to rise above any temporary setbacks."

(Mike Mars must have been a super fun guy to have at parties.)

The book itself is heavily researched and detailed about the space program, the various airships involved, and the rigorous training needed to become an astronaut.  This overabundance of detail tends to bog down the first two-thirds of the novel.  The book is heavily illustrated by Albert Ordaan, in6cluding many renderings of the X-15 and its workings.  Of the illustrations of the four astronauts, only those of Mike appear to make him look youthful.  Remember all four are the same basic (unstated) age.  All four are experience military pilots.  As a nod to the book's young readership, Mike and Johnny Bluehawk are referred at least once as "boys," and all four astronaut are referred to a "young lads."

After a rigorous selection process, Mike is chosen to fly the X-15 into space, with Rod as the alternate.  Something had to be done to eliminate Mike from the lead position.  The saboteurs steal a Sidewinder missile with the intention of shooting Mike down before the X-15 leaves the Earth's atmosphere.  Johnny Bluehawk stumbles onto the plot, is captured, and then framed for stealing the missile.  Can Johnny escape in time to stop the plot?  Can Mike navigate the tremendous forces of nature and physics to touch beyond Earth's reach before heading back safely?

I won't answer those questions, except to say that there are six more books in the Mike Mars series.

An interesting and readable book, despite its flaws, taking me back to the early 60s when the entire country was enthralled with the prospect of space travel and of man's audacity to achieve it.

Air Force! is a collection eight stories with the same basic theme, albeit targeted to a more mature audience.  Harvey was an aeronautics writer with many articles to his credit and he knew what he wrote about.  The first story in the book, "Orbit Flight," also takes place at Edwards Air Force base and is about the first attempt to penetrate space with the X-15B.  Again, we are given many technical details, although in an easier to digest form then with Wollheim.  The emphasis of this tale, and of most of the others in the book, is on the personal and family lives of the Air Force test pilots and of the great sacrifices made in an attempt to have mankind touch the stars.   Some of the stories dealt with the dangerous testing of new and unproven equipment.  I enjoyed the book a great deal and it reawakened the pride I felt when I lived through that era.

The stories:

• "Orbit Flight" (The Saturday Evening Post, October 11 and October 18, 1958)
• "Panic on Runway 6" (The Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1956)
• "Test Jump" (The Saturday Evening Post, June 30, 1956)
• "Runaway Prop" (The Saturday Evening Post, May 2, 1959)
• "Jinx Jet" (Cavalier #44, February 1957) 
• "100 Miles Up" (Argosy, February 1958; also in the May 1959 Australian and UK editions of Suspense)
• "Moon Shot" (The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, 1958; also reprinted in The Saturday Evening Post Stories 1958, editor uncredited, Doubleday, 1959, also published as The Saturday Evening Post Stories Volume Five, Elek Books , 1959)
• "Destruct Button" (Argosy, May 1959)

Air Force! was published as an original paperback by Ballantine Books in 1959.  To my knowledge it has never been reprinted.  At lest two inexpensive copies are available from Abebooks.

Mike Mars Flies the X-15 was published as a Doubleday Book for Young Readers in 1961, and reprinted in paperback by Paperback Library in 1966.  The hardcover is available for $15.95 adn6 the paperback for $9 from Abebooks.

I recommend both for pure nostalgia reasons and highly recommend Frank Harvey's book just because.

MAJOR BOWES ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR (JULY 27, 1939)

Long before American Idol or America's Got Talent there was Major Bowes.

Edward Bowes (1874-1946)  made it big with his Amateur Hour, first aired in April 1934 on New York City's WHN radio station.  It moved to NBC on March 24, 1935, then to CBS in September 1936 until it had completed its radio run.  Bowes hosted the show until his death on June 13, 1946, the day before his 72nd  birthday.  Hosting duties were then taken over  by Ted Mack, who had joined the Bowes operation in 1935; after a few  months, Mack transitioned the show to the fledgling medium of television, while the show also continued to run on radio until 1952.  During the 1950-1951 season,  both versions were simply titled Original Amateur Hour.  In 1955, the television show became Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour until it closed in 1970.  During its run, the show had appeared on all four major television networks.

Bowes's avuncular personality had a lot to do with the show's success.  His was one of the most recognized voices during the Golden Age of radio.  The rapid popularity of his show, which provided Americans with a bit of relief from the massive unemployment of the Great Depression, made him as famous as the many persons he ushered into stardom.  Among the some of his better-know contestants were opera stars Lily Pons, Robert Merrill, and Beverly Sills, comedian Jack Carter, and pop singers Teresa Brewer and Frank Sinatra.  Sinatra had fronted a group known as The Hoboken Four; there were so popular that Bowles reportedly brought them back week after week under different names.

I don't think there were many famous names among the contestants in the show linked below, but it does give you a good feel for the show and what Major Bowles meant for American audiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1kmd0qLSjQ

As a bonus, here's The Hoboken Four from  1935, with what is believed to be Frank Sinatra's first recorded song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BM5O_elYnU&list=PL6IqODMTNHPVuodLARp32vsW7EXsbzcFV&index=9 

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: NOBODY LIVES THERE NOW, NOTHING HAPPENS

"Nobody Lives There Now, Nothing Happens" by Casrol Orlock  (from Women of Darkness, edited by Kathryn Ptacek (1988)

This short, quirky tale is leavened with a touch of Ray Bradbury with perhaps a dash of Shirley Jackson.

In a small California town, locked permanently and purposefully in the 1880s, the Marquettes have just moved into a monstrosity of a Victorian mansion (four stories with five widow walks) built over a hundred years ago by a robber baron to house his mail-order bride. Before the marriage ceremony cold be held, though, she took a lonely walk and vanished.  An intensive search was held,  but the young woman was never found.  The robber baton abandoned the house, putting it up for sale, and there it remained for over a century, being offered by various real estate agents over the years and being held together by new paint every ten years.  And then the Marquettes moved in.  

The neighbors watched with interest as the movers lugged in the furniture:  a grand piano, an antique woodstove, a microwave, a large something that looked like a pole lamp mated with a chandelier, a massive television, a cabinet that could have come from the 1850s...  They saw the furniture but they did not see the Marquettes.  Indeed, no one did.  The Marquettes never left their home, not to do grocery shopping, or to hang their laundry in the back yard, they took no newspapers, had no in-person dealings with the postman, and politely declined invitations to various parties and local events (by letter, of course).  They seemed to have occasional visitors, but no one ever saw anyone come or leave.  Music from the piano could be heard, and /once in a while the outlines of guests could be seen through the shaded windows.  But of the Marquettes, there was no trace.  They were only seen once, on Halloween, when the eight Jefferson children dared to approach their door, and even then, they were hidden behind the door, with their arms only showing; for their effort, each of the Jefferson children received a single piece of salt water taffy, wrapped in very old paper and incredibly hard.

Shortly after Easter, the strange gifts began coming.  A scarf hanging on a bush behind Ginny Worsted's, an old but useful scooter by the pond where the Jefferson children played, a jar of golden honey in a flower bed,  toys for families with children, a license plate frame for seventeen-year-old Ed Windry (who worshiped his old Chevrolet), an apron caught on Miss Emma's fence, a hubcap  that rolled by Mr. Wilson's old Studebaker, which needed one...and more.  No one knew where the gifts were coming from, but Virginia (who twice served as PTA secretary and who lived next to the Marquettes) suspected her reclusive neighbors.  Virginia's husband John scoffed at the idea, as did the other townspeople, but Virgionia held firm in her unreasoned belief.

And with the gifts came a summer of plenty.  Gardens and crops flourished as never before.  The enitre town went through a period of peace and happiness  A coincidence?  Perhaps.

Then, come October, things took a different turn.  The frost hit and an early winter came.  Cruel tricks began to be played.  Tommy Jefferson got a high school girl pregnant; his grandmother keeps paying the local stores for items that Tommy has stolen.  Virginia found three dead snakes wrapped together on her screen door.  All four tires on Ed Windry's Chevrolet were slashed.  All twelve kittens born to one of Miss Gilchrist's cats were strangled.  a razor-sharp scratch was made on the elementary school playground slide, a very ripe hunk of cheese was left in Wilbur Evan's mailbox, and a skinned mouse wrapped in cellophane was found in the freezer shelf at Fork's Market.  Miss Gilchrist wrote a letter to the local paper, hinting that violence against whoever had strangled her kittens would not be amiss.

Virginia's youngest son found a treasure at the beach. It was a "small antique box, water-worn cherry wood with silver and abalone-shell roses inlaid on all four sides."  Inside the box were only seven hard  bits of candy.  The  boy swore he had fond the box inside a sand castle.

And then the Marquettes moved away, as mysteriously as they had come, without anyone actually viewing them leave.

That's it.  That's the story.  No explanations.  No rationale.  Yet somehow it maintains a quiet, uneasy power over the reader.

Carol Orlock (b. 1947) has published only a few short stories; the FictionMags index list only three, although  two others at least were published in "little" magazines.  "Nobody Lives There Now, Nothing Happens" was possibly her fourth published story; it was nominated for Bram Stoker Award.  she is also the author of two novels, the well-received The Goddess Letters (1987), which retold the myth of dimeter and Persephone, and The Hedge, The Ribbon:  A Novel (1993), interconnected magical realism stories, the winner of the Western States Book Award.  She was married to the late writer Jack Cady, and published two horror books with him under the joint pseudonym "Pat Franklin."  She has also written two nonfiction books about human biorhythms and one on the effect of medical science on old age.

OVERLOOKED FILM: WENDIGO (1978), plus a few extras...

One of the true classic novellas in the horror genre was Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo," first published in Blackwood's collection The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910).  According to the FictionMags Index, it has been reprinted at least 39 times since its original publication; due to the limited scope of the Index, it is safe to assume that it has been reprinted many more times.

The story has been filmed and adapted many times, and has been recorded and read many more times for radio, podcasts, and the like.

Here's a French adaptation of the story that strays pretty far afield from the original.  It is  by all accounts, an awful film.  There are only two reviews of the flick on IMDb, and  both give it only one star; one goes so far as to title the review "Huntinn of ze moouse."  The movie stars no one you have heard of, but does add some eye candy not present in the original story with the addition of Carol Cocherell in her only screen credit.

Because I know that readers of this blog are staunch fellows (and gals) all, I present this turkey:

https://archive.org/details/Wendigo

But that's not all!  Here's an AI generated version of the story that at least covers the basics of the novella, omitting much of the atmosphere and horror, in just four minutes, thirteen seconds! 

https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection&query=the+wendigo

Blackwood (1869-1951) was one the premiere writers of horror and the supernatural stories in the twentieth century.  Here's the Libravox recording of the full story, read by Michael Thomas Robinson.  ennoy.

https://archive.org/details/willows_mtr_librivox

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ERNEST TUBB (1914-1984)

 "The Texas Troubadour," one of the pioneers in country music, was a large influence in the popularity of honky-tonk music.  Among his most  noted songs were "Walking the Floor Over You," "Blue Christmas," and "Waltz Across Texas."  In 1947, Tubb was the first person to bring the Grand Ole Opry to Carnegie Hall.  He was a prolific duet artist, performing with such people as The Andrews Sisters, Loretta Lynn, Red Foley, and The Wilburn Brothers.   He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1965.  I wasn't able to find an overall  number for his record sales over his fifty-year career, perhaps someone can help me out with that.

The person who helped start his career was Carrie Rodgers, the widow of the "Singing Brakeman" Jimmie Rodgers, whom Tubb approached to ask for a photo of her husband shortly after he had passed away.  Impressed with Tubb, she helped him get a contract with RCA records.  Tubb never forgot her kindness and tried to pay her back by helping and supporting other new artists.   This "established his reputation as one of the industry's most generous and selfless performers.  Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Skeeter Davis, Jack Greene, George Hamilton IV, Stonewall Jackson, Loretta Lynn, Carl Smith, Hank Snow, Justin Tubb (Tubb's first child), Charlie Walker, The Wilburn Brothers, and Hank Williams all owed various degrees of thanks to Tubb."

"Walking the Floor Over Over You"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-0KHkf5V98

"Waltz Across Texas" -- perhaps his most requested song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeRO1Wt0R4I

"The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers" (1936) one side of Tubb's first recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N52Zkx-0lcM

"The T B Is Whipping Me"  the other side of Tubb's first recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVB4kqt-Ifc

"Pass the Booze"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A6id3Ik1hc

"Are You Mine"  with Loretta Lynn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmGR1zcpCMc

"Too Old to Cut the Mustard"  with Red Foley

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

"I'm Moving On"

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

"Drivin' Nails in My Coffin"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnEMOQTh27s

"Thanks a Lot"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx3PIIk8tZk

"Wabash Cannonball"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUp1NDmkEC0

"The Yellow Rose of Texas"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmDiy6XpiA4

"Sweet Thing"  with Loretta Lynn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed3tnnfav0I&list=PL2lsxyxplCkZ8U_FdpGIXKDQ2XuLHVQTc&index=24

"Driftwood on the River"  with The Jordanaires

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o76FSBTnYnc&list=PL2lsxyxplCkZ8U_FdpGIXKDQ2XuLHVQTc&index=28

"Mean Mama Blues"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v2fS-7x0v4&list=PL2lsxyxplCkZ8U_FdpGIXKDQ2XuLHVQTc&index=33

"Blue-Eyed Elaine"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gih_XNcFe2I&list=PL2lsxyxplCkZ8U_FdpGIXKDQ2XuLHVQTc&index=38

"In the Jailhouse Now"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=321cmIOfRO4

"Let's Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello"

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

HYMN TIME

 The Dixie Hummingbirds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plt2tF7h3R8

4 MOST BOYS #39 (MARCH 1950)

This one took me by surprise for two reasons.  First, the title.  4 Most Boys...are you kidding me?  That implies that there are a number of  boys this comic book for whom this comic book is verboten.  That's like if the title of Calling All Girls was actually Calling All Girls Except Lucinda Who Is a Skank.  True, a banner across the front cover also reads "Foremost Boys Comics,"  But that's offset by the large type of the actual title and by the vertical printing of the title on the left side of the cover.  It is my considered opinion that whoever titled this comic book screwed up big time.

The other surprise was the teaser notice on the lower right cover:  "The True Life Story of All-American CHUB PEABODY"  Hang on a minute.  I know of only one Chub Peabody, Endicott Peabody, the 62nd governor of Massachusetts.  (When my wife worked a sales desk at Jordan March in Nashua, New Hampshire, Mrs. Chub was one of her favorite customers.)  A World War II Navy veteran who was awarded several commendations, including the Silver Star, Chub Peabody served one term as governor (1963-1965) and as known for his vehement opposition to the death penalty and for signing the bill establishing the University of Massachusetts Boston.  Peabody had deep New England roots:  this ancestor, John Endecott (note the spelling), was the longest serving governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company; his grandfather, Endicott Peabody, was an Episcopal priest who founded both the Groton School and the Brooks School, was well as Episcopal churches in Arizona and Massachusetts; his maternal grandfather served on both the Boston Common Council and in both chambers of the Massachusetts General Court; his father served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York for eighteen years; his mother was a noted civil rights and anti-war activist in the 1960s, as an elderly (72-year-old) prominent (Chub was governor, and she was a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt, and her father-in-law had officiated at Eleanor and FDR's wedding) white woman, she became a symbol of the civil rights movement and was arrested several times; his sister represented the United States on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and had a number of romantic affairs, including ones with film director John Huston and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (she was with him when he died); his niece, Frances Fitzgerald, is a Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award-winning historian; another niece, Penelope Tree was an influential supermodel in Britain's "swinging sixties" (when asked to describe her in three words, John Lennon said, "Hot.  Hot.  Hot.  Smart.  Smart. Smart." -- and, yes, that's more than three words).  As governor, Chub's liberal roots were also shown in his support of laws to prevent discrimination in housing and in establishing drug addiction treatment centers.  Good intentions sometimes mean little in politics and Chub lost the Democratic primary for reelection.  He later ran for a number of other offices, including the Senate in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and made several attempts to run for Vice President.  What I did not know was that Chub was a Unanimous All-American and First-Team All-Easton college football player who had been inducted into the College football Hall of Fame.  Now, thanks to 4 Most Boys #39, I do.

The issue starts off with "The Cadet," featuring Kit Carter, a cadet at the Daunton Academy for Boys.  Kit and his friend, Dan Merry, stumble across a cabin in the woods being used by detective story writer Dick Mann.  A shot rings out!  It's an aggrieved ghost writer who wants payment for a story he had written for Mann.  Mann takes a rifle to face the ghost writer, but ends up killing himself.  then Mann becomes a ghost.  Kit tries to tackle the ghost writer but it turns out that he, too, is a ghost.  Then Kit is killed and becomes a ghost.  The ghosts begin multiplying and multiple Kit-ghosts and Mann-ghosts chase Dan.  then Dan wakes up.  He had tripped and bumped his head and dreamed the whole thing.  but we knew that, didn't we?

The next story features Edison Bell.  Young Eddie had seen the magician Thorstin's act and was impressed.  He decided to recreate Thorstin's tricks.  But Eddie then gets suspicious of Thorstin and decided to watch his act one more time.  Then he gets even more suspicious...and for good reason,  Thorstin is using his act as a cover for jewel robberies.  Eddie may not be the greatest amateur magician, but he was able to trade Thorstin's costume robes for real-life prison stripes!

Two one-page text stories follow.  "Finger Marks," in which a murderer tries to frame another person with rubberized finger prints, and "The Future Champion," in which Don wins a boxing match despite having two cracked ribs.

Now we get to the four-page story about Chub Peabody, a most distinguished lineman "who was chosen on more All-American teams in 1941 than any other player in the country," and holder of the Knute Rocke Trophy.  At the Groton School, he had a "fine academic record," was "elected president of the missionary society and vice-president of the dramatic club. Not caring for indoor sports, he turned down a  chance to play basketball and opted instead for football, where, in his senior year, he captained the team to an undefeated season.  "Not endowed with prodigious strength or speed,  but the possessor of an unquenchable fighting spirit, Peabody entered Harvard and made football history!"  He worked hard at exercises to develop his back and his neck  -- developing his neck from a 14 to a 17.  By mid-season in his sophomore year, Chub had won a first season berth.  He became the tram's most feared offensive guard; the press began "lovingly": calling him the "baby-faced assassin."  In his final game, Chub played three-quarters of the game with an injured thigh, beating rival Yale 14-0.

The final story in the issue features The White Rider and Super Horse.  (If you are wondering what sort of person names their horse "Super Horse." don't; the horse's actual name is Cloud.  I may be wrong, but I suspect the Super Horse name came from the same genius who called the comic book 4 Most Boys.  BTW, sometimes Super Horse is spelled as two words and sometimes as one.)  Anyway, The White Rider and SH (aka Cloud) are moseying down the rail when they come across a railroad construction camp on fire.  And, golly!  There's dynamite in the cabin and it might go off at any moment.  The White Rider throws a rope around a beam and has SH (aka Storm) pull hard, taking the entire front off the  building down.  Then TWR runs in and grabs the  boxes of dynamite one by one and brings them to safety.  The shack collapses, but not before TWR gets all the dynamite out.  There's skullduggery a-going on -- this was the fifth "accident" the construction crew has had.  If they don't finish the line in a week, the man building the railroad line will be bankrupt and the bank will foreclose (considering the title of the comic book, shouldn't it be "4close?").  It doesn't take a genius to figure out the banker eager to foreclose (4close) is behind it all.  TWR confronts the banker, is taken captive, and is tied up and placed on the railroad tracks in a tunnel with a lit bundle of dynamite ready to explode.  but the bad guys don't count on SH (aka Storm) , who sense something is wrong, rushes into the tunnel, grabs the explosives in his teeth and tosses them over a cliff.  KABOOM!  The there's a gun battle and SH (aka Storm) grabs the bad banker with his teeth and shakes him until he confesses.  You could say the bad guy's plans have all gone to SH.  TWR and SH (aka Storm) ride off into the sunset for more exciting adventures.

An interesting comic book with moderate-to-fair artwork.

Check it out:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=97579&comicpage=&b=i