Yma Sumac (1922-2008) was a Peruvian-American coloratula soprano. Her five-octave range, her embrace of exotica music, her stage personality, and her exotic looks during the 1950s made her a sensation among audiences world-wide. Her music, I fear, is an acquired taste -- one that I unfortunately have never acquired, but there are thems that like it.. But she dis some amazing things with her vocal chords.
I wonder how many remember her today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4niH1RVvwU
Agatha Christie's 1937 Hercule Poirot novel Dumb Witness my be better known to American readers as Poirot Loses a Client, as indeed he did.
Poirot's morning post includes a distressing communication from an elderly woman saying that she needs his help, giving no indication of her problem. Poirot's curiosity is aroused when he realizes that the letter had been written two months before, so he and Captain Hastings go off to investigate.
The woman had been poisoned and survived. Then, she fell down the stairs, tripping on a rubber ball supposedly left by her terrier. Suspecting that one of her relatives may be trying to kill her, she sought help from Poirot. She wrote the letter on April 17, but by the time Poirot received the letter, the woman was dead.
As Poirot and Hastings try to solve the murder, they are strangely aided by Bob, the wire-haired terrier.
The novel was adapted for radio as a two-part mystery by Michael Bakewell and stars John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot and Simon Williams as Captain Hastings. Other cast members are Sam Dale, Joanna David, Becky Hindley, Rosalind Knight, Damian Lynch, Ifan Meredith, Elizabeth Proud, and Tracy Wiles. Richard Beadsmore played Bob the dog. The program was produced and directed by Enid Williams. It aired on Thursday and Friday afternoons, December 7 and 8, 2006 on BBC Radio 4 FM.
Dare you match wits with the great Belgian sleuth?
https://archive.org/details/agatha-christie-dumb-witness
'The Valley of Unrest: A Book without a woman: Edgar Allan Poe: An Odd Oddity Paper" by Douglass Sherley first published in book form in 1883 [see below]; reprinted in The Man Who Called Himself Poe, edited by Sam Moskowitz, 1969)
This is an odd story, relating in part Edgar Allan Poe's sojourn at Virginia University when he was seventeen, and drawing itself on Poe's 1831 poem, "The Valley of Unrest" (originally, "The Valley Nis").
The unnamed narrator is a year younger than Poe when, lost and home-sick on his first day at Virginia University, he is approached by Poe, who says, "I like you. I want to know you." From day day, the narrator became Poe's closest friend while they attended the school. Poe was a sometimes moody, sometimes whip-smart friend who had the natural ability of a leader. He drew among him a number of students who were rebels of a sort -- prone to play fast and loose with the rigid standards of the university, mainly in the area of playing cards for money and drinking. The most popular drink during these illicit card games was peach and honey, evidently a standard drink or either ale or wine among the Old South elite.
Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University, had a bugaboo about playing cards for money and he wanted the practice stopped at the school. He gathered the names of those most likely to involved and had the sheriff raid the school with writs for the suspected gamblers. Word had gotten out about the raid and a group of students, led by Poe, managed to escape. Poe led them "over an almost untrodden path" to the nearby Ragged Mountains, a wild part of the Blue Ridge, and to the remote Valley of Unrest. The group had managed to bring food, playing cards, and a goodly supply of peach and honey with them. There they stayed for three days, sneaking back to the university at night to have their supplies refreshed by some of their friends. Each night around a campfire they amused themselves before retiring by taking turns telling stories. They got word that they had been forgiven and on the third night, before marching back to the school, they again swapped stories. The last to speak was Poe.
He told a tale of the location where they had been hiding, a spot inhabited by human shadows and three demons. Two young men, fast friends since childhood, found themselves on opposite sides during a war. One dark night in the heat of battle they faced each other unknowingly. It was only after one of the friends was slain did the other realize who it was that he had killed. Stricken by his action, the surviving friend found himself cursed to go about the world a homeless, friendless wanderer who would eventually find himself lying in a grave forever nameless. And so it came to pass the he spent years in lonely wandering until a strange compulsion brought hi to the Valley of Unrest -- that same compulsion that forced him to dig a grave and to lay himself down in it.
After Poe had told that tale, the card-playing, peach and honey drinking group of students returned to the university.. The following December both the narrator and Edgar Allan Poe left Virginia University, never again to have contact with each other..
Thus ends the first part of the story, one that reads as if (and may possibly be) a true account. But then there's the remaining part of the tale.
The time is now in the late 1870s, nearly three decades after Poe's strange death, and the narrator finds himself in a small Italian town. It's Carnival time and he has has rented the Ducal palace and he strangely found himself longing to return to his native land. As so he left the palace and the local folk began saying he was driven out by the ghost of some murdered Duke. Returning home was a bit of a disappointment -- all his old friends had either died or had moved and all the places he had so fondly remembered had drastically changed, except for the University of Virginia, an unchanging landmark of his youth. And one thought persistently and illogically came to him: what if someone had actually been buried in the Valley of Unrest in a "nameless grave"?
But that lonely dell in the Ragged Mountains was not easy to find. Our narrator searched long with the troubled thought of there being a bunch of "new-blown lilies on a nameless grave" in the Valley of unrest. Suddenly he was aware of being watched by someone. It was an old man, older than he. The strange man recognized as one of the group of students who had camped out nearby almost fifty years before. The old man had watched the group, silently and hidden, and remembered well Poe's tale that was related that final evening. The man led the narrator through the thick forest to the same dell in the Valley of Unrest where the group played cards, drank, and told stories.
There, in the center of the dell, was "a green mound of earth, grave-shaped, without a stone, with only a bunch of lilies at the head, just coming into bloom. In truth, I had found it, and there before me, the nameless grave."
One day in 1835 (the old mountaineer, whose name turned out to be Gasper Conrad, said) a stranger came to the area and sought out lodging for the night from him. A friendship grew and the stranger decided to build a small hut and spend the winter in the mountains. He shunned all neighbors except for Gasper and soon earned a bad reputation among the mountain folk because of this. He gave no name but was soon dubbed "shaggy" by the populace. They thought he might be a criminal or a murderer, or some demon sent to plague the few mountain folk in the area. Shaggy was shunned, as was Gasper for his friendship with the man. The following year he told Gasper that he knew the day, hour, and time of his own appointed death. Shaggy said he had once been associated with Aaron Burr, who was indirect cause of the one great evil in his life.
On September 14, 1836 -- the same day that Burr died -- Shaggy led Gasper to the lonely dell where he had dug a wide grave in which he placed a coffin. Shaggy lay in the coffin and then died, his last words being a pitiful cry, "Don't! don't! I am Albert Pike Carr!" Gasper felt that the name belonged to someone other than Shaggy.
Years later he learned that Albert Pike Carr and his best friend from childhood had gone off to join Aaron Burr during his famous expedition. Burr suspected one of his mean of treason and ordered Carr's friend to do away with him that night when the traitor was to be on sentry duty. But the traitor had claimed illness and asked Carr to take his post. Carr's friend mistakenly kills Carr, his best friend in the world. Racked with guilt, the man wanders the earth until he finds himself the man who was called Shaggy in the Ragged Mountains.
Poe's story that he had made up before a campfire had become eerily true.
The publication of this story is unusual. It was first published as a book of some 150 pages, "printed on one side only of quarto [about twelve by nine inches -- JH] sheets of thick red* paper, with most generous margins. The sheets are held together with blue** silk cords." It was printed in antique style, with f replacing s throughout. There was evidently an 1883 and an 1884 printing, both similar.
The author is presumed to be Douglass Shepley, who is listed as merely the editor and "who vouches for the authenticity of this posthumous manuscript." Sherley attended the University of Virginia long after Poe, but Poe did attend and a man named Thomas Goode Tucker, who was a close friend of Poe. Sherley had published some excepts from letters by Tucker in Virginia University Magazine and some assume that the story came from Tucker and was polished by Sherley. We will probably never know.
Sherley (1857-1917) was a Kentuckian who studied law at UVA and published a number of short books. 1n 1893 and 1894 he went on a lecture tour that included James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain. He died in Indiana and was buried in his native Louisville.
By the way, I have no idea why the book included in its subtitle "A Book without a woman," ecept, perhaps, because there was no woman in the story.
"The Valley of Unrest" is a quirky, readable story that deserves wider attention. It can be read online in its original form on the internet; other, more eye-pleasing copies are also available.
* or maybe orange
** or maybe brown (the difference in color may be ascribed to the age of the book, or perhaps to individuals who perceived the different colors)
Your Show Time was an early television effort to bring famous literary short stories to the small screen. It ran for 26 half-hour episodes from January 21 to July 15, 1949 -- a total of 26 episodes adapting tales from such authors as Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Each episode was introduced by "The Bookshop Man," played by Arthur Shields doing his best Barry Fitzgerald imitation.
The fourth episode of the show featured Theophile Gautier's horror story "The Mummy's Foot" (originally "Le Pied de momie," published in Le Musee des familles, September 1840). In this version, Peter Renault is a young playwright who is writing a show about ancient Egyptian times. Unfortunately he gets a little too "wrapped up" in his subject.
Herbert Anderson (1917-1994), in his first television role, stars as Renault. Anderson had a 35-year career in films and television. He began doing bit parts in films, but after "The Mummy's Foot" spent most of the rest of his career in television -- most notably as Herbert Mitchell, the father in Dennis the Menace (1959-1963).
Rounding out the cast were J. Edward Bromberg, Peggy Dow, Phyllis Coates, and Hank Henry.
This episode was produced by Louis Lantz and directed by Sobey Martin, from an adaptation by Stanley Rubin.
Enjpy.
https://archive.org/details/YourShowTimeTheMummysFoot
Openers: I returned from the city about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago if I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as that of soda-water that has been standing in the sun. "Richard Hannay," I kept telling myself, "you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you jad better climb out."
It made me bite my lip to think of the places I had been building up those last years in Buluwayn. I had got my pile -- not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights for me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days.
But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had had enough of restaurants and theatre and race-meetings. I had no real pal to about with, which probably explains things. Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but they didn't seem much interested in me. they would fling me a question or two about South Africa, and then get on to their own affairs. A lot of Imperialist ladies asked me to tea to meet someone from New Zealand and editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of all. Here was I, thirty-seven years old, sound in wind and limb, with enough money to have a good time, yawning my head off all day. I had just about settled to clear out nd get back to the veld, for I was the best bored man in the United Kingdom.
The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan (1915; first published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in their July, August, and September issues as by "H de V.")
Be careful what you wish for, Richard Hannay. Within a few paragraphs you be pushed into an adventure that will have you running for your life over the hill and moor of Scotland, chased by both police and anarchists plotting to destabilize Europe. As a character, I found Hannay to be a mixed blessing, at times shrewd and daring, and at other times of be a dim bulb. The book I found also to be a bit off-putting because of at least one character's racist and anti-Semitic. But the book has a lot going for it. It is a classic adventure-espionage novel, a "shocker," as the author described it. In 2003, the book was listed as one of the UK's best-loved novels by the BBC.
Most of us are familiar with the story from Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film starring Robert Donat. In 1938, Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air adapted the book for their fourth episode, not getting the notoriety as their adaptation of that H. G. Wells novel later in the year. Other radio adaptations include episodes of the Lux Radio Theater (1937, with Robert Montgomery), Philip Morris Playhouse (1943, with Herbert Marshall), The Hour of Mystery (1946, with David Niven), the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Stage Series (1947). Studio One (1948, with Glenn Ford), Suspense (1952, with Herbert Marshall [again]), eight BBC adaptations, and three BBC solo readings. There have also been at least three audiobook versions of the novel. Another version of the book, starring Kenneth More as Hannay, was released in 1959, followed by a 1978 version starring Robert Powell, and a television film staring Rupert Penry-Jones in 2008. Currently filming is a Netflix television mini-series with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead. A theatrical adaptation of the novel was staged in 1995, and rewritten in 2005; it became the fifth longest running play Piccadilly's Criterion Theatre; it moved to Broadway in 2008 and was nominated for six Tony Awards, winning two. (The London show won an Oliver, and the Broadway show also received a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. A 2014 BBC radio documentary focused on the novel's impact at home and abroad.
I have not seen every version of The Thirty-nine Steps, but a good number of them do not follow the book and have different ides of what the "thirty-nine steps" are. Much of this can be laid to Mr. Hitchcock. who threw out most of the novel when he made his film.
Richard Hannay was too a character to waste on just one book. Buchan used him as a major character in Greenmantle (1916), Mr. Standfast (1919), The Three Hostages (1924), and The Island of Sheep (1936), and as a minor character in The Courts of the Morning (1929) and Sick Heart River (1940). Hannay also appears as a member of The Runagates Club (1926), a collection of twelve stories; another member of that club is Sir Edward Leithen, a major character in five of Buchan's novels, including Sick Heart River.
Hannay was also the title character in the 1998-1999 television series featuring Robert Powell in the title role. He was also featured in a 1952 six-episode series, The Three Hostages, with Patrick Barr as Hannay, and in a 1997 television movie of The Three Hostages, with Barry Foster as Hannay.
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875-1940) carried on dual careers as an author and as a politician and diplomate. As an author, he wrote 28 popular novels, 43 non-fiction books (many of which were histories, including one book of 24 volumes), eleven biographies, four poetry collections, and five short story collections, along with editing 14 anthologies. On the political side (following periods as a barrister and a publisher), Buchan was the private secretary to the High Commissioner of Southern Africa, a lieutenant colonel in the intelligence corps and director of intelligence during World War I, reporting to prime minister David Lloyd George, s Unionist member of Parliament, King George V's Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the church of Scotland, and the 15th Governor-General of Canada.
On February 6, 1940, Buchan suffered a stroke and injured his head as he fell. Two surgeries failed to save him and he died on February 11, His time spent in Canada and his clear devotion to the Canadian people endeared him to much of the populace. He was given a state funeral in Ottawa and his ashes were then shipped to England for burial.
Incoming:
Sam Cooke with The Soul Stirrers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsuqH1Ca060&list=PLSQ9_a7EjS7dLf94hg_G6VbH_nyVB1l0o
Dudley Bradshaw, a wealthy young playboy, has a secret identity. He's Mr. Satan, a costumed hero, international detective, and soldier of fortune. He had no superpowers, no sidekick -- just a purple devil's costume from a Fancy Dress costume shop (the costume also included a long yellow cape). His brief comic book run was in the first nine issues of MLJ Comics Zip Comics, where he served -- along with Kalthar (King of the Jungle), Miracle Man, Capt. Valor, and others -- as a backup feature to the adventures of Charles Biro's Steel Sterling, Man of Steel.
Mr. Satan was created by writer Abner Sundell and artist Ed Ashe. The pair created most of Mr. Satan's none adventures as well as other features for MLJ.
Mr. Satan has no backstory. Why he decided to get gussied up in that get-up remains a mystery, as does why he chose such a poor costumed hero moniker. His adventures -- six pages per issue -- are quickly told, with no suspense, little mystery, and even less depth. He remains one of the few MLJ comic book heroes was was not picked up later by one of the comic book publishers of the 60s.
The 1940 Mr. Satan should not be conflated with the much more popular Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball.
For your edification, here the complete Dudley Bradshaw oeuvre:
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=82522&comicpage=&b=i
