TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT. Paramount, US/UK, 1960. Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, Betta St. John, John Carradine, Lionel Jeffries. Written by Berne Giler and Robert Day, based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs Director: Robert Day.

   Basically a Western transposed to Africa, with Gordon Scott instead of Randolph, but fun in its way.

   The Tarzan of Magnificent isn’t the solipsistic jungle man of the early Tarzan films, but more like a Lone Ranger of the bush, going about rescuing folks and catching evildoers, and the plot gets moving when Tarzan (Gordon Scott) captures killer Coy Banton (Jock Mahoney) of the notorious Banton Gang, and tries to bring him to justice, as they say. The Lord of the Apes gets his prisoner to a smallish village, but it seems everyone there has seen High Noon and refuses to help him for fear of reprisal from the Banton Gang, which is headed by patriarch John Carradine, in the manner of Lee J. Cobb in Man of the West.

   Nothing daunted, Tarzan decides to escort his prisoner across the prairie –er— I mean through the jungle, knowing the gang will be dogging his heels and accompanied by a disparate group of hangers-on: shades of Ride Lonesome, or maybe The Naked Spur. There’s some interesting cross-cutting between the good guys and the baddies as the characters try to work out their personal issues along the way, sundry encounters with the local fauna, and a would-be dramatic bit where one of Tarzan’s party turns out to be an ex-doctor who rallies himself to save a life — Stagecoach, anyone?

   All this of course is just filler leading up to the final confrontation between Tarzan and Coy Banton, and when that moment finally arrives, it doesn’t disappoint; we get a lengthy, brutal and highly entertaining hand-to-hand battle between the protagonists across jungle, rocks, waterfalls and what-have-you, and while the outcome is never in doubt, the players and their stuntmen make it well worth your time.

   By and large however, Tarzan the Magnificent isn’t in the same league as any classic western; it’s a nice try and something a bit different, but the writing and directing just ain’t there. And as for the acting…. Well one doesn’t go to Tarzan movies for the acting, but Lionel Jeffries does well in an unrewarding role, Jock Mahoney projects a virile menace, and John Carradine is his reliable self. I just couldn’t help wishing Gordon Scott had a little less dialogue.

STUART M. KAMINSKY – Poor Butterfly. Mysterious Press, 1990; paperback, 1991.

   Toby Peters, Kaminsky’s vintage private eye, is hired to find out who’s attempting to sabotage the reopening of the restored San Francisco Metropolitan Opera house.The year is 1942 and a major player is renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski who’s rehearsing the first production, Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.”

   Toby drives to San Francisco and when it’s apparent he needs backup, he sends for his best friend, midget translator Gunther Wherthman, his chief muscle, ex-wrestler Jeremy Butler, and his landlord, dentist Sheldon Minck.

   To these colorful characters, add the mix at the opera house that includes a murderous Phantom (of the opera), an evangelical minster (Reverend Adam Souvaine) whose minions are picketing the opening protesting the scheduling of an opera with a Japanese subject, and a prima donna for whom Toby falls in a big way.

   This is feather light entertainment that is best savored before, during or after an afternoon nap. Short and light on substance but agreeable for a one time date.

Bibliographic Note:   This is number 15 of 24 books in Kaminsky’s Toby Peters series, written between 1997 and 2004. You can find a complete list here, along with covers for most if not all, along with lists of books in his several other series.

BILL PRONZINI “La bellezza delle bellezze.” First published in Invitation to Murder, edited by Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg (Dark Harvest, hardcover, 1991; Diamond, paperback, February 1993). Reprinted in Scenarios (Five Star, hardcover, 2003).

   The idea behind the anthology Invitation to Murder is to present the reader with a wide variety of stories all based on a single idea: the body of a young girl is found in her apartment. Besides Bill Pronzini’s inclusion, among other authors whose tales are inside are Loren D. Esteman, Joan Hess, Judith Kelman, Nancy Pickard and Andrew Vachss. (Here I’m mentioning only those listed on the front cover of the paperback edition, ones I imagine the publisher assumed would catch a would-be buyer’s eye.)

   Besides settings, genres, moods and presentation, of course as in most collections, the quality of the stories vary widely as well. The detective puzzle stories fare the worst, I’m sorry to say. Joan Hess’s attempt at a locked room mystery, “Dead on Arrival. for example, should have been cleared up in seconds, then a minute more to catch the killer. Well, maybe two minutes.

   The solution to a “dying message” mystery by William J. Reynolds is contrived, and the whole incident would have no chance in the world of ever happening that way. Better are a ghost story “The Life and Deaths of Rachel Long,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, hauntingly told without quite gelling, and “Darke Street,” by Gary Brandner, a story about an aging cop almost ready for retirement who comes across a strange musty shop on a mostly deserted city street. This is one that could easily have appeared in the pages of the old Weird Tales pulp magazine.

   I especially enjoyed “Invitation to Murder” by Richard Laymon, in which An author with a deadline to write a story for this very same book finds the next door neighbor playing loud music very distracting. The multitude of ideas this writer comes up with before discarding them are better than some of the stories in this book, assuming you can accept the existence of zombies, for example. This one’s a small gem of a tale. I’m not surprised it was used as the title story of the anthology.

   I may have liked Bill Pronzini’s contribution, “La bellezza delle belleza,” even better, however. (Yes, I’m finally getting to it.) Translating the title from the Italian gives us “the beauty of beauties.” This might refer to the granddaughter of an elderly Italian friend of a friend who asks the author’s nameless PI to investigate a money problem she is having with the landlord, but in reality the phrase may apply even more to the changes happening to the city of San Francisco, and the death of the old days in particular. Evocatively done, in terms of both the city and the people in it, and the transition both are forced to undergo.

Added Later:   For what’s worth, the names on the cover of the hardcover edition are Nancy Pickard, Bill Pronzini, John Lutz, and Carolyn G. Hart, authors of the first four stories.

SOUTH OF SUEZ. Warner Brothers, 1940. George Brent, Brenda Marshall, George Tobias, Lee Patrick, Eric Blore, Miles Mander. Director: Lewis Seiler.

   The title makes this movie sound as though it were another pre-War Egyptian spy adventure, but not so. The geography is right, more or less, but a title something like “The Middle of Tanganyika” just wouldn’t attract anybody to the box office. And it’s really not a spy adventure, either, but rather a murder mystery than begins in the diamond fields of central Africa and ends in a British court, back in England. It is there that the main protagonist, played by George Brent, due to a deliberate case of false identity, is on trial for killing himself. Only two people know that, though, himself and an eye witness who saw another murder done, back in Africa.

   How did Brent’s characters get mixed up in such a mess? That’s a good question, and how he managed to do it is the best part of this otherwise mostly mediocre mystery movie. It’s all for the love of a girl, however, as you may have guessed, but Brent’s typically low key performance doesn’t rise even halfway to the occasion, that being the hand of Brenda Marshall, with whom he has only a modicum of chemistry.

   George Tobias is terrific as the near-sighted villain of the drama, but there is very little I found in this film to suggest any kind of motivation for Lee Patrick, who plays his wife, to do any of the strange things she does.

MARILYN TODD – Swords, Sandals and Sirens. Crippen & Landru Publishers, softcover, November 2015.

   If you don’t always like your mysteries with contemporary settings, there are a few authors who can oblige by taking the reader centuries into the past to places that once teemed with people but are now crumbling jumbles of detritus; one of the best at this approach is Marilyn Todd.

   Rather than trying to ape the stilted style of speech that we’ve come to expect from badly-dubbed sword-and-sandal movies, Todd modernizes the proceedings in such a way as to keep her characters from sounding like a dress rehearsal for a high school production of Julius Caesar while preserving the salient attributes of the ancient cultures she places us in. The result makes for smoother reading and assists us in concentrating more on the mystery plot.

   Swords, Sandals and Sirens collects eleven of Todd’s historical mysteries, with settings in either ancient Greece (3 stories) or, most often, Rome in the time of Augustus Caesar (7 stories, with one other set earlier, during Julius Caesar’s dalliance with the Queen of the Nile). The Greek stories feature several characters: the wholly mythical Echo, as well as two more down-to-earth individuals, the Delphic Oracle and Iliona, a high priestess who has appeared in at least three novels.

   The remaining Roman stories focus on Claudia Seferius, the always cash-strapped widow of a wine merchant — and a real looker. Thanks to the prevailing oppressive tax structure and the repressive patriarchal culture of the times, Claudia is often forced to skirt the law, always with the prospect of exile from Rome lurking in the back of her mind—but it seems that every time she’s about to make a big score that will get her out of the red, somebody gets murdered.

   When that happens, the law’s long arm soon appears, sometimes like a wraith from the shadows, in the person of Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, a patrician member of the Secret Police whose ambition for promotion would make squashing a minor scofflaw like Claudia the work of but a moment. Yet when these two get together to solve a murder, for some reason Marcus overlooks his duty and never does nab her. Maybe it’s his respect for her smarts, maybe it’s her regard for his prowess, maybe it’s his concern for her welfare, maybe it’s her respect for his position — and maybe, just maybe, it’s because they’re in love.

LARRY D. SWEAZY – A Thousand Falling Crows. Seventh Street Books, softcover, January 2016.

   It is a dry spring in Texas circa 1934, the ravages of the Dust Bowl still taking their toll, and former Texas Ranger Sonny Burton — Red Burton was a legendary Ranger, who among other things arrested John Wesley Hardin, and Sweazy, who knows his Ranger history, no doubt had that connection in mind — who lost an arm and his career in a shootout with Bonne Parker and Clyde Barrow is trying to rebuild his life. When Aldo Hernandez, the janitor of the hospital he was in, asks Sonny to help find his daughter who is involved with a pair of robbers, he sees a chance for a kind of redemption by saving the girl from becoming another Bonnie Parker and beginning a new career as a private detective.

   A Thousand Falling Crows is a noirish hard-boiled tale with an elegiac voice about loss and redemption as that case dovetails into a more serious matter of a killer murdering young women and leaving them in local fields to be eaten by the crows of the title. With help from his son, Pete, and from legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who hunted Bonnie and Clyde to their bullet-ridden fate in Louisiana, Sonny might just reclaim his manhood and his past if he can save one not-quite-innocent from herself and the bitter facts of the harsh landscape of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

   Larry D. Sweazy is a Spur Award winning Western writer who also delves into mystery, and here starts what I hope is a new series about a good man in a tough dangerous world. He manages a nice balance between realism and romanticism here, presenting a sort of Gothic vision of an era known for its unforgiving violence and loss as much as its unbending faith there would be a future.

   Sweazy has an impressive list of accomplishments as a writer, but this book is not without flaws. I found at times that he leaned toward a slight excess in some of his atmospherics — including the quote above which needs a bit of tightening by a good editor — but for the most part he is in control, and any minor quibbles are just that, quibbles. I will certainly read more, look for some of his Western novels and other titles, and look forward to more about Sonny Burton. Sweazy is potentially a major voice in development.

   I’ve never had much interest in Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) but somewhere along the line I wound up with a copy of Jan Cohn’s biography IMPROBABLE FICTION (1980). A few weeks ago, for no particular reason, I started idly skimming through this book. At least it was idle skimming until a paragraph on page 155 brought me up short. It seems there was a time early in the 20th century when Rinehart became interested in spiritualism.

   As we learn from Cohn: “Mary and Stan [her husband] probably had their first experience with spiritualism in 1909, at Lily Dale near Chautauqua, where there was a spiritualist camp. Both had sittings there with a medium named Keeler. First they wrote notes on a slate and awaited replies that were to come through Keeler. Stan wrote notes to his father, his brother Charlie, and a young doctor friend, but the replies were unsatisfactory. A trumpet seance followed and Stan’s brother Charlie spoke, but again it was unconvincing.”

   The Keeler mentioned here didn’t make it into the index of Cohn’s book, obviously because she didn’t know the rest of his name. I do. I had read about this spiritualist before, and I remembered where. Not to keep anyone in suspense, he was the uncle of Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), the nuttiest filbert who ever sat down to a typewriter and one of my favorite writers ever.

   Harry’s first wife had died of cancer in 1960, and her death so devastated him that for the next three years he was unable to write fiction. He did, however, bang out a long series of “Walter Keyhole” newsletters. These in effect constituted a low-tech blog, printed on multi-colored paper, discussing any subject that caught his fancy—cosmology, autobiography, writers’ gossip, religion, restaurants, cats, whatever — and mailed out on an irregular basis to almost everyone for whom he had an address.

   The hobby, or whatever you want to call it, cost him up to $50 a week, an amount not to be sneezed at in those days, but he obviously felt the price was worth it and kept it up, although less frequently, even after he remarried and until about six months before his death. Over the decades I acquired originals or photocopies of 188 of these newsletters, and several years ago I organized the material in them into THE KEELER KEYHOLE COLLECTION (2005), a hefty volume which I still thumb through with enjoyment every so often. I knew that was where I had first heard about Harry’s slate-writing uncle, and finding the relevant passages plus a bit of time with my good buddy Joe Google brought me up to speed.

   Pierre L.O.A. Keeler (the initials stand for Louis Ormond Augustus) was born in 1855, or perhaps 1856, and died in 1948 at age 92, or perhaps 93. Late in 1960 Harry wrote in one of his Keyhole newsletters that Pierre,

   A few months later, after reading a piece about Pierre in the National Enquirer, he complained in another Keyhole that the Enquirer “neglected completely to point out that the high spot of his work was to bring out messages from the ‘dead’ not only upon the slates brought by his clients, but in actual handwritings of the dead.”

   Are we to conclude that Harry believed Unc was a genuine medium? Not at all. In a later Keyhole, probably dating from the summer of 1963, he claims to have known Pierre “fairly intimately” and describes him as “a consummate sleight-of-hand artist, deriving his astounding results via various methods, [and] was, therefore, a charlatan. Was, in short, exactly like all male members of the tribe of Keeler.” No Mike Avallone-style I’m-the-greatest hype for Harry!

   Googling Pierre’s name, we find that he was quite a character, continuing his slate-writing career for decades despite being exposed again and again by a number of psychic investigators including Houdini. Could he have fooled people on the same scale in the Internet age that allows us to learn so much about him with so little effort? Probably. There’s an old Latin proverb, mundus vult decipi, the world wants to be deceived, that I suspect remains true today.

   Writing about his uncle, Harry consistently misarranged his middle initials, L.A.O. instead of L.O.A. I don’t know if we should make anything of this, but it’s a sober fact that the female lead in one of the most charming Keeler novels, Y. CHEUNG, BUSINESS DETECTIVE (1939), is a young woman of Chinese-Hawaiian descent named Loa Marling. Did Harry derive that name from his uncle Pierre’s middle initials?

   Writing about Harry can easily become habit-forming, for me anyway. I acquired the habit back in my teens when I first discovered HSK, and here I am about to turn 73 and still hooked!

   Having become a lawyer and law professor during those intervening decades, I have a particular interest in Harry’s take on that subject. Very few of his books have lawyer protagonists but one of those few is the first Keeler novel that I ever stumbled upon. The main character in THE AMAZING WEB (1930) is David Crosby, a young attorney who screws up his first big case—where the defendant is the woman he loves!—but goes on several years later to prove himself a tiger of the courtroom, with a golden future as a criminal defender ahead of him and, as Keeler Koinkydink would have it, the same young woman at his side. Here, at the end of more than 500 pages of plot labyrinth, is where David Just Says No.

   Instead David decides to buy a farm and devote the rest of his life to producing “clean sweet food for the thousands.”

   The other Keeler novel with a lawyer protagonist offers a more positive view of the profession and is also of historical importance because its protagonist is a woman. THE CASE OF THE LAVENDER GRIPSACK (1944) is the fourth and final volume of what today is known as the Skull in the Box series. Elsa Colby, recent graduate of Chicago’s Northwestern Law School, has signed a Keeler Krackpot Kontract that will divest her of title to a valuable piece of real estate known as Colby’s Nugget, and vest title in her rascally uncle Silas Moffit, if she should be disbarred or lose a criminal case within a certain number of months.

   For obvious reasons Elsa is accepting no cases and spends her time making a quilt. Moffit pressures Judge Hilford “Ultra Legal” Penworth to compel her to defend a capital case she can’t possibly win and to disbar her on the spot — which is within the judge’s power as Chief Commissioner of the Ethical Practices Subdivision! — if she refuses. To understand what the case is about you have to read the three previous Skull in the Box books — THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC EARDRUMS (1939), THE MAN WITH THE CRIMSON BOX (1940) and THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN SPECTACLES (1940) — but any readers not up to that ordeal may substitute the summary I wrote for the second edition of Jon L. Breen’s NOVEL VERDICTS (1999).

   The trial — for a murder that took place less than 24 hours earlier! — is to be held in the drawing room of Judge Penworth, who is suffering from a bad case of gout. The courtroom action is full of long-winded speeches and light on Q-and-A but packed with Keeler’s inspired daffiness — and with sentences like this one and several of those above which feature long asides punctuated with an exclamation point! The crossword puzzle exegesis in Chapter 13 is guaranteed to pop the eyeballs of every cruciverbalist, and the surprise ending will knock the socks off any reader with the patience to hang on till the end. As in THE AMAZING WEB, although this time the attorney is the woman and the client the man, they’re clearly going to get married after the book is closed.

   Thanksgiving is two days away as I finish this column. In the years of his widowerhood Keeler endured a number of long and lonely turkey days, and an entry in a Walter Keyhole newsletter written late in 1962 memorializes one of them.

   I hope everyone who reads this column had a far more pleasant holiday than that.

BRAM STOKER “The Burial of the Rats.” First published in the UK in the January 26, 1896 and February 2, 1896 issues of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. First published in the US in the January 26, 1896 and February 2, 1896 issues of The Boston Herald. It also appeared in the September 1928 issue of Weird Tales (cover shown). First published in book form in Dracula’s Guest And Other Weird Stories, George Routledge & Sons (1914). Available online here.

   Although Bram Stoker’s short story, “The Burial of the Rats” isn’t a particularly literary work of horror fiction, it’s nevertheless a highly atmospheric one. In many ways, it’s more a work of adventure fiction than weird fiction, more Conrad than Blackwood.

   Indeed, Stoker, despite his fame for creating the template for the modern vampire myth in Dracula (1897), wasn’t nearly the wordsmith as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who helped invent the modern detective story. Stoker, however, was more than able to create highly effective scenes that, when fully absorbed, clench the reader by the throat.

   Such is the case in “The Burial of the Rats,” a story of admittedly dubious literary merit, but one that leaves an indelible impression on the reader’s psyche. Written from the first-person perspective of an Englishman on a Continental sojourn, the tale follows the narrator as he explores the dangerous and dirty shantytowns outside of Paris.

   Specifically, he decides to visit the area where rag-pickers make their homes in decrepit structures. There, he encounters an old woman in a ramshackle dwelling infested with not only rats, but also rat-like humans, dirty men capable of horrific violence against their fellow man. The story follows our intrepid narrator as he tries to escape certain death at the hands of his gruesome would be captors.

   â€œThe Burial of the Rats” doesn’t have much in the way of dramatic, literary tropes, ones that often appear in truly exceptional works of weird fiction. Aside from the notions that romantic love can propel a man forward in the face of certain death and that certain human behaviors are animalistic, Stoker’s tale doesn’t delve particularly deep into any moral or philosophical questions. But it does provide the reader with a bit of excitement and an unforgettable chase scene in which the narrator escapes with his life.

   It is that time of year when children of all ages experience what collectors feel all year round. The thrill of the possibilities, the excitement of the search and finding your prey, the joy of possession – and we don’t have to wait for Santa.

   Every collector has his Holy Grails, his or her list of those that have escaped their grasp for too long and may not even still exist. I decided this season to ask Santa for some help, and I decided to share it here.

   The first is always of interest to the collector. So I have long sought the series most accept as TV network’s first weekly mystery series with a regular cast – BARNEY BLAKE, POLICE REPORTER. The series aired live on NBC from April 22, 1948 to July 8, 1948 and starred Gene O’Donnell as Barney.

   One of my favorite characters in fiction is Craig Rice’s John J. Malone of books, films, radio, and TV. I have reviewed the radio series here (and discussed the TV series in the comments)

   The TV version of Malone aired on ABC between September 24, 1951 and March 10, 1952 and starred Lee Tracy as Malone. The series aired live and alternated with MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY on Monday at 8-8:30pm. While MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY has been released on DVD, I have yet to find one episode or even clip of AMAZING MR. MALONE.

   It was common in the fifties for radio series to become a TV series and that was the fate of George Harmon Coxe’s Jack Casey. The TV series CRIME PHOTOGRAPHER aired on CBS from April 19, 1951 to June 5, 1952. In Season One Casey was played by Richard Carlyle who was replaced in Season Two by Darren McGavin. Today few remember the once popular Casey who got his start in pulps and in addition to radio and TV made it in novels and films.

   THE MASK aired on ABC from January 10, 1954 to May 16, 1954. It featured two brothers, Walter and Peter Guilfoyle (played by Gary Merrill and William Prince) as lawyers who fought crime. It was also TV’s first hour-long mystery series with a continuing cast of characters.

   21 BEACON STREET aired on NBC from July 2 to September 10 1959. PI Dennis Chase (Dennis Morgan) worked with a group of specialists to solve crime. Reportedly the series producers sued MISSION IMPOSSIBLE for stealing its idea (or one of its characters). It also may be the first TV series with a female license PI (Joanna Barnes as Lola).

   ADVENTURE SHOWCASE aired on CBS on Tuesday during the summer of 1959. The series featured four failed pilots, one airing each week. IMDb gives details of three of the four titles – BROCK CALLAHAN (episode title “Silent Kill” and starred Ken Clark, written by Stirling Silliphant and directed by Don Siegel), JOHNNY NIGHTHAWK, a lover of adventure and professional pilot with his own plane (starred Scott Brady, written by Tony Barrett and directed by Oscar Rudolph), WAR CORRESPONDENT (starring Gene Barry as Sgt Pike, written by Otis Carney and directed by Christian Nyby).

   All sound interesting, but I am a fan of writer Sam Rolfe, and he apparently wrote the second week’s failed pilot of which almost nothing is known – not plot, characters, cast, nor title — and that is what I am searching for. Santa knows all — including collectors never pick the easy ones.

   Speaking of challenges, number one on my wish list (and bucket list … I did say I was a collector) is THE LONG HUNT OF APRIL SAVAGE. The TV Movie pilot was written by Sam Rolfe, and may have had the episode title of “Home is an Empty Grave.” Everything about this show is intriguing. The pilot sold and the series was on the proposed ABC’s 1966-67 schedule. The premise was ahead of its time. Robert Lansing starred in the Western as April Savage. Savage’s family had been killed by eight men and during the series he would search for each to kill them.

   Similar to today’s arc stories Savage would find the killers one at a time over the period of the series, or so it was planned. But there were behind the scenes problems, and reportedly Rolfe quit and the show fell apart, so ABC quickly turned to another pilot also with Lansing called THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS. (A review of a made-for-TV movie cobbled together from edited episodes of THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS can be found here.)

   Sometimes you wonder how a TV series with such great talent involved could disappear, an example of this is ABC’s STONE. The series aired January 14, 1980 to March 17, 1980. It was created by Stephen Cannell (ROCKFORD FILES), Richard Levinson and William Link (COLUMBO) and produced by Cannell for Universal Television. It starred Dennis Weaver (McCLOUD) a cop who writes a best seller that affects his work on the police force.

   DETECTIVE IN THE HOUSE aired on CBS between March 15 and April 19, 1985, and starred Judd Hirsch as a successful engineer who quits to become a PI and is tutored by a retired PI played by Jack Elam. This hour-long drama may have had Howard Duff in an episode or two. I wanna see Elam as a PI in a “drama.”

   LEAVING L.A. aired on ABC from April 12, 1997 to June 14, 1997. The series was about an odd group of people working at the Los Angeles morgue. The cast included Christopher Meloni, Ron Rifkin, Allison Bertolino and Hilary Swank (pre-Oscar). Someday this one will pop up somewhere and since Santa is always watching, maybe he will tell me if I’ve been good.

   Sometimes just a clip from a forgotten/lost series can add it to the wish list. Here are a few series that made Santa’s list with only a clip or theme song.

   MONTY NASH was a syndicated TV series based on a series of books by Richard Telfair. Harry Guardino played government investigator Monty Nash in this half hour series that aired in 1971.

   KINGSTON: CONFIDENTIAL starred Raymond Burr as a rich communication mogul who liked to fight crime. This NBC series aired first as a successful TV Movie called KINGSTON in 1976. The series lasted 13 episodes from March 23, 1977 to August 10, 1977.

   VERONICA CLARE was on Lifetime network from July 23 1991 to September 17, 1991. Veronica was an owner of a jazz club in L.A.’s Chinatown and doubled as a PI with a 40’s style. While the clip’s audio is near unlistenable, the video shows the series neo-noir style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iryLt679SrY

   BLACK TIE AFFAIR was originally called SMOLDERING LUST until NBC changed it over creator/producer Jay Tarses objections. Tarses is known for his comedy work (THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, BUFFALO BILL). In this series Tarses created his version of the PI mystery. The series aired from May 29 to June 19, 1993, and starred Bradley Whitford and Kate Capshaw. Once the series changed its name to BLACK TIE AFFAIR the theme would lose its lyrics but here is the original theme with its lyrics.

   Now comes the horrible moment I remember as a kid. I am only half way into the Sears Christmas catalog, and I realize my list is too long. I could make Santa mad by asking for too much — aka all I really really need. But I am an adult now, and I no longer have to depend on the kindness of others. I can continue to shop until it is time to give Santa yet one more try next year. Ho ho ho everyone.

WEIRD TALES, September 1935. The cover of this issue includes one of artist Margaret Brundage’s beautiful nudes for which she was well-known, and still is, for that matter. It illustrates the first story, “The Blue Woman,” by John Scott Douglas, which puzzled me right then and there, since the woman on the cover is not blue, but a beautiful and entirely natural shade of pink.

   I’m sure it helped sell a lot of copies of this issue, though. The story itself is not very good, though, and one wonders why Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales at the time, chose it to be the lead story. There is a pseudo-scientific reason why the woman is blue, and the observant reader will put two and two together within the first page or so of the story, as soon as it learned that the wife of wood-carver Ludwig Meusel was released from her job at a watch factory with a large payment of cash and a diagnosis of a fatal illness.

   A lanky red-headed private eye named Ken Keith is brought into the case of murder that develops, which he solves with not too much effort. I do not know whether Keith appeared in the two earlier stories by Douglas that appeared in Weird Tales, but if not, perhaps he showed up in one of other roughly 350 stories Douglas also wrote for the aviation, adventure, detective and sports pulp magazines over the course of his writing career. Well, probably not the sports pulps.

   The second story in this issue, “The Carnival of Death,” by Arlton Eadie, doesn’t so indicate it, until the end, when surprise! I discovered that it’s the first of four parts. I really hate it when that happens. It’s about mummies, ancient Egypt and a present day curse, and I’d love to able to finish it, but alas, my collection of Weird Tales isn’t extensive enough to do so.

   The novel was published in its entirety by a British publisher but is impossibly difficult to find. Ramble House has published a restored edition of The Trail of the Cloven Hoof, another of Eadie’s novels serialized in Weird Tales the year before (1934), but so far, although promised, they don’t don’t seem to have found a copy of this one to use.

    “The Man Who Chained the Lightning,” by Paul Ernst, is the second of eight adventures of Doctor Satan to appear in Weird Tales, and the story is more one of horror and the grotesque than weird, per se. Doctor Satan was one of the earliest and perhaps the longest-running of the pulp super-villains. His genius could have been put good use for the world, but instead he dressed in a red rubber suit and a cap with horns and used his fabulous inventions for the commonest of crimes.

   In this story he uses electricity both to kill and to re-animate corpses to steal funds from the bank accounts of the city’s wealthiest men. Opposing him in this case is equally brilliant Ascott Keane and his more-than-secretary Beatrice Dale. Dr. Satan is foiled this time, but the image of his naked captives cooped up in cages too small for them will stay with me for a long time.

   Before moving on, it should be noted that all eight of Dr. Satan stories have been collected any published in a single volume by Altus Press (2013).

   I have always associated the name of Clark Ashton Smith with fantasy fiction, infused with the essence of poetry and the ebullience and brilliance of descriptive writing. The story “Vulthoom” is science fiction, however, but with no diminishment in the use of words to produce an almost overpowering sense of wonder.

   Two men who find themselves in impoverished circumstances on Mars are invited to work for an immortal being, Vulthoom, having arrived from another planet millions of years ago and now living miles beneath the surface of the red planet, to help pave the way for him to conquer Earth. They resist, but trying to escape and after making their way through miles of underground tunnels and caves, they….

   If the opportunity ever comes your way, read this one. As well as later in other collections, it first appeared in Genius Loci and Other Tales (Arkham House, 1948).

   Next is the conclusion of “Satan in Exile,” by Arthur William Bernal, a novel serialized in four parts. I did not read it, but the synopsis suggests that it is a science fiction story about Prince Satan, a pirate or bandit of the interplanetary spaceways, with a nod toward Robin Hood. It has never been reprinted in complete form, nor can I suggest whether or not someone should.

    “The Shambler from the Stars,” which follows, is a short story by Robert Bloch, and a rather famous one which is dedicated to a certain H. P. Lovecraft. Translating a ancient book from the Latin, while visiting an eccentric expert in the occult living in Providence, Rhode Island, the narrator manages to summon a strange vampire-like being from space. Here’s an excerpt:

   Two short short stories follow next. The first, “One Chance,” by Ethel Helene Coen, takes place in a plague-invested 18th century New Orleans and has a very effective O.Henry type twist. The second, “The Toad Goad,” by Kirk Mashburn, is a rather ordinary tale about an Aztec artifact collector in Mexico who removes a sacred object he shouldn’t.

    “The Monster God of Mamurth,” by Edmond Hamilton, is a reprint from the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales (shown to the right). In this an archaeologist seeking ruins of ancient Carthage comes across city in ruins inside an invisible wall and guarded (for so he discovers once inside) by a giant invisible spider-like creature. Variations on a theme, but an effectively creepy one when in the right hands, as it is here. (Remarkably, as I have later discovered, it is the first of Hamilton’s many works of science fiction or fantasy to be published.)

    “Return of Orrin Mannering,” by Kenneth Wood, and the last story in this issue, is a ghost story less than two pages long about how a desperate killer fugitive is brought back to justice. A filler, but smooth enough going down.

   By this time, after all of capsule summaries and associated commentary, you will have realized that for the relatively steep price of 25 cents in 1935, readers really got a lot for their money. Not all the stories were gems, but how much ordinary, mundane non-genre short fiction from the the same year is still as readable today?