Month: March 2023
Fathom (1967)
A young woman visiting Spain with a skydiving team is recruited to recover a missing atomic device that is desired by the Chinese and apparently in the hands of a notorious international criminal, but she soon hears many different stories from the competing parties. There are lots of twists in this lighthearted entertainment that is …
Wednesday Pulp: Top-Notch Magazine, March 15, 1923
Street & Smith’s Top-Notch Magazine started as a magazine aimed at boys but soon changed to a general-interest adventure pulp, lasting from a start in 1910 until 1937. The March 15, 1923, issue is the first I’ve read, and it has the expected assortment of long and short fiction, including serial parts, filled out with …
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Monogram Monday: Mr. Wong in Chinatown (1939)
The Mr. Wong series took on what I consider its definitive form with this, the third entry in the series. Marjorie Reynolds joins the regular cast as reporter Bobby Logan, always ready to bend rules to get a story and also eager to champion those she thinks wrongfully accused. She and Wong’s friend Captain Street …
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Weekly Reader — February 26 – March 4, 2023
I finished two books during this week, as well as one pulp magazine issue. Books Towers & Tortures: A Double Dose of Dexter Dayle, by Dexter Dayle — a Ramble House collection that brings together two British “Piccadilly novels,” low-cost lending library thrillers by an apparently pseudonymous author. Neither novel in the volume is good: …
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Sunday Fun: A Gentle Zephyr
Ride ‘Em Cowgirl (1939)
The last of Dorothy Page’s starring westerns for Grand National may be the best of the lot, as she seems more active throughout, making a daring escape at gunpoint and directly confronting the head crook, for example. Vince Barnett returns as comic relief, this time with a female counterpart. Milton Frome is rather lackluster as …
Funny Friday: Where They’re Biting
Wednesday Pulp: Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction, September 17, 1927
The magazine begun in 1924 was by mid-1927 being published under the title shown above, though within a year it would be renamed once more, to its most familiar title, Detective Fiction Weekly, which it would retain until 1941. The September 17, 1927, issue contains the usual array of long and short fiction, including serial …
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