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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Monogram Monday: The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939)
Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) attends a party whose host (Morgan Wallace) is slain in the midst of a charades-type game. The victim had feared for his life after arranging for a rare gem to be smuggled out of China. The slain collector’s wife (Dorothy Tree) and private secretary (Craig Reynolds) are suspected, as they were …
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Weekly Reader — February 19 – 26, 2023
I finished two books during this week, as well as one volume of a multi-volume work and two pulp magazine issues. Books All Those in Favor, by H. Martin — a 1969 collection of business-related cartoons published by the American Management Association, this small volume reprints items that first appeared in several journals, including three …
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Sunday Fun: Repeat Business
Funny Friday: Bad Company
Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)
One of the strongest entries in the Charlie Chan series sees the detective (Warner Oland) racing to Germany (part of the trip aboard the Hindenburg) and the 1936 Olympics to catch up with a murderer and a stolen aeronautical invention before the latter can be sold to sinister foreign buyers. Two sons lend a hand …
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Wednesday Pulp: Weird Tales, March 1923
One hundred years ago this week, the magazine Weird Tales debuted. The “Unique” magazine is perhaps the most famous of the pulps to readers today thanks to its publishing of horror by H. P. Lovecraft and Conan tales by Robert E. Howard, but it encompassed many more authors and works during its three-decade run. I’m …
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Monogram Monday: Mr. Wong, Detective (1938)
Before the Charlie Chan series moved to Monogram in the 1940s, that little studio had its own series about a Chinese detective, James Lee Wong, who had starred in short stories in the magazine Collier’s. The first five of the six movies star Boris Karloff as the sleuth, an expert on many things, including Chinese …
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