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 …

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: …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …