The February 13, 1926 issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly featured four serials, including the start of Charles Francis Coe’s The Ranch Beyond, one novelette, four short stories, five poems, and a special insert that is a tribute to Frank A. Munsey, the founder of the magazine, who had passed away on December 22 of the …
Read the full post →“<em>Argosy All-Story Weekly</em>, February 13, 1926”
Boston Blackie is back, this time arguing for a sort of work-release program for prisoners so they can help with war production efforts. Of course, things go wrong from the very start, as one of the convicts uses permission to visit his wife and child as an opportunity to retrieve the loot from his crime …
Read the full post →“<em>The Chance of a Lifetime</em> (Columbia, 1943)”
The final Inspector Trent film starring Ralph Bellamy is rather a thriller than a mystery. A young woman out for thrills (Shirley Grey) helps a thief but soon finds she’s in over her head when the partners he was double-crossing come after the loot. Inspector Trent seems quite on the ball from the beginning in …
Read the full post →“<em>Girl in Danger</em> (Columbia, 1934)”
A delightful comic entry in the 1960s heist genre, with Audrey Hepburn as the scion of a wealthy family that has its position through skillful art forgery and Peter O’Toole as the man whom she recruits to help her steal one of her family’s fakes, on loan to a museum, before an insurance evaluation can …
Read the full post →“<em>How To Steal a Million</em> (Twentieth Century Fox, 1966)”
About 90 years ago, the July 25th weekly issue of the crime and detection pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly offered up a fair amount of entertaining stories, some purportedly true. T. T. Flynn’s The Garroters of Ghost Cove, the issue’s novelette, is a fast-paced story in which protagonist Bob Riley, breaking into an apartment, discovers …
Read the full post →“<em>Detective Fiction Weekly</em>, July 25, 1931”
Federal agents use the marvelous Radar to thwart crooks plotting to steal a uranium shipment and deliver it to a foreign power. There are multiple layers of crooks, with varying degrees of competence and all evincing a willingness to sacrifice others to increase their take. Fortunately for the Feds, they have their technological wonder device …
Read the full post →“<em>Radar Secret Service</em> (Lippert, 1950)”
Ivory is the aim of the bad guys in this Jungle Jim outing, in which the man of few words is sought out by an anthropologist hoping he will guide her to the forbidden Land of the Giants, whose territory also is the target of those after the elephants as well. The “giants” don’t seem …
Read the full post →“<em>Jungle Jim in the Forbidden Land</em> (Columbia, 1952)”
Bob Hope’s final starring feature film is a comedy thriller very loosely based on Louis L’Amour’s contemporary western crime novel, The Broken Gun. Scarcely anything remains of the original story, however, save for aspects of the setting; the differences are so great that one wonders why Hope licensed the novel at all. Hope has a …
Read the full post →“<em>Cancel My Reservation</em> (WB, 1972)”
An inventor working on a better means of transmitting and receiving television signals faces challengers, including lack of funds and sabotage, as he tries to find a market for his development. Fortunately, he has the aid of a determined businesswoman and her pal and of a science-loving friend in this fast-moving little programmer. The scheming …
Read the full post →“<em>Trapped by Television</em> (Columbia, 1936)”
A gangster newly released from prison decides to take advantage of the government’s war-related ban on sales of new tires to get involved in the black market, including making counterfeit tires with a synthetic rubber substitute. When one of those tires, an early experimental failure, causes a crash that kills a young woman’s brother, her …
Read the full post →“<em>Rubber Racketeers</em> (Monogram, 1942)”
