The Range Busters come to the aid of a sheriff (Steve Clark) facing a rash of payroll robberies, but matters get really serious when Crash is caught in an explosion set by the gang. A fairly well-crafted script has the obvious leader of the crooks taking orders in turn from an unknown someone else, and …
Read the full post →“<em>Boot Hill Bandits</em> (Monogram, 1942)”
While visiting old client Sir Henry Baskerville, Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner), aided by Dr. Watson (Ian Fleming), solves two killings and the disappearance of a horse. Professor Moriarty (Lyn Harding) and helper Colonel Moran are involved in the plot in this thriller, acting on behalf of a bookie who wants the favored horse to lose …
Dr. Robert Ordway resolves to take a rural vacation, doing some hunting and fishing, but soon finds himself in the midst of a typhoid epidemic — with woes in part attributable to an old-fashioned doctor’s resistance to modern methods — that has set the stage for murder as well. The story is a bit meandering, …
Read the full post →“<em>The Millerson Case</em> (Columbia, 1947)”
R.A.J. Walling’s sleuth Mr. Tolefree is called in by a man dealing with an eccentric family to buy a long-held antique, but not to investigate anything to do with the purchase, but rather to figure out the strange goings-on the buyer experienced while staying at the family home. Mr. Tolefree ends up a guest there …
Read the full post →“<em>The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas</em>, by R.A.J. Walling”
A grumpy and bedridden man is shot down while a storm rages. Which of his greedy relatives committed the crime? Or was it someone outside the family instead? A local clergyman investigates, using interviews with the various parties to discard the red herrings and eventually find the true killer, who is trapped thanks to a …
A mine owner in fear for his life sends for great English detective Sexton Blake (David Farrar), and the sleuth soon finds himself investigating murder and more. Hectic and choppy, with far too much going on to follow the story as it jumps around, but interesting withal, though the version I saw was also so …
Read the full post →“<em>The Echo Murders</em> (Anglo-American, 1945)”
Helen Broderick takes over as Stuart Palmer’s sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, here helping Inspector Piper (James Gleason) — with some good-natured rivalry, too — solve the murder of a woman who met her doom while taking an early-morning ride. Suspects abound, including an ex-husband, jailed for non-support but sprung the night before the killing, the ex-husband’s …
Read the full post →“<em>Murder on a Bridle Path</em> (RKO, 1936)”
A killer seems to be stalking a group staying at an isolated house along the coast, and Sherlock Holmes is called in by an insurance man to investigate, as the members of the group have provided for their fellows to be the beneficiaries of their relatively recent policies, suggesting that one may be murdering the …
Read the full post →“<em>The House of Fear</em> (Universal, 1945)”
My pulp magazine focus this year is on Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1926, ninety-five years ago. My aim is to read all the issues I possess (currently around 18) in the week that corresponds to the week the issue would have been available, bearing in mind that the date on pulp magazines was the date …
Read the full post →“<em>Argosy All-Story Weekly</em>, January 9, 1926”
Tensions run high when a troupe of performers takes a vacation at a Malibu beachfront house, and then a strangler strikes. As a girl who knows Jimmy tries to get his help, Charlie Chan ends up investigating, with the help of both Jimmy and Birmingham Brown, and with the aid of a state policeman (Kirk …
