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Post by dem bones on Apr 21, 2009 21:49:45 GMT
David Stuart Davies (ed.) - The Casebook Of Sexton Blake (Wordsworth Editions, 2009) Eric Parker, from the cover of the Sexton Blake Annual, 1940 edition Mark Hodder - Introduction
Cecil Hayter - The Slave Market (1907) In the dangerous depths of Africa, Blake races to the rescue of an old school friend! W. J. Lomax - A Football Mystery (1907) Blake and Tinker join the England team to beat the cheating opposition! Ernest Sempill - The Man From Scotland Yard (1908) Blake has his first encounter with the greatest super-villain he would ever meet! William Murray Gordon - The Law of the Sea (1912) Blake goes down with the ship in his own version of the sinking of the Titanic! G. H. Teed - The Brotherhood of the Yellow Beetle (1913) - Blake grapples with oriental cunning in the form of Prince Wu Ling! Robert Murray Graydon - A Case of Arson (1917) - A master crook is at work but Blake is on his trail! G. H. Teed - The Black Eagle (1913) A wronged man is out for, vengeance, Can Blake stop him before it's too late?From the blurb Welcome to the breathtaking adventures of Sexton Blake!
For the greater part of the 20th century, the countless escapades of super sleuth Sexton Blake kept millions of readers on the edge of their seats. Together with his faithful sidekick, the youthful Tinker, and his intelligent bloodhound, Pedro, he stood firm against an onslaught of crime and villainy, defeating his enemies with his extraordinary powers of deduction, iron fists and unyielding determination. This thrilling collection presents seven exploits from his 'golden age':'Scuse me if i cut straight to the chase. After reading a review of A Football Mystery on the Skipper's superb Blakiana site, i was struck by an overwhelming case of the 'must have! must have's, but .... well, how rare must copies be these days? Couldn't believe it when Wordsworth announced they were including it in their Sexton Blake Casebook! W. J. Lomax - A Football Mystery"It's not football - it's - it's necromancy, sir." "Black Magic" said Blake, without the vestige of a smile."Woolwich Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Southampton, Derby, A Nottingham Forest-County combo - all the top football clubs in England have smugly lined up to play against a previously unknown band of travelling mercenaries known as the Crimson Ramblers, and all have been effortlessly brushed aside by embarrassing margins. Sexton Blake takes this particularly badly. In his day he was a tidy centre forward with the Old Miltonians (hammered 15-0 by the Ramblers in their first game on these shores) and, when it is announced that this bunch of all-conquering Spring-heeled Jacks are to play our national side, he resolves to expose them as a bunch of cheating foreigners before they can administer a humiliating trouncing to our boys. Now here's a happy coincidence. Blake is currently investigating the disappearance of Sir James Collier who went missing on the eve of Derby's stuffing by the Ramblers and has yet to resurface. Blake learns an interesting tid-bit. Sir James also happens to be Derby's best player! The second half of the Nottingham United vs. Crimson Ramblers fixture. Blake's crafty snoop around the visiting team's dressing room reveals that their manager, Howard P. Raymond, has a specially reinforced bag which he carries with him at all times and if that's not indicative of foul play then show him something that is! Meanwhile Tinker, Blake's insufferable boy assistant, contrives to get himself kidnapped by Raymond and his comedy-accented star forwards, Blitzen and Eclair, who dump him down the disused mine on the outskirts of Polworth village. Well, at least he's located Sir James. The story really ups a gear now as, while Tinker and Sir James are making a desperate bid for freedom (very neatly handled: all choking coal dust and claustrophobia), Blake spends an age combing Polworth for clues, only to be met with tedious anecdotes about a sheep and a missing bar of soap from every 'bumpkin' he encounters. Just as his colleagues are escaping, Blake is overcome and given a taste of "the living tomb", but bloody Tinker is on hand to rescue him and "when things like that happen to a man in the course of a few minutes, some little latitude in the display of emotion may be permitted him". Anyway: this sets us up just so for The Greatest Game Of Football That Was Ever Played. Blake, having discovered the Ramblers' secret, resolves to punish the scoundrels and, after weeks of training, is at the peak of his fitness and ready to captain his country versus the 'Ramblers. So as to remain unrecognised, he and fellow debut caps Tinker and Sir James, adopt impenetrable disguises for the game which is, indeed, a rousing and - for some - bruising encounter. This time, there'll be none of that malarkey of previous games wherein the visitor's keeper smoked a cigar, read the newspaper and put on his overcoat to keep warm, that's for sure. But can England possibly win and preserve their status as football invincibles? OK, so it's not horror: i cheated a little by quoting the "necromancy" line - the Ramblers' secret is nothing so mundane - but, if you like the sound of this one then, trust me, spend that measly £2.50 - you won't be disappointed. Over a week of no reading and both this and The Faculty Of Terror in quick succession. Talk about feeling all rejuvenated!
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Post by allthingshorror on Apr 22, 2009 9:24:17 GMT
so THAT'S where you've been...
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Post by dem bones on Jun 27, 2011 21:19:55 GMT
Mike Higgs (ed) - The Sexton Blake Casebook (Gallery Press, 1987) Eric Parker Leonard H. Brooks - The Mystery Of Glyn Castle (1923) William Murray Graydon - The Case Of The Society Blackmailer (1925) William Murray Graydon - The Crime In The Wood (1927) William J. Bayfield - Down And Out (1929) Hal Meredeth (Harold Blyth) - The Missing Millionaire 1893)here's an alternative Sexton Blake Casebook, a coffee table job reproducing the original magazine covers of the novels featured though, sadly, bereft of an introduction or any incidental material. Inclusion of The Missing Millionaire is particularly welcome as it is "the very first Sexton Blake story" and, reputably, unreadable. the Wordsworth book has done well enough to go to a second edition so here's hoping some of Blake's borderline horror titles (see Pleasure Derived from Objects of Torture, especially if your name is pulphack) eventually return to print.
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Chuck_G
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 32
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Post by Chuck_G on Nov 5, 2012 14:56:28 GMT
I just ordered this one through B&N. I've never read any Sexton Blake before, but it looks like it has all the elements I like. I'm a big fan of pulp adventure so 'The Slave Market' and 'Brotherhood of the Yellow Beetle' are really interesting to me. And dem's review of 'Football Mystery' is great!
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Post by dem bones on Nov 5, 2012 21:59:37 GMT
I'm ashamed to admit it's yet another book i started, fell hopelessly in love with, and all but forgot about when some new diversion presented itself. I hope you get the same thrill from The Football Mystery as I did. It's as wildly entertaining a ripping yarn as I ever read, and I really must get stuck into The Casebook again soon. Please let me know how you get on with it!
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Post by ripper on Nov 24, 2012 20:38:09 GMT
Dem, this sounds like great stuff! I haven't read any of SB's earlier adventures, though I did read a couple of the 1960s volumes, which struck me at the time as being influenced quite strongly by the then current spy craze--or at least the couple that I read did. Anyway, I'm very sorely tempted to shell out the asking price for the Wordsworth collection :-).
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Post by dem bones on Nov 25, 2012 21:03:46 GMT
Dem, this sounds like great stuff! I haven't read any of SB's earlier adventures, though I did read a couple of the 1960s volumes, which struck me at the time as being influenced quite strongly by the then current spy craze--or at least the couple that I read did. Anyway, I'm very sorely tempted to shell out the asking price for the Wordsworth collection :-). found another selection of pre WWII Blake adventures at the market this morning for 50p. In his introduction, Jack Adrian admits to preferring Baker Street's other top sleuth over Sherlock Holmes and from what little i've read of him so far, think there's a good chance I will too. Jack Adrian (ed.) - Sexton Blake Wins (Dent. 1986) Cover illustration by Sands Graphics based on an original Union Jack cover from 1927 Jack Adrian - Introduction
Gwyn Evans - The House of the Hanging Sword ( Detective Weekly, 10 Feb. 1934) G. H. Teed - The Treasure of Tortoise Island ( Union Jack, 17 Jan. 1925) John Hunter - Under Sexton Blake's Orders ( Sexton Blake Annual, 1941) Rex Hardinge - The Man I Killed ( Detective Weekly, 8 July 1933) Donald Stuart - The Green Jester ( Union Jack, 22 March 1930) Anthony Parsons - The Secret Amulet ( Sexton Blake Annual, 1940) Anthony Skene - The Box of Ho Sen ( Detective Weekly, 15 Apr. 1933) Robert Murray - The Four Guests Mystery ( Union Jack, 8 Oct. 1932) Pierre Quiroule - Sexton Blake Solves It ( Evening Standard, 23 Nov. 1936) Selected Bibliography/ AcknowledgementsBlurb: Crime classics from the Golden Age featuring the Baker Street sleuth Chosen and introduced by JACK ADRIAN
Voodoo menace in the West Indies, missing persons in London and a sudden death to the tune of Dvořák's 'Humoresque' are just some of the mysteries that Sexton Blake solves with cool aplomb.
Like his close neighbour, Sherlock Holmes, Blake has proved to be one of the most popular figures of detective fiction, and in this stylish collection of stories written by a variety of authors he faces a rogue's gallery of villains, including the opium-smoking Monsieur Zenith the Albino and the infamous crooked surgeon, Dr Huxton Rymer.
'The Sexton Blake stories display extreme ingenuity and an immense vigour...' - Dorothy L SayersJumped straight in on G. H. Teed's The Treasure of Tortoise Island as the most likely voodoo adventure, and looks like i may have hit pay dirt as the action has just shifted from London to the West Indies. Lady Richmond approaches Sexton Blake concerning her husband, Sir Henry, who, on a recent expedition out East, contracted 'Goo-nah', a rare wasting illness. Blake knows of only one living man better informed on the disease than he - the brilliant surgeon, Dr. Huxton Rymer. But Rymer is an evil criminal mastermind with whom he has locked horns on more than one occasion, although they sometimes agree a truce over Christmas. Through one of his legion agents, this one a man known only as 'XW 932', Blake arranges a meeting with Dr. Rymer at Irish Terry's, a notorious underworld den in slimiest Soho. Obviously it wouldn't do for Blake to be recognised in such a joint, so he and Tinker work on their Cockney accents, disguise themselves as "ugly blighters," and take to smoking "fags." Blake also affects a facial scar and a limp for good measure. The makeover takes two hours but "the means by which he had achieved the result would form almost a story in itself, and it would be injudicious to embark on an account of it in the present chronicle." It was a waste of effort in any case. A doped and drunken tart recognises the pair immediately and alerts the meanest villains. Blake draws his gat, denounces the broad as a lying hop-head and warns the mob, "I am a dangerous guy to fool with and you can mark me dynamite," which seems to convince them that he's a legitimate wrong 'un - until the floozy who started it all claws his face, ripping off the fake scar in the process. Bullets fly, bodies fall and it's only the intervention of the Doctor that saves Blake's skin. He may be evil through and through, but Rymer is a stickler for fair play and the rendezvous was arranged in good faith. He accompanies Blake and Tinker back to Baker Street .... to be very continued ...
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Post by dem bones on Nov 26, 2012 20:54:18 GMT
Dr. Rymer agrees to take the now yellowed and withering Sir Henry Richard as his patient and diligently sets to work on a vaccine. They relocate to Jamaica, whose climate, Rymer assures him, will hasten a return to health, but as always the evil mastermind has an ulterior motive. Jamaica is home to a deadly accomplice of old, the powerful Voodoo High Priestess and sometime Blake love interest, Marie "the passionate octoroon" Galante.
When Rymer catches up with Marie in Spanish Town, she's involved in a heated debate with one of her pawns, Captain Pearson who, having turned renegade to serve the fiery temptress, now finds himself surplus to requirements. When Pearson, drunk to the gills, threatens to strike her, the Doctor pounces from the shadows to settle his hash. Marie rewards him with "jungle passion".
Captain Pearson returns to England and runs squealing to Blake. Dr. Rymer and Marie Galante have exhausted Sir Henry's fortune and now plan to strip Tortoise Island of its natural assets to fund Marie's "secret Empire of the Blacks"!
Blake, Tinker and the snivelling Pearson set sail for the Kingston to rescue Sir Henry. Pearson being persona non grata, the Baker Street boys ignore him for the duration of the voyage, preferring to dine at the Captain's table. Pearson has made a bad situation worse by leaving leaving a note for his former mistress, taunting her over his defection. As the whole of the West Indies is Marie Galante territory, her spies will already be onto them.
So, our two stout Englishmen and true plus one weasel arrive on Jamaica with Marie and the brilliant surgeon set to work their "Devilish rites" and "every single negro on the island a possible suspect."
They sure as Hell don't write them like this any more.
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Post by pulphack on Nov 27, 2012 7:04:53 GMT
I have to say, the Dent collection beats both the Wordsworth and the Snow books collections of recent years hands down, as Jack Adrian really does know his stuff. Not just about Blake, but his Sapper supernatural collection, his Dornford Yates' Berry collection, and his Edgar Wallace anthologies that find stories not collected in book form (in one instance a whole novel that had been serialised and then rewritten for US book publication with so many changes as to be a different story) are all superb.
This collection concentrates on the key writers of the Golden Age and picks stories that really do demonstrate their individual strengths to best advantage. And of course it has a great introduction: did Teed really kill another Blake writer and steal his wife? Did Gwyn Evans really pick up a cheque for a manuscript that had one chapter typed and a ream of blank paper beneath? Did Anthony Parsons really dictate the decadent adventures of Zenith the Albino while travelling on trains to jobs as a surveyor?
And let us not forget that the estimable Mr Lowder/JA started his career as a young man by being gypped by Bill Baker when his SB novel 'The Abductors' was published as a 'Desmond Reid' (ie - 'sorry son, it had to be rewritten so here's half the cash') with nary a comma out of place.
Anyway, that links to Ripper's question about Blake the spy from the sixties (by the way, hello Rip, welcome back!).
When Bill Baker relaunched the fifth series in Mayflower, a lot of the mss were left overs and rewrites from the fourth series at Fleetway. So they were standard late fifties/early sixties crime, a bit like all those lovely Edgar Wallace Merton Park B-movies. However, that was in '63, and the Bond boom was taking off. Truth is, sales weren't that great, and Baker made a conscious effort to bring back spy chief Eustace Craille (who had appeared ocassionally in cold war thriller Blakes) and put Blake more into the thick of the spy boom. It didn't really work. Two reasons for this: firstly, no matter how good the books are read in retrospect (and the Blake spy books stand up to a lot of the spy boom novels), the character had too much history and baggage for old readers to adapt, and new ones to take notice.
The other thing is, you look at the likes of Martin Thomas, Wilfired MacNeilly and Bill himself, whose pictures used to adorn fourth series titles, and then at the likes of Adam Diment (of The Dolly Dolly Spy etc, and man most likely to before fading happily away)... They look like your geography teacher if he was Terry-Thomas or Valentine Dyall. Diment looks and dresses like David Hemmings. I once wrote a long and boring piece for Collectors Digest on this era (happily lost), but considering those images tells you all you need to know about why Blake the dolly dolly spy was a non-starter commercially.
(The books are well worth it, though)
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Post by dem bones on Nov 27, 2012 19:35:42 GMT
Chris Lowder = 'Jack Adrian' = 'J. R. Montague' but not 'James Montague' who wrote Worms. Finally it sinks into the dense dem skull.
Will certainly dip into more of the Mayflower Blakes in the new year, but these pre-WWII adventures are plenty to be getting on with for time being. As pulphack sez, Jack Adrian's author biographies are as wildly improbable as the stories themselves.
John Hunter - Under Sexton Blake's Orders: After emerging unscathed from an attack by the massed hordes of blood-crazed voodoo worshippers and their "inexhaustible shower of well-aimed knives" at close of The Treasure of Tortoise Island, small wonder that Blake fancies his chances against the Nazis. A lunk-headed acquaintance, Captain James Dack, ill-advisedly accepts a well-paid commission to meet a ship off the coast of Lands End. Dack believes he's been hired for a good, honest whiskey smuggling jaunt, but his employer, Morgan Sturgess, is involved in a conspiracy to spring a sadistic war criminal from the Belgian country house where he's being held prison. General Erich Von Grausten, personal friend of the Fuhrer, is "the incarnation of everything that's evil in Nazidom," and the Foreign Office turn to Blake to see that he does not escape justice. Blake duly sends the General and several swarthy foriegners masquerading as Englishmen to Davy Jones' Locker. And storms a U-boat.
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Post by justin on Nov 27, 2012 23:01:43 GMT
I have a confession as to who wrote Worms... all will be revealed in The Fanatic at some point...
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Post by dem bones on Nov 28, 2012 9:03:36 GMT
I have a confession as to who wrote Worms... all will be revealed in The Fanatic at some point... [opens mystery email] Bloody Hell! I always had 'em down as versatile, but never in my wildest dreams ..... Another killer scoop from the mighty PF and no mistake!
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Post by ripper on Nov 30, 2012 20:25:57 GMT
Thanks for the welcome back and that's really interesting information about SB in his 1960s incarnation. I see that the George Mann collection is available at my local library, so I have reserved it and will also get the Wordsworth collection. I can just about remember the Sexton Blake TV series from the late 1960s. I have no idea if it is likely to become available on DVD, nor even if it is still in existance. I do have a number of Sexton Blake collectors cards, with the front of each card being a single panel of a story, with, I think, 10 or 12 cards per story and perhaps 5 or 6 stories in the card collection. I think these cards were brought out to tie in with the TV series, but each card mentions that SB was also then featuring in Valiant comic. I don't know whether there was any connection, but the BBC produced a series of radio adventures of Sexton Blake, with William Franklyn portraying the titular character. I have about 12 episodes and they seem to be set contemporaneously in 1967 and some feature espionage storylines, whereas I seem to recall that the TV series was set between the wars.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 3, 2012 10:37:33 GMT
There are some clips of the Redifussion '60's TV series on Youtube, but it seems to be basically lost, like a lot of Redifussion shows. Some bits may turn up, as they did for things like Do Not Adjust Your Set, but I'm not holding my breath. That was my first memory of Blake, too, and I forgot about him for years after that before the BBC made Sexton Blake And The Demon God bout ten years later. This was written by Simon 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' Raven, and teetered on pastiche, though I'm not sure whether or not it was supposed to be. It was novelised by John Garforth (the second best Avengers tie-in writer) and published by Mirror Books, of all people! Both the TV series were set in the 1920's.
The radio series, however, was set contempory to its broadcast in '67. It was written by between the wars Blake writer Donald Stuart aka Gerald Verner, who had turned his hand to scriptwriting post-war and cheerfully recycled all his old plots (bringing them up to date) just he had with his books (half his total bibliography seems to consist of de-Blaked novels with the hero's name changed). He was a splendid hack of the highest order who knew how to keep it going and fling in a joke here and there. His son was flogging MP3's of the series a while back to interested parties, but 've lost his email. The disk I've got has 17 files, but one of these is just the theme tune. I'm not sure if there were more than 16 shows, but I've never seen more listed.
Franklyn is a wonderfully urbane Blake, and Stuart's version of glamorous Paul Dane is a woman obsessed with her weight who can't stop eating and is the subject of much leg-pulling from Blake, which probably says a lot about what old school Blake writers thought of Paula Dane...
There's a scene in 'The Intelligence Men' where Morecambe and Wise are in an office pratting about and in a line - as their MI5 superiors - are William Franklyn, Terence Alexander and Francis Matthews, who at that time were Blake, The Toff, and Paul Temple on BBC radio - now that's a golden age detective line-up to treasure. It always makes me smile, but no other bugger I know is anally retentive enough to get the reference...
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Post by ripper on Dec 3, 2012 14:56:38 GMT
It's a great pity that the SB TV-series seems to be lost. William Franklyn was, indeed, very smooth as Blake in the radio series, and perhaps he would have made a good TV Blake as well. Heather Chasen plays Paula to perfection. She has just the right voice to play a glamorous, sophisticated woman, and her exchanges with Blake and Tinker are funny, and as you say, she's very fond of her food :-D. I have heard re-runs of The Toff and Paul Temple on Radio 7/4 Extra, but to my knowledge the 1967 Blake series has not been broadcast--perhaps something to do with rights?
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