If you're a Robert Leslie Bellem fan (I am!), you gotta love HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE. This issue leads off with a Little Jack Horner story by Jerome Severs Perry (who was really Bellem), followed by the Dan Turner story "The Lake of the Left-Hand Moon", a great yarn that was one of the first Bellem stories I ever read when it was reprinted in THE GREAT AMERICAN DETECTIVES, a fine anthology from 1978 edited by William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer. If that's not enough, there's a Dan Turner comics story written by Bellem and drawn by Adolphe Barreaux, plus a back-up short story by Ellery Watson Calder (who was also, uh, Robert Leslie Bellem). The only story in the issue not by Bellem is by the great E. Hoffmann Price. What a fine issue.
4 comments:
Bellem never met a roscoe that didn't go kachow. Love Dan Turner stories.
Sounds like a real keeper. Question: Did Bellem write like Bellem in the pseudonymous stories? What, you don't have the issue at hand? Well flag your slacks buckety gallop to the shelf and peel your peepers until you cop a hinge of it.
Bellem's style is toned down some in the pseudonymous stories. Like any good pulpster, he was capable of writing in different styles. After I found out that he had written scripts for the Lone Ranger, I kept waiting for an episode where the Ranger said, "Let's go, Tonto, hellity blip!"
Hey, I too read The Lake of the Left-Hand Moon in THE GREAT AMERICAN DETECTIVES.
Since then I've eyeballed a small stack of Dan Turner yarns, but that one stands out as the longest and most involved of any I've read.
While all of Dan's adventures are worth reading, many are short and have fairly mechanical plots that basically exist to serve as frameworks for a lot of dame-ogling and lunatic linguistic inventiveness. And this is fully jake with me.
I've laughed as hard at some of these yarns as I've laughed at any prose I've ever read.
Laughed so hard my elly-bay was doing nip-ups and I had to fight to keep from jettisioning my pancakes.
But I've always wondered if there were a run of Dan Turner stories that were more like Lake of the Left Hand Moon-- longer tales with more plot and more space for the author to spin a yarn.
Do they exist? That's what I crave to know.
John Hocking
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