#golden age detective stories

[fromthedeskofcripslock]

Some of Lord Peter’s best from The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

[darkhorse-javert]

New (old) detection discovery... Cyril Hare, (pseud). Writer of many short stories and about half a dozen novels. Just read 'An English Murder' from 1951 which has recently been reprinted. Really enjoyed it.

The author was, in real life, a distinguished lawyer, and friends with another Lawyer/Mystery Writer- Michael Gilbert whose two novels I enjoyed.

[oakendesk]

Guilty Detective Story Magazine Sep 1958

Wil Hulsey

[batbabydaily]

detective comics #68: the man who led a double life

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Crooks of the Waldorf by Horace Smith. London: John Long, 1930. Dust jacket illustrator unknown. The book recounts "the escapades of Joe Smith (no relation to the author), the house detective at the original Waldorf Astoria on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue (now the site of the Empire State Building.)"

Below is an excerpt from the book. It can be read online here, but can't be downloaded as anything other than a JPG.

Top photo: Stuff Nobody Cares About Bottom screenshot: University of Michigan

[stormvanari]

i miss drawing the angry carrot boy

[whalehouse1]

One thing I love about reading the golden age comics (besides the fact they go unhinged fast) is that it’s nice seeing Dick good at stuff other than acrobatics and being sexualized. The kid is a science genius (especially physics so all you AU ppl if you wanted to make him an engineer it’s plausible), aces just about every subject, takes foreign language classes (I think it was Latin, but I can’t remember for sure), is an ace slingshot user (it’s just hilarious to me that’s never acknowledged and he’s the only hero I can think of who has this skill), he is a good kid all things considered but is absolutely ruthless to criminals. I think it was Detective Comics 46 Where Bruce just let him pick off the riffraff while he dealt with Strange. And he does it in some of the funnest ways possible. Also not that it’s a “OMG Dicknis amazing in it, but I really liked Detective Comics 47. It’s messaging was super hamfisted but it just was a nice story, not amazing or superb, just a good one that reminded a bit on how Bruce was on BTAS which I will favor above just about anything.

[siena-sevenwits]

Are you a teacher who would rather do anything than mark papers right now/is freezing up from communication collywobbles?

Pro tip: Light two hazelnut candles. Make a pot of green tea, with some jasmine in it if possible. Go put on mascara, red heels, and a classy bucket hat - it need not be authentic 1920's. Turn on playlists that feel joyfully academic to you (I recommend the one at the bottom of the post.) Move out of the basement library and into the dining room where there is natural light. Say a prayer remembering not to rely on your own strength. Tell tumblr how aesthetically pleasing your approach is - boom. Productivity.

(I hope.)

[martyrbat]

anyways - so excited for tomorrow's themed posting,,, i know its a very short story that's only 40ish images and straight forward in narration but,, its one of my favourites :) i hope u all enjoy it too and tolerate me being extra annoying hehehe

[kindredspiritsandgoodomens]

"She was a spoilt child, and spoilt children are apt to grow up irresponsible, and irresponsible adults - by not facing the seriousness of their own actions - do create a dream atmosphere that affects outsiders too."

Nigel Strangeways

Malice in Wonderland, Nicholas Blake (pseud. Cecil Day-Lewis), 1940

[vintagegeekculture]

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

[oakendesk]

Guilty Detective Story Magazine Mar 1957

Wil Hulsey

[batbabydaily]

detective comics #53: viola vane

[luthwhore]

my very lukewarm take whenever i see people complaining about it how DC is bad now, not good like it used to be, is that every single era of comics from the golden age to now has had both good comics and bad comics and the only reason you think that older eras of comics were better is bc most people only read (or only remember) the good ones.

tynion’s batman and detective comics runs were relatively recent and were both excellent.

ram v’s detective comics run has been widely praised, and for very good reason.

PKJ’s action comics run is one of the best action comics runs in history.

the current poison ivy comic is incredibly good.

joshua williamson’s superman run is amazing.

mark waid’s world’s finest comic is like a love letter to the silver age, repackaged in a way that is easy and fun to read while still telling deep, meaningful stories with the characters.

i definitely empathize with people who are frustrated at their faces being fucked over by canon, but this isn’t exclusive to the last decade or so, and it’s frustrating to see people writing off the genuinely good books being published by writers and artists who genuinely love the art they’re making just because they’re being written now.

i promise you, there are good comics being published at DC. and yes, there are bad stories too, but again — there have always been both good comics and bad comics.

[lipstickhotchocolate]

Kind of want to combine my hyperfixations and redesign Stardew bachelorettes and bachelors in various eras of vintage fashion?

If I don’t end up drawing this, here’s my general vision so far just because (yes I am skipping the 30s and 40s because I don’t find them as visually interesting):

20s:

Penny. Her hair reminds me a lot of the pinned up faux bobs that flappers would wear and I think she would look AMAZING in a drop waist and cloche hat.

Krobus. His little trench coat get up gives me sort of 1920s Agatha Christie detective novel vibes.

50s:

Shane, because I think he would look dapper with a kind of Cary Grant and Marlon Brando hybrid inspired look? Like with sharp lines and but because he’s messy his sharp suit is ruffled after a long night.

Abigail. I know this isn’t the obvious choice, but due to my hatred™️ of Pierre and Caroline’s parenting style, Abigail’s story has always felt a bit like her breaking away from tradition, especially for gender wise. As such, I want to draw her in Beatnik style, with a black turtleneck, a beret, slacks, and huge dark glasses.

60s:

Harvey :). His fascination with planes means I absolutely have to draw him in the golden age of travel. I’m thinking a smart suit, kind of more early 1960s, inspired by the fashion in the original Bond films.

Haley. I would probably do a different part of 60s fashion to Harvey for her, more akin to the mid to late sixties Swinging London movement, as inspired by Twiggy and Mary Quant. Boxy mini dress, Gogo boots and a Bridget Bardot-esque bouffant.

70s:

Maru. The 70s were big for jumpsuits and women’s fashion got a lot more practical, which I think works well with her personality. I love Maru and I love flared jeans so 🫠 I also think I would give her big hair (I love her older game designs)

Leah. Leah’s hippie artist vibes work perfectly for the 70s flowery hippie fashion. Please put my girl in a loose fitting prairie dress or some bell sleeves. Her hair would also work with the long natural wavy look of that era.

80s:

Emily. I know her vibes are at a first glance 70s, but the style of her dress and her hair remind me SO MUCH of Winona Ryders wedding dress in beetlejuice? So the gothy fashion of the 80s with big spiky hair and mesh and craftiness remind me of Emily.

Elliot. Once again at a first glance 70s, but I will put this man in a late 70s/early 80s glam rock outfit if it kills me. With the massive hair and the sort of military inspired studded jacket and everything. Hear me out.

Alex: the 80s were probably the start of the jock character, and Alex to me reads like he could literally be a character in the breakfast club to be honest. He must be taken back to his roots.

90s:

Sam. In the 90s skater boy fashion was literally like… the thing, so this is obvious. Give him a baggy ahh flannel , a baggier ahh graphic tee and a baggiest ahh pair of jeans. And some fugly 90s man hair.

Sebastian. Not really a huge redesign, but I’m incapable of not drawing him as like a mall goth / early emo kid (yes I know they’re different but similar style roots).

[starlightshadowsworld]

Bsd except Kouyou had joined the Agency. Because she wanted to leave the Port Mafia. What if she left the darkness for the light and it didn't burn her?

The older man who got her out (like Oda with Dazai, like Atsushi with Kyouka) getting Kouyou out but he is killed.

The search for the weilder of the golden Demon beginning and somehow the Agency find her first.

"The Golden Demon, the killer of more than 35 people. That's you isn't it?" Asks Ranpo, he expected an older cold hearted assassin.

Not a scared kid cowering behind her ability.

Reminded Ranpo of another scared kid who was waiting for him at the Agency. Who the Port Mafia still wanted to get their grubby hands on.

He holds a hand out to her.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

The President would understand right?

Lil Ranpo: dragging lil Kouyou Akiko! We have a new little sister!

Lil Kouyou: We're the same age! And I'm older than you!

Lil Ranpo: Hmm nope!

Lil Yosano: I have a sister?!

It took some time to get the story out of her.

Kouyou was practically clinging onto Ranpo who didn't seem to mind.He even let her have one of his sweets and was shocked she'd never had any.

Lil Ranpo: That is truly the worst crime imaginable.

Lil Kouyou: I also killed people.

Lil Ranpo: I stand by my previous point.

Fukuzawa tells Kouyou that she will never to kill again. That she will be under his protection, and she will be safe now. Kouyou breaks down because this can't be real.

Yosano hugs her, tells her she gets it's hard to take in but it's true. They didn't hurt me, they won't hurt you.

Kouyou wanting to save people from the darkness like her friend saved her, like Ranpo and the Agency saved her.

She's pretty good at Detective work, at first she mostly helps Ranpo to reach his cases. But as time goes on she starts to take the ones he finds boring.

As her confidence grows so does her wit and reveals a kind, fierce and stubborn personality.

The three of them are just as stubborn and reckless as each other and Fukuzawa is so glad he can't go even more grey.

Oh yeah, she fits in well.

And she and Fukuzawa (who's basically adopted her as his third child) have the same birthday so there's a double birthday party every year.

She belongs here, and she's so happy.