I first read the 1922 novel, Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue, in about 1959, after picking it up for fifty cents at a Houston Public Library book sale. It was sort of crime novel about a high-society chap with a butler and chauffeur who would slip on a black silk mask and then use his burglary skills to thwart criminals. He would leave little gray diamond-shaped stickers at the scene of his activities to taunt the police. As a result, his pseudo-criminal persona came to be know as “The Gray Seal”. He had a secret lair, the Sanctuary, and a second undercover identity as a junkie called “Larry the Bat”, which permitted him to get information on underworld activities.
The novel had stuck in my mind all these years, and I recently went looking for info on it via Google. (I was just learning lock-picking when I read the book, so there was a sort of emotional connection.)
One of the things I ran across was a Project Gutenberg release of [u]The Adventures of Jimmie Dale[/u]. After downloading that, I began reading through it, and it suddenly clicked that Jimmie Dale’s persona and situation were a lot like those of Bruce Wayne/Batman.
The author, Jeffrey Blair Latta, points out that the entire pulp genre owes much of its character to the Jimmie Dale stories. This includes main characters like the Shadow, the Spider, and Batman, but also hardboiled detective novels, like those of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. If you have any interest in the pulps, you’ll probably enjoy this article. Based on all the recent interest in old comic books, I figured there might be a few pulp fans, too.
When did New York become fictionalized as Gotham City in the Batman comics? Was it prior to the addition of the yellow oval on his uniform (which was the time of a major revision of the style of the series)? I know that the early Batman stories plainly referred to the city as New York, and, of course, Gotham is quite an old pseudonym as applied to NYC.
I got pretty good at it, but haven’t practiced in over 20 years. I even had good success with the (relatively) high-security Series 200 pin tumbler padlocks used by the Army. People were always losing their keys, and rather than cut the locks off–a real task, and a waste of a very expensive lock, I’d pick them open. Once open, there was a screw inside the shackle hole that let you remove the innards, so that the lock could be re-keyed.
It’s a lot of fun–more of a challenge than most crossword puzzles, but the downside is that lock picks are generally considered to be burglar tools, and mere possession can get you locked up, so I mostly just practiced at work while I was in the Army, and only brought them out occasionally to help someone who’d locked their keys in their car. Not actually being a burglar, there wasn’t much point in continuing with it once I’d retired, and all my tools have long since disappeared.
It’s a shame that a lot of skills, like locksmithing, are falling by the wayside. So many things arn’t worthwhile to repair any more. I had a friend who had a very successfull business repairing televisions way back when people had them repaired insted of throwing them away and buying new.
Was Doc Savage considered pulp fiction? Because Doc Savage was my favorite when I was a kid. Bantam republished the whole series in the early 70’s. I had 70 some odd of them.
Doc Savage and his five assistants.
Brigadere General Theodore Marley Brooks. aka “Ham”. The most astutue lawyer Harvard ever turned out. Dressed so impeccably that tailors would follow him down the street to marvel at how clothes should be worn.
Col. Andrew Blodgett Mayfair. “Monk”. The worlds greatest chemist.
A short guy as wide as tall with arms that reached the ground. He loved to harrass his best friend Ham and get into fights with 20 guys at a time.
Col. John Renwick. “Rennie”. The most famous civil engineer in the world. His hands were like melons of solid iron. His favorite pastime was to punch panels out of solid Oak doors.
William Harper Littlejohn. “Johnny”. Archeologist and geologist. Of course the best in the world. Emaciated with thick glasses, still a tiger in hand to hand. Liked to use huge words to annoy Longtom.
Major Thomas J. Roberts. “Longtom”. The physical weakling of the group though an electrical engineer of unparallelled genius.
And of course Clark “Doc” Savage Jr. A towering pinnicle of brawn and brain and inexhaustably rich. Though primarily a physician Doc exceeds all of his comrades in their chosen fields. The only man who could whip Monk if he chose.
In the fashion department he didn’t come close to Ham. The Bantam covers always depicted Doc with his shirt torn to ribbons, one cuff still attached to a wrist.
Doc had a “Fortress of Solitude” before Superman was a twinkling in his daddies eye. There he performed a top secret surgery on evil-doers that turned them into upstanding, happy citizens.
