The 1971-1973 British series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes dramatized non-Holmes stories of detectives solving mysteries in Victorian and Edwardian England written by contemporary authors. For Balladeer’s Blog’s review of the first episode click HERE
Episode: THE AFFAIR OF THE AVALANCHE BICYCLE & TYRE CO. LTD (October 4th, 1971)
Detective: Horace Dorrington, created by Arthur Morrison. The first Dorrington story was published in 1897.
Review: Horace Dorrington was a refreshing change among the London by Gaslight detectives. The wily, double-dealing scoundrel represented every reason that hoity-toity Britishers of the day looked down on the character of private detectives. Writer Arthur Morrison’s Dorrington was in the grand literary tradition of despicable yet charming rogues.
Peter Vaughan is nearly flawless in his portrayal of the suave yet black-hearted detective. In the opening scene – a teaser before the main mystery – we viewers get to see Horace Dorrington’s true nature.
He charges a cheating wife three hundred British Pounds for supposedly “buying back” her indiscreet letters to a lover who is blackmailing her. He cheats his unseen partner in the detective firm out of his share of the fee by having the wayward wife make the check payable to him (Dorrington) only and after she leaves we learn that Dorrington didn’t “buy back” the letters from her blackmailer – he stole them – so he just pocketed three hundred Pounds in pure profit. Continue reading
Richard C Meyer’s fantastic team of mercenary superheroes nicknamed the Jawbreakers are back in action! They’ve been called the new AVENGERS, the new JUSTICE LEAGUE and the new X-MEN, and with good reason. 
JAWBREAKERS: GRAND BIZARRE, the third installment of the superteam’s adventures, features never before revealed secrets regarding the group of mighty mercenaries plus the mind-blowing menace of the Grand Bazaar. Said Bazaar appears on Earth once every 66.5 years and is a more hardcore version of the kind of foes that the Justice League Dark and the 1970s Defenders fought. 
THE MATARESE CIRCLE (1979) 
As The Matarese Circle opens in 1979, Scofield has been with Consular Operations for 22 years, almost since its founding. A Harvard grad fluent in multiple languages, Brandon joined the U.S. State Department right out of college. After a couple years in the “real” State Department he gravitated to State’s covert section Consular Operations (or Cons Op for short). 
ECLIPSE MONTHLY Vol 1 #10 (July 1984) 
True to his word, the Masked Man (Dick Carstairs) has been at the side of Maggie Brown (his emerging love interest) each step of the way for her therapy. She is still at Frank Capra Memorial Hospital learning to cope with her new blindness following her injuries during our hero’s battle with the Joe Manfredi Gang last time around. 
THE Nth MAN (1920?) 
A MEXICAN MYSTERY (1888) 
THE MONSTER OF LAKE LA METRIE (1899) – This short story was written by Wardon Allan Curtis and was first published in the August of 1899 issue of Pearson’s Magazine. 
The pair of researchers begin to theorize that the lake reaches down to the Earth’s “hollow interior.” (Yes, it’s one of THOSE notions again.) They suspect that plant and animal species long extinct on the surface are still alive deep within the planet and occasionally wash up in the lake’s waters. 
Alexandre Dumas pere is synonymous with swashbuckling historical adventures like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask.
GEORGES (1843) – Published just one year before The Three Musketeers, this novel is not only a rollicking adventure full of action, romance and double-crosses but it deals with racial issues in such a way that you would have thought it would have been adapted for film four or five decades ago. The title character uses his sword to fight slavery! 
ECLIPSE MONTHLY Vol 1 #9 (June 1984)
The Masked Man (Dick Carstairs) is on-hand as Editor-In-Chief J Judah Johnson (a pastiche of J Jonah Jameson) assigns our hero’s reporter friend Barney McAllister to scour the city to see if any more members of the Architectural Terrorists are still at large. 
A PLUNGE INTO SPACE (1890) – Written by THE Robert Cromie, later editions of this novel came with a preface by Jules Verne himself. Scientist Henry Barnett, after 20 years of labor, has mastered “the ethereal force which permeates all things,” a combination of electricity and gravity. This mastery will allow for interplanetary space travel. 
In anticipation of encounters with hostile life-forms on other planets, the clique has also manufactured disintegrator weapons, with which they fight off curious parties of indigenous tribes in order to preserve their secret. 
PART THIRTY-NINE – Some of the Fool Killer’s targets in the September of 1910 issue of James Larkin Pearson’s Fool-Killer: 
*** “Republocrats,” as Pearson and his Fool Killer called the corrupt fraternity of career politicians/ career criminals who belonged to the two gangs called Democrats and Republicans. Today the term is spelled “Republicrats.” 
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