Thursday, April 17, 2014

Crossover Cover: The New Adventures of Foster Fade, the Crime Spectacularist

This anthology from Pro Se features new stories about Foster Fade, a journalist, amateur sleuth, and inventive genius who works for the New York Planet newspaper. Fade appeared in three stories by none other than Lester Dent in the pulp All Detective in 1934. Three of the stories have crossovers. Derrick Ferguson's "The Cider King Murders" has references to orchestra leader King Mantell from the movie The Princess Comes Across and Black Pony Scotch from Otto Preminger's film noir Laura. Aubrey Stephens' "Voodoo Death" features a well-dressed lawyer named John Brooks, who refers to his brother Theodore and the latter's old friend from the Great War, Lt. Col. A.B. Mayfair. Theodore and A.B. are better known as "Ham" Brooks and "Monk" Mayfair, two of the five aides of Dent's most famous creation, Doc Savage. (It's worth noting that Dent's Doc Savage pulp novel The Invisible-Box Murders contains a reference to a New York newspaper called the Planet, which is presumably meant to be the same paper Fade works for.) Finally, Adam Lance Garcia's "The Black Rock Conspiracy" has Fade's ghostwriter, Dinamenta "Din" Stevens, asking her date to accompany her in helping out Fade, an invitation described as the equivalent of getting asked to join the Freemasons, Skull and Bones, and the Diogenes Club all at once. Since the Freemasons and the Skull and Bones Society are real organizations, the implication seems to be that in Fade's world, so is the Diogenes Club from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. On a related note, the town of Black Rock is also mentioned in Garcia's recent novel The Green Lama: Scions, which also has an allusion to the events of "Dead Men's Guns," another story by Garcia in The New Adventures of Foster Fade.

4 comments:

  1. You caught the connection! Actually, there's on more connection you missed. ;)

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  2. Dent's character Lynn Lash is also in the CU if I remember correctly.

    It's interesting to note that Ham had an English half-brother in the Doc Savage novels. So he apparently had more than one brother.

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