Crossover Cover: The Patriot Game

Department of Justice agent Pete Riordan investigates the sale of guns to the IRA. The seller is suspected to be Mikey-Mike Magro, who is being released from prison. Riordan suspects that Magro is also seeking revenge against his former colleague Digger Doherty, brother of Bishop Paul Doherty. Pete Riordan first appeared in Higgins’ novel Kennedy for the Defense, which takes place in the CU via a reference to Robert B. Parker’s P.I. Spenser. Mikey-Mike Magro, Digger Doherty, and Digger’s brother Paul first appeared in Higgins’ novel The Digger’s Game.

Crossover Cover: Artful

The Artful Dodger and young Abraham “Bram” Van Helsing struggle against vampires seeking to rule England. The Baker Street Irregulars also appear, and it is stated that their leader is always called Wiggins. Apparently the concept of the Irregulars predates Sherlock Holmes’ involvement with them. In the preface, A Christmas Carol is described as a biographical study. David, explaining how the Dodger avoided being shipped off to Australia, writes “By now, you are doubtless becoming impatient in wondering just how it was that the Artful was walking the streets of London rather than striding the deck of a ship bound for the land of Oz (an excursion not to be confused with his later unexpected journey to the Land of Oz, an astoundingly unlikely sequence of events that will remain unexplored for the duration of this history.”) The portrayal of Fagin as a vampire, and the revelation in the novel’s final sentence that he will later become Jack the Ripper, place this novel outside CU continuity.

Crossover of the Week

October 29-November 1, 1937

THE DEADLY PUPPETS

            A doorman from the Cobalt Club is killed by what appears to be living puppets, who are having a gun battle with the vigilante known as the Skullmask. The doorman received a tip from Reid, the publisher of the Daily Sentinel, who was in town for a publishers’ convention. Reporter Moxie Donovan’s coworker Fran Striker tells him that their paper, The Daily Star, will ignore the puppet aspect of the story because that is what Commissioner Weston wants. Donovan remembers covering “that gun fight on the pier that bronze guy had with those silver-suited guys,” and taking lead in the shoulder “when the hunchback in the fright-wig stopped the take-over at Grand Central.” Donovan also refers to a shootout at Chinatown in June which that Shadows guy was at.

            Short story by Teel James Glenn in Weird Tales of the Skullmask, BooksForABuck.com, 2009; reprinted in Deadline Zombies: The Adventures of Maxi and Moxie, BooksForABuck.com, 2010. The Cobalt Club and Commissioner Ralph Weston are from the Shadow novels. Britt Reid, the publisher of The Daily Sentinel, is also known as the Green Hornet. Moxie’s reference to the Sentinel as a Chicago newspaper is mistaken, as Britt lived and operated in Detroit. Moxie Donovan appears in his own series of stories by Glenn, which are collected in Deadline Zombies and its sequel, Headline Ghouls. Fran Striker is named after the real radio and comic writer who worked on The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet, among others. “That bronze guy” is Doc Savage, who battled a group of silver-suited villains in the pulp novel Death in Silver. “The hunchback in the fright-wig” is the Spider. A few Spider novels have action scenes set at Grand Central Station; Moxie could have received a bullet wound in the shoulder during any one of them. “That Shadows guy” is Glenn’s hero Anton “Dr. Shadows” Chadeaux, who appears in the books Shadows of New York: The Mysterious Adventures of Dr. Shadows and Manchurian Shadows. The incident in Chinatown in June is an allusion to Manchurian Shadows, although Donovan does not make a physical appearance in that story.

Crossover Cover: Rites of Passage

Bianca Jones’ captain in the Baltimore Police Department sends her to the Department of Mystic Affairs’ academy to receive further training in battling supernatural menaces. While there, she begins a rivalry with a fellow cadet named Karver, who is secretly a former demonically possessed serial killer called the Carver that Bianca brought to justice early in her career. This story is a crossover between French’s monster-fighting cop Bianca Jones and Agent Karver of the DMA, who first appeared in Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series before spinning off into tales of his own. Since Bianca Jones is in the CU, so are Agent Karver and the other characters in the Murphy’s Lore books and their various spin-offs.