Adventure Tales #4

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Seabury Quinn. Adventure Tales #4

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ADVENTURE TALES (SPRING 2007 / Vol. 1, No. 4)

As I reported in the second issue of Adventure Tales, Rich Harvey’s annual pulp convention, PulpAdventurecon, is my favorite convention. (I don’t get out much, but I make a point of attending this one every year.) The one-day event is primarily a dealers’ room (this year it overflowed into two rooms) where attendees wander around, shopping for pulp magazines, books, and other vintage collectibles while chatting. Wild­side Press usually has a dealer’s table, and this year I brought my older son, Ian (age 12). My wife predicted that he would be bored, but she was 100% wrong—he loved every aspect of the show. He decided to collect memorabilia featuring The Shadow, and although the original pulp magazines were out of his price range, he managed to pick up two post­ers, a bunch of toys from the Alec Baldwin movie, and several sets of Old Time Radio records with adventures of The Shadow (Orson Welles is his favorite Shadow), Mandrake the Magician, and several others.

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“Very well, then. I’ll tell you. They’re footprints. Somebody who had been walking through the snow, before it was deep enough to cover the ground completely, was standing in that cabinet today. You can make out the heel-and toe-prints of his shoes, and here you can see where the sand and gravel has been spread out in a film over the metal where the snow melted from his boots. It’s a glacial silt-deposit in miniature. That dates his visit. It didn’t start snowing till nearly six o’clock this afternoon, and the ground was frozen hard as bed-rock up to an hour or so before the storm began. The temperature rose several degrees—enough to thaw the very top of the ground—before the snow commenced, and for the first half-hour or so the flakes were wet. This sleet has been coming down only the last hour, maybe a little less. So I say somebody walked through the snow just after it began, got a scum of sand on his shoes and hid in this case without stopping to wipe his boots. He could stand here and see everything going on in the room through the slits in the cabinet door.”

Dr. Nesbit smiled ironically as he shook his head. “You may be able to take a piece of skull and build a man from it, or reconstruct a dinosaur from a splint of thigh-bone, Professor Forrester,” he conceded, “but I’m not ready to admit you’ve reconstructed a case of burglary and murder here.”

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