Super Detective Library
Entry updated 6 February 2023. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
UK Comic (1953-1961). The Amalgamated Press, Ltd. 188 issues. Title changed to Super Detective Picture Library from #155 (1959). Artists include Arnold Beauvais, Bill Lacey, Oliver Passingham and Ron Turner. Writers include Conrad Frost, Bob Keston and Harry Harrison. Cover in colour, strips in black and white.
About 30% of Super Detective Library's issues were sf (not counting Super Detective Picture Library, which had only one, favouring World War Two as its secondary subject matter). Each 68-page comic had just one story (see Graphic Novel), usually featuring a detective or other crime fighter (see Crime and Punishment). Some were original characters, others already existing: the latter included Bulldog Drummond (see Sapper), Dick Barton (see Dick Barton Strikes Back), Sherlock Holmes, The Toff (see John Creasey), Rip Kirby (see Alex Raymond), The Saint (see Leslie Charteris), and Fu Manchu (see Sax Rohmer); there were also adaptions of works by Frederic Brown, Victor Canning, Frank Crisp, E. Phillips Oppenheim and Edgar Wallace. A few were reprints of newspaper strips. These stories were mainly non-fantastic, though there were occasional borderline genre elements – such as Bulldog Drummond Again – The Final Count (#13) which has a contact Poison "more terrible than the atom bomb" (see Weapons) and a jet Airship. A couple of these issues might be considered sf: in Dick Barton Finds the City Under the Sea (#12) a domed underwater (see Under the Sea) city built by Hitler as an intended submarine base is now used by an ex-Nazi as his headquarters to loot the worlds treasures, using advanced Technology designed by a hypnotized British Scientist. Charteris's The Flying Saucer Mystery (#5) has a confidence trickster persuading a dying millionaire that he has contacted Aliens who can cure him. The conman is a scientist who wants the money to build a full-sized, working flying saucer that can reach Mars – and intends to use The Saint as a guinea-pig for the small prototype he has already built (which works, though it ends up going into space without passengers).
The initial eight indisputably sf stories (1953-1954) were standalones. The first of these, Men From The Stars (#14), has an immense alien sphere approaching Earth: a spaceship leaves it and lands in the English countryside. As the British government waits, South American planes arrive and drop atom bombs on the spaceship, which retaliates, exploding the bombs in mid-air, destroying the aeroplanes. The Aliens now steal a village, a railway engine, one of the Colossi of Memnon from Egypt and a ship. Pilot Rod Collins manages to fly into their spaceship, which takes him to the sphere, which is full of relics from many worlds: the aliens are collectors, the sphere a museum. The Rocket Racketeers (#21) features Blackshadow, a masked secret service agent dressed in black who is guarding a British rocket base in West Africa. Here, Dr Werner, a scientist who had become a British citizen, plots to sell British rocket secrets to "foreign powers" (this is possibly a reference to Wernher von Braun; there is also a physical resemblance, though Von Braun had become an American citizen). Another issue, Kidnapped by Martians (#23) has the self-described "master race of Mars" worrying that they will soon become extinct, leaving only their less intelligent but hardier slave race as survivors: they decide to invade Earth, eyeing its natural resources. Though they initially plan to kidnap some Earth children to train them as a fifth column, they eventually choose a more peaceful option; the more dubious elements of their civilization are not addressed. The best of these early issues is The Planet of Peril (#29): the first spaceship to the Moon is caught by the gravity of Thor, a small planet permanently hidden behind it; landing, the astronaut is attacked by giant, gun wielding radio-controlled apes. However, the real threat comes from a rescue party sent from Earth, two of whose members are murderous and more interested in mineral exploitation – fortunately the astronaut's girlfriend has smuggled herself aboard. Revolt on Venus (#35) is a lively Planetary Romance with two British astronauts finding Venus ruled by a kindly king, but with an evil Grand Vizier – who is very much the oriental stereotype (see Clichés) of that role. After Crime Under the Ocean (#36), where a giant atomic deep-sea salvage vessel is stolen by crooks for piracy, all Super Detective Library sf issues would come under one of two series: Paul Darrow and Rick Random.
Paul Darrow (6 issues, 1954-1956) first appeared in Dictator of the Deep (#42), where the liner carrying prisoner Karl Nemo sinks during a storm; dragged by the currents into an undersea cave he finds and enslaves the fish people living there, bringing in fellow criminals and using the caves as a base to sink and loot ships. Ten years later Paul and his sister Rita, exploring the sea bed in their bathysphere, are captured – Nemo has been following their career in maritime exploration and wants them to join him. As the alternative is death they agree, but look for a way to escape – they do so after allying themselves with rebellious fish people and destroying the base. The siblings' subsequent adventures involve a subterranean (see Underground) Lost World with Dinosaurs and cavemen (see Origin of Man), eventually gaining use of a subterrene to explore it, then later discovering Nemo survived and has taken over an underground civilization – he puts Paul to work in his uranium mines. However, Nemo is eventually defeated, to be put on trial by those he terrorized. Though solid, well illustrated and with plenty of action, the Paul Darrow stories do not really stick in the mind. Rita has little to do, spending nearly all of one issue paralysed and another imprisoned.
Of considerably more interest is the twenty-first century's "detective of the spaceways" Rick Random (27 issues, 1954-1959), a member of the "Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation". The artwork was by Turner (including two collaborations), save for three issues by Lacey and a couple whose artist is unknown; scripts were mainly by Frost, Keston or Harrison. Rick first appeared in #37's Crime Rides the Spaceways. Here the seven people whose actions led to the premature death of Anna Martin find themselves, under various pretexts, passengers on a space-liner travelling to Venus. Another passenger plans to murder them all: however, their first victim is discovered before departure, so Rick joins the voyage. He interviews the passengers, beginning to piece together the details of Anna's tragic life – then the Spaceship is sabotaged, forcing it to crash on the planetoid Logo, whose vegetation is mobile and hostile (see Life on Other Worlds). There are two more murders before Rick deduces the killer's identity – the culprit is engulfed by a giant puff ball shortly after.
The second Rick Random tale is Kidnappers from Space (#44), whose plot has two strands: one involving space pirates who kidnap an industrialist's son; the other has Earth and its allies preparing to invade the planet Urdana, mistakenly believing its been attacking their spaceships (in fact the pirates were responsible). Rick goes on ahead to reconnoitre and is captured: he learns the truth, saving both the day and the son. The Fantasy-tinged scenes on Urdana (with royalty, usurpers and winged horses) have remarkable artwork by Turner. Rick's stories can lean towards familiar crime puzzles (see Clichés) with sf trimmings, with others featuring him as a problem solving adventurer (such as #75, The Secret of the Ocean Planet, tasked with finding the British crown jewels which have been lost on an ocean planet) – some embrace both. An example of his more traditional detective work is The Five Lives of Mr. Quex (#64), where a multi-millionaire appears to be in five locations; in fact he is one of a set of quintuplets – the others were adopted, but on discovering their origins plan to murder and take turns replacing him; they also find each other exasperating. If that story might be retold without any sf elements, Manhunt Through Space (#90) is very different: though it involves Rick clearing the name of a women wrongly convicted of murdering her rich husband, it is densely packed with genre elements. These include much worldbuilding, varied Alien species and Archive, a giant Computer that stores all the known data in the Universe and is housed in the caves that honeycomb an Asteroid. Given most humans in the Rick Random series up to this point have been white, the presence of "the famous Negro scientist, Dr M'Bwango", inventor of a "thought probe" (see Psionics), and the Chinese prison governor, Lee Chong, is a welcome change (see Race in SF). This improvement continues, with a – relatively – greater multicultural mix of characters (including Dr M'Bwango making a couple more appearances) and the appearance of more professional women who play an active role in the adventures rather than as damsels in distress (see Women in SF).
The five Rick Random scripts attributed to Harry Harrison were The S.O.S From Space (#115) (though some sources have Keston as the author); here a 10,000 years-old message is found from the last survivors of a planet colonized (see Invasion) by the Ebloni, brutal aliens whose empire is still expanding in the present day. The message says they have developed a weapon that could destroy the Ebloni, though it was too late for them to use it. Rick and a team visit the planet, recovering an object said to contain the information – but find it stores the survivors, who can pass on details of the weapon. We are told it does defeat the Ebloni: though the story of the infiltration of the Ebloni stronghold and the assistance the team get from the subject species is good, the ending seems rushed. The Space Pirates (#127) has Rick trying to identify which of four suspects aboard a space liner is an agent of the pirates. In Perilous Mission (#129), following acts of sabotage and the murder of one of its staff, Rick goes undercover on a Pacific food farm that breeds whales. The Mystery Of The Robot World (#137) has the Eden-like Arcadia, where Robots outnumber humans by "thousands to one", enabling the latter to live in luxury: a small faction murder the Arcadian Prime Minister, blame Earth and demand war – as Earth's defeat would allow them to dominate the galaxy. Though robots will not kill humans (see Laws of Robotics), they will destroy machinery, so the war faction plans to release 5 million small robots programmed to destroy Earth's infrastructure, rendering it powerless. Though people do not isolate themselves, Arcadia seems to echo Solaria in Isaac Asimov's Naked Sun (1957) – with the robot elements, the story could be a tribute to him. The fifth Harrison story is The Terror From Space (#143), where Rick returns to Earth after a mission, to finds its government declaring war on the galaxy and himself denounced as a traitor. Joining a resistance force in the south of France, they discover Earth's leaders have been replaced by Shapeshifting aliens; here Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (1955) might have been an influence.
Other tales include Gold Rush Planet (#66), a western with futuristic technology and bar fights set on the planet Arizon, where gold has been discovered; The Invaders from the Ocean Planet (#83), where the planet Oceanus has two underwater races, one good, one bad – the latter come to Earth and begin melting the icecaps so they can occupy our flooded cities. In The Mystery of the Time Travellers (#97) Martin Hart, a British scientist's assistant disappears when working on a newly invented Time Machine: this leads to concern that history might be altered. Two glamorous twin Norwegian physicists are able to improve the device; though it is still flawed, Rick uses it to visit the thirty-first century to consult their scientists, who tell him Hart is in 1099. He is about to marry a women who would have married someone else: this begins to affect the future as all the descendants of the latter pairing, and their effect on history, vanish with often catastrophic effects.
Though some Rick Random plots are only workmanlike, many are interesting and engaging, with the 68 pages allowing room for greater worldbuilding and, to a degree, characterization than is usual in that era's typically shorter comic strip format. However, it is Turner's exceptional artwork that steps these stories up from very good to classic; also taking advantage of the amount of space available, he can indulge his imagination, particularly in the creation of technology and aliens. It should be added that Bill Lacey's artwork is also of a high standard. A final Rick Random story, "Riddle of the Astral Assassin" was serialized in issues #113-118 of 2000 AD (1979) with art by Turner and a script by Steve Moore. [SP]
links
- Comic Book Plus
- Grand Comics Database
- Grand Comics Database – Super Detective Picture Library
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