BEHIND THE MASKA

It's pretty much all Greek to us.

We found this cool cover featuring a femme fatale pulling a pistol from her bag on the website Βικιπαίδεια, or Greek Wikipedia, and it’s from the very first issue of the Greek pulp magazine Maska, a publication that dates back to 1935. Notice the sneaky hand behind her? She’ll be needing the gun. Maska featured translated versions of detective stories from U.S. pulps, but over time also published fiction that was Greek in origin.

As far as this issue is concerned, here’s what we go through sometimes to operate this site. We wanted to know what the text at bottom was describing, so we plugged the image into a text-from-image program and came out with the Greek letters. We plugged those into a translator and they came out as “Dan Fohler – The Sign of Betrayal.” Then we searched high and low for Dan Fohler, and found típota. That means “nothing.” It’s a word we learned when we visited the Greek isles.

So we wrote a whole thing about needing a legit pulp expert to lend a hand here, then we had an idea. We used another translator. Opinions vary, yes? That translator came up with “Dan Foochler.” We were pretty sure there were no Foochlers out there but we looked anyway. Nada (we’re multi-lingual when it comes to that word). Well, fine. We did more searching on Fohler, got all Boolean with it, and still came up with a blank.

By this time we needed a glass of white wine. So we did that, maybe actually had a couple of glasses, and started fresh on this Foochler thing. How many translation interfaces are out there? Several, at least. So we tried again with a different one. This time we came up with Dan Fuchs. Bingo! Lotaría! This is the guy. He turned out pulp fiction and wrote a few novels during the ’30s, but also wrote or co-wrote screenplays for Criss Cross, Storm Warning, The Human Jungle, and Panic in the Streets.

So the first issue of Maska had a story by Dan Fuchs, and he’s pretty important within our areas of interest (and yours too, if you’ve read this far). So next—and pay attention to the intricate details of how our editorial process here works—we realized we had a bottle of white wine that needed to be finished fooching urgently. Since the hour we wrestled with this Maska matter is more time than we usually spend on posts (as if the regular typos aren’t a clue), for today we’re done as of this moment.

Greece, Maska, Criss Cross, Storm Warning, The Human Jungle, Panic in the Streets, Dan Fuchs, magazine art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 16

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanideâ€”not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juiceâ€”resulting in his death in late 1937.

February 15

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.