The Green Ghost

Category

Pulp Heroes: The Originals

Return of the ORIGINALS!

Item Details

Item Name:
The Green Ghost
Item #:
gg0

The Green Ghost—magician sleuth George Chance—started out as The Ghost in the Winter 1940 issue of a self-titled pulp magazine, with a novel called, appropriately enough, Calling the Ghost. Over the next four years Chance appeared in thirteen additional tales, all penned by master pulpsmith G.T. Fleming-Roberts, in The Ghost Super-Detective, then Green Ghost Detective, finally migrating to Thrilling Mystery, and making his final appearance in the October 1944 issue of Thrilling Detective.

George Chance, magician sleuth, equals his mentor, the late Harry Houdini in the art of escape. He’s also a renowned skeptic and debunker of fakes and frauds, as well as a master criminologist, excelling in makeup and disguise, lock-picking, knife-throwing, illusion—anything and everything a top-notch magician knows. Chance courageously puts his expertise to use as a relentless crusader for justice, donning a skull mask to became “The Ghost” (shortly after changing his name to “The Green Ghost”), and aiding Police Commissioner Standish against criminals everywhere, solving impossible crimes. Chance is aided by a select band of six agents and friends who know his secret and share in his mission for justice.

The covers to the pulps that carried his stories depicted a character with a ghoulish visage—one that harkened back to Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. However, the stories themselves had a somewhat lighter touch. Our new stories in Moonstone’s Return of the Originals will match the mood and intensity promised by the pulp covers. The Green Ghost strikes terror in the hearts of criminals and even civilians due to his horrific skull-like appearance and his seemingly supernatural abilities.

George Chance has gone off to war, worked for the OSS, and is now back in New York City, taking up the mantle of The Green Ghost again. While he’s a little world weary at what he's seen during the war, he's not a damaged psycho vigilante angry at the world. He's still a hero. But now he has an extra bag of tricks from his OSS days to add to his illusionist skills.

And for the first time, The Green Ghost is going to face a few real supernatural menaces. We won't go overboard, but the idea of a Houdini-type skeptic facing the real occult, as opposed to charlatans, and how he responds to it, is intriguing. In addition, his companion Meriem “Merry” White had "flashes of intuition" in the original pulps, i.e. she's psychic. How does her skeptic boyfriend deal with that? We're going for a Mulder/Scully in reverse vibe here.

And of course, along the way, we're ramping up the action quotient!

This is not a reboot, it is an expansion and continuation of George Chance’s adventures, and he still the same Green Ghost. The original pulp stories—we’ve read as many as we can reasonably get our grubby little pulp starved hands on!—are treated as canon, and with the greatest respect.

Win Scott Eckert & Eric Fein
Moonstone's "Return of the Originals"

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