The talent of artist Alex Raymond.

Alex Raymond: An Artistic Journey—
Adventure, Intrigue, and Romance
by Ron Goulart

On the Goodman Games website Joshua LH Burnett offers a profile of Alex Raymond (1909–56), the artist of the comic strips Secret Agent X-9 (written by Dashiell Hammett), Flash Gordon, and private detective Rip Kirby.

Hammett's Secret Agent X-9 on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Lloyd Bridges in
Secret Agent X-9 (1945)

This week, a dramatization of Secret Agent X-9—originally a comic-strip collaboration between Dashiell Hammett and artist Alex Raymond— airs on BBC Radio 4 Extra, starring Connie Booth. Episodes usually may be heard for up to a week after broadcast.

In Continental Op news, Hammett's Red Harvest was selected as part of the Library of Congress' "Books That Shaped America" exhibition.

WWII-era cartoonists: "Eat right to work and win."

This 1942 comic book, available through the University of Nebraska libraries, featured prominent cartoonists telling the American public how they should eat to foster the war effort. Chic Young's Dagwood partakes of one of his famous sandwiches, Alex Raymond 's Flash Gordon "eats plenty of meat," and Lee Falk and Ray Moore's The Phantom advises us that we should have a good breakfast. (Note that Alex Raymond was the cartoonist on Secret Agent X-9, teamed up with Dashiell Hammett).

(Hat tip to the AHA blog. About the image: The well-fed Phantom, by Lee Falk and Ray Moore)

More items from LOC.

More interesting items I've found from the Library of Congress:

• 1934 panel from the comic strip Secret Agent X-9 (text by Dashiell Hammett; art by Alex Raymond).

• "Hungarian Baroness Scores Success as Authoress," on Baroness Orczy, from the December 24, 1905, issue of the San Francisco Call, in which the baroness reveals that she reads Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, Georg Ebers, and Bret Harte.

• A promotion for the upcoming serialization of Anna Katharine Green's Lost Man's Lane in the January 2, 1898, St. Paul Globe, in which Green talks about her writing philosophy: "I look for the naturally unexpected, and when I have found such a treasure, I take pencil in hand and take the 'dear reader' into my confidence and tell him or her just what, in my estimation, will induce him or her to go on."

About the photo: Anna Katharine Green, taken bet. 1870 and 1890. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

75 years ago today: Dashiell Hammett and Secret Agent X-9.

Among the neat photos in the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection is this one of Dashiell Hammett toasting the creation of his comic strip Secret Agent X-9 on February 5, 1934, with co-creator Alex Raymond, Rube Goldberg, Chic Young (the creator of Blondie), and others.

About the photo: DVD of Secret Agent X-9 (1945), starring Lloyd Bridges and Keye Luke.