ENTRIES IN CAPITALS LIKE THIS indicate adventures forming part of the chronicles of the “Finest In The World” as published in Pisces All Media’s Science Fiction and Hero Pulp .PDF download magazine THRILLING MYSTERIES IN SPACE or in the new Pulp/Comicbook Print version GOLDEN TALES.

This timeline is particularly useful for plotting a campaign. Various historical persons can be slotted into adventures and so on to make the now traditional and almost obligatory cameos beloved of many fans of Pulp adventuring.

1875

Jack Wright born;

A group of prisoners from a Reconstructionist prison escape by balloon and end up on the Mysterious Island, where after many adventures they encounter the ‘Nautilus’ and Captain Nemo;

Frankenstein’s Monster reappears, in Ireland. His behaviour is not much altered although his demeanour is more reasonable;

Abraham Van Helsing and his wife Élisabéta are attacked by Dracula and his minions whilst crossing the Transcarpathian Mountains; Abraham survives, his wife is turned into a vampire and subsequently beheaded by Abraham. Abraham swears to destroy Dracula;

Mary Van Helsing gives birth to a boy, André;

Judge West discovers a deposit of giant skeletons in Devil’s Bluff, western Missouri;

Birth of satanic charlatan Aleister Crowley aka The Beast aka Brother Perdurabo;

Hercule Pierrot born in Spa, Belgium;

1876

After incredible acrimony that threatened a second American Civil War, Rutherford B. Hayes seeks to be awarded the US Presidency following a disputed result US election;

Mary Van Helsing dies of scarlet fever;

Margaretha Geertruida Zella aka Mata Hari born;

1877

Rutherford B. Hayes is confirmed as US President. The states that allowed this suffer the collapse of their state governments, and post-Civil War “Reconstruction” collapses, which allows imposition of racist segregation laws;

Hector Servadac and a piece of the Earth are sucked into a passing comet and he begins an interplanetary odyssey through the solar system;

March 22: Vulcan, a small world closest of all the planets to Earth’s Sun, transits across the face of the Sun as predicted by the “father” of Vulcanian astronomy, Urbain LeVerrier, who died shortly before the observation attempts began;

Ignazio Saietta aka Il Lupo aka Lupo the Wolf born;

1879

Political turmoil forces Marie Frankenstein out of her eyrie in the Alps. She voyages to America and sets up an estate in Texas;

Albert Einstein born;

Sun Yat Sen emigrates to Hawaii;

1880

James A. Garfield wins US Presidential election;

Frankenstein’s Monster appears in Scotland;

Billy the Kid active in southwest of USA. Amongst his exploits is a dramatic battle with a vampire and an encounter with El Head;

Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria born;

Birth of Peter Morello aka The Clutching Hand;

Birth of Cesare Mori aka The Mafia-Smasher;

1881

The Fantome de L’Opéra affair occurs;

James A. Garfield assassinated, vice-President Chester Alan Arthur becomes US President;

The James Gang raids Marie Frankenstein’s “Greystone Dude Ranch”. In the process a henchman of the gang is shot and killed. He is subsequently used as the major part of a Frankenstein type monster. After a brief rampage the monster is shot down and destroyed with explosives by Jesse James;

Gunfight at the OK Corral;

Nikolai Kibalchich designs a manned rocket ship;

1882

Robert H. (later Professor) Goddard born;

1883

Dennis Holmes born to Mycroft and Regina Holmes;

Eruption of Krakatoa;

William Frederick Cody aka Buffalo Bill forms his Wild West Show and begins a successful perpetual tour of the world with this entertainment;

1884

“William West Junior” aka Young Wild West born;

Grover Cleveland wins US Presidential election;

Dracula becomes fully active in Transylvania, swiftly assimilating local nobles and subverting the otherwise oppressive local civil militia and gendarmes;

Dexter Flinders Petrie, son of the famous archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, born;

Sun Yat Sen converts to Christianity;

Fabian Society founded;

1886

Robur the Conqueror menaces the world with his airship, the ‘Albatross’;

February: riots of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square;

1887

Copying the efforts of the Florida Gun Club, the Selene Company attempts to make a journey to the Moon but their attempt ends in a cataclysmic explosion that kills all members of their group;

Sherlock Holmes solves the case of a Study in Scarlet;

Solicitor Jonathan Harker is summoned to Dracula’s Castle as part of Dracula’s wide-ranging plan to move to the centre of the British Empire and take it over from within;

The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde occurs;

Chiang Kai Shek born;

James Griffin graduates with a degree in chemistry. Unknown to Griffin, one of his professors, Thaddeus Oliver, takes a copy of Griffin’s early work on invisibility;

November: ‘Bloody Sunday’ riots in Trafalgar Square;

Frank Griffin marries American socialite Joan Rains;

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded;

1888

Mad scientist Mr. Synthesis attempts to shift the orbit of the Earth and modify human evolution;

Jack the Ripper murders five prostitutes in the East End of London. Various detectives and police, including Sherlock Holmes and Frederick Abberline, seem to have failed to solve the mysterious serial murder spree;

Benjamin Harrison wins US Presidential election despite polling lower in the popular vote than Grover Cleveland;

Dracula is defeated by the suitors of Lucy Westenra, Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina and Abraham Van Helsing in consultation with Sherlock Holmes;

Joan Griffin née Rains gives birth to a son, Robert;

Birth of Peter von Frantizius aka “The Armorer of Gangland”;

Asahara Shojiku creates a porcelain robot geisha that runs on rice wine and is capable of over 100 different manoeuvres;

James Killgore II, 17^th Earl of Girvan & Ayr and his pregnant wife Alice set off for western Africa to inspect Killgore’s rubber company holdings. En route the crew of their ship mutinies, putting them ashore in the northern Congo;

Birth of James Killgore III, destined to be the 18^th Earl of Girvan & Ayr;

1889

Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of The Sign of Four;

The Florida Gun Club study Mr. Synthesis’ plans and also consider shifting the Earth’s orbit;

“William West Junior” orphaned in southern Kansas and adopted by William West (hence his name). William West Jr. begins his training as the ultimate cowboy;

William Withey Gull dies of complications following a stroke.

London is rocked by scandal in September when the North London Press first reported that a Lord of the Realm was a regular customer at a male brothel that had been shut down by Scotland Yard in July. A follow-up story in November even hinted that the scandal could reach all the way to His Royal Highness Prince Eddy, son of the Prince of Wales. Allegations of aristocratic and royal involvement were scandalous enough, but when the story accused officials of a cover-up to protect Prince Eddy, it creates a sensation;

Alice Killgore dies of fever. A few weeks later John Killgore II is killed by a Great Ape from the Mountain of Sleep. A female Sleep Mountain Ape adopts the infant James Killgore III. The apes attempt to pronounce his name as they have overheard it but end up calling him “Kigor”;

1890

Helen Porterhouse born in Baltimore, Maryland;

1891

Jack Wright, boy inventor, creates his amphibious plane and begins his adventures in Wrightstown (a small coastal town about an hour’s horse ride North of New York) founded by his deceased father;

Fu Kiang Shih marries Burmese princess Mang Seti;

Franco Costello, future “Prime Minister of the Underworld” of the American Mafia, born;

1892

Sherlock Holmes begins an intense period of his adventures;

Mang Seti gives birth to a baby girl, Fu Li Shih;

Fu Kiang Shih founds the Brotherhood of Skulls to resurrect Quin Shih Wong, “First Emperor of China”;

Scientist Orfanik creates a crude form of holographic camera;

Kent Allard born;

Duncan Wilden, a rapist, murderer and bandito, is captured by the town of Los Amigos in Texas. Wilden is executed by the town using their unique electrical execution chamber. Rather than dying, he is “charged up” with hundreds of years worth of life, making him virtually indestructible. The town imprisons him in a concrete pit;

Young Wild West encounters a young colt he names Spitfire. The horse becomes his cohort and steed for the remainder of their lives;

Wild Will, chief of the East London street arabs and expert river pirate of the Thames, is shot and killed by Redbird Vogel, the scourge of the street arabs;

Grover Cleveland wins US Presidential election;

Sun Yat Sen graduates as a medical doctor;

Birth of Richard “Speed” Dash;

Hercule Pierrot as a young gendarme in Belgium has to deal with a mysterious sniper and is stymied by officialdom;

1893

Utilising his Robur and Nemo notebooks, Engel Heart retards his ageing process through manufacturing a one-use anagathic “potion” known as “Formula Chi”;

1894

The most intense period of cases for Sherlock Holmes comes to an end;

Engel Heart relocates to “Little Africa” in Manhattan NY;

Japan goes to war with China over control of Korea;

1895

Frankenstein’s Monster appears in the Swiss Alps;

Joan Griffin née Rains gives birth to a son, Frank Griffin, Jr. The family move from Devon to Wrightstown NY due to the settlement incentives offered by the town’s rulers;

Sino-Japanese war ends;

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky begins his research into a rocket-propelled spaceship;

Nathan Kaplan aka Kid Dropper born;

Birth of John Edgar Hoover, eventual lifetime chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI);

Indecency trials of Oscar Wilde destroy the man and his career;

1896

Eccentric inventor Thomas Roch creates designs for the world’s first submarine-launched rocket-powered missile;

First Olympic Games of the modern era held in Athens, Greece;

William McKinley wins US Presidential election;

Birth of Francis Scott Fitzgerald;

Mad scientist James Griffin perfects duocaine, a compound that can render a living being invisible;

Doctor Sun travels to London and, after being the captive of the Chinese secret service for twelve days, is freed by friends and goes on to formulate his political reform programme for a new People’s Republic of China;

1897

Alexander W. Praetorius graduates medical school cum laude as a Doctor of Medicine and a General Surgeon. He immediately begins a travelling practice, necessitated by his unorthodox experiments in brain transplantation, reanimation of dead tissue and harmonic physics;

Griffin, the “Invisible Man”, goes on his brief rampage, ending with his death. The innkeeper of a tavern in Port Stowe where Griffin stayed retains a copy of Griffin’s scientific notes and later sells them to one Alexander Praetorius MD;

Birth of Salvatore Luciano aka Charles “Lucky” Luciano aka Mr. Satan;

1898

Submersible super-ship ‘Corsaire Triplex’ is the most powerful vessel in the world during its brief career;

Mister Sabin becomes the premier spymaster of continental Europe;

The monstrous humanoid known as The Claw is born to tavern mistress Zola and Tibetan bandit chief Mei Ting;

Enrico Caruso dominates the opera world with his performance of ‘Fedora’ in Milan;

Suspected missing link and murderous metahuman Louis “Pretty” Amberg born;

German company A.G. Bayer isolates, creates and markets morphine derivative “Heroin”;

Kigor finds and enters his parents’ campsite for the first time. Within the hut his father built he finds his father’s knife. Attacked by a mad gorilla, Kigor kills the beast using the blade;

Construction begins on the Paris subway aka Le Metro;

1899

Doctor Caresco, a mad doctor, begins his red work;

A group of wealthy Londoners led by the mysterious “Madame Romayne” form a secret cabal to rule the “Anglo-Saxon World”. They call this group The Cuckoo and create two villages, one in Scotland on land owned by the Churchill family and the other on the Cornish coast on land believed to be owned by the Harker family. The Scottish village, which is situated over ancient caverns, is turned into a partly subterranean complex in which the members of The Cuckoo live and work. The Cornish village is sealed off from the outside world and is used as a maximum security prison for the group;

Morlocks from the year 801,895 AD invade the London Underground before being exterminated by English mystery men and gentlemen detectives of the day with heavy casualties;

Boer War starts in South Africa;

The Itur tribe of the eastern Congo are exterminated by an expedition of the Belgian force publique;

Lupo the Wolf emigrates from Sicily to New York to run Black Hand operations there with his own brand of absolute savagery and terror;

Tesla discovers terrestrial stationary waves that generate electricity;

Kigor eavesdrops on missionary lessons and using this information and the books from his father’s hut he teaches himself English and French;

1900

Olympic Games held in Paris, France. These are the first modern Olympic Games at which women compete;

William McKinley wins US Presidential election;

The baby who would grow up to be the Iron Skull is left at the Ghost Man village in the Upper Congo by the mysterious Great Apes of the Mountain of Sleep;

Boxer Rebellion in China;

Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese born;

Lupo the Wolf sets up a public human butchery operation at 323 East 107^th Street in Italian Harlem;

Tesla formulates and promulgates a theory that interplanetary aliens are living amongst the peoples of Earth undetected;

Satanic magician association Ordo Templo Orientalis founded in Berlin;

1901

Pan-American Exposition held at Buffalo NY;

September 6: President William McKinley assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition by anarchist Leon Czolgosz;

Theodore Roosevelt becomes US President after assassination of McKinley;

Enrico Caruso performs with the Metropolitan company in New York to worldwide acclaim;

First British naval submarine launched;

A British lunar expedition under the leadership of Professor Cavor makes its secret trip to the Moon;

Fulgencio Batista, later dictator of Cuba, born;

Walter Elias Disney born in Chicago, Illinois;

Kigor befriends a bull elephant whom he names “Rantor”. Following a ritual dispute Kigor kills his Great Ape foster-father;

Construction of Le Metro completed. Numerous side tunnels and mysterious galleries are more or less sealed up, but remain accessible through hidden tunnels and secret doors;

1902

Sherlock Holmes solves the eerie case of the Hound of the Baskervilles;

Young Wild West begins his career;

The murderous world tour of “boy genius” Jack Wright begins in Western America from where he criss-crosses the globe in his airship, ending the epic journeys with a murderous rampage in Central Australia in the lost city of Karapras;

Charles Augustus Lindbergh born;

Boer War ends;

Russian researcher M.M. Pomortsev constructs solid fuel rockets with a range of 5 to 6 miles;

Maier Suchowljansky aka Meyer Lansky aka “Little Man” born;

1903

Locked in battle in his aluminium war-dirigible Eagle with Engel Heart who is piloting his Robur-airship Libertarian, Jack Wright suffers fatal electrocution, subsequently crashing his dirigible in the Hudson river;

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian schoolteacher and rocketry theoretician, publishes a report detailing the use of liquid propellants and the use of rockets for payload delivery and space exploration;

Iroquois Theater, Chicago, is site of worst theatre fire in US history. 602 people die and this leads directly to the passing of fire codes across the nation;

Wilbur and Orville Wright make the first official heavier than air piloted flight at Kittyhawk on December 17^th;

1904

Olympic Games held in St. Louis, Missouri;

Frankenstein’s Monster appears on the Azore Islands;

Although his part-Immortal nature will gift him extraordinary long life, Fu Kiang Shih begins his efforts to create an anagathic elixir for himself and his family;

Russian-Japanese War begins;

Mr. Bensington and Dr. Redwood develop “Boomfood” from the fungus “Herakleophorbia”. It is not initially known that the fungus originated in outer space, or that Boomfood caused monsterism and giantism. These drawbacks prevent Boomfood from becoming generally available;

Giant rats sighted regularly in the Thames openings of London’s sewer system from this time onwards;

Hercule Pierrot retires from Belgian police force as detective. Poirot sets up his own practice in Europe and meets Inspector James Japp for the first time;

1905

Sherlock Holmes apparently returns from the dead;

Dexter Petrie graduates from St. Barts, London, as a Doctor of Medicine and opens a small practice in the West End;

Publication of first of Einstein’s theories on Relativity;

Russian-Japanese War ends;

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel born;

1906

Frankenstein’s Monster appears in British Columbia;

Dennis Holmes, now a successful coloniser and bureaucrat for the British Empire, is made chief of all police forces in Burma. He uncovers the diabolical machinations of Fu Kiang Shih;

“Typhoid Mary” is found;

The Saxton Expedition to Manchuria on behalf of the Royal Geological Society discovers the existence of an ape-man monster in a block of ice and attempts to bring the frozen body back to civilisation. In the course of their trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the creature awakens as the ice melts, leading to a slaughter on board the train. Only Doctor Saxton himself and his companion Doctor Wells survive to tell the tale;

V.V. Karavodin patents a pulsating ram jet design;

“Lucky” Luciano emigrates from Sicily to New York;

Anthony Joseph Accardo aka “Joe Batters” born;

Ghost Men set up a village near the Mountain of Sleep. The village is abandoned after Kigor is forced to kill the chieftain’s son. Kigor discovers that he has now read and mastered his father’s library as well as having mastered the sign language of the Great Apes and the secret languages of the other animals;

1907

Kigor destroys a band of Arab slavers hell-bent on taking an entire tribe of Congolese prisoner and taking them back across Africa. Kigor also discovers just how much stronger than a civilised man he is and that he is an Olympic-level swimmer, weight lifter, athlete and marksman;

Margaretha Geertruida Zella aka Mata Hari joins the German Secret Service;

Kigor finds a hidden cache near his parents’ camp containing a locket, diary, map and sound recording cylinder;

1908

Olympic Games held in London, England;

Frankenstein’s Monster contacts Nikolai Tesla seeking his help to end its existence. Instead, Tesla changes the creature’s “galvanic” life energy, reducing the creature’s strength but also making the monster calmer and better able to reason problems out rather than flying into rages. With government officials hot on its trail he monster flees;

Tunguska in Siberia suffers widespread devastation and irradiation as a mysterious object that changes direction in flight falls to Earth;

A storm in Kansas causes severe damage and is also blamed on the disappearance of several people outside Kansas City Missouri;

Charlie Chaplin begins to appear on the variety theatre stages of England and then America;

1909

Theodore Roosevelt leaves office;

Professor Robert Goddard begins his research in rocketry;

Kigor encounters “Free Congo” mercenaries raiding native villages and enslaving Ba-Kongo to gather rubber for them. He kills the mercenaries and rescues their prisoner, a young American missionary teacher named Helen Porterhouse. He then saves Helen’s life by wrestling the lioness who was about to pounce on the beautiful young woman;

James Killgore III’s cousin, Brinsley Moran, is confirmed as the 18^th Earl of Girvan & Ayr. James Killgore II and III are officially presumed dead due to the perjury of the surviving mutineers;

1910

Charlie Chaplin’s (silent) movie career begins;

Violetta Hatton, aka Captain Manhattan, born in Brooklyn;

Would-be mobster Boss of Bosses Carmine “Big Red” Galante born;

Secret meeting on Jekyll Island results in the setting up of the US Federal Reserve;

Kigor destroys a party of French raiders but spares the life of their leader, Lieutenant Darnot. Darnot takes Kigor’s fingerprints and escapes Kigor’s jungle prison. Darnot arrives in Brazzaville and takes ship to Lyons;

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin completes his fleet of dirigibles;

1911

Dennis Holmes receives the permission of the Foreign Office (through the machinations of his father) to pursue Fu Kiang Shih wherever he might eventually turn up. The trail leads back to London. Recruiting Doctor Dexter Petrie to his cause, the pair begin fighting Fu Kiang Shih. Petrie first encounters his future wife Kâramanèh;

Chinese democratic revolution begins;

Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese moves to New York from Sicily;

Mexican Civil War officially ends;

American Aeronautical Society is founded;

Birth of Lionel Royal Exley aka “Paladin” in Kansas City;

Lieutenant Darnot carries out investigations and discovers Kigor’s true identity with the assistance of Pierrot, a retired Belgian police officer;

Following anti-trust racketbusting activities the Carter tobacco plantations are forced to create a new independent cigarette brand, “Llama”;

Zeppelin’s LZ-10 Schwaben enters service as a passenger service;

1912

Kent Allard enters the American Diplomatic Corps as what is effectively a spy;

Olympic Games held in Stockholm, Sweden;

Theodore Roosevelt runs for US President as chief of his own political party, the “Bull Moose Party”. An unsuccessful assassination attempt is made on him in Milwaukee whilst he campaigns;

Fu Kiang Shih is defeated and apparently killed;

Doctor Dexter Petrie marries Kâramanèh;

The passenger liner Titanic sinks with huge loss of life;

Saville Row creates the “trench coat”;

Cellophane patented;

Nikolai Tesla refuses the Nobel Prize because it is offered jointly to him and his bitter and imitative rival Thomas Edison;

Republic of China created by revolutionaries. Doctor Sun becomes its first President as well as the figurehead of the newly-created Kuomintang (KMT) democratic reform political party;

Royal Flying Corps created;

Founding of the Germanen Oder, a pan-Germanic pagan sect using as its symbol the “left-handed” Swastika;

Kigor and Helen discover the lost city of Shebora in the upper Congo. Shebora is the site of King Solomon’s Diamond Mines and its lost civilisation is guarded by grey-furred “Ghost Apes” as well as archaic soldiers and strange glowing “Death Women”. Whilst in the city having adventures both Kigor and Helen drink glowing spring waters that are later found to have retarded the ageing process;

1913

Kent Allard is assigned undercover to the French Embassy in Moscow. During this tenure he is of service to Tsar Nicholas II who rewards him with the gift of a unique ring set with a jewel known as a girasol;

Olympic chief Baron Pierre de Coubertin invents the Olympic Rings symbol;

At the request of his brother Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes assumes a brilliant disguise and penetrates the German spy network in England;

Kâramanèh gives birth to a daughter, Fleurette Petrie;

Civil war breaks out in earnest in China;

Jack “Jock” McPherson born in Aberdeen, Scotland;

Buffalo Bill sells his shares in his travelling show and becomes a performer and novelist rather than a show manager and owner;

James “Jimmy” Hoffa born;

Richard Milhous Nixon born on a sharecropper lemon ranch outside LA;

Kigor and Helen married in native ceremony in Kbanga Nkromo, the “Venice of the Congo”;

1914

Sherlock Holmes solves the mysterious conundrum of the Valley of Fear. He subsequently destroys the German’s spy network in England, capturing the German spymaster von Bock;

Outbreak of World War I;

Kent Allard becomes a flying ace and adopts the identity of the Black Eagle. He is also in reality an agent of a Tsarist secret service group called the Seven Stars;

German Olympics chief Carl Diem invents the Olympic Torch Relay;

Woodrow Wilson wins US Presidential election;

Yuan Shih Kai proclaims himself Emperor of China;

US Congress passes the Harrison Act to regulate and tax narcotics;

Zeppelins enter service with Germany as air bombers;

Bethane Sinclair Stewart, aka “Red Alert”, is born;

1915

French detective Gaston max foils the plots of the Golden Scorpion. The latter is a member of the Brotherhood of Skulls and is trying to steal the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau to use as the focus for a ritual to resurrect Quin Shih Wong;

Young Wild West defeats a group of German agents and saboteurs in Wyoming;

Balor von Wulfenstein, an Austrian-Hungarian vampire, agrees to try and assist German occultists in the creation of “Blood-Men”, half-vampire troops to be used in trench warfare. Wulfenstein is apparently killed in the final version of the creation process, and only a handful of Blood-Men seems to have been finished;

Zipper patented;

Lusitania sunk;

Commercial release of cereal flakes;

Elaine Reeve, assisted by detective Craig Kennedy, battles the evil plots of the black-costumed villain The Clutching Hand;

Lothar Hessler aka Lawrence Hazelton aka The Clown born in Chicago;

Birth of Frank Sinatra, favourite Mafia crooner;

Aerial bombardment of London by Zeppelin;

US Congress creates the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics;

Kigor is contacted by the Allied authorities and agrees to fight German interests in Africa on their behalf;

Hercule Pierrot meets and befriends Captain Arthur Hastings on the Western Front;

1916

“The Black Eagle” is a double agent for American intelligence whilst still serving with the Seven Stars Tsarist group;

Halley’s Comet reappears;

Gaston Max is killed on the Western Front during a German gas attack;

Olympic Games scheduled to be held in Berlin, Germany, cancelled due to World War I;

Child labour abolished in the US by Federal Law;

US Railroad workers guaranteed an 8-hour working day by Federal Law;

Frankenstein’s Monster appears in Seattle, Washington;

Blood-Men are used in the Battle of Cambrai on the Western Front, and blasted out of existence by the crew of Tank GB-HL-1;

Bernard Quartier born;

“Lucky” Luciano becomes leader of the Five Points Gang;

Bethane “Red Alert” Stewart’s mother dies in childbirth giving birth to a stillborn baby boy;

Hercule Pierrot arrives in England as a Belgian displaced person refugee. Aided by Mrs. Inglethorpe of Styles Court, Hercule Pierrot meets Captain Hastings again and solves the mysterious affair of the murder at Styles Court. Pierrot sets up practice in England, moves to 14 Farraway Street, London.

1917

The Smithsonian Institution awards a $5,000 grant to Professor Robert Goddard to conduct rocket research in the upper atmosphere.

November 7^th: in Russia the Bolshevik Revolution begins, destroying the Tsarist nation and its empire;

Dennis Holmes is knighted and attached to British Secret Intelligence with the code-name ‘Khan’;

Buffalo Bill dies;

Mata Hari arrested by the French authorities, tried, convicted and executed for espionage;

USA declares war on Germany;

Roger Stevens born in Hell’s Kitchen NY;

US Congress passes a draconian Espionage Act;

Bethane “Red Alert” Stewart’s father enlists in the US Army and fights in World War I. His daughter is left in the care of her Aunt Cynthia in Penfield rural NY;

1918

“The Black Eagle” fakes his own death in an aeroplane crash behind enemy lines. He then sets up a deep cover intelligence network for American intelligence, and escapes back over the front line to the allied High Command;

Fleurette Petrie dies of rheumatic fever;

Dennis Holmes aka Khan plots and successfully carries out the abduction, drug interrogation and unsuspecting return of a top aide to Canaris, his opposite number on the German side of World War I;

A series of grisly murders in Baghdad, Iraq is solved by retired Belgian police detective Pierrot with the aide of local police adjutant Ambrose Wall;

End of World War I, Germany agrees to surrender pursuant to the negotiated Treaty of Versailles;

The US begins regular air mail services;

Expedition to Braco da Infacari deep in the Brazilian jungles enters the Infacari region itself and encounters a tribe of white women. After savage battles the expedition survivors escape the region, eventually being discovered half mad and raving on the banks of the Carioco River;

Mob camp follower Virginia Hill born;

Professor Robert Goddard writes, but does not publish, ‘The Ultimate Migration’. This visionary work describes the exodus of the human civilisation from a dying Solar System onboard nuclear-powered colony ships;

Nikolai Kibalchich's design for a manned rocket ship was published in Byloye ("The Past") magazine;

Professor Robert Goddard demonstrates a solid-propellant rocket (the Bazooka) at Aberdeen, Maryland;

Ringling Bros. Circus offers Louis “Pretty” Amberg a job as a missing link in their circus sideshow. Rather than butcher the circus men Amberg boasts of the offer;

Walt Disney attempts to enlist but is turned away as being too young. Instead, he spends a year as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, driving bigwigs around and covering his ambulance not in camouflage but in cartoons and caricatures;

A worm unknown to science is discovered living in a crate in Rome. Before it can be catalogued and killed it disappears. Its discoverer is found, dead, of an apparent gunshot wound to the head;

Bethane “Red Alert” Stewart’s father returns from World War I as a war hero and a pacifist and becomes an archaeologist specialising in “prehuman” remains. He obtains a teach position at Miskatonic University, Arkham;

Ian Crighton Dalton born to Colonel Flinders and Lady Morella Dalton;

Colonel Flinders Dalton killed in action;

1919

Kent Allard is at a loose end after the end of World War I and wanders the world selling his services to the highest bidder;

Prohibition enacted;

Dennis Holmes is ambushed by Fu Li Shih and her Shih Fang cultists and killed;

Signing of Charter of League of Nations by agreeing nations;

Birth of “Heremond Dupin” to poor Flemish labourers. He is dumped on the steps of the office of the Vingtieme Siecle newspaper and subsequently adopted by its editor Rousseau Dupin;

Publication of second of Einstein’s theories on Relativity;

Professor Goddard publishes his paper ‘A Method of Reaching Extremely High Altitudes’;

Robert Goddard makes a progress report to the Smithsonian Institute;

The Clutching Hand sets up a front business office in East Harlem;

Adolph Hitler joins the DAP;

1920

Prohibition begins enforcement on January 16;

Professor Flaznagel assists Lieutenant Commander Triumph Kellogg Justice of the Royal Navy in his adventures against the Weed Men of the Sargasso Sea;

First radio station goes on the air;

Olympic Games held in Antwerp, Belgium;

Modern parachute and ripcord invented;

Foundation of the League of Nations;

Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees American women the vote;

Harding wins US Presidential election;

Australian schoolgirl superheroine ‘The Sheila’ born in Brisbane to “Scorpion” Gruder and his Filipino wife Sami;

Marlene Drake aka Black Fury born;

Earthquake in Kansu, China kills 100,000+ people;

The Smithsonian publishes the report it received from Professor Goddard the previous year. The published report, ‘A Method of Attaining Extreme Altitudes’, is widely misinterpreted in the press of the day as being a plan for a manned mission to the Moon;

Establishment of the Tikhomirov Rocket Development Laboratory in Moscow Russia;

Russian researcher Fridrikh Tsander proposes a STOL vehicle, which takes off under propeller power and then fires up rocket engines, which consume the onboard metal parts, no longer needed in flight;

“Lucky” Luciano and Meyer “Little Man” Lansky form a lucrative and successful partnership as murderous bootleggers;

Lupo the Wolf arrested on counterfeiting charges by US Secret Service agents Smith and Jones;

The German Nazi Party “DAP” becomes the “NSDAP”;

After an incident involving a firecracker and a trap pony it is decided by the Stewart clan that flame-haired “Red Alert” Bethane is old enough to be enrolled in the Starhurst Academy for Young Ladies outside Oak Falls, NY. From this point on she boards at the college and visits her father during school breaks and special occasions;

1921

Readers Digest founded;

Gabrielle Chanel releases her first perfume, Chanel No.5;

The Miss America Contest is created in Atlantic City with the purpose of extending the tourist season beyond Labor Day. Margaret Gorman, 16, is the first Miss America;

British-backed White Russian counter-revolution fails. Savage reprisals by the Bolsheviks follow;

Bessie Coleman returns to America after earning her pilot's license. The first licensed black woman pilot in the world had been rejected by American flight schools because of her race and Coleman had been forced to go to France to obtain her license;

Rorschach invents his inkblot test;

Enrico Caruso dies;

Hitler takes control of the NSDAP as its leader or “Fuehrer”;

Kigor discovers that his cousin has usurped his title. He travels to England to claim his inheritance and after many misadventures finally emerges triumphant;

1922

Establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics;

Kent Allard encounters a big game hunter and mercenary called Lamont Cranston. The two do not hit it off and in fact battle each other across Asia until they part company in Shanghai. Kent Allard hears about a mysterious Tibetan city-state known as Shambala, and sets off to find it;

Insulin isolated;

Automated postal franking system successfully invented;

Fascists take power in Italy;

Kigor returns to Africa and establishes a huge ranch in Kenya as well as maintaining a stronghold in the Congo;

1923

Amelia Earhart earns her pilot’s licence;

Herr Doktor Hermann Oberth, one of the fathers of space travel publishes his seminal book about rocket travel and exploration in outer space ‘The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space’;

Vice-President Calvin Coolidge becomes President of the US after Woodrow Wilson fall seriously ill;

Great Fire of Berkeley, California destroys 600 buildings, kills 60 people and causes $10,000,000.00 in damages;

Kent Allard, Fu Kiang Shih and an Englishman calling himself Akron Omen are amongst the many students of the Tibetan mentalist known as The Green Chief. The three men are his three best disciples. Final honours go to Kent Allard after Akron Omen retreats to a cave of ice for deeper meditation and Fu Kiang Shih is exiled for cheating during a martial arts survival exercise in the Valley of the Nine Dragons;

Teapot Dome scandal rocks Harding administration;

Doctor Alexander Praetorius is missing believed killed in a laboratory fire in Maine;

Interpol founded in Vienna at the behest of the Nazis;

Walt Disney starts his animation movie company with his brother in Hollywood California;

Construction begins on the “Hollywoodland” sign as part of a massive housing development backed by organised crime, movie moguls and realty speculators. Slated for demolition or erasing are local Indian sites and the Holly Wood Lake;

Kigor rescues a young Mountain Great Ape and raises it as part of his family;

1924

Nellie Taylor Ross is elected first woman governor in U.S. (Wyoming);

Olympic Games held in Paris, France;

Calvin Coolidge wins US Presidential election;

Modern paper egg cartons invented;

Leopold and Loeb convicted of the brutal sex murder of Bobby Franks;

Birth of Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, future mob boss of Philadelphia;

The Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel is founded in Moscow;

Tsiolkovsky's book ‘Cosmic Rocket Trains’ describes multi-stage rockets;

Russian researchers Tsiolkovsky, Tsander and Kondratyuk propose the use of the atmosphere as a breaking medium for the spaceships returning to Earth;

Embarrassed by Mafia excesses in Sicily, Mussolini orders the Mafia-Smasher into action;

FBI created;

Radios go off air all over Earth voluntarily to await any possible signal from Mars during the planet’s close approach. Signals received when translated seem to draw crude human faces wearing squarish head dresses;

Birth of Richard Reid in Ibsen, New Mexico;

1925

Caviar is introduced to France at the Universal Exposition;

Riot at the Hershey chocolate Factory over working conditions, hours and pay;

Kent Allard returns to civilisation after spending years in Shambala. He attempts to pilot a plane to establish an air mail route to Guatemala but crashes in the Yucatan. He discovers the lost Xinca tribe and their idol whose eyes are girasols. One is missing and it is revealed that the missing stone is the one set into his ring;

Earlydale in southern England is terrorised by a presumed werewolf;

Tikhomirov’s institute is renamed the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) and moved to Leningrad;

Birth of Ben “Big Ben” Brinn in Hell’s Kitchen NY;

“General” Maximus is hired by the Belgian and French governments to exterminate the recalcitrant tribes of the upper Congo and increase rubber production. He fails and is very nearly killed by Kigor;

1926

British Imperial Conference issues the Balfour Declaration establishing the basis for independent British Dominions within the structure of a Commonwealth of Nations;

Kent Allard adopts the persona of the Shadow of Justice;

Robert H. Goddard successfully launches the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket at Auburn Massachusetts;

October 31: Harry Houdini dies of peritonitis caused by a mistaken punch from a well-meaning if dim-witted admirer;

Violetta Hatton gets her pilot’s licence and becomes a barnstormer and ferry pilot in New York. She also flies a separate mono-plane maintained for her by Simon “Slick” Barré. When she flies this bright orange plane she is known as Captain Manhattan as she patrols Manhattan from the air. No one knows her true age and most assume that Captain Manhattan is a publicity hound rather than a crimefighter;

Birth of Vincenzo “Vinnie the Chin” Gigante, future mob enforcer and gunsel;

1927

John LaBelle, the Fighting Virginian, is involuntarily launched from his Mars to 1927 Earth by the Martian mastermind warlord Zdar;

Charles Lindberg flies non-stop across the Atlantic and becomes a “perpetual celebrity’;

Movietone offers newsreels with sound for the first time;

Robert and Frank Jr. buy the Griffin papers containing their family secret of the formula for the invisibility compound duocaine from the estate of Doctor Alexander Praetorius;

The KMT break off all relations with the Chinese Communist Party and begin purging the communists from their ranks as well as fighting them in the streets;

Salvatore Maranzano is sent from Sicily to New York by legendary Mafiosi Don Vito. Don Vito is imprisoned and never arrives in New York, but Maranzano himself begins the bloody Mob turf struggle known as the Castellammarese War with Joe the Boss;

Cuban chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca loses his title to Russian-born Alexander Alekhine;

Exhibition of interplanetary space travel technology in Moscow;

German Society for Space Travel founded in Berlin by I. Winkler;

William O’Connor, the new chief of detectives in Chicago, creates The Gunners, a squad of police machine gunners equipped with armoured cars and heavy ordnance;

1928

Winner of the inaugural Oscar for Best Picture is Wings;

The Shadow of Justice saves the lives of millionaire industrialist Clark Thomas Wynyard and his son Bryce from gangster assassins;

A record is set on Wall Street for trading on stock in a single day on March 12;

Teletypes enter general use;

“THE FINEST IN THE WORLD” First meeting of John LaBelle the Fighting Virginian and the Shadow of Justice;

Olympic Games held in Amsterdam – women compete in field events for the first time;

Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie;

Shirley Temple born;

“HEARTS OF THE BLACK STONE”

The world's first television program was broadcast into three homes in Schenectady, New York;

“CRIMSON CARNIVAL”

Murder of the carnies of Rizzoli’s Carnival at Lawneigh Field, NY;

Murder of Richard “Speed” Dash at Rizzoli’s Carnival at Lawneigh Field, NY;

The Shadow of Justice makes orphaned boy David “The Fox” Dash his ward;

Herbert Hoover wins US Presidential election;

“SMALL WONDERS”

David “The Fox” Dash meets and befriends “scientific swashbuckler” Doctor Gulliver. Together the pair foil (amongst others) electronic duplicate maker Doctor Halo, the Miniscule Men, the size-changing and monstrous Claw and Joe “TNT” Testurello;

Belgian boy detective Heremond Dupin journeys across the Soviet Union in a naïve attempt to destroy the régime. He just manages to escape with his life and is placed on the NKVD’s liquidation list;

The KMT captures Beijing and receives international recognition as China’s official government;

German scientist Alexander Sander creates the world’s first operational aircraft rocket engines, utilising powder fuel and banks of small rockets for propulsion;

Construction and flight of the world’s first rocket aircraft Ente (“Duck”) in Germany;

Hirsch Prize for best work in astronautics established;

Walt Disney creates Mickey Mouse;

“TIME AND THE EASEL”;

Formation of the team of superbeings called The Finest In The World in Manhattan NY, NY;

Damage sustained by the subway system during the Morlock attack on New York makes two of the three systems unprofitable. Corrupt political and legal battles begin to change ownership of the train lines;

“RADIO COWBOY AND THE SKY RUSTLERS”;

1929: The Year of the Big Crash

1930

“MISTER KING”;

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is All Quiet on the Western Front;

Fu Kiang Shih and his Brotherhood of Skulls succeed in revitalising the “Jade Mummy”, Quin Shih Wong. The newly revitalised emperor and all of his servants are apparently destroyed when the Fighting Virginian blows the top floor of the Hortek Building in Manhattan to kingdom come;

American Interplanetary Society founded on April 4^th;

Schrodinger develops theory of electron clouds, forms theory of wave mechanics;

“JAZZ AGE”;

Pluto, the eighth major solar planet, is discovered by scientists on Mount Lowell Observatory in Arizona;

World population reaches two billion;

First airline stewardesses in the world work for United Airlines. They are required to weigh no more than 115 pounds, be unmarried and be nurses. They wear white nurse uniforms when working;

US aviatrix Ruth Nichols beats Charles Lindbergh’s transcontinental speed record;

English aviatrix Amy Johnson flies from London to India in 13 days;

The 99s, the Association of Female Aviators, is founded with Amelia Earhardt as its first president;

By November, 6,000 people are trying to make a living selling apples on the streets of New York alone;

Fortune Magazine makes its debut;

More than a million Mexican agricultural workers immigrate to the Southwestern United States;

In California the realty boards of many large communities report clauses inserted in housing deeds and sales contracts restricting occupation of certain areas to "persons of Caucasian race”;

Herr Doktor Hermann Oberth and his youthful assistants Wernher von Braun and Ludwig Viktor von Todt experiment with a 15 Ibs. thrust chemical rocket;

Paladin breaks up a white slavery racket and catches its leader, a racing car driving madman named Christopher “Big Wheel” Wellman;

“ATTACK OF THE TOAD-WOMEN FROM TITAN”;

The Shadow of Justice begins to appear on radio introducing a weekly crime segment, after he discovers that the radio station has contracted a “pulp” writer to create a weekly adventure show based on his previous cases;

December: Poison fog kills 300 and sickens thousands more on the Belgian coast;

Boy detective Heremond Dupin retrieves the sceptre of King Otto of Transcarpathia, forestalling a major war in central and eastern Europe. On his return to Belgium he discovers that a meteorite that crashed into the North Sea is the source of the strange poison clouds plaguing the Belgian coast;

Raketenflugplatz, the world’s first rocket test firing range, is declared operational near Berlin, Germany;

Louis “Pretty” Amberg buys a laundry business so he can use the laundry bags to stuff corpses into;

Murder, Inc. formed by “Lucky” Luciano, the Little Man and their allies as a gangland assassination-for-hire bureau. The Shadow of Justice and The Drummer begin a long-term investigation into the membership and methods of Murder, Inc.;

Francis Xavier Mornschrifft aka The Dutchman born in Antwerp, Belgium;

The term “meta-human” is coined at Cambridge University to describe humans who fall far below or are raised far above the “genetic normal” for the species;

Publication of the mathematical studies on population of Lady Professor Doriana Grace Lumley suppressed on orders from the British Admiralty on the grounds that her matrices are capable of furnishing enemy states with information classified as being for the eyes of the UK government and the Navy only;

Ex-US Senator Captain Hobson begins delivering speeches in which he decries illegal drug use, especially Heroin abuse, as being part of a plot by the “living dead” to take over America;

Cave-Girl begins solo crime fighting as well as still serving as a member of “The Finest In The World”. She first encounters and battles the superbeing known as The Magdalene at this time;

Instant Coffee invented and produced for sale in sealed containers;

“DISTANT THUNDER”;

“THE SLEEPING CITY”;

“Ky-Gorr and the Lion Man” begins location shooting in the Congo. The filming is plagued with both the usual hazards of the Congo and mysterious murders and sabotage;

“CURSE OF THE ORANGE MAN”;

1931

Desmond Morton and Winston Churchill set up the super-secret organisation M Section, answerable only to the reigning monarch of Great Britain. The purpose of M Section is to oppose and destroy all enemies of Britain that are beyond the reach of conventional resources (including the official intelligence services) of the realm. Amongst its earliest recruits are “Blackjack” Laurel, Maxwell Knight, Joan “The Cat” Waverley and the Anglo-Indian Ram Chevers;

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Cimarron;

Albert Einstein urges all scientists to refuse military work;

Harold C. Urey and associates discover Deuterium and also discover that it is present in all naturally occurring water;

John D. Cockcroft develops high-voltage apparatus for atomic transmutation;

“SKYWAY ROBBERY” Quin Shih Wong confirms his survival as he attacks the Hindenburg on its maiden passenger and mail voyage to New York. His scheme involves the use of the air pirates common at the time, led by Fu Li Shih and her surviving Shih Fang assassins. Both Fu Li Shih and her master apparently die when their sky pirate airship Steel Spirit is shot out of the sky over Jamaica Bay;

As a follow-up to the 1926 Imperial Conference, the British Dominions are declared to be “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any respect of their domestic or external affairs, though united one to another by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”;

Cuba’s “Kid Chocolate” became the first Hispanic boxer to win a world title, in the junior lightweight class;

The first labour strike in the United States over a cultural issue took place in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, when the owners of the cigar factories attempted to get rid of the lectores, the readers who read aloud all day long from a wide variety of books and periodicals to help cigar rollers pass the time in their boring manual task. The owners accused the lectores of radicalising the workers and replaced them with radios; the workers walked out;

In Los Angeles alone shelters give asylum to over 200,000 persons and another 200,000 became freight car migrants on the Missouri Pacific Line;

Nine black youths who come to be known as the Scottsboro Boys are arrested for the suspected rape of two white girls;

Adventurer and hunter Nicholas Plunder Falkner captures a gigantic ape he christens Mightorr and brings the creature to New York to show it off. Mightorr panics and breaks free, eventually rampaging through the city before being reluctantly killed by the armed forces and local mystery men;

Heremond Dupin, after fruitlessly attempting to find and kill the Iron Skull, leaves the Congo and becomes embroiled in a worldwide battle against a cartel of drug smugglers calling itself The Golden Crab;

Captain Manhattan joins the 99s;

Whoremaster Mike “de Pike” Heitler murdered by Al Capone’s mob;

Joe the Boss murdered by Mob hit team on the orders of fellow mobster Manzano and with the assistance of “Lucky” Luciano aka Mr. Satan;

Groups for Study of Rocket Propulsion, GIRDs, are established in Leningrad and Moscow;

Reinhold Tiling demonstrates a solid-fuel folding wing rocket missile;

German test launches on Repulsor rockets reach an altitude of over 1,000 metres;

“The Night of the Sicilian Vespers”: Lucky Luciano and Little Man Lansky assassinate their mob competitors. This truly started the unique American Mafia;

1932

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Grand Hotel;

American Interplanetary Society tests its imported German-model Repulsor Rocket, damaging it irreparably;

John LaBelle returns to Mars via Professor Flaznagel’s Xiton-Ray Ioniser Wave Mechanism;

James Chadwick proves the existence of neutrons, using alpha particles striking a beryllium foil. He determines their mass by measuring the recoil tracks of known atoms of the rarefied gas in his cloud chamber;

John Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton split the atom on a linear accelerator, proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity;

Carl Anderson discovers the positron;

Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly across the Atlantic alone in 15 hours and 18 minutes, the fastest crossing on record;

"Happy Days are Here Again" from the movie Chasing Rainbows becomes a theme song for the Presidential campaign;

Ruthy Tu becomes the first woman pilot in China's Army;

Olympic Games held in Los Angeles;

Roosevelt defeats Hoover in the US presidential election and is elected President of the United States;

"Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" is a popular if ironic song with Radio listeners;

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is published, quickening public interest in the plight of the sharecropper;

A terrorist calling himself El Shaitan creates a group of saboteurs and attacks French holdings in North Africa;

A mysterious black mob boss known as ‘The Genie’ creates a force of black gangsters in Harlem NY known as the Forty Thieves;

Professor Robert Goddard test flies a guided rocket;

Struggling starlet Peg Entwhistle commits suicide by jumping off of the “H” in the “Hollywoodland” sign. The day after her death, a letter arrives in her mail offering a starring role in a musical about a woman driven to suicide;

Kigor and Helen are driven out of the Congo by the Iron Skull and his tribesmen. They decide to move at least temporarily to Manhattan;

1933

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Cavalcade;

January – Calvin Coolidge dies;

Prohibition Repealed;

Adolph Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany;

The El Monte Strike, possibly the largest agricultural strike up to that point in history, was led by Mexican unions in California;

Mexican and Mexican American workers in Texas organized one of the broadest unions in the history of Hispanic labour in the United States: La Asociación de Jornaleros (The Journeymen’s Association), which represented everyone from hatmakers to farm workers;

3.2% alcohol beer returns to the USA;

Engel Heart’s mother Ruby dies at the age of 91. Engel Heart returns to Louisiana for her voodoo funeral and in the process is embroiled in battle with the vampire Brog Miodas;

Captain Manhattan joins the 99s;

A group of Foreign Legion deserters calling themselves the Three Musketeers encounter and kill El Shaitan and his gang;

British Interplanetary Society founded in Liverpool, England;

Mobsters calling themselves the Five Iron Men take control of the totally corrupt Kansas City and begin a large scale narcotics trade;

Doctor Eugene Sanger publishes his book ‘Rocket Flight Technique’;

GIRDs and GDL are merged to create the Scientific Research Institute for Jet Propulsion (RNII);

1934

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is It Happened One Night;

Hired by Verna Gironda, detective Craig Kennedy once again battles the Clutching Hand. This time the Clutching Hand apparently dies in their final battle;

American Interplanetary Society changes its name to American Rocketry Society on April 6^th of this year. From June through September the Society experiments with launching rockets at Marine Park NY;

British aviator Jean Batten beats Amy Johnson's time by more than 4 days on her solo flight from England to Australia. Batten goes on to complete the first England-Australia round trip by a woman;

In the US strikes begin across the nation in Summer;

The Dust Bowl begins to engulf Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the Dakotas;

Marlene Vellia Drake travels to Africa with her anthropologist parents. Whilst there a Znandi witch doctor gifts her with the magical skin of a Congo black panther;

The Soviet Union tests an unguided cruise missile;

Germany tests the A-2 rocket on Borkum Island in the North Sea;

Brin “Big Ben” Benjamin becomes a runner for the “Westies” gang. He earns the “Big Ben” nickname due to his small stature and weedy physique;

1935

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Mutiny On The Bounty;

A cabal of four gangsters hatches a plot to blackmail Senator Beaumont Croyd. The plot is uncovered and foiled by the Shadow of Justice;

British Air Defence Research Committee receives first report on radio direction finding aka RADAR;

Police summoned to a blazing car wreck in Brooklyn find the garrotted and smashed body of Louis “Pretty” Amberg inside;

1936

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Great Ziegfeld;

Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany, under the watchful gaze of Der Fuhrer. These are the first Olympic Games to feature a torch relay;

Sergei Korolev begins tests on the 216 series of winged missiles;

Ian Dalton enlists in the Royal Navy and swiftly moves up the ranks, quick enough that his family connections to various powerful figures is attributed as the main reason. He is singled out and trained by Desmond Morton as part of his M Section;

Dirigible Hindenburg launched;

1937

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Life of Emil Zola;

Full-scale invasion of China by Japan;

Bizarre weather effects and “miracle rains” strike all over the Earth;

“ASTRO-NAUTS CONQUER THE UNIVERSE”;

October 25-30: An immense moon-like sphere, dubbed a “rogue planet”, transits Earth at a distance of no more than five and a half geographical hours. A piece of this world seemed to detach itself, hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere and striking somewhere in the Brazilian jungle;

Jesuit Father Bernard Hubbard discovers 12,000-year old glyphs on rocks in the Aleutian Islands;

The first radio telescope on Earth in built by Grote Reber of Wheaton, Illinois in the United States;

RNII’s leadership is arrested and murdered by Stalin’s henchmen;

Germany tests its A-3 rocket in the Baltic;

Spanish Civil War begins;

Walt Disney Studios begins their period of greatest output including many of their enduring classics;

Hindenburg explodes and crashes at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey;

1938

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is You Can’t Take It With You;

The Japanese forces that now control almost all of China find and destroy Fu Kiang Shih’s extensive bacterial warfare complex. They destroy it but take all of the knowledge from it and combine it with their own efforts in their secret laboratory in southern China;

Blohm und Voss develop the Ae 607, a single-seat jet interceptor with an offset cockpit and three 30mm cannons. Military production of the craft was never commenced;

Anschluss annexes Austria to Nazi Germany;

Bryce Wynyard’s book Batwings over Manhattan, a fictionalised account of the career of the Shadow of Justice, is published in New York by Sweet, Smith & Co.;

1939

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Gone With The Wind;

The insurance company detective Ethelred “Long Arm” Hughes is assigned to investigate a series of train wrecks. He discovers that a master of disguise called The Fireball is responsible and that this man is actually an agent of the Bund;

Dr. Eugene Sanger constructs a single-seat rocket-propelled stratospheric bomber for the German Reich. Flight problems and payload issues prevent the aircraft from being put into service although experiments with the craft continue until 1942;

September 1: Nazi Germany invades Poland, the long-anticipated World War II starts;

Soviet I-16 fighter planes are fitted with under-wing rockets that are used in anger from 1939 onwards;

League of Nations suspended;

Kigor and Helen travel to London and Kigor joins the RAF as a bomber pilot named “Jim Killgore”. Kigor and Helen with the help of The Drummer find a formula to temporarily nullify the effects of the Waters of Shebora. This allows Helen to conceive;

1940

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Rebecca;

Quin Shih Wong loses his left arm below the shoulder when allied hero Lexington “Blue Wolf” Lorenzo flies a Spitfire at him. Quin Shih Wong has his followers create a mechanical arm for him using plans previously stolen from one of Engel Heart’s laboratories by The Drummer’s ex-assistant Choy Fat;

Impressed by the innocence of a convicted supposed murderer Frank Griffin, Jr. gives the man some duocaine that he has prepared;

Arado create a jet bomber prototype E.370, to enter production as the Arado-234;

Henschel creates the Hs 293 radio-controlled bomb;

The Shadow of Justice forces mobster Abe “Kid Twist” Reles to turn informer, destroying Murder, Inc.;

Francis Xavier Mornschrifft emigrates to America with his parents Alphonse and Gina. All three become American citizens;

Suzanne Tempest born;

Batwings over Manhattan is converted to comic form by Bill Abel;

British post office workers and university mathematicians invent the modern world’s first electronic computer;

Helen Killgore gives birth to a son, Clayton Rice Killgore, the putative 19^th Earl of Girvan & Ayr and future “Kigor”;

1941

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is How Green Was My Valley;

Germany invades the Soviet Union;

Messerschmitt creates the Me 163 rocket glider interceptor;

Attack on Pearl Harbour by Japan;

Brin “Big Ben” Benjamin enlists in the Marine Corps;

1942

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Mrs. Miniver;

Robert Griffin sells the secret of invisibility, the formula for duocaine, to Doctor Edgar Drury. He then joins an expedition to the Congo where he is defrauded out of his money. With the help of the Iron Skull, who travels with him to Miami Florida, Griffin assumes the identity of the Invisible Man and brings the fraudsters to justice. Sadly, he is killed by the evil Doctor Drury’s invisible hound shortly after. Drury himself and his “hellhound” are then killed by the Iron Skull, who subsequently returns to the Congo;

Chiang Kai-Shek is appointed Supreme Allied Commander of the China theatre of World War II;

Rudolf Schriever designs a flying saucer V-7 aircraft for the German Reich. Experiments on supersonic flight and electromagnetic propulsion continue throughout the war until April 1945;

The A-4 rocket is converted to a “vengeance weapon” and receives the military codename V-2;

The Mafia-Smasher killed in Palermo by the Mafioso partisan Guno;

John Tempest born;

Richard Reid enlists in the Navy but is almost immediately diverted to secret scientific projects for the Office of Naval Intelligence;

Doctor Robert Stanton invents a new wonder food he calls “soma”, based on the notes of Doctor Redwood;

The Cave-Girl is asked to solve a series of thefts from Empire State University which are impeding a top secret project being conducted there;

Survivors of the “lost city of Atlantis” emerge on the Canary Islands and battle Nazi submariners;

The Purple Ghost foils the blackmailer “Man of Secrets” by pretending to be a ditzy socialite;

Nazi agent Dr. Kutchler steals the Stanton “soma” formula and uses it to create “Plasma Men” whose only weakness is common sugar, which causes plasma men to suffer terminal hypertrophe;

1943

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Casablanca;

The Cave-Girl leads a group of submariners on a successful mission to liberate her island home from its occupation by the Germans. Amongst the operatives sent with her is Sergeant Brin “Big Ben” Benjamin;

Sabotage of Allied oil by the German operative known as Werewolf leads to a massive effort to find and stop him. Eventually he is foiled by young adult detective Heremond Dupin;

Arado’s Ar 234 jet bomber enters production and enters service by December of this year. The Ar 234 was a two or four engined two or three crew bomber with defensive 20mm twin or quadruple cannons, radar and a pressurised cockpit;

Fall of Stalingrad confirms that the war is no longer winnable by Nazi Germany;

Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman rediscovers LSD-25;

Peron takes power in Argentina;

After many false starts the Manhattan Project to produce an atomic weapon begins. Amongst the physicists and other scientists involved are Professors Richard Reid and O.O. Gulliver;

The Paladin kills Nazi saboteur The Wrecker in a pitched battle at a Tennessee steel works;

1944

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Going My Way;

Tallboy J.T. Laurel aka Blackjack begins his crimefighting career in wartime London and overseas as a British commando;

Focke-Wulf develops two different jet bomber projects: Projekt-A, a twin-engine 1,000kg payload 1,000km range 1,000kmh speed bomber, and Projekt-B, a flying wing with the same basic specifications as Projekt-A but a radically different appearance;

Heinz von Halem develops the Triebflugel, a VTOL rotary-wing target-defence interceptor;

V-1 and V-2 attacks on London and southern England;

1945

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Lost Weekend;

Blackjack seriously wounded in Berlin during a shootout with occupying Russians;

Blohm und Voss create and fly prototypes of the P.215. This twin turbojet aircraft was a three-seater night and all-weather fighter with a top speed of 504mph;

July 16: Trinity: US detonates what Oppenheimer calls the first atomic explosion of the modern age;

US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki;

Nazi Admiral Doenitz supervises evacuation of ODESSA members and submariners from Nazi territory to south pole and Argentina;

End of World War II and all occupations by Axis forces;

Civil war begins in China between Chinese Communists and the KMT;

‘Operation Paperclip’ activates. The US evacuates top Nazi scientists to America under the supervision of Nazi sympathisers in the OSS and SS-Colonel Wolff. Russians simply enslave the Nazi scientists whom they manage to catch;

Professor Richard Reid is assigned to work with Nazi scientist Herr Doktor Ludwig Viktor von Todt on rocket research. The collaboration is far from smooth and a contingent of Marines are assigned to the research as security to prevent the Nazis from doing anything rash. Commanding the Marines is Captain Brin “Big Ben” Benjamin;

After reviewing Nazi files relating to “total knowledge”, US scientific genius Doctor Vannevar Bush conceives of the Memnex, a “final encyclopaedia” capable of storing all the information about a person and discovered by that person during their life.

1946

Whilst recovering from his wounds in a hospital in Somerset, Blackjack encounters the Time Traveller and together they foil a scheme hatched by an evil ancient Egyptian cult and their Mummy leader to replace seriously wounded servicemen with mummies;

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Best Years of our Lives;

The Shadow of Justice marries long-time associate Margo Lane in a ceremony attended by many of Gotham’s (and the world’s) heroes;

Havana Meeting of Mafia and other organised crime bosses;

The USA and the USSR begin testing their captured Nazi technology. Both nations test launch captured V-2 rockets, some with radical new propulsion or electronic systems;

“Lucky” Luciano permanently deported from the US for his gangsterism;

Electronic computer ENIAC created;

Kigor and Helen disappear somewhere in Africa;

Jonathan Parker born;

1947

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Gentleman’s Agreement;

Blackjack tells reporter Hermione Boag about his experiences with the Time Traveller. She records what he tells her but does not publish it for fear of ridicule;

UFO crashes at Roswell New Mexico and is recovered along with its occupants by United States Army Air Force personnel from the nearby White Sands facility and local nuclear bomber air base;

The Iron Skull is shot and seriously wounded by white mercenaries. He escapes back to the hidden village of the Ghost Men, where he later dies of his wounds. Training of his replacement begins in earnest;

LA super-prostitute Black Dahlia brutally raped and murdered;

Bugsy Siegel killed in his Beverley Hills home by Mafia hoodlums;

The Fox forms a new “Finest” team of superbeings with Cave-Girl and other active heroes. The team is not particularly successful and disbands;

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created by Presidential order;

Britain becomes the first country to successfully launch a supersonic jet. However since the flight is secret, official honours for breaking the sound barrier go to Chuck Yeager and the X-1 aircraft, which is a 1937 German design;

Death of Aleister Crowley;

Pilot Kenneth Arnold reports seeing a flight of crescent-shaped craft that flew at incredible speeds with a motion similar to a saucer skipping over water;

1948

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Hamlet;

Hermione Boag is mugged on a Manchester street and her diary, which includes the ‘Narrative of Blackjack Laurel’, is stolen;

The British Interplanetary Society commences a critically important study into the creation of a launch vehicle for putting artificial satellites into space;

Martha Warbaugh born to Moses “Daddy” Warbaugh and his wife Anita;

1949

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is All The King’s Men;

The Shadow of Justice retires from crimefighting. He and his wife Margo leave America for Asia, to help defend Shambala from Chinese annexation. He entrusts his girasol ring to his successor, The Fox;

The Transduction Lucent Corporation of America buys out most of the Lane family’s land in Kansas and constructs a fertilizer and DDT plants on the land. This creates hundreds of new jobs for the local community and causes the company to create a company town at the site. They name the settlement Littletown after Tranduction Lucent Corporation boss Mark William Little;

Paxton Van Helsing, last survivor of the Van Helsing escutcheon, recovers from his long hallucinatory madness and marries his psychiatric nurse Emerald Summers;

Chinese communists gain control of the whole of the mainland of the nation. The KMT are forced to evacuate to Taiwan;

US creates the Department of Space Medicine under the control of the USAF;

Soviets adapt the V-2 and create a new generation of ballistic missiles;

CIA opens its Assassination Bureau assisted by the mafia and Nazi émigrés;

The LA city council refurbishes the “Hollywoodland” sign and removes the “-land” so that the sign spells HOLLYWOOD, which has by this time well and truly become a nickname for the movie-making part of LA;

1950

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is All About Eve;

Margo Lane-Allard gives birth to a son, Daniel Clark;

Emerald Van Helsing gives birth to a daughter, Jade;

First International Astronautics Congress held in Paris France. It is agreed that an international federation of astronautics will be established;

Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision published. It proposes what amounts to a coherent and detailed catastrophe theory supported by Einstein but ridiculed by most other scientists. Nearly all of Velikovsky’s specific predictions are later proven correct;

Michael Farr McDonald born in Montreal;

1951

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is An American In Paris;

Leaving their son Daniel in Shambala, Kent and Margo Allard depart the hidden city-state and enter Tibet to help the locals fight off the Chinese. They are caught and executed by machinegun firing squad along with many of the other defenders of Tibet due to the surprise attack of Chinese metahumans and super-soldiers;

International Astronautical Federation established;

Russia launches the “geophysical” rocket carrying a payload of live animals;

Korean War begins. Many mystery men are contacted by the US government and asked to help. Few accept;

American TV network CBS brought under the direct control of the CIA;

CIA begins its long-term germ warfare and radioactivity experiments on the populations of poor areas of American cities;

Francis Xavier Mornschrifft joins the CIA and receives the codename “The Dutchman”;

North Korea begins mentally altering captive foreign soldiers. Time magazine popularises the term “brainwashing” for this type of human conditioning;

1952

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Greatest Show on Earth;

Tired of the endless talking at the British Interplanetary Society, Professor Bernard Quartier splits from the group with some of its brightest members to form the British Rocket Group (the BRG);

The Space Biology Branch of the USAF Aeromedical Field Laboratory is established at Holloman AFB;

World War 2 general “Ike” Eisenhower elected President of the USA;

1953

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is From Here To Eternity;

BRG receives secret funding from the Ministry of Defence for atomic rocket research, which is carried out on the Scottish coast, at Woomera in South Australia and in the Bahamas;

Heremond Dupin and his companions participate in the joint BRG-Spectra Moon Rocket project at Butr-Sbrodj in Hungary. Ultimately the rocket ship is launched but its flight is aborted after orbiting the Earth and the rocket is “hard landed” again safely by its crew. The rocket is found to have a light covering of “space weed”, and the substance is destroyed with flamethrowers;

End of the Korean War through negotiated treaty;

1954

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is On The Waterfront;

KGB created to replace earlier Cheka / NKVD;

Mysterious inhuman voices speak from turned off radios in the Midwest of the USA and in London, speaking against future world wars using atomic weaponry;

1955

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Marty;

BRG secretly launches a rocket carrying three astronauts into space. All the astronauts return from space fatally contaminated with an alien algal life-form that is destroyed by Professor Quartier;

1956

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is the historical film Around The World In 80 Days;

The CIA begins a long-term investigation into so-called “Mystery Men” from circa 1800 to contemporary times. The study is headed by Professor Francis Xavier Mornschrifft aka The Dutchman, himself widely believed in espionage circles to be a “metahuman” of some sort;

The Dutchman begins his long-range experiments into astral projection and “remote sensing”, code named MK-ULTRA;

1957

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Bridge On The River Kwai;

The USSR launches Sputnik 1, the modern world’s first artificial satellite, followed by Sputnik 2 containing the dog Laika;

The Dutchman begins a secret programme of “Executive Action” aka “Project X” to create super-agents and “political options” for the CIA;

1958

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Gigi;

USSR launches the geophysical lab Sputnik 3;

The US launches its first abortive satellites before successfully putting Vanguard TV-4, the first solar-powered satellite, into orbit;

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) created by act of US Congress;

DARPA created by US executive order;

1959

January 1: Batista regime in Cuba falls, Fulgencio Batista himself flees by aeroplane, bearing a colossal fortune in Mob and American investment money;

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Ben-Hur;

During excavation of a new station for the London Underground and final demolition of the Moorlock base from the turn of the century, a crashed alien spacecraft from prehistoric times is found. The alien “ghosts” from the craft cause a brief mass panic before being destroyed along with the ship and everything from it by Professor Bernard Quartier. His destruction of the artefacts and ship led to arguments within BRG and many of the ‘peaceniks’ in the group resign;

The USSR runs its ‘Luna’ missions, launching a probe on to the lunar surface and taking photographs of the far side of the Moon and then landing a robot probe on the Moon’s surface;

1960

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is The Apartment;

John Fitzgerald Kennedy elected President of the USA;

Project Ozma, a radio-based search for signals from intelligent life in space, receives unidentified signals from space. The project is then militarised by stealth and reorganised so as not to find any further similar signals;

In a final address to the nation, outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warns that the single greatest threat to world peace and the freedom of the USA is the unchecked growth of the military-industrial complex. Widespread technical problems prevent his message from reaching homes in many areas of America;

1961

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is West Side Story;

The Ministry of Defence takes over the BRG and turns it into a military research sub-department of MI-69, better known as Department ‘SOS’;

Earth-bound astronomers observe a colossal object orbiting the earth in an erratic, guided, pattern. The object is observed throughout 1961;

USSR maintains the first successful orbit of the Earth by humans, first with Yuri Gagarin and then with Gherman Titov;

President Patrice Lumumba of the Congo assassinated;

Clayton Rice Killgore is confirmed as the 19^th Earl of Girvan & Rice and also begins adventuring as Kigor, Lord of the Jungles;

The Fox discovers a plot for total takeover of America by a shadowy group calling itself the Bell Brothers. Despite his best efforts, the Bell Brothers, assisted by their mentor The Dutchman, destroy The Fox’s network of agents, forcing the hero to reinvent his approach to crimefighting;

1962

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Lawrence of Arabia;

June: the colossal object seen in Earth orbit last year disappears;

Explorer and submariner Charles Sifkakis discovers ruins belonging to what he believes is the “lost city of Atlantis” on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean;

The USSR and USA launch probes to Venus;

All probes launched towards Mars during this year explode on takeoff or malfunction in the Earth’s upper atmosphere forcing their controllers to abort them;

“Lucky” Luciano dies at Naples Airport of an apparent heart attack;

“Suicide” of Marilyn Monroe;

DARPA creates an early version of the Internet in an effort to realise Dr. Bush’s dream of Memnex.

1963

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is Tom Jones;

Professor Bernard Quartier suffers a near-fatal heart attack and resigns his position as Chief of the BRG;

The Dutchman activates his “Project X” team;

Daniel Clark Allard begins training in the ancient fighting arts in the hidden city of Shambala. At the same time he is also trained like his father before him in ancient secrets of stealth, invisibility and hypnosis;

CIA commissions a feasibility study for the high-altitude release of chemicals, bacterial agents and radiation to trigger a worldwide surge in “metahuman” development;

US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassinated by CIA hitmen in Dealy Plaza, Houston. The Dutchman watches the assassination unfold alongside CIA agent Lee Harvey Oswald who then flees the scene;

Valentina Tereshkhova becomes the first woman to orbit the Earth;

Oklahoma motel manager Jack “Lead Lip” Zangetti tells friends the day after the JFK assassination that Jack Ruby would kill Lee Harvey Oswald and that a member of Frank Sinatra’s family would be kidnapped to distract attention from the JFK assassination inconsistencies. Zangetti is found dead shortly after. Initial coronial reports suggested that he had suffered asphyxiation from having a plastic bag put over his head. His death is listed as suicide;

Richard Reid supervises construction of a launch facility on the pacific atoll of Tovakalua. He gathers together a small team of maverick researchers and adventurers, chief amongst them Captain Ben “Big Ben” Brinn USMC, Retired and Suzanne and John Tempest, the son and daughter of his project liaison Dr. Simon Tempest;

Kigor (the second) adventures in the war-torn lands of Congo and Angola and discovers that the lost city of Shebora is still safe. He drinks of its magical waters, and makes another discovery: the new Iron Skull is a teenaged American-educated girl! After the two test their powers against each other they unite to keep secret the mysteries of Shebora;

The Fox retires from active crime fighting;

Frank Sinatra Jr. is kidnapped by persons unknown but released shortly after, unharmed.

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