Germany is of course the land of the spooky schloß, but there are many other domiciles that Frauen mit tollen Haaren can flee from...
They can flee a handsome Hanoverian crescent...
They can flee the haunted beach house of Heringsdorf Mecklenburg-Vorpommern...
They can flee 'cross the Spree from the bust of Nefertiti on Berlin's Museum Island...
They can flee the God-awful medieval banquet they put on for tourists at Marksburg Castle, before the jesters appear and everyone throws up their rotisserie chicken and beans...
They can flee the dismal dungeons of the Aachen Grashaus...
They can flee round and round the fachwerk facades of Dornstetten's Altstadt until they're dizzy...
Or they can just go to the Black Forest and scream at the prices.
Germany is of course a land of rules, and no fleeing is allowed unless gowns are ankle length.
Many German towns now frown upon women with great hair turning up unannounced at local historic monuments and demanding to flee them. These are now routinely locked after 5pm to stop such goings on, although you can apply for a municipal 'erlaubnis zu fliehen' in certain Länder.
Some German women are experimenting with cross-genre fleeing; for example fleeing an Aztec castle in the manner of Lara Croft. I doubt it will catch on, but well done for trying.
German men are also trying to get in on the gothic fleeing scene nowadays, but German women quite frankly aren't putting up with it!
And that's it for tonight's Germanic gothic fleeing guide. Kümmere dich darum, wie du fliehst...
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It was the biggest manhunt in Britain: police, the press, aeroplanes, psychics all tried to solve the disappearance. In the end nobody really knew what happened. It was a mystery without a solution.
This is the story of Agatha Christie's 11 lost days...
By 1926 Agatha Christie's reputation as a writer was starting to grow. Her sixth novel - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - had been well-received and she and her husband Archie had recently concluded a world tour. But all was not well with the marriage.
In April 1926 Agatha Christie’s mother died. Christie was very close to her: she had been home-schooled and believed her mother was clairvoyant. The shock of her sudden death hit the author hard.
Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.
Let me try and set it out.
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing.
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines.
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.
Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel...
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice.
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic?