Flaming Moe

When you start a blog post like this, you are setting expectations pretty damn high:

There are certain individuals whose names have been adopted as shorthand in the fiction community. When you see their name, it usually means weird and/or wild shit is going to go down. There is no reason for a writer to throw in a reference to Nikolai Tesla, for example, unless they want to later have a death-ray or giant killer robot or just some sort of weird science in general. Similarly, if you see Aleister Crowley show up in a story, you know that there’s going to be magic involved, or possibly cults. Or maybe orgies, because that is how Crowley rolled.

I say it is well past time that another name was added to that list.

The amazing thing is that the post that follows lives up to that opener. It’s the somewhat true story of Moe Berg: major league baseball player, top secret OSS agent, and would-be assassin of Werner Heisenberg–and all that’s in the actually true part of the post. (Check the infallible Wikipendium for collaboration.) The made up part, in which Moe, as forerunner to Marvel Comics’ Dr. Strange, fights a decades-long occult battle against J. Edgar Hoover, is fun too.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.