The Drums of Jeopardy

Description

A 1920 story sequential by The Saturday Evening Post commencing in January 1920. In 1922, the novel was adapted into a Broadway act and the next year a film. A second movie adaptation emerged in 1931.

It is told that a juvenile Boris Karloff, who formerly had some unofficial movie roles, picked his screen name for his first film debut in 1920 from a Russian outraged scientist character, Boris Karlov in this story. The tag Boris Karlov was gotten from Harold’s novel for the 1922 Broadway act, but by 1923 with actor Boris Karloff making use of the same sounding deviation, the movie adaptation changing the name of the character, portrayed by Wallace Beery as Gregor Karlov. In the 1931 movie adaptation with Warner Oland portraying the character, the outraged scientist’s name is brought back to Boris Karlov, before Frankenstein would make Boris Karloff a domestic term for many years. Fatefully, Boris Karloff would portray a number of outraged scientists on films, but not Boris Karlov.

Harold MacGrath was a successful author, short fiction writer and screenwriter. Also called at times as Harold McGrath, he came from Syracuse, New York. When he was young, he became a reporter and columnist for the Syracuse Herald newspaper until the later years of 1890s when he released his first book, a romance entitled Arms and the Woman. The New York Times stated that his succeeding novel, The Puppet Crown, was the Top 7 bestselling novel in the USA for the entire 1901. Harold afterwards created books for the mass market of romance, adventure, furtive, detectives, and many more at the usual percentage of over one each year. He would have three additional of his novels that were included in the top ten bestselling novels of the year. At one fell swoop, he printed several short fiction for popular American periodicals including The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and Red Book magazine.
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