R Bloch: "A Question of Identity," "Death Has Five Guesses," and "The Bottomless Pool" (w/ R M Farley)

I think we've covered two of the thirteen stories that appear in the April 1939 issue of Strange Stories, Henry Kuttner's sword and sorcery tale "Cursed Be the City" and David H. Keller's story of a failed marriage, "The Dead Woman." Behind the woman-in-esoteric-bondage cover of this issue also lurks Henry Kuttner's "The Bells of Horror," which I read before this blog began haunting the interwebs. That leaves ten stories in the mag which constitute virgin territory. We'll blaze a trail through three of those ten today, the three which were produced with the participation of the man who scripted Barbara Stanwyck's The Night Walker, the last black and white film made by Universal Pictures, Chicago-born Los Angeleno Robert Bloch.All three of today's stories saw reprint in the 1998 collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, a book which I mentioned in our last blog post, as well as a 1986 French collection with an amateurish cover illustration--zoinks, is that Bloch himself on…