THE PULP CALENDAR: January 2

Detective Fiction Weekly was the second part, along with Argosy, of the Munsey company's weekly one-two pulp punch. Launched in 1924 as Flynn's, as the magazine always reminded readers, it was probably the No. 3 detective pulp after the epochal Black Mask and Popular Publication's later entry, Dime Detective. I picked this particular issue from 1937 solely for the date. Its most noteworthy feature isn't hyped much on the cover. Author D. B. McCandless is only third-billed there, but his story "A Bouquet of Guns" is probably the issue's highlight if only because it features a female detective, Sarah Watson, as its protagonist. McCandless wrote not quite a dozen stories about Watson, who was no glamour girl but a stout, frumpy female capable of holding her own in a fight. There's a Watson story included in Bernard Drew's invaluable anthology Hard-Boiled Dames, which reprints stories in facsimile form with their original layouts. Another can be found in one of the DFW issues in the unz.org online trove; you can read it here.