THE PULP CALENDAR: March 27

W.C. Tuttle never rested on his laurels. By 1937 he'd already created a bunch of enduring characters, from Hashknife Hartley, who went back to 1920, to his Argosy phenom "Hilarious" Henry, of 1935 vintage. It never hurt a pulp writer to have another character you could depend on seeing published, so for Western Story he created Peaceful Peters in a short story named for the character. Peters was one of Tuttle's less-successful efforts, or else one he tired of relatively quickly. Peaceful appeared in only five stories between this issue and July 1938.In that same period Tuttle published three Henry serials in Argosy, so you know where his real efforts were going. The only other series character in this issue is Guthrie Brown's Lefty Pearl, who got his start in 1935 and was almost done by the time "Lefty is Right" appeared. Only two more stories are reported in the Fiction Mags Index. John Dudley Phelps gets the novelette, "Blue Barrier," while Luke Short continues one of his early serials, Silver Horn Breaks. Eugene R. Dutcher and H. C. Wire contribute the rest of the stories, while six columnists, a poet and a letters section fill out the rest of this weekly's 144 pages. The covers aren't as starkly elegant as they'd be in 1939 but with Tuttle and Short in the forefront this was probably a halfway-decent issue.