Tuesday, August 9, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 9


Now that's a thrilling title. And yet Murray Leinster's serial The Man Who Feared is not the most eccentric (or, depending on perspective, most lame) title in this 1930 Detective Fiction Weekly. That honor, if you can call it that, must go to Erle Stanley Gardner's novelette "The Crime Waffle." I'd hoped that some reference work on Gardner might explain that one, but it must remain a mystery for now. This number also features "The Charlie Chaplin of Crooks" in a nonfiction article that begs the question in what respect can one be the Chaplin of crime? Are you comical? Are you shabbily dressed? Do you play for pathos, or are you an artistic genius? The answers lie within. On a more mundane level Judson P. Philips concludes the serial Mountain Murder (a fairly common pulp title), while Harold de Polo and Robert H. Rohde contribute short stories. DFW cover art at this time was already fairly stodgy, but with that Leinster title (and the fainting dame) this cover is positively soporific.

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