Friday, September 30, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 30


An attractive 1923 Adventure cover by George Annand closes out the month. The highlights of this issue most likely are a story of Swain the Viking, one of pulp's most badass heroes despite being a teetotaling Christian, by Arthur D. Howden-Smith, and Harold Lamb's tale of two of his Cossack heroes, Ayub and Demid. I have the Bison Books collections of Lamb's Cossack stories -- they're great stuff -- but I haven't gotten to that particular one yet. Other dependable names include Gordon MacCreagh and Hugh Pendexter, and Gordon Young certainly was popular with contemporary readers. You also get Frank C. Robertson, Howard B. Beynon, H. S. Cooper and Charles Victor Fischer, but Lamb and Howden-Smith should be enough to sell this particular issue.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 29

Little more than a week before this 1934 Argosy marked its anniversary on this blog, a member of the Yahoo pulpscans group uploaded a complete scan of it. Back in July, Foreign Legion fan and blogger Jack Wagner uploaded a scan of the issue's best story, Georges Surdez' "Military Prisoner." As there's no table of contents for this one in the FictionMags Index, it's my cultural duty to give you the original.



F. Van Wyck Mason's cover story is a typical pulp redemption tale. An American doctor is ruined professionally and socially after his performing euthanasia on a wealthy patient, at her request, is exposed and denounced. He becomes a hard-luck trader deep in darkest Africa, when who should show up looking for guides but his enemy and his former beloved. I think you can take it from there, but it's entertaining enough. Calling it a "Complete Novel" at 38 pages is a stretch, but Argosy was flexible about type size in its effort at this time to cram as much content into 144 pages as possible, and "River Raiders" is satisfyingly dense. Nevertheless, "Military Prisoners" takes the honors this issue, as an Surdez story is likely to do. The real disappointment here is the concluding chapter of W. Wirt's The Assassin, the last appearance of Jimmie Cordie and his merry mercenaries, thought they'd make at least one encore appearance in Short Stories the following year. In this three-parter,  Japanese conspirators hope to provoke a break between the U.S, and their country by having an American gangster assassinate Henry "The Last Emperor" Pu-yi, their puppet head of state in Manchuria.The main problem with the story is that Cordie and his band are so invincible by now that Wirt can't maintain any suspense. More than ever, the serial seems like an excuse for Wirt to indulge in the vaudeville shtick of those aggressively ethnic antagonists, Irish Red Dolan and the self-dubbed "Fighting Yid." I've liked the other Cordie stories I've read, but it was sad to read this. For most contemporary readers the real highlight was more likely the new installment of A. Merritt's long-awaited serial Creep, Shadow!, reviving his characters from Burn, Witch, Burn! I've never read any Merritt despite his great reputation as a fantasist, but I found this installment of his last major work pretty interesting. The rest of the issue is okay, and I'll reserve comment on J. E. Grinsted's The Kid From Hell until next week. For now, this issue of Argosy is sponsored by:


Wednesday, September 28, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 28


The Vivian Legrand story in this 1935 Detective Fiction Weekly is actually titled, "The Adventure of the Maharaja's Wife," but the cover editor knows how to sell his magazine. This is The Lady From Hell's first cover appearance since her debut in January, but it's Eugene Thomas's twelfth story about his antiheroine in that time. She'd get twelve more stories and three more covers over the next year. Apparently the Lady outranks Richard Sale's Daffy Dill, who stars in the novelette "Man Bites Dog" this week. The actual long story this time is Maurice Beam's "Bad Blood," which clocks in at 33 pages. Max Brand continues his serial Murder Me! while Ray Cummings resumes his sci-fi series "Crimes of the Year 2000." Short stories by H. W. Guernsey, Robert McBlair and David Redstone round out the issue, along with a "How Good A Detective Are You?" vignette by Richard Wormser. Looks like a pretty good lineup overall.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Roe Richmond, MOJAVE GUNS (1952)

Roaldus Richardson started out writing for the sports pulps in his mid-twenties during the mid-1930s. He used the nickname "Roe," which I assume rhymes with "Joe," though I suppose "Roey" is another possibility and was actually my first guess. The alternative sounds like a pen name the Jetsons' dog might give himself. During World War II Richmond started publishing western stories, and by the 1950s the western was his main genre. He stuck with pulps until very late in the game, writing many of "Jackson Cole's" novels about Jim Hatfield in Texas Rangers magazine, which lasted until 1958. Throughout this period Richmond published novels like Mojave Guns, which first appeared in a cheap hardcover edition issued by Arcadia House. It doesn't look like the story first appeared in pulp. The paperback was published by Lion, the book-publishing arm of Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, the ancestor of today's Marvel. I'd thought that I wouldn't find grimmer back-cover copy than came with Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand, but for Mojave Guns Lion came up with strong competition.



Richmond's novel is violent Indian-fighting fiction with little regard for the Apaches battling the U.S. Cavalry. At times the Indian fighting takes a back seat to infighting within the cavalry. Chris Herrold is a West Point graduate seeking redemption and revenge in Arizona Territory. His father was killed by Indians after earning a reputation as an overzealous butcher of his own men, while his brother was fragged by a soldier officially unknown for cowardice. Chris takes after his father and is good at getting his own men killed, earning him the particular contempt of Rick Montrell, an ex-Confederate with little patience for book soldiering, whose brother died during the battle that led to the murder of Chris Herrold's brother. It's possible Rick did the deed himself, though there are other suspects among the veteran troopers. Chris is the odd man out with the eligible women of Fort Burnside, rivaling Montrell for Anita Raven, the daughter of the unit's wise old scout, and also rivaling a nearby rancher, Kirby Tisdale, for Teresa Thurston, the commanding colonel's daughter. Chris always means well, though he's a bit too anal about uniforms for his own good, but his profound alienation turns him against just about everyone, not to mention the Apaches.

Relegated to quartermaster duty after his latest debacle, and later relegated to the guardhouse after fighting with a real asshole of a brother officer, Chris seethes with self-loathing and rage while Rick leads an expedition in search of the secret hideout of Chief Hatchese's Apache band. Finding their lair thanks to the old scout, Rick sends his main force back to Burnside to bring along the colonel and sufficient manpower and firepower to crush Hatchese. Richmond intercuts from the harassed ordeal of the men riding back to Burnside to Rick's survival ordeal in dangerous proximity to Hatchese to the deteriorating situation in the fort as a truly incompetent officer struts his stuff with Chris stuck in stir. Ultimately the battle comes to the fort, where Chris Herrold gets one more chance to redeem himself and makes the most of it. Richmond gets it all done in an efficient 124 pages of what they used to call "fast action," effectively sketching the torment of cavalry warfare in the desert. It may be too brief only because Kirby Tisdale is an underdeveloped character who proves more important in Richmond's plot than you'd expect him to be -- and no, he didn't kill Chris Herrold's brother. In short, he ends up with more than he seems entitled to, but on the other hand this means Richmond doesn't deliver a predictable finish. Mojave Guns is the first long-form work I've read by Roe Richmond, and it was good enough to make me willing to try some more.

Here's a panoramic view of the novel's wraparound cover:


THE PULP CALENDAR: September 27


The Munsey corporation desperately continues tweaking Argosy's cover format in 1941. There are two changes from the last 1941 issue we looked at, two weeks ago. Argosy has eliminated the white sidebar that occupied about a third of the cover and advertised several authors and stories each week. More importantly, Munsey has reinstated fully-painted covers, starting with this one by Virgil Finlay. More unhappily, Argosy continues its most recent trend of highlighting nonfiction, though this issue's cover story by Jay Hamilton is part speculative fiction, describing an American bomber attack on the Japanese capital while weighing the likelihood of such a scenario. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the thought that truth was more exciting than fiction. The fiction highlights are war-themed novelettes by Louis C. Goldsmith and Joel Townsley Rogers. On the serial front Jack Byrne wraps up his western Cowboy, Ride Your Luck! while William Gray Beyer continues his sci-fi comedy Minions of the Shadow. There's hardly anything as insufferable as a sci-fi comedy from this period. This one continues a series Beyer started in 1939, focusing on a 20th century man who wakes from suspended animation after 5,000 years and befriends Omega, a nigh-omnipotent, whimsical being -- you know, the sort of highly-evolved character who pretty much has magical (if not divine) powers because, well, why wouldn't he? One of that series was enough for me, and Minions of the Shadow is the fourth. There are also short stories by John Russell and Hal G. Evarts, as well as Luke Short's charming "Paper Hero," the story of a busy pulp writer who finds himself accused of plagiarism. This issue is part of the unz.org Argosy trove, but I haven't really read much of it.  The war stuff isn't what I'm looking for in pulp fiction, and the Beyer is probably pretty bad. We saw a few weeks ago that Munsey could still throw a passable Argosy together even at this late point, but worse for the venerable weekly is still to come....

Monday, September 26, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 26

This one's pretty lurid for a 1931 Argosy, at a time when the venerable weekly's covers were still relatively sedate looking. Cover author Frank L.Packard was a major early pulpster best known for his antihero Jimmie "the Grey Seal" Dale. This issue has no listing in the FictionMags Index, but between auction listings and the serial contents of surrounding issues we can fill the picture out a little. It includes the conclusion of Harl Vincent's sci-fi serial Red Twilight while continuing Charles Alden Seltzer's western Double Cross Ranch and Robert E. Pinkerton's The Fighting Prodigal, the tale of a "Logging War in the Wisconsin Forests." Standalone content includes stories by Jack Allman ("The Salvage of the Sagomar"), William Merriam Rouse ("Wiggle and Twist") and C. A. Freeman ("Prisoner-at-Large"). Especially noteworthy is "Seminole," a rare pulp contribution from pioneer environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas -- she published fiction regularly in The Saturday Evening Post -- who lived to be 108.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 25


Here's an unusual color scheme for a 1934 Short Stories cover that eschews the magazine's trademark red sun for a blood-red background to a sharply contrasting black and white image of a frightened man. It heralds a "complete novel" (50 pages) by Walter C. Brown, a leading pulp orientalist. The magazine goes on more familiar terrain in James B. Hendryx's latest Halfaday Creek novelette featuring Black John Smith. Some more familiar names in this issue are Berton E. Cook, Hapsburg Liebe and Robert H. Rohde. Reginald C. Barker and Edward T. Turner contribute short stories while Roy Vickers completes the serial Nothing But Diamonds. "Dan Edwards' Bunk Detail" was a nonfiction column that had been running since November 1933 and would continue through the end of 1934. It's not exactly an all-star lineup for Short Stories, though Hendryx may have been their most popular author, but that cover definitely would have gotten browsers' attention.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 24

Something was going wrong at the Munsey corporation by 1938. Less than a year before, Munsey had launched a new "all stories complete" monthly pulp, All-American Fiction. This was very much an "all-star" title, each issue flaunting the names of contributing authors on the front cover, early on without promoting any individual story. After four issues the 160 page pulp went bimonthly. After the fifth issue it dropped to 144 pages. After the sixth it shrunk to 128, the same size, by that point, of the weekly Argosy. The eighth issue was its last, though Munsey made a point, as you see above, of formally merging it with Argosy. Another Munsey experiment launched at the same time, Double Detective, proved more successful, maintaining a monthly schedule until the fall of 1940. Argosy kept the All-American Fiction name alive until Christmas, though the content most likely was indistinguishable all along. The one arguable concession to the All-American aesthetic was the generic cover of this first merged issue. Unlike All-American, this cover mentions no authors at all. That obscures the presence of novelettes by Donald Barr Chidsey and Luke Short, a Hornblower serial chapter by C. S. Forester, the debut of a new serial by Walter Ripperger and stories by Eustace Cockrell and W. Ryerson Johnson. There's also the rarity of not one but two female contributors, as Frances Shelley Wees continues her serial Lost House and Virginia Dare contributes the short story "Birthday Present." Technically, since Forester was English and Wees Canadian, this issue has no business claiming to be All-American Fiction, but business is business, though it wasn't as good as it used to be for Munsey.

Friday, September 23, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 23


H. W. Scott doesn't quite pull it off this time -- the ghost or devil looks a little too sketchy to me -- but it's another cool cover design for a 1939 issue of Western Story. The magazine's "book-length novels" might not always live up to billing -- Tom Roan's "Rancho del Diablo" is 47 pages -- but they do result in less variety than you'd get in other pulps of similar size. There are only four works of fiction in this 128 page issue. Along with the Roan, you get a good-sized chunk of Jay Lucas's serial Range of Hunted Men and two short stories, John Colohan's "Luck of the McRories" and Mojave Lloyd's "Saddle Savvy." There's arguably a higher percentage of nonfiction here than in other western pulps, given the number or regular columns as well as Gerard Delano's epic-length "Story of the West," which reaches part 73 of 105 this issue. Then again, since Western Story was a weekly, this balance of fiction and nonfiction probably made it easier for regular readers to keep up. And since Western Story remained a weekly longer than just about any other pulp, Street & Smith clearly were doing something right.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 22

This 1934 Argosy is part of the unz.org pulp trove and gives me an excuse to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about the cover story, Theodore Roscoe's "That Son of a Gun, Columbo." It's an early example of Roscoe's fascination with the Caribbean undead as well as a perhaps unpatriotic account of Christopher Columbus. Speaking of the dead, this issue concludes George F. Worts' Peter the Brazen serial Kingdom of the Lost in stunning fashion, with the death of Peter's longtime love Susan O'Gilvie. Readers in 1934 may have known already, however, not to trust an author's account of a death plunge like the one Susan takes without confirming a dead body at the bottom. They may not have been surprised to see Worts take it back and explain how Susan survived in the final Peter story, published the following year. Meanwhile, A. Merritt continues his long, long awaited (and final) serial Creep, Shadow!, while W. Wirt continues a Jimmie Cordie three-parter, The Assassin. Erle Stanley Gardner contributes a Jax Bowman novelette, John H. Thompson puts his comic drifters Bill and Jim through another wringer and Jay Lucas offers a tale of the Himalayas, "Shula Set." Sample the issue at your leisure using this link. We'll stay in 1934 for the next two Thursdays so I can show off some more Argosy from my own collection -- including the return of Bellow Bill Williams on October 6!

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 21

The topic of Tarzan's costume and hair color came up a few days ago, and now we're looking at an unusual looking Zorro from 1935. Johnston McCulley's masked man is one of the most famous products of pulp fiction, but he didn't really get too many covers, and in the few that exist, from the 191 All-Story Weekly heralding his first appearance in The Curse of Capistrano to this, his last cover, he never looked the same way twice. Our image of Zorro is formed by Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power and Guy Williams, and it's the image of a man in black. However, I've never read Capistrano, so I can't say for certain what McCulley originally envisioned -- or, for that matter, whether V. E. Pyles' cover represented McCulley's vision for the two-parter Mysterious Don Miguel. Zorro would not reappear in pulp until 1941; during the interval there were variations of Zorro in Republic serials as well as the Tyrone Power film for 20th Century-Fox. When Argosy brought the hero back, it was a period when the venerable but tottering weekly eschewed cover paintings. McCulley then spent more than six years grinding out Zorro short stories on a nearly monthly basis for the Thrilling group's West, but while the hero was mentioned often on the covers, I don't think he was ever shown on one. After a while he wasn't even mentioned. By 1951 McCulley arguably had run Zorro into the ground, but he would live to see the character restored to fame through the good graces of the Walt Disney Studio. In any event, any clarification as to whether Zorro actually ever dressed this way would be appreciated.

Zorro is supported in this issue by W. C. Tuttle's Henry Harrison Conroy and George Challis's Ivor Kildare in continuing serials, and by Erle Stanley Gardner's Jax Bowman, a relatively short-lived character of his, in the novelette "Bunched Knuckles." George F. Worts wraps up The Gold Fist while Ellis Parker Butler and R. V. Gery contribute short stories, as does Edward Better in what's purportedly his only pulp story -- at least under that name. Better is probably more mysterious than Zorro now.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Robert Carse, FROM THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE (1951)

Robert Carse is one of my favorite pulp writers. He was very good at Foreign Legion stories and similar stuff, from Devil's Island or prison colony tales to the adventures of mercenaries in turbulent Latin America. One of his persistent interests was Haiti, the setting of such Argosy serials as The Drums Roar (1935) and Dark Thunder (1939), the latter in some ways the first hint of where Carse would go with From the Sea and the Jungle.  He was intrigued by the seemingly paradoxical notion of Nazi activity in Haiti, and by creating a fictional analogue for Haiti in the Republic of Macuta Carse freed himself to explore the paradox more deeply in the novel. It's stunning to see at least one admittedly light-skinned Macutan -- one with German blood as well -- take the Nazi side as war comes to the Western Hemisphere, but the deeper reality Carse portrays is a justified resentment of the United States for Americans' racist contempt for the Macutan government and its military. It's often easy to lose track of who the bad guys are in the novel, since Carse builds up a genuine Nazi German big bad by keeping him in the distant background, almost like a Kurtz figure the novel's hero must reach at the end of a nightmarish quest. While the Nazis wage submarine warfare on Atlantic shipping from a nearly inaccessible base, the Americans engineer a coup d'etat and assert their hegemony over Macuta in insultingly heavyhanded fashion. Most of the representatives of the American government or military are jerks, as Carse demonstrates in a scene where drunken soldiers pretty much wreck an elite Macutan club and humiliate the newly-elevated president and his wife.


For all that, Carse's hero is an American in the Bogart mode. Johnny Michaels is a onetime small-time gangster, a rum-runner and gun-runner, who settled in Macuta and went legit by opening a popular hotel. The Nazi, Hans Ludig, was once Johnny's best friend in Macuta, apparently egging on his resentment of the U.S. while playing what Johnny belatedly recognizes as a long con on him. Johnny is no racist -- he recalls hankering after "high yaller girls" as a young man -- and is disgusted by the unthinking racism of most Americans he encounters. Inevitably, however, he must take his country's side even as the Americans continue to behave abominably toward Macuta. He must track down Ludig not so much for personal payback, even though he feels that Ludig had tricked him for years, as to avenge a young American sailor, the sole survivor of a ship torpedoed by a sub from Ludig's base, who eventually succumbs to the horrible burns he suffered in the attack, despite the best care of Johnny and his White Russian girlfriend Danila -- she's the naked lady on the back cover; the front portrays a sort of voudou priestess who's pretty much just a friend of Johnny's. Carse somewhat overplays the bonding of Johnny and the dying sailor, who apparently reminds Johnny of his younger, more innocent self, and the emotional impact of the sailor's death as the motivator for Johnny's quest to destroy Ludig. Having excelled at slam-bang action in the pulps, Carse falters when he tries to be introspective or retrospective in proper literary style. Reminiscences pop up at odd moments in the story but never quite make Johnny Michaels into the fully rounded character Carse wants him to be.

From the Sea and the Jungle is 347 pages in the 1952 Popular Library Giant paperback edition I own, and at times it was nearly as much a slog to get through as the one Johnny experiences after he escapes from a Macutan prison and embarks on his hunt for Hans Ludig. The novel spends too much time inside Johnny's head for its own good, but that's Carse trying to write an "adult" novel as much as a literary one. It can't quite be a fully adult novel in the sense we take for granted today; for Carse "muck" is the equivalent of Norman Mailer's "fug" from The Naked and the Dead, for instance. But despite Carse's limitations as a psychological novelist, the inherent tension of the political situation in Macuta holds the novel together until Carse goes into action mode on more familiar pulp terrain in the final third of the book. Prisons and prison break are his meat, and from the time Johnny is thrown into prison for helping some Macutan fliers flee the country (to fight for the Free French) the novel moves more briskly, even as Carse cuts away from the jungle action to the American debauch in the Macutan capital. Interestingly, Carse keeps his Nazi villain at a distance all the way to the end. Yes, Johnny finally faces his friend-turned foe, but Carse isn't interested in giving Ludig a big scene to either explain himself or expound on his Nazi evil. He's like a human MacGuffin, someone everyone wants to get but without intrinsic value as a character. I don't recall the poor man having a line of real dialogue in the whole book. I suppose that may be because, with the war over, Carse wasn't interested in writing anti-Nazi propaganda. A sort of permanent undeclared war between Macuta and the United States, papered over by a world war, is arguably his real subject, though Johnny Michaels' personal-redemption story -- he had thought himself soft, if not a coward, for giving up the gangster life, and he fears that his involvement in Macutan intrigues has alienated him from Danila -- finally overwhelms the social commentary. Carse leaves us with an unresolved paradox: Johnny is our hero for acting like a good American and stopping the Germans, but From the Sea and the Jungle may leave readers wondering what actually was good about being an American, or at least an American abroad. It's no great or even very good novel, but it is an often thought-provoking relic of the popular literature of World War II.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 20

This 1923 Adventure has at least one thing I'd really like to read, and more besides. The sure thing is the last installment of T. S. Stribling's serial Fombombo. The issues with the first two installments of this four-parter have been uploaded and disseminated online, and Fombombo was a highlight of both -- which is saying something because those two issues also introduce Arthur D. Howden-Smith's Swain the Viking.  Largely forgotten now, Stribling is the author the pulp world would have considered their prize pupil in their own time; he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1932 novel The Store. Fombombo is a sort of mock epic based on the high concept of throwing a Babbitt like ugly American salesman in the middle of an archetypal Latin American revolution and having him experience a slow-motion moral awakening. Half of it is great stuff and I hope to find out about the other half eventually. Along with Fombombo this issue boasts novelettes by Arthur O. Friel and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, the start of a Hugh Pendexter serial, a Mohamed Ali tale by George E. Holt, and stories by H. S. Cooper, Walter Inland, Thomas Samson Miller, Frederick Moore, William Byron Mowery and John Webb. I don't know all of these writers, but this is Adventure in its peak years, so I'd guess they all have something going for them.

Monday, September 19, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 19

A quick survey of Tarzan's appearances on pulp covers over the year reveals great uncertainty about the ape man's hair. Comic strips by Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth and their successors have done more than anything else to solidify the image of a black-haired Tarzan in many minds, but pulp artists like Argosy's Hubert Rogers often envisioned a lighter-haired jungle lord. This 1936 cover shows that the pulps hadn't yet caught up with the fashion set by Johnny Weissmuller in talking pictures. Before Metro Goldwyn Mayer put Weissmuller in a loincloth in a clear Pre-Code invitation to the female gaze, illustrators and filmmakers commonly clad Lord Greystoke in the sort of one-shoulder singlet you see here, some adding a fur headband to the ensemble. By the next time Argosy published a Tarzan serial, in 1938, he is finally in a loincloth. This seems to me a change for the better, as Tarzan now no longer looked like a caveman (especially with the club he sports here) or circus strongman. At this time Edgar Rice Burroughs was bouncing Tarzan back and forth between Argosy and Blue Book, with an exceptional sojurn in Liberty being the nearest the ape man came to the slicks. The other features this issue are Donald Barr Chidsey's novelette "Spanish for Goat," another novelette by William Chamberlain, short stories by Theodore Roscoe and W. C. Tuttle, and serials by L. G. Blochman and George Bruce, as well as a Stookie Allen "Men of Daring" strip about Wyatt Earp -- a hero nearly as fantastical in some renderings as Tarzan himself.

SERIAL PULP: The Spider's Web (1938), Chapter 7: SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT

A collaboration with the Mondo 70 movie blog....
After an inexcusable delay we return to the cinematic exploits of Richard Wentworth, Norvell Page's epic pulp crimefighter better known as The Spider. Regular and patient readers will recall that this Columbia serial pits Wentworth against The Octopus, a masked supercriminal with a possibly fake limp who seeks control of the nation's utilities through terrorist means. We last saw Wentworth in costume brawling in an open car with minions of The Octopus until the car plowed into an electrified transformer fence. What you didn't see last time was Wentworth diving out of the car to avoid electrocution. Before leaving the scene, The Spider makes sure to leave his brand on one of the corpses in the car.

The gangsters want to kill Johnny, the newsboy introduced last episode who can identify one of the gang believed dead. They create a traffic distraction while three of them head for Johnny's apartment. Seeing this, Wentworth quick-changes in his car and prepares to go into masked action in broad daylight. Questioned on this by Ram Singh, Wentworth explains: "Warrior, when immediate action is necessary the police are too handicapped by rules and regulations; therefore The Spider must strike at once." He goes up a fire escape, frightening one of Johnny's neighbors, and comes in through the window to surprise the would-be kidnappers. He shoots one and grabs another while the third flees without Johnny. A cop alerted by the neighbors screams comes up the fire escape to get The Spider. Our hero was going to interrogate the gangster he captured, but the wrongdoer is more useful now as a human shield, soaking up the cop's bullets. The Spider dashes away, quickly doffs cape and mask, and in mufti bursts in on the cop begging for protection from the pursuing Spider. The cops shove him out of the way, not noticing the suspicious bundle of clothes he's carrying. Wentworth might have mentioned to Ram Singh that The Spider's services are necessary because cops are dumb, but perhaps that would have been belaboring the obvious.


Soon afterward, Wentworth and Ram go back to the garage they know to be an Octopus base and walk into an impromptu trap set by the star henchman (Marc Lawrence). I'd given this guy credit for quick-thinking earlier but I take it all back now. He has Wentworth and Ram Singh in his power and orders them into a car for delivery to The Octopus. He searches Ram Singh and claims one of the Sikh's throwing knives, but doesn't bother searching Wentworth. He sends them into the car, but our heroes promptly go out the other door, giving themselves cover as Wentworth pulls out his pistol and opens fire on the gang. Jackson, another of Wentworth's assistants, moves in and puts the gangsters in a crossfire. They take out one of them and get some info on maps and banks out of him before he expires.


It might have been better not to tell The Octopus about this debacle, but someone did and now the big man is ticked off. He chooses to blame the people he assigned to watch Wentworth, who lost him before he went to the garage. He singles out a specific whining gangster for death by belly gun before moving out with his new plan.


The good guys know that The Octopus wants to rob a bank, but there are a lot of banks in town. Where to start looking? Fortunately, the villain makes things easier for the crimefighters by having his minions go crazy in the streets, smashing fire hydrants with their cars all over town. By process of elimination, Wentworth deduces that they'll hit a bank in a district where they haven't been wrecking hydrants. It then becomes easy to single out the targeted bank and rewire its alarm system. The Octopus apparently has sent his men to rob a bank owned by another supervillain. Its alarm system includes a battery of clearly labeled tear-gas bombs installed in the ceiling, and an electrified gate.

The situation deteriorates rapidly for the robbers, and on top of that The Spider shows up with guns blazing. Inevitably, though, our hero gets clumsy and lets a gangster bop him in the back of the head. Down he goes as the would-be robbers make their getaway, just as the electrified gate is about to close on the helpless Spider. And as usual Columbia throws all suspense off the cliff by telling us what Wentworth will be up to in the next chapter. I'll save those details for next time, if you don't mind.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 18

There's nothing special I can say about the contents of this 1929 issue of West, but its red cover certainly would have caught any eye on the racks. And now I'll take back the "nothing special" disclaimer after looking up this issue's short-story collaborators, Elliott W. Michener and Jack Laird. These guys were a fairly prolific writing team, working mostly for West, during the years when they were inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Once free again, they found crime more lucrative, or less difficult, than pulp writing. Both eventually went to Alcatraz, where Michener rehabilitated himself for good through gardening and Laird actually managed to escape, albeit for an hour, using a homemade army uniform. Freed for good in the 1950s, they became inventors and lived to ripe old ages. I suspect their true story is stranger than any fiction they came up with in stir.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 17

Here's an awesome Rudolph Belarski cover introducing a ten-part 1938 Detective Fiction Weekly serial. It's the only pulp work, apparently, by Lewis Clay -- presumably the same man who wrote a number of serials in the 1940s, including the original Superman chapterplay from 1948. So awesome is the cover, if not the concept behind it, that DFW regulars like Richard Sale's Daffy Dill don't even merit a mention up front. Overall, it's a pretty good sounding lineup, also including Roger Torrey, Hugh B. Cave, Lawrence Treat, Robert Arthur and two relative unknowns: Bert Collier and the more prolific Eric Howard. If you buy pulps for show, this one looks like a must-have.

Friday, September 16, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 16


This 1933 cover tells us that W. Wirt's Jimmie Cordie has turned gun-runner as if we might be shocked at that development. Having read some of the Cordie stories it looks to me like another day at the office for the American soldier of fortune who wrought havoc in Asia with his little band of  scrappers during the first half of the 1930s. Some Argosy readers felt that Wirt went over the top with large scale violence, but there must have been an audience for this sort of Mongolian mayhem, or else Cordie wouldn't get the cover so often. I've always wondered about W. Wirt. The author never got a profile in "Men Who Make the Argosy," and I haven't found anything biographical about Wirt. That initial troubles me. Look at B. M. Bower, another of this issue's contributors. Bower was one of pulp's most popular western writers for a long time as the creator of the Flying U Ranch. As western fans now know, the B. stood for Bertha. She'd been writing Flying U stories since 1904, but "Law of the Flying U" was her Argosy debut. Largely forgotten now, Bower here appears alongside Max Brand (with part two of The White Indian) as a pulp peer. The other serials are by Fred MacIsaac (The Lost Land of Atzlan) and Herbert L. McNary (the baseball story The Diamond Specter). There's also a fantastic-sounding novelette, "The Black Sorceror," by Forrest Rosaire, who's "The Man Who Makes the Argosy" this week, as well as short stories by Charles Green and Douglas Leach. I've only just started a 1933 Argosy collection of my own but if 1934-35 is the pulp's peak, as I believe, the year before is probably pretty good, too.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 15

This is a 1931 Adventure from my own collection. I don't think it's an intact copy; my understanding is that in this era you had an advertising section before the table of contents that, if such was still the case in 1931, has been cut away. Still, the content that counts is intact, though I don't think I'd risk cracking the 192 page magazine's spine to do any serious scanning. I've only read about a third of the issue so far, and the stories are pretty good.

In this era Adventure's covers rarely if ever illustrated any of the stories inside, but you could imagine that Sidney Riesenberg's cover is a portrait of Hashknife Hartley, W. C. Tuttle's most enduring western hero. Hashknife's career began in Adventure in 1920, and there he stayed, for the most part, until 1935, apart from a few forays into Argosy. From 1935 to 1951 Hashknife was a star of Short Stories, though Tuttle created a kind of poor man's version of the team of Hashknife and Sleepy Stevens for Exciting Western's Tombstone and Speedy series in the 1940s. The original Hashknife was the exemplar of Tuttle's pulp specialty, the cowboy detective, though the author is at pains to deny pretentious claims for his hero's genius in this introduction to him (or reintroduction) from this issue's opening installment of the two-parter The Make-Believe Man.



Hashknife was no super-sleuth of the range country, but he did have a keen mind and a keen eye for small details, together with a bulldog tenacity. He was a product of the cattle range on the Milk River, Montana; the son of an intinerant minister who had almost too many sons and daughters to share his pittance. So little Henry Hartley, with only a smattering of education, went into the world to win a living.
He grew up quickly, both physically and mentally, a student of human nature, a crude analyst of things. Drifting down through the cattle country, he stopped for a while at the famous old ranch that gave him his nickname, and there he met Dave – Sleepy – Stevens, another cowboy with an itchy foot.
The other side of the hills called to both of them, and they rode away together, just a pair of vagabond cowboys.
And many a rangeland had passed under their horses’ feet since that day, and many a hill had seen them go up one side and down the other. It had not been a profitable partnership. Right now they had less money than they had the day they rode away together, but behind them were deeds well done and memories that money could not buy.
 
In this story Hashknife tries to solve the killing of a fellow saddletramp he knows to have been a real, professional range detective, along the way embroiling himself and Sleepy in the family drama of a woman whose son robbed her, supposedly to pay off a gambling debt, and whose daughter-in-law still lives with her. To Hashknife that doesn't add up; someone that low wouldn't pay any sort of debt. Where he goes with that insight I won't know until I see the October 1 issue someday.

Fortunately there are several satisfactory stories complete in this issue. The best so far is L. Patrick Greene's "Justice," surprisingly frank in its acknowledgment of the sexual exploitation of African women, often the wives of colonial troops, by British officers. The story's hero has the hard-earned respect of his Black Watch, former Zulu warriors, but has to take extra steps to defend their honor after forbidding them from killing the African orderlies who act as procurers for the predatory British. Just as Greene's portrayal of Jim the Hottentot in his Major series evolved over time so that Jim was virtual co-hero of some stories, so here, despite some inevitable racism, he sympathetically portrays the Black Watch's demand for respect as men. I like that Greene resorts to that old pulp standby, the white man's charm that supposedly will detect a guilty party, only to blow right past that point where other stories climax to get to the meat of his subject.

Also very good is "First Command," by Jacland Marmur. A writer I discovered in unz.org's collection of Collier's Weekly, Marmur was pulp's answer to Joseph Conrad: a native of Poland who wrote sea stories in English. This one sets up a cliched situation of two young officers whose lifelong rivalry is punctuated by fistfights in every shared port of call, who end up getting their first posts or serious responsibility on the same ship. When disaster strikes almost instantly, the rivalry vanishes almost as instantly as the men's professionalism comes to the fore.

The last story I read before deadline was L. G. Blochman's "Monsoon." It's well-written but misguided, as Blochman is more interested in the British officer facing criticism from an impatient colonial elite than in his improbable and thus automatically more interesting antagonist, a Canadian World War I veteran who inspires a native uprising. We simply don't learn enough about this man apart from an idealistic belief in liberty that defies the officer's experienced cynicism. It's not that the officer doubts that Indians want liberty; it's just that he knows them to be peasants first who'll revert to peasant ways at the first opportunity, which he strives to provide to them. Maybe it's just my anti-imperialist bias talking (despite my fascination with imperialist stories), but the real story just has to be how the Canadian forms his army, but still finds time for friendly games of chess with the officer.

Coming up for me are Hugh Pendexter's novelette "No Man's Land," about Quantrill's Raiders; Raymond Spears' western story "The Nester;" Gordon Carroll's "story of the tanks" "The Gunner's Seat;" Andrew A Caffrey's "The Fishing Was Good;" another memoir from globetrotting soldier of fortune Rafael de Nogales, and the conclusion of Ared White's Napoleonic serial Monsieur Le Falcon. I really look forward to the Pendexter, but even if the rest aren't up to the standard set in the early pages this issue is still a treat already.

It was inexcusable of me not to credit this issue's sponsor:

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 14


W. C. Tuttle's Henry Harrison Conroy had become "famous" in little more than six months. After making his debut in late February 1935, the vaudevillian turned rancher, sheriff and "Shame of Arizona" had appeared in two more Argosy novelettes before earning his first cover and first serial this issue. He looks a little more stalwart and rugged in V. E. Pyles' rendering, despite his paunch, than he'd look in his many subsequent cover appearances. The whole point of Henry was that he was a comical figure, blatantly Fieldsian, and thus never taken seriously by the criminals of the west whom he inevitably outwitted or simply defeated. Still, Henry had arrived and there was no disputing that. He probably got more Argosy covers over the remainder of the decade than any series character.

Sharing the bill with Henry is Frederick Faust in a dual role. In his most famous part, that of Max Brand, he concludes the serial The Sacred Valley. As George Challis, he presents the second installment of The Dew of Heaven. This serial features Challis's other swashbuckling character, the pirate Ivor Kildare -- Faust clearly liked that name -- to whom the author was returning after getting Tizzo the Firebrand out of the system. After having created the Challis alias for a 1926 Western Story serial, Faust revived it as a swashbuckling brand name with the original Ivor Kildare serial, 1934's The Naked Blade. For this issue's fourth serial, George F. Worts continues his eccentric adventure, The Gold Fist. If you want complete stories, the big one this time is Alfred Batson's "White Jade." This is grand brawling adventure in Asia. As the tag says, "When a Jap, a Chinese and an American all scheme for a fabulous stake, there's no telling the outcome." Throw in a deep-sea diving angle and "White Jade" is vintage pulp fun. You also get R. V. Gery's "The White-Haired Boy," in which an American ship captain gets embroiled in one of those Latin American revolutions, and Charles Newton Elliott's "Bighorn," which is about a mountain sheep, not a beef. It all adds up to another solid Argosy from one of the magazine's peak years.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 13

I haven't read this 1941 Argosy but I've picked it for today because it has about as snazzy and pulpy a cover as this soon-to-vanish cover format permitted. Virgil Finlay's art here compares favorably with the best comic-book cover art of the period, and perhaps that's the effect Argosy was aiming for. There's no listing for this issue in the FictionMags Index, and I can only add to the cover info that E. Hoffman Price's two-parter Faraway Loot, which got off to a promising start the week before, concludes here. If Theodore Roscoe's "The Crocodile" lives up to Finlay's cover then this issue could well be worth having.

Monday, September 12, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 12


The folks at Ace of Aces Books have made part of this 1936 Argosy available for our reading pleasure. Their website has a nice little collection of aviation stories by Frederick C. Painton, including this issue's cover story, "Transpacific Plunder." an entertaining mix of Chinese hijackers, American gangsters and Japanese intrigue bedeviling a two-fisted American pilot. Painton plays off Yellow Peril stereotypes before presenting us with the more streamlined and honorable Chinese antagonist you see on the cover.

In his mind's eye had been built a picture of Chang Tze as a fat, grave Chinese with impassive yellow face,inscrutable slit eyes — in short, a Fu Manchu! What he saw was a slim, debonair oriental of perhaps thirty, with close- clipped stiff black hair parted in the center; a high forehead above a long, narrow face of slightly saffron tint; and a body nearly six feet tall and powerfully made. Even Tony had to admit that Chang Tze was a lot of man.

You can read the rest by downloading the .pdf from this link. The rest of the issue features serials by George Bruce (The Speed King is about baseball, not auto racing), L. G. Blochman (featuring series character Leonidas Prike, a detective based in India) and Johnston McCulley (wrapping up his "Zorro-land" adventure Don Peon.) There's a novelette by Maj. R. E. Dupuy and short stories by Charles T. Jackson (possibly a Mase McKay adventure?), James P. Olsen and John R. Phillips. I can vouch for the Painton story and in 1936 you probably can trust Argosy for the rest of the issue.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 11

Argosy covers usually illustrate one of the stories inside, but there were a few exceptions to that rule in 1937. This particular cover seems to belong on a sports pulp, but the nearest thing to a sports story inside is a racetrack story by Borden Chase. The main events are W. Ryerson Johnson's "Black Damp," a story from that interesting and violent period when labor unrest seemed an appropriate subject for pulp fiction, and Robert Carse's "The Wall," one of his many Devil's Island stories. Frederick C. Painton's short story "Fifty Bucks, Please," is an eccentric effort, a story within a story within a story, the framing device being a letter to the editor of Argosy requesting immediate publication because the author fears that someone will steal his plot. There are also serial chapters from Bennett Foster and house-name Martin McCall, a silly novelette by D. L. Ames about a mild-mannered man who becomes a master criminal, and a short piece by Murray Leinster, "The Greatest Scoundrel Unhung." It wouldn't take much to make this issue better than you'd think from the cover.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 10


L. Patrick Greene's Aubrey St. John Major, aka "The Major," may have been portrayed more often on the cover of Short Stories, his second home after his early years in Adventure, than any other series character. Here he is in 1934, as painted by cover artist/gun columnist K. H. Kuhlhoff.  Greene's novelette "By Rule of Drum" isn't the longest piece in the issue; that honor goes to W. C. Tuttle's novella "Flames of Fate," while Roy Vickers' serial chapter is also longer. But The Major is clearly the star of this issue, which also features a story by multigenre master Murray Leinster and work from such lesser-known names as Reginald C. Barker, Frank J. Leahy, Patrick O'Keefe, George Rosenberg (aka George Armin Shaftel) and Edward T. Turner.  The Major's busiest years as a cover subject, running up to the end of the decade, actually were yet to come.

Friday, September 9, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 9


Another beautiful H. W. Scott cover fronts this 1939 Western Story, advertising a tough-sounding "book-length novel" by Luke Short. At 48 pages "Lead Won't Lie" is pretty substantial, but whether it's book-length depends on what you mean by a book. It and the third installment of Stuart Hardy's Madman's Mesa leave room for short stories by Van Cort (aka Wyatt Blassingame), Norman A. Fox, Kenneth Gilbert (most likely an animal story) and Harry F. Olmsted. Short and the cover are probably enough to make this issue worthwhile.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 8


Most twice-a-month pulps had cover dates of the 1st and 15th of each month, the great exception being Short Stories, which preferred the 10th and 25th. When Adventure first went twice-a-month in 1917 its cover dates were the 3rd and 18th. When it reverted to twice-a-month in 1926, after nearly five years as a thrice-monthly, it used the 8th and 23rd as cover dates for the remainder of the year, plus an extra issue dated December 31, before adopting the more conventional 1st and 15th dating system. To sum up, this 1926 issue is the only September 8 Adventure there is, and it's an intriguing mix of familiar faces and proven talents along with writers who are pretty much strangers to me. The proven quantities include L. Patrick Greene (of Major fame), Ernest Haycox, Ralph R. Perry and Leonard H. Nason, the last in the middle of Chevrons, a five-part serial. Raymond S. Spears and Charles Victor Fischer were established names who've never made much of an impression on me. Negley Farson, Wilkeson O'Connell and W. Townend are just about meaningless names to me, while David Clarallan Jr.'s "The Cannibal" is apparently his only pulp story anywhere. He presumably tells something of himself, as was expected of first-time Adventure authors, in this issue's Camp-Fire letters section, but Clarallan, described as a traveler in the FictionMags Index, didn't hang around the fire too long.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 7


Here's the second of three Detective Fiction Weekly appearances from 1935 of Erle Stanley Gardner's mystery man, The Man in the Silver Mask. He's a vigilante who, in language anticipating The Green Hornet, "hunts the biggest of all big game -- public enemies that not even the G-Men cannot reach." Like the Hornet, Silver Mask has an Oriental ally, though for all I know the resemblances end there. I don't think Britt Reid or Kato was into torture quite as much as these gentlemen appear to be on the cover. Still, Silver Mask arguably is a precursor to the costumed crimefighters who would appear in comic books within a few years. Along with Gardner, who by now had made a mainstream hit with Perry Mason, this issue features DFW regulars Fred MacIsaac and Richard Sale, the former continuing his Strike-Breaker serial, the latter contributing the novelette "The Dancing Corpse." H. W. Guernsey, H. H. Matteson, and Fridtjof Michelson contribute short stories. On the non-fiction side you'll learn about "The Murder of the Perfect Woman," and "When Burglars Become Bandits." The latter article is written by "Ex-Burglar." I suppose that makes him a bandit.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 6

This 1941 Argosy concludes Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Quest of Tarzan. The ape man has divided the shipwreck survivors into two colonies: the good people and the bad. The bad colony is a collection of stereotypes: both the old-fashioned "pig-eyed" German and the ultramodern Nazi, as well as an Arab slave trader and a bolshevistic Russian malcontent. Tarzan is right to separate them from the good guys, but in some possible parable about appeasement the good people try to help the bad guys while Tarzan is away battling Mayan transplants on this South Pacific isle, and the bad ones promptly steal everything valuable and run amok. They get what they deserve, while Tarzan first rescues a Mayan "native" from sacrifice, then does the same for a British woman who wanders into captivity. The Mayans think the ape man to be "Che," the god of the forest. I wonder whether Ernesto Guevara knew that meaning of the word when he took it as his nickname. In any event, the good people get off the island and Tarzan goes on his way. Burroughs would write one more Tarzan story involving the ape man in World War II. He submitted it to Argosy in 1945, but by then the magazine was Popular Publications' flagship monthly, and its editor turned Burroughs down. He published it as Tarzan and the Madman in 1947.



This issue has an ominous novelty to it. For the first time I can think of, Argosy headlines a non-fiction story; an anonymous (ghost-written?) account of "The Miracle of the Battleship Malaya," illustrated with photographs. The closest Argosy ever came to doing that before was in 1936, when it launched White Adventure, George O. Norville's serialized memoir of an Antarctic expedition. As 1941 ground on, the magazine would recruit its fiction writers to pen non-fiction war articles. You get the feeling that Argosy was chasing a "men's" audience that already was starting to grow alienated from fiction at a moment when the news arguably was more dramatic than any fiction. Of course, Blue Book had solicited non-fiction pieces for ages, but those always ran in the back of the book. Something else was going on here that points toward the supplanting of pulps a decade or so later by men's adventure magazines touting the reality of every outlandish tale they told. For now, however, we're still more interested in the fiction.



E. Hoffmann Price was one of the authors tasked with writing factual war stories later in the year. I doubt his December 13 report on the Philippines was more exciting than this issue's opening installment of his two-parter Faraway Loot. This is old-school pulp in a relevant setting: China, one theater of war where the action was not yet dutifully rendered as a morality play. The American hero has to haul out of a Central Asian city controlled by a Soviet diplomat, who gives him a treasure the man fully expects to reclaim by robbery. This is the Terry and the Pirates territory of clashing warlords, individual freebooters and the nebulous Invader on the horizon. I enjoyed it thoroughly and now regret that no one has scanned the September 13 issue with the conclusion.




We leap from China to Chinatown with Walter C. Brown's "The Shanghai Necklace." Along with Arden X. Pangborn, Brown was one of Argosy's Chinatown specialists. The difference between the two authors is that Brown often made his American policeman, Sergeant O'Hara (called "Sah-jin" in the hood) the hero of his stories, while Pangborn's policemen were often ignorant bigots. I have a theory that the Chinatown genre was the precursor of today's "urban fantasy" genre, which imagines colonies of supernatural beings living by their own laws in our midst. On their own terms, Chinatown stories must have appealed to readers with guilty fantasies of getting away with murder, as Chinese protagonists often do on the premise that their victims have it coming. Here, however, the murderer is a bad guy and it's up to "Sah-jin" to figure out who he is. While it's more fun to have Chinese protagonists like Pangborn's Wong Soo, Brown's story is still unapologetic pulp and helps make this issue the most entertaining of the 1941 issues we've looked at recently.

I even liked a story I didn't expect to, Robert Arthur's "The Boys From Mars." I didn't expect to like it because it's a sci-fi comedy in that arch style that introduces the protagonist with mock pretension as "Mr."  Worse, Mr. Dexter Dexter is a verbose. bombastic figure who should have been insufferable just on the strength of his name. Yet I was amused by his indefatigable cluelessness when confronted by saurian visitors from the planet Mars, whom he assumes almost to the end to be no more than carnival freaks. The Martians themselves are charming. Tinkerers determined to be the first Martians on Earth, would-be conquerors without being menacing, hypochondriacs who heard Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast and know to be on the lookout for germs, and yet so endearingly naive as to be captivated by a pulp magazine serial space opera. Their greatest regret on leaving the planet -- the food doesn't agree with them -- is that they won't find out what happened to the heroine after the cliffhanger. I usually find Arthur to be a bland author representing Argosy at its worst in its declining years, but "Boys From Mars" was better than it had any right to be. Since Richard Sale's serial Cape Spectre isn't really bad and George Michener's trifle "The Hardcase Cat" is over quickly, this issue as a whole shows that even at this late, bleak moment in its history -- it will cease to be a weekly one month later -- Argosy could still put together a credible package of pulp fiction when the stars were right.

Pulp Reading: ARGOSY, April 24, 1937, COMPLETE

My Labor Day weekend project was to finish an Argosy scan I started months ago, only to get distracted by other finds and projects. I scanned and uploaded the April 17 issue earlier this year, and I have the May 1 issue for future scanning. This new upload will allow collectors to read the complete two-parter by Joel Townsley Rogers, Locusts From Asia, in which a yellow-peril flying circus intervenes in the skies over the western front during World War I. It also includes what I believe to be the first appearance of Frank Richardson Pierce's popular sourdough raconteur, No-Shirt McGee. Needless to say, there are plenty of other goodies for pulp fans. My long-term goal is to have Eustace L. Adams' Revolution With Pictures complete, which will require me to get the April 10 issue. The final installment is in the May 8 issue, which is available at unz.org. For now, I hope you enjoy these 144 pages from a year when Argosy was still going strong. Download the .cbz file from the link below.


Monday, September 5, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 5

Simpler is better most of the time with pulp covers. Street & Smith seems to have gone through cycles of cover design. Like 1939, 1931 was a period of relatively minimal cover copy, with paintings that might well tell their own stories independently of any story inside. This is a nice example from 1931. Robert J. Horton is the star author, but also inside are Max Brand, continuing his serial Golden Lightning, and Jackson Gregory, wrapping up The Silver Star. An editor might have been tempted to throw "bronze" into one of the other stories, but if so the temptation was resisted. Hugh F. Grinstead, Joseph F. Hook, Ray Humphreys and Howard J. Perry are the other fiction contributors. And it looks like that cowboy has a winning hand one way or the other.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 4


I was busy finishing a scan today (that I'll share with you tomorrow) so here's a perfunctory Calendar entry from 1937. The cover story, "Lonely Inn," was the first of three posthumous Bulldog Drummond stories Detective Fiction Weekly would publish over the remainder of the year. H. C. "Sapper" McNiele had died less than a month earlier, on August 14. Bulldog Drummond would carry on in print (thanks to an authorized successor to Sapper) and on film for years to come. Oddly, the remaining Sapper stories got no hype on the covers of the issues they appeared in. This issue also has novelettes by John K. Butler, Viola Brothers Shore and Roger Torrey, short stories by Wyatt Blassingame, Dale Clark and Cyril Plunkett, and the conclusion of William Edward Hayes' serial Kill the Umpire! These weren't DFW's biggest stars, but they were familiar names to regular readers of the time.