THE PULP CALENDAR: October 27

This is the sort of thing I've been looking for all month, so of course, being unimpressed by the pulp weeklies' October 27 covers, I had to go to the slicks to find it. I can understand why the weeklies wouldn't have Halloween covers. The Munsey weeklies -- Argosy and Detective Fiction Weekly -- used their covers to promote stories inside, and those rarely addressed Halloween as an event, while the Street & Smith westerns were, well, westerns. So here's a Saturday Evening Post from 1928, with a cover by Frederic Stanley. This is where most pulp writers wanted to end up -- here or in Collier's. As it happens, several of this issue's fiction contributors were, or would be, pulpsters. Bernard Atkey, who finishes a two-part story here, was publishing in Blue Book contemporaneously, and would continue to publish his comic Hobart Honey stories there after the Post dried up for him. Charles Garland Givens, billed here as "Colonel Givens," gradually shifted into the detective pulps in the early 1930s. James Warner Bellah, whose later stories inspired some classic John Ford westerns, dabbled in pulp briefly, publishing three stories in Argosy in 1932. Benito Mussolini, who has a non-fiction piece here, did not publish in the pulps, though some may have accused him of having a pulpish imagination.