tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18561247745875703342024-03-12T17:20:03.607-07:00TRUE PULP FICTIONAdventures in a Golden Age of Storytelling
by SAMUEL WILSON,
Author of "Mondo 70," "The Think 3 Institute," etc.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.comBlogger587125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-40112799274662665322019-07-22T19:20:00.001-07:002019-07-22T19:20:41.678-07:00Pulp self-awareness, 1947<p dir="ltr">"<b>H</b>e found <u>Larsen</u> reading by a gasoline light in a cell that had been an oat bin. Heat from the hot mantle had beaded the teamster's brow with sweat and the light gleamed brightly on his bald head. On the cover of his magazine a fearful blonde clutched her breasts and shrank from a black shadow that was about to clutch her.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"'Did it get her?' Barton asked, tapping the blonde in the stomach with his pipe and grinning.</p>
<p dir="ltr">"'Naw!' Larsen said in disgust. 'Them pictures on the front never have nothing to do with the yarns inside.'"</p>
<p dir="ltr">-- Steve Frazer, from "Shotguns at Shavano," his <i>Adventure </i>debut, July 1947.</p>
Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-76176662991410568012019-03-11T16:28:00.001-07:002019-03-11T16:28:12.200-07:00ADVENTURE, August 1938<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>fter having hardly any time for pulp reading for a while I finally got a chance to settle down with this issue of <i>Adventure</i> from from Howard V. Bloomfield's editorial regime. Despite the cowboy on the cover the lead story is a Georges Surdez novelette, "A Head for the Game." It's a change of pace for Surdez in that his usual French Foreign Legion protagonists appear here as antagonists, picking a feud with a commander of Senegalese Tirailleurs. The hero's command gives Surdez plenty of opportunities to make more racist statements than normal about African soldiers -- brave but stupid, incapable of keeping a modest feud like the one in the story from escalating to bloodshed unless strictly handled. The author makes some halfhearted attempts to make characters out of some of the Tiralleurs, but halfhearted might be too generous to Surdez this time. In any event, the main action, after the hero is systematically robbed of supplies by the Legionnaires, is his stealing a march on them, so to speak, by raiding an insurgent camp to reclaim the head of a Legion commander that had been displayed as a trophy. As is almost always the case, Surdez writes well, but this story leaves more of a bad taste in one's memory than is typical.<br />
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Meanwhile, <b>"General Yu Died Gloriously" </b>is the best story I've read to date by Ared White, though for me that isn't saying much. Usually the author of turgid spy stories, White here turns his attention to the Sino-Japanese War, as seen from the perspective of a German veteran of the world war serving as a glorified drill instructor for one of China's unreliable warlords. The German is appalled to find the warlord betraying the cause to the Japanese while his Chinese officers appear to accept his act with fatal passivity. He's about to take a chance to alert the central command when the most sympathetic of those officers appears to inform him, with the equivalent of a wink, that General Yu was killed in action, providing a heroic example for his troops to follow in obedience to central command. Stories about the Chinese war pre-Pearl Harbor could keep a critical distance from both sides in the conflict and are often more interesting than later tales with a more propagandistic purpose, and White definitely benefits from the timing of his story. For what it's worth, this issue also features Captain R. W. Martin's nonfiction account of being the first American flier to shoot down a Japanese bomber over China -- a story which was subsequently strongly challenged, if I recall correctly.<br />
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Towards the back of the book, Meigs O. Frost's <b>"Two Men in a Marsh"</b> is one of those stories in which a two-fisted northerner scandalizes the south by refusing to indulge in the local duelling habit. Our hero here is no coward, of course, but gives offense by finding the whole ritual of honor ridiculous. When a southern friend tries to make up for the hero's bad form in a manner that can only guarantee his own death, our protagonist is ready to kill his antagonist any way the antagonist pleases. But then the hurricane hits and the novelette becomes a survival story. Cut off from civilization and most food and fresh water, the northerner and the chivalrous ass must work together to survive, and to the southerner's credit he's nothing but reasonable about it. Needless to say, the men bond under adversity -- to the extreme, illustrated from behind on the page, of struggling naked on their raft to get the attention of a potential rescuer. This is the first story I've read from Frost to make an impression. He crossed the cultural border himself, being born in Connecticut and dying in Louisiana, where his story is set. At age 56, Frost was near the end of his pulp career. His last stories appeared in 1939, and it may not be coincidence that he won an award for his newspaper work on the <i>New Orleans Times Picayune</i> the following year.<br />
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Elsewhere this issue, Hugh Wiley, worthy of praise as the creator of non-stereotyped Chinese detective James Lee Wong, disgraces himself with a Negro dialect story, "Horseshoe Luck," while Perry Adams goes "off the trail" for "Rendezvous," a flashback-ridden affair in which a mountain climber returns to the "Grandmother" of the Alps on the anniversary of his wife's sacrifice of her life to save his. Arthur D. Howden-Smith concludes his slave-trade serial <i>The Dead Go Overside</i> while Richard Howells Watkins delivers a sea story, "Dead Reckoning," that did little for me. Overall, though, it's an entertaining issue, with some items of a more morbid historical interest.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-81316206311610641062019-02-05T19:54:00.000-08:002019-02-05T19:54:02.645-08:00'And a damn good job it is, this bossing the Arena gang.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>R</b></span>obert Addison Nicolls (1905-1993), a history teacher and football coach at the Friends School of Baltimore, has a grand total of ten stories listed in the FictionMags Index, four of them backup stories for <i>Doc Savage</i> in the 1940s. His first pulp story apparently was his most popular. <b>"The Roman Way" </b>(<i>Adventure</i>, June 1940) was twice reprinted by Popular Publications, in 1950 and 1955 issues of the venerable story magazine. It's written in what could be called the anachronistic vernacular style, though our perception of the casual but not exactly slangy narration as anachronistic is conditioned by the more formal or flowery language of historical fictions by Harold Lamb and others. Basically Nicolls has the veteran Roman soldier Servius, now an assistant manager of a gladiatorial school and arena, talk in what sounds like the voice of a common man.<br />
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<i>...the Arena dungeons outstink 'em all. They're in a class by themselves. Still, it's our bread and garlic now -- Marcus's and mine. And a damn good job it is, this bossing the Arena gang. Easy in winter when the shows aren't on, but a ticklish piece of work when the big season starts. We run our gang on legion discipline; you've got to if you want to hang on in this business. Marcus is boss, just as though he were still centurion in the old Tenth, and me his </i>optio<i>, his second in command. That's how it's always been. I guess that's how it'll always be. Marcus first, me second.</i></blockquote>
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At the same time, Nicolls gives Servius vivid powers of description, particularly when it comes to smells.<br />
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<i>Fresh blood sopping the ground on a hard fought field has a salty tang that goes to the head like a draught of strong wine, and even the horses flare their nostrils and squeal and jump. Next day it resembles the smell of stale flat lees in the bottom of a cheap tavern drinking cup, and the piled up bloated bodies spread a sickish sweet odor that makes a man retch in spite of himself.</i></blockquote>
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The narrator's mind flashes back and forth from the arena to the days when he and Marcus fought in Britain alongside Julius Caesar. He remembers rising through the ranks under Marcus's strict discipline and finally earning his admiration and trust. After a long day of heroism in battle, Servius still gets flogged with Marcus's vinestock for falling in late that morning, but immediately afterward receives a commendation and promotion. He remembers Servius falling in love with a native woman, having a child with her, and having to leave them behind when Caesar withdraws from Britain. In the present, a gang of captured Britons condemned to be killed by beasts in the arena stages a riot. Marcus tries to convince the ringleader to have his men go peacefully, arguing that if they stay healthy they can at least give the animals a fight, even without weapons. Then he recognizes a bit of gold the young man's wearing and realizes that it's the son he left behind long ago. He offers the youth his freedom, but the Briton is determined to stay with his men. The most Marcus can do is arrange it so the Britons will have weapons to use against the beasts of the arena. This only lends a patina of honor to the execution and Marcus knows it. "I shall want a report on the deaths of the British prisoners," he tells Servius, reflecting once more on "the Roman way" summed up in the saying <i>vae victis,</i> "woe to the conquered." The effect is pathos rather than sentimentality and it's a surprisingly good fit with the slightly hardboiled tone of Servius' narration. The story clearly made an impression on readers, but one gets the sad feeling that Nicolls never topped his first effort.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-24383324115730036132019-02-02T17:07:00.000-08:002019-02-02T17:07:02.259-08:00'The sun would have been kind not to have revealed this.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>H.</b></span> A. De Rosso has a reputation for writing some of the darkest western pulp stories. He peaked in the 1950s, as pulp westerns moved closer to the more mature tone of movie westerns in the same period. He published 25 stories in 1953, including <b>"Long Rope - Short Prayer!"</b> in the April 1953 <i>10 Story Western</i>. In this one, range detective Red Harrison is called to Santa Gertrudis to investigate rustling, only to find he's been set up. The rancher's wife Bridget Mullineaux had her own cattle stolen by a trusty henchman in order to create a pretext for a detective to reopen the case of Jim Woodruff, her lover who was killed for rustling. Bridget is certain that Jim was framed and expects Harrison to smoke out the actual rustlers while investigating the fake rustling. Her suspicions appear more plausible when some of Jim's old buddies try to scare Harrison out of town. They claim he's trying to frame someone for the most recent rustling, but it also looks as if they have something to hide. Harrison's investigation continues after he kills one of those men, bu the intervention of another woman, Isobel Cobb, starts to tear Bridget's story apart. Isobel tells Harrison that Jim Woodruff married her three days before he was killed -- and really was a rustler. She warns Harrison to quit and leave town or else she'll tell Bridget the whole story. Infatuated with Bridget, Harrison can't let that happen. He heads to Isobel's place, presumably to silence her, only to find that Bridget's faithful henchman Tacoma had already done the job -- this post's title sums up the scene -- only to be mortally wounded by another of Woodruff's old cronies. Tacoma lives long enough to tell Harrison that he killed Woodruff because "He hurt Bridget." Harrison hunts down the last rustler, as much to wipe out the truth once and for all as to get justice for poor Tacoma. "An ugly purpose was clawing at Harrison's brain," DeRosso writes, "He did not like to think about it. He tried pretending it wasn't there." But just the same he goads the rustler into a gunfight, even as he wonders "if this was worth it when stacked against a woman's illusory dream." There's no real benefit to it, since Bridget is married to the rancher. The only payoff Harrison can hope for is some sort of loving look from her as he leaves, but he doesn't get it. It's almost stereotypically noirish stuff but in a western pulp from 1953 it must still have had some transgressive novelty, and even now it's probably the best story in the issue.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-24601356135432288312019-01-20T15:30:00.000-08:002019-01-20T15:30:27.234-08:00'At moments I am even envious of the defunct Mr. Li.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>sang Ah-bou was James W. Bennett's attempt at a Charlie Chan-style detective, the twist being that Tsang did his detective work in China itself, where he would have plenty of opportunities to interact with westerners like Bennett himself, who did some diplomatic work and taught creative writing in the middle kingdom earlier in his life. Tsang is more than a tough guy than Chan; "His loosely fitting gray serge gown concealed muscles trained in jiu-jitsu and of an iron-like hardness," writes Bennett, who apparently never caught on about kung fu during his time in China. His athletic training comes in handy when his Occidental superiors in the Shanghai police assign him to solve the murder of a Chinese movie actor in his second outing, <b>"Tsang, Accessory"</b> (<i>Oriental Stories</i>, Winter 1932). Whether Bennett researched the Chinese film industry is unclear and probably unlikely. He portrays an upstart company with American personnel muscling in on a market dominated by native talent, making the established talent suspect in the death of Li, the leading man of the new studio. Other possibilities include the upstart studio's American director and cameraman and its Chinese-American leading lady. To investigate in depth, Tsang gets himself hired as the dead actor's replacement, his questionable physical resemblance more than compensated for, in the director's eyes, by his ability to do his own stunts. A fatigued Tsang complains of his added workload in a letter to his superiors, but it gives him the opportunity to slowly reduce the suspect list until he stumbles upon the opium racket for which the new film company is a front. It might seem unlikely that a director with Hollywood experience would get involved in the drug trade, but as Tsang explains, "It is true that he can command thousand of dollar, possibly, as director. But as head of opium ring, he can make many million." From that example, you see that Tsang's English remains imperfect -- it's realistically erratic rather than by-the-numbers pidgin -- but shows a better grip on grammar than Charlie Chan had. The story's twists include the revelation that Li the actor was in on the opium racket, while his leading lady is a detective in her own right -- presumably working for the U.S. government -- who actually killed the guilty thespian in self-defense. The story's title is explained at the end when Tsang, sympathizing with the actress-detective and the American cameraman who apparently loves her, decides to let the murder case go unsolved. His superiors may think the worse of him for this seeming failure, but our hero reflects that "that is penalty I must pay for joining ranks of law-breakers. It all comes, I think, of the bad custom in United States of having lady detectives!" Tsang made two more appearances in 1933 issues of <i>Rapid-Fire Detective Stories,</i> but after that Bennett's career in pulp fiction was just about done, and his creation would be just about forgotten.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-7472579831245865162019-01-17T19:13:00.002-08:002019-01-17T19:13:41.393-08:00'Do not forget, sheik, that brave sons and virtuous daughters are the offspring of mothers!'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>W</b></span>illiam Ashley Anderson's fiction career extended from 1914 to 1973, and the man himself lived to be 98 years old. He had a run of stories in The Saturday Evening post in 1919 but spent most of the 1920s in the pulps, mainly in <i>Adventure</i>. <b>"The Edge of the Simitar"</b> (July 30, 1924) is a tale of exotic espionage during the Great War that owes a little something to Talbot Mundy and maybe a little something more to John Buchan. Our hero is an ailing Frenchman, Cohusac, who's stirred from his torpor in isolated Aden when a British friend informs him of a conspiracy afoot to establish an Islamic regime in Christian Ethiopia. As Germany has for some time pandered to Islamic resentment of the French and British imperialism, and given Ethiopia's reputation at the time for invincibility, such a conversion could tip the balance of power in Africa and beyond. Suspicion focuses on an American, Sevier. His nation is still neutral in 1916, and his personal alignment is uncertain. Believing this American instrumental in organizing the planned Abyssinian coup, Cohusac concocts a plan to get him driven out of the country.This involves him disguising himself as a hunchbacked troubador, the better to serenade a local lady, allegedly on the American's behalf, thus creating a scandal. This silliness is necessary, in retrospect, to introduce us to the true mastermind of the conspiracy: Miriam, the object of our hero's serenade. Anderson portrays her as a sort of Muslim counterpart to Hilda von Einem, the German instigator of a Muslim conspiracy in Buchan's <i>Greenmantle</i>. As a Muslim, his villainess is even more exceptional, if not more formidable, than Buchan's. He emphasizes the discomfort of her male Arab con-conspirators.<br />
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<i>Miriam was one of those amazing Mohammedan women who since the war have shown that many of the great movements in Mohammedan history have originated in the harimlik. She, a woman, an annoyance to men, was looked upon with universal respect for her intelligence. Despite this, however, the Mohammedans were too deeply set in their prejudices to approve of the boldness with which she went unveiled. Had she been in Arabia her conduct would have been considered of so immoral a character as to make it impossible for the sheiks and </i>hadjis<i> to treat her with anything but disapproval and contempt. The fact, however, that Somali women are never veiled, and Abyssinian women are not only unveiled but have also as much personal freedom as Europeans, made it impolitic, if nothing else, to express their disapproval openly. </i><br />
<i>At the same time, they never overlooked an opportunity to snub her if they felt they could do it in safety, since they feared her also on account of the power of witchcraft she was supposed to have -- reading men's minds, seeing through the covers of books, prophesying with accuracy.</i></blockquote>
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The irony, as the story reaches its climax, is that Miriam knows something that Cohusac doesn't that makes all his efforts rather pointless. Sevier, she knew all along, is not the agent provocateur Cohusac and his British friend feared, but exactly the opposite: an agent of the British government. The Frenchman has the satisfaction, however, of rescuing Miriam from rape at the hands of one of her erstwhile allies. He has accomplished something after all. Anderson, meanwhile, has tried to have things both ways, playing on what fear then existed of jihad among American pulp readers while indulging in a perhaps more strongly felt fear of a sort of superwoman representing disorder on a global scale. Miriam's presence gives his story a redemptive thrill that the plot itself lacks and makes it worth a read today.<br />
<br />Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-59946476776934951812019-01-14T19:15:00.000-08:002019-01-14T19:15:02.192-08:00'A touch of sun -- it does queer things.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>B</b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>lue Book</i> was the main market for H. Bedford-Jones' serial anthologies of thematically-related stories. The gimmick gave him an excuse to surround each actual story with some framing device when they could well have stood well on their own, but his approach certainly paid more. HBJ had two separate series going on in the July 1937 issue: "Ships and Men," written in collaboration with Captain L. B. Williams -- that is, in collaboration with himself -- and "Warriors in Exile," represented in this issue by <b>"A Touch of Sun." </b>The framing narrative includes an apparent nod to Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday, as it introduces an impossibly old Foreign Legion veteran to narrate a tale from the early days of the Legion, in the 1830s, that he claims to have witnessed. The tale itself concerns Pan Andrei, a Polish nobleman who was exiled from his homeland by its Russian overlords and ended up with the Legion in Algeria, only to desert to the natives two years later. He takes up the Touareg cause under the name El Mohdi, alongside a Turkish veteran and his daughter Khattifa, with whom Andrei falls in love. The old narrator attributes the Pole's desertion and his transformation into a renegade "Arab" to too much sun, but apart from that insinuation that he had to be mad to do it all, the story treats his new Muslim friends in relatively respectful fashion. Khattifa, who dons a youth's uniform to remain at her beloved's side, is particularly contrasted with Andrei's Polish wife, who appears in Algeria bearing tidings of his pardon and his reinstatement to nobility. He hears of this indirectly, having infiltrated the French base in native guise in order to learn the Legion's plans. The prospect tempts him briefly, but once he leaps to the conclusion that his wife is more interested in her own reinstatement to high society, he remembers all of Khattifa's virtues.</span></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: small;">Allah! What a contrast between that woman, a princess, and this Turkish girl who loved him, rode with him, was going to bear him a child within a few more months! Here was life -- warfare, hard living, privation, and love that sweetened it all. Here was the proper destiny for a man; not back there on the estates of a prince.</span></span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: small;">Alas, in the next engagement El Mohdi is knocked unconscious and separated from his army, waking up alone in the sun. He had set the Legion up to be ambushed, but now, hearing the songs of the Polish battalion and feeling the sun again, his alignment is scrambled once more. Now he rushes to warn the Poles of the attack but they, seeing him approach in Touareg garb, shoot him dead. This last detail confuses one of the audience in the framing story, because it's all supposed to be based on Pan Andrei's diary, and how could he have written up his own demise? The old narrator suggests that he might have thrown that last part in himself, but that disclaimer reads more like an authorial shrug of the shoulders. </span></span>Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-31385491145843699372019-01-08T19:54:00.002-08:002019-01-08T19:54:48.551-08:00'Wipe your chest, renegade!'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0uSXbJUfbWfK-l2sW6PZAMWki9j1aUdd7BigbXuDXoA4q7jljpq5mD-J_cZctNP4jfA4VensBLiy6SAAJko8zpv_ifmzDNq8SM6LwqcZg9uHE3mwh96k8WrjNm8SU2bhtaY2BA4f9IGQ/s1600/20190108_084317.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="991" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0uSXbJUfbWfK-l2sW6PZAMWki9j1aUdd7BigbXuDXoA4q7jljpq5mD-J_cZctNP4jfA4VensBLiy6SAAJko8zpv_ifmzDNq8SM6LwqcZg9uHE3mwh96k8WrjNm8SU2bhtaY2BA4f9IGQ/s400/20190108_084317.jpg" width="247" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>H.</b></span> Bedford-Jones was fond of framing devices, at least when writing short stories. Sometimes they helped maintain the gimmick for a series of thematically related stories, and sometimes, probably, they simply padded out a story to make it more lucrative for the prolific author. They tend to keep us at a distance from the main story, since you have to get the story of someone telling the story first. It's unusual for the framing device to warn us away from the story, but that's the impression given -- perhaps unintentionally -- by the framing device for <b>"J. Smith, His Mark" </b>(<i>Adventure</i>, June 1940). In the framing device, our present-day narrator is shown some curios by a Hollywood friend, and then is treated to a private screening of a film alleged to be unreleasably bad. The story of that apparent stinker is our main story, an adventure of Captain John Smith when he was a mercenary in Morocco, years before his legendary exploits in Virginia. The story itself is not bad, if not much of a story. Smith makes a friend who shows him the ropes, an English renegade kills the friend, and Smith gets a measure of revenge in a duel that ends with him carving his initials, Zorro-style, in his enemy's chest. This trifle has a morbid coda as our narrator's friend calls his attention back to an exotic drum he'd admired earlier. The skin of the drum is the skin of Smith's enemy, the initials still showing. The narrator has nothing to say about the cinematic quality of the film he's watched, but we might observe that if anything made the project unreleasable, it was the presumably explicit footage of Smith slicing both of his enemy's ears off before signing his work. The Production Code didn't allow for such things -- but pulp did.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-89874241587336382552019-01-06T16:42:00.000-08:002019-01-06T16:42:26.979-08:00'You had a continent to choose from and you tried to steal what was mine.'<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>B</b></span>ased on my limited reading I think of J. D. Newsom is of a Foreign Legion story specialist, but his novella <b>"Lord of the Stony Rises"</b> (<i>Adventure</i>, July 30, 1924) finds him in Australia telling a meandering tale of one man's vengeance giving way to another's. The common foe is John Burdette, a mighty land baron on somewhat unscrupulous origins, first shown firing, in humiliating fashion, an even less scrupulous underling, Mitcham. This Mitcham dreams of taking revenge and has an inkling of how to do so, having become aware of the legal uncertainty of much of Burdette's property. He's such a loser, however, that he can do nothing about it and is reduced to a paranoiac fear of Burdette ever lurking near him until he happens to run into just the person to help him. A chance encounter begins a mismatched partnership between the thuggish, weaselly Mitcham and the dandified "shrimp" called Rushton, who has the means and the apparently whimsical temperament to take on Burdette by running cattle on his supposed land. Rushton is a constant infuriating surprise to Mitcham, from his unlikely competence with a bullwhip to his ability to hold his own with Mitcham in a fight. He also has more stick-to-it-ness than Mitcham, who's willing to sell out immediately when Burdette suggests a price that strikes Mitcham as lordly but seems pathetic to Rushton, who has hinted at reasons of his own to stick it to Burdette. Burdette himself recognizes Rushton as the real threat and strives to flip Mitcham back to his side. Mitcham had seemed to be the protagonist of the story, but as his craven nature becomes undeniable Rushton becomes our hero as rough outdoor life rips away his veneer of refinement to reveal the real character beneath. This change gives the story more of an episodic quality than it probably should have, especially once it moves into endgame mode with Burdette tasking Mitcham to provoke a native uprising in order to destroy Rushton. Newsom is blunt about the fate of the continent's aborigines, making plain that relegating them to reservations is more or less a death sentence, but shows them little sympathy. The tribe Mitcham deals with is especially awful, their adoration of the man as a god (for providing them with booze, among other reasons) going horrifically overboard in a kind of parody of the Catholic Mass as the people become convinced that partaking of the divine flesh will give them magical powers. With Mitcham thus disposed of the stage is cleared for the showdown with Burdette in which Rushton finally reveals his grudge with the land baron. It proves to be typical melodramatic stuff: Rushton's grandfather once owned most of the land Burdette now holds, but was driven out after refusing to let Burdette marry his daughter, Rushton's mother. In the ultimate melodramatic moment, Burdette has a vision of the long-lost girl and promises not to harm her boy before dropping dead from a heart attack. It's a bit of a mess but still an entertaining story, and in any event this was still early in Newsom's career. He'd been publishing in <i>Adventure</i> since 1922, and his best work was still ahead of him.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-57838176218856763712019-01-05T06:53:00.001-08:002019-01-06T16:13:13.454-08:00'It was I who suggested the idea of two impostors meeting each other.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMmAv9HHQjBO057YShl53sVj9953617SqgZh03dYEsRWclgDUcmZ6JpYJf7_eE4FS5zwwOYhsrXdQ0wiEWL7Gk8udSvfxMh3kXeD7P37nGsIpmECfsmMCNu8gEgpmRQfsJt90WATMiGbU/s1600/20190102_091519.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="566" data-original-width="800" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMmAv9HHQjBO057YShl53sVj9953617SqgZh03dYEsRWclgDUcmZ6JpYJf7_eE4FS5zwwOYhsrXdQ0wiEWL7Gk8udSvfxMh3kXeD7P37nGsIpmECfsmMCNu8gEgpmRQfsJt90WATMiGbU/s640/20190102_091519.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>F</b></span>rom the publishers of <i>Weird Tales,</i> <i>Oriental Stories</i> covered an expansive "East" extending from our Middle East to the Pacific. In the Winter 1932 issue, E. Hoffman Price and Otis Adelbert Kline's <b>"The Dragoman's Jest"</b> is a play on readers' fanciful notions of the East. In Egypt, a native coffee shop owner regaled a tourist with the tale of how a conniving draagoman -- a translator and tour guide -- became a wealthy grandee. Once upon a time, this man was giving his American mark the usual tour, mainly in order to mooch off him, when the American is suddenly smitten by the vision of a briefly unveiled Kurdish princess. He promises a big payoff if the guide can arrange a tryst with the eastern beauty. The guide arranges with the princess to concoct an exotic adventure for the American, only for authentic bandits to introduce an unwelcome element of realism. That only makes things more romantic, but in the end the American mass to pay a huge ransom to the chieftain to whom his beloved had been sold in order to rescue her and himself. Just in case any reader thought the American had gone too far in his romantic enthusiasm, our native narrator assures us that the princess was also an American tourist (from Keokuk, Iowa) living out a fantasy adventure -- and that the tour guide had arranged for the bandits and ended up, disguised as the chieftain, collecting the ransom money. In short, everyone put on a show based on what a couple of yokels expected from their land and people, and laughed all the way to the bank. Cute stuff.</div>
Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-32472969082264376522019-01-02T18:50:00.002-08:002019-01-02T18:50:32.085-08:00'I'm going back to white man's country, where you can see what you're fighting!'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1UGmLao7AjY7b-5qb_XyfdwkSm-cQmm5CmTnuCAmVbgaxyvfeUPZV4NfaBbEMBjQ6dA7S5VRkFoOFCNICQrrVUuU7AmsHsWlapKtMgbpvGVi_QSK8ZkVeObbU43MKKORgXSqzgOfzFVE/s1600/Screenshot_20181214-193202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1UGmLao7AjY7b-5qb_XyfdwkSm-cQmm5CmTnuCAmVbgaxyvfeUPZV4NfaBbEMBjQ6dA7S5VRkFoOFCNICQrrVUuU7AmsHsWlapKtMgbpvGVi_QSK8ZkVeObbU43MKKORgXSqzgOfzFVE/s640/Screenshot_20181214-193202.jpg" width="450" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>L</b></span>et's start a hopefully more productive new year with a trifle from the November 12, 1932 issue of <i>Argosy</i>. William E. Barrett's <b>"Cat Hair"</b> is a story of white men in the Solomon Islands, part of a genre that never ceases to fascinate me. What fascinates me about the genre, set in Africa most of the time, is the ambiguity of the stories' superficial racism. The whole genre most likely qualifies as racist because Africans and other natives are shown consistently to be subordinate and ideally subservient to whites. Yet black characters are often given heroic qualities, particularly those who serve as sidekicks to series characters like Jim the Hottentot in L. Patrick Greene's series about the Major. Heroism is conditional upon loyalty to the white man, of course, but subordination isn't necessarily synonymous with inferiority in these stories unless we're dealing with social status. As it happens, there aren't really any heroic native characters in "Cat Hair." What I like about Barrett's short story is its reversal of a familiar trope of such stories. The hero, Collishaw, drives a cruel and bigoted white colleague off the islands by playing on the white villain's susceptibility to superstition.<br />
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After seeing the new man beat a "number one boy," Collishaw realizes that the new man is likely to provoke a native uprising that will wipe out the good whites as well as the bad. He can't openly reproach Bronson, as "He was too old a hand to take sides with a native against white authority, no matter how abused that authority might be." But when Bronson proves hatefully intractable Collishaw conspires with a native servant to put a permanent scare in the goon. He sets up a scenario in which the native will be caught trying to take some of Bronson's hair for a voodoo-style ritual cursing. He reassures Bronson that the man has only gotten away with hair from Collishaw's cat. When the cat turns up dead soon afterward he allows Bronson to draw his own conclusions, assuring a happy ending for all but the cat. In a move that might offend some modern readers, Collishaw sacrificed his pet, poisoning it to cinch the illusion of evil magic and frighten Bronson out of Africa. The modern reader might be forgiven for asking why Collishaw didn't just kick Bronson's ass, but a story like this is a window opening out to, if not a funhouse mirror reflecting another world -- or at the least it shows us how people from 86 years ago or so saw how their world worked.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-60416492892024274682018-12-05T19:24:00.003-08:002018-12-05T19:24:34.082-08:00'Kitty Gardner couldn't be blamed for encouraging him, but the truth was going to be a bitter pill.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlYBvekPhI65aT32mmiArLjfMlNBGSfr79Xl7CRDlI0ePmB1Fx7_hlACdmMo1IFM_5Lc4-9pPWeN15cuzOLNEKVr1bs_gMURphtpZ5BuhYwUE9uXEAx4JXe0ASWYYhlB5Xz7le93WxAyE/s1600/20181205_214900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1127" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlYBvekPhI65aT32mmiArLjfMlNBGSfr79Xl7CRDlI0ePmB1Fx7_hlACdmMo1IFM_5Lc4-9pPWeN15cuzOLNEKVr1bs_gMURphtpZ5BuhYwUE9uXEAx4JXe0ASWYYhlB5Xz7le93WxAyE/s640/20181205_214900.jpg" width="454" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T. T. </b></span>Flynn is best known today for writing <i>The Man From Laramie</i>, the source for one of director Anthony Mann's great western films with Jimmy Stewart. By the time that story first appeared as a Saturday Evening Post serial in 1954 Flynn was primarily a western writer, but at the end of the 1930s westerns were only a small part of his output. <b>"The Devil's Lode"</b> (<i>Western Story</i>, June 24, 1939) was one of only two westerns Flynn wrote that year, the rest of his stories going to detective pulps. Perhaps because he still wrote westerns only infrequently, this 60 page "book-length novel" has some freshness to it. Its hero, Paso Brand, flees Mexico to escape the family of a rival suitor he'd killed. He befriends a beleaguered gold miner who helps him out of one revenge attack and has new problems to solve. The main problem, in theory, is which of Bull Gardner's men at their isolated mine is betraying Gardner to the outlaw band of Shorty Baxter. Flynn sets up a lot of possibilities, but isn't really writing a detective story here. He makes Gardner's right-hand man a red herring, suspicious to us because of his reflexive hostility to our hero. In a lot of pulp fiction first impressions tell the whole story, but Flynn departs from expectations by making this antagonist one of the good guys, if never really a friend to our hero. His biggest departure from convention involves Bull Gardner's daughter Kitty, the inevitable ingenue who seems predestined to be Paso Brand's girl. Paso Brand himself seems to take this for granted, which sets up a reversal that gives a humorous unity to the whole sprawling story. Another young member of that Mexican clan has fallen in with Shorty Baxter's gang by the time they capture Paso and Kitty. Juan Escobar is determined to take revenge on Paso at a time and place of his own choosing, but in the meantime Paso desperately encourages Kitty to butter him up. This works better than Paso anticipates, as Juan proves willing to free Paso and forget his family honor if Paso will help him keep Kitty out of the dirty hands of the outlaws. Of course, Paso is happy to go along, though he pities Escobar for a poor sap. He keeps thinking this way all the way to the end of the story, when he advises Kitty to let Juan down slowly.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>'You've got a problem in young Escobar. He's head over heels in love. It'll take a lot of talkin' to make him ever think different.'</i><br />
<i>'I don't want him ever to think different! I love him! Where is he?' Kitty cried, turning to the door.</i><br />
<i>Paso's mouth was open soundlessly as she left the room, running toward the office.</i></blockquote>
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Paso actually takes this like a good sport, perhaps realizing that some cosmic justice has resolved his feud with the Escobars by allowing one of them to steal a girl away from him. Of course, like many an old-time cowboy, at least in the more comical stories, he's happy to have gotten a good horse out of his adventure. "Devil's Lode" isn't really comical apart from the ending, but it's an entertaining piece with space enough for Flynn to create a convincing sense of isolation and danger in the distant mining camp if nothing else. The novella stands out in length and quality from the mostly mundane contents of this particular issue of <i>Western Story </i>and promises better things still when Flynn becomes more of a full-time western writer in the 1940s.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-22825365828290057722018-11-30T18:55:00.001-08:002018-11-30T18:55:26.135-08:00'I regret that one cannot speak freely in France these days unless one carries a bomb.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCkSJj1WNVrFeE4LSn-uJigMlg8XfFx1K-X4zUEpHoeRNir3CgVaINs116osdix_N8TEgOH32ZVvY_XFF4EdeAzXGCdudLG7QFIfeqwgkzFTsO_nN97WoFJ5AUaSTNQzXk36-p2khyphenhyphenHsE/s1600/20181130_211732.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1115" height="458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCkSJj1WNVrFeE4LSn-uJigMlg8XfFx1K-X4zUEpHoeRNir3CgVaINs116osdix_N8TEgOH32ZVvY_XFF4EdeAzXGCdudLG7QFIfeqwgkzFTsO_nN97WoFJ5AUaSTNQzXk36-p2khyphenhyphenHsE/s640/20181130_211732.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>W</b></span>hen World War II came, Georges Surdez, who had been the Foreign Legion writer par excellence in pulp, made the new war his subject, whether it was fought by the Legion or by others. With the end of the war came a new shift, or at least the hint of one. <b>"One For France and One For Me"</b> (<i>Adventure</i>, January 1946) sees Surdez moving in an almost noirish direction, with an abrupt cynicism about the French Resistance so soon after the war. Norman, an American point-of-view character returning to a town where he'd been harbored by resistance fighters during the war finds himself caught up in a manhunt that appears mostly to be a settling of scores. His old buddy in the resistance, Frederic, is still a fugitive, only now hunted by a sovereign French regime that sees him as no more than a bandit. The more Norman learns about the war within the more, the darker and murkier the picture grows. Ordinary Frenchmen took advantage of both the Resistance and the Nazis to get rid of personal enemies, and the same situation holds, more or less, now that the war is over.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Suppose you are an employee in some large firm, next in line for a good job. You make your choice between the Gestapo and the Resistance. In the first case, you write, 'So-and-so takes strolls near the railway station often - he notes the troops passing through.' That's enough to get him picked up. To the Resistance you write: 'You wonder who tipped off the Boches about the aviator? Ask so-and-so.' And you get your promotion while the other chap's in jail, or after he's killed. Or say you're a middle-aged man with a pretty wife younger than yourself. She has a cousin of whom she's very fond. There's nothing wrong as yet, but you think there may be soon. A couple of notes and he is arrested as hostage, or deported to Germany. It's the </i>lettre de cachet<i> within the reach of all.</i></blockquote>
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Frederic has many scores to settle. He wants to publish lists of informants that the new government would rather see suppressed. He especially wants revenge on a pathetic informer who turned his own daughter, the resistance fighter's lover, over to the Gestapo, supposedly on the naive assumption that she would quickly confess under pressure. She proved tougher than anyone thought and ended up dying under torture without naming names, and her blood is on her father's hands. Over time, Frederic killed the Germans who'd tortured his love, but his vengeance is incomplete while the old man lives. He's a juror for the trial of Frederic's grandfather, a fascist and collaborator. Tricking Norman into acting as his escort, Frederic invades the courtroom carrying a bomb. He wants the opportunity to denounce several of the jurors as crooks or collaborators, but wants to act as judge, jury and executioner for the old man. Living up to the principle that gave Surdez his title, Frederic kills his grandfather ("One for France"), then delivers the <i>coup de grace</i> to his true enemy after the spectators virtually lynch him ("One for me."). As a bonus, Frederic finally shoots himself. Almost inevitably, Norman learns that Frederic's bomb was a fake. A fellow American laughs cynically, but Norman "had believed in the bomb. And then, when you thought of Emilie and the others ... you did not feel like laughing at all." For one of Surdez's first postwar stories, this is an extraordinary piece of work.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-70277078954493602122018-11-18T18:23:00.002-08:002018-11-18T18:23:09.405-08:00'You might think you was a killer but you ... you didn't have the stuff'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>I</b></span>n <b>"Heritage of the Owlhoot"</b> (<i>Action Stories</i>, October 1939) Walt Coburn strives to get into the head of a young outlaw. The first part of the "complete novel" is a harrowing account of Dave Sandall's killing of an abusive, alcoholic father and his sentencing to a cruel reform school. Everything seems to go against the youth, from the booze-sozzled attorney assigned him by an indifferent court to a bungled escape that leaves him in the wilderness with a broken leg. His fortunes turn, though not necessarily in the right direction, when he befriends another delinquent, Hutch, after earning his respect by beating him senseless with a crutch. They team up to escape, Hutch killing a sadistic guard in the process, and turn owlhoot to survive. Tension develops early as Dave stops Hutch from killing a cowboy who gives them shelter in a line camp shack. Dave may have killed his own father, but that was a "him or me" moment; as a rule he doesn't believe in killing harmless or defenseless men. Hutch has a "take no chances" mentality when it comes to potential snitches, and in general he has more of a mean streak than Dave, if not a compulsion to provoke life-or-death fights. From that point, Dave has a hunch that Hutch will try to kill him someday, if only because, so he intuits, Hutch is afraid of him. For all that, Hutch remains a loyal partner on the owlhoot trail. Given an opportunity to abandon Dave to the mercies of a theoretical posse, Hutch chooses to stick with him overnight. He has what Coburn calls a "queer code," by which he means (I think) nothing subtextual but something paradoxical if not unfathomable. He may well want to kill Dave someday, or it may be inevitable that something would provoke him into trying, but that doesn't contradict an equally compelling loyalty -- maybe solidarity might be a better word -- he feels toward his comrade in escape and banditry.<br />
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The pair finally end up with some version of a "Hole in the Wall" gang where Hutch exposes some fundamental weakness of character through his desperate efforts to impress veteran outlaws with his bragging, while Dave simply sits aloof. The plot takes a sadly melodramatic turn here when one of the outlaws reveals that Dave had not committed parricide after all. The drunken bum who raised him wasn't Dave's father at all, it turns out. His real father, long dead, was a rancher who bequeathed Dave his ranch. The outlaw arranges for Dave to leave and claim his heritage, but not before Dave saves Hutch from a sudden attacker bent on revenge for something -- it's actually a nice touch that Coburn doesn't fill in the backstory, though we can conclude that he was the man who left horses outside the reform school for Hutch and Dave's escape -- by shooting him in the hand. That itself may sound corny but Coburn actually treats this in a more realistic way than the movies or funnies, since the next time we see this man, he's minus the hand. By that time he also has Hutch as an ally, as several years later they visit Dave's ranch to shake him down for money. That tells us something about the sort of co-dependence Coburn perceives among the outlaw kind; they may hate each other but sometimes they have no one but each other to stick with.<br />
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The stage is set for a final showdown in which Hutch will likely have the advantage because of his preternatural ability to see in the dark. Fortunately, Hutch is backlit when the final showdown comes, but even then Dave takes a bullet to put one in Hutch. Dave will live but Hutch will not. His final words are "no ... hard ... feelin's." An interesting sentiment at the end for someone shown as such a hater, and maybe a suggestion that on some level (he also says "Pick up the marbles") none of it was ever more than a grim game for him. For Dave's part, "Somehow, he had never been able to hate Hutch." Instead, he weeps at his sometimes friend's passing. His old friend and his new friend, the line shack cowboy who's heir to a ranch of his own, agree that, despite all we've seen, Dave "never was a killer." To be a killer is something different from killing, it seems, but Hutch's sudden loss of rancor at the end of his life may make you wonder how much of a killer he really was. Coburn's story is suggestive rather than incisive, maybe raising more questions than it can answer, but it's certainly a more sympathetic attempt to understand the outlaw than I was expecting from a 1939 story. Despite its corny turns, I appreciate it for that.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-4006385326042958572018-11-05T18:36:00.003-08:002018-11-05T18:36:33.629-08:00'I belong here, where life is rough -- like me,' he refused.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>R</b></span>alph R. Perry's <b>"Missing"</b> (<i>Argosy</i>, August 1, 1931) is the earliest Bellow Bill Williams story I've read so far. The tattooed pearler was already a well-established character by this point; he's mentioned as a favorite character by some Argonotes letter-writers as early as 1930. Perry is careful to remind us right away that Bellow Bill isn't the superhuman sailor of the sort Albert Richard Wetjen and others wrote about; it's practically a defining characteristic of him that "he is not a particularly good shot." Otherwise, he's strong as a bull and blessed with the proverbial hollow leg. Bill's task this time is to recover the archetypal wayward son of a rigid American businessman. The old man is offering a big reward, but the boy, for a time Bellow Bill's protege, now stands accused of piracy and attempted murder. Bill's partly responsible for the heir's plight, for to get him away from the local police the pearler sent him to "the den of the worst scoundrels in the pacific," the leader of whom now claims never to have seen the young man known as Pug. But Pug can be identified as part of a pirate gang by a distinguishing scar seen by witnesses, so Bill will be hard pressed to clear his name.<br />
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Even though there's plenty of action, this is more a battle of wits than many of the later Bellow Bill stories I've read. On Thursday Island he has to negotiate with a cunning crook, the half-caste proprietor of the Hall of the Five Benevolent Virtues, who combines "the cunning and the ambition of a Dutch father .. with the savage passions of a Papuan mother." He has to convince this Mitaki that it'll be worth his while, in pearls, to deliver Pug back to his father without first killing Bill. Mitaki is counterscheming just as fast and figures out a way to frame Bill himself for another murder in the course of the negotiations. All through this, Perry goes to great pains to describe the layout, above and below, of Mitaki's place, where most of the action takes place. You practically could draw a blueprint from his description, the point of which is to emphasize the advantages Mitaki enjoys on his home turf, including such modest ones as his ability to evade violence on Bill's part simply by taking a few steps from his office into plain view of the bar patrons. However racist Perry's description of Mitaki may be, the story's success as a thriller depends on establishing the half-caste as a very intelligent, hence very dangerous antagonist -- though the author makes it just a little too easy for Bill to see through Mitaki's subterfuge thanks to a telltale bloodstain on his sleeve. Everything turns out all right, of course, and for some reason Perry closes the story on something like a note of pathos as Pug invites Bill to come to America with him and take a job in the family business, only to be rebuffed. Bellow Bill belongs in a rough and tumble world, no matter how qualified he might be for success elsewhere. "Fact is," the pearler confesses in Perry's last word, "I like it that way, even at the worst." Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-56686767259647336732018-11-03T18:33:00.002-07:002018-11-03T18:33:26.433-07:00'Kinney was only eighteen,but moocah salesmen get them young.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>D</b></span>onald Barr Chidsey worked in a wide variety of pulp genres from historical swashbucklers to contemporary crime stories. In <b>"The Prairie Stretched Away"</b> (<i>Short Stories</i>, July 25, 1940) he tried his hand at drug humor, though the story is probably on funny in retrospect. It intends to be a taut, suspenseful story, and I suspect that Chidsey brought a sense of irony to his sensitive subject matter, since narcotics are, in fact, instrumental to the story's happy resolution. The hero, Kinney, is introduced hitchhiking, hoping to make his way across the country after kicking what seems to have been a bad drug habit. Chidsey portrays a bleak, empty landscape, emphasizing his hero's isolation, until a truck nearly sideswipes Kinney on the shoulder of the road. As the truck goes on its way, Kinney finds that he's stumbled onto a line of wires that lead to the underside of a nearby bridge. Sure enough, he's also stumbled onto a band of gangsters who plan to blow up the bridge when a bus passes over it. The killers are professional and impersonal; they don't know who specifically ordered the atrocity or why it was ordered; it's all just a job of work to them, and though they're not to thrilled about the idea, they realize that they're going to have to kill Kinney as well. They're hiding out and shivering cold in a nearby shed and Kinney proposes to make himself useful by getting some kindling for a fire. You see, before they got to the shed, they passed over a stretch of weed that's actually a stretch of weed.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Kinney, seeing those weeds in the beam of the flashlight, swallowed hard and tried to think about something else. Sure he knew them! For he had not only used the stuff but when he got hard up he'd peddled it and packed it into cigarettes. So naturally he knew those weeds. They'll grow wild about anywhere. There's nothing fastidious about them.</i></blockquote>
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Naive as I was, I thought, when his addiction had been mentioned earlier, that Kinney had been hooked on harder stuff than this. I had forgotten that circa 1940 many folks found it hard to imagine harder stuff than marijuana, the weed with roots in hell! Fearful though he is of falling back into addiction, Kinney calculates that his only way to thwart the bombing and escape alive is to set a heap of the stuff on fire -- Chidsey emphasizes that the weeds are sun-dried and ready for use -- and get both his captors and, inescapably himself, high as a kite. This gives Chidsey an opportunity to experiment, based on what experience I dare not say, in portraying a marijuana high.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>He heard an automobile. This was with one mind; the other mind said that there were no automobiles in the world, and what of it anyway. But he heard this. It was far away. He glanced first at the tall man, then at the short one. Had they heard it too? Was it possible they didn't hear? Were they deaf?</i><br />
<i>After a long while the taller man got to his feet and moved slowly toward the door, which was very far away. He did not seem to walk; he seemed to </i>float<i> along. His lips were moving but Kinney did not hear any words.</i><br />
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<i>* * *</i></div>
<i>Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and every minutest vein he could trace the circulation of his blood along each inch of its progress. He knew where it slowed, and where it churned fitfully ahead. He knew when every valve flapped. His heart had been beating so loudly that he was amazed that the others did not hear it, but now the shack was filled with glory that suffocated, and his heart labored no longer, a mere pump, but had become a fountain; the jet surged upward and struck against the roof of his mouth, and fell noisily back, splashing and scampering through his body, so that he tingled all over. Maybe he was having a hemorrhage? He thought that he would die very soon.</i></blockquote>
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Meanwhile the tall gangster falls into the telltale giggle of the marijuana addict familiar to all fans of <i>Reefer Madness.</i> He then grows agitated and violent, like the marijuana-smoking Mexican bandits of many another pulp tale. He's convinced that Kinney is trying to run away while Kinney is convinced that he isn't moving at all. He threatens Kinney with a shotgun that Kinney perceives to be "half a mile or more away. He fires, and Kinney hears "a dull, delayed, apologetic 'boom' which tumbled into oblivion, as though ashamed of itself." This failure reduces to gunman to helpless laughter. All the while, the short gangster remains in a stupor. Finally, when neither criminal can function, Kinney staggers out to catch the transcontinental bus, then wakes to learn that he's a hero, offered a big reward by the bus company, but like a proper pulp hero, Kinney would rather have a job. His mentor, the man who saved him from addiction, approves of his choice and tells him, "Give you a <i>job? </i>Why, if that's all they give you I'll go out and dynamite a few of their buses, myself!" That's so pulp, but so's the whole story.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-72199476710010560572018-10-21T19:22:00.003-07:002018-10-21T19:22:53.542-07:00'Hissing steel answered 'political correctness'..."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>O</b></span>ver the last week I read my way through the May 1944 issue of <i>Adventure</i>. It was quite a bit of reading because the pages had that tight 63-line layout I described from a later issue of <i>Fifteen Western Tales</i>. It enabled the editor to brag that even though the new issue, at 146 pages, was 16 pages less than the previous issue, it actually had more content. I believe it. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the stories were set in the wartime present. For whatever reason, the wartime stories in this issue mostly dealt with the Pacific war. Also unsurprisingly, there's an inescapable propaganda aspect to those stories. The proof of real quality, especially in retrospect, is how well any author transcended the propaganda imperative. Allan R. Bosworth's <b>"The Steamboat Breed"</b> is hopeless, mainly because of its silly gimmick, apparently popular at the time, that has ghosts of heroes past helping Americans fight the Japs. In this story it was Davy Crockett and his backwoods buddies helping out in the Aleutians. Worse still, in its own way, is Sidney Herschel Small's <b>"The War Fan."</b> This was a story in Small's Koropok series, in which American airman Llewelyn Davies carries out sabotage inside Japan in the guise of a light-skinned "Hairy" Ainu, a despised minority in that country. In the past, Small had often written sympathetically, if also stereotypically, of Japan and other Asian cultures, but on this evidence the Koropok stories give a vicious caricature of the Japanese that probably should have been forgotten after the war. By far the best story here dealing with the Japanese is the conclusion of E. Hoffman Price's two-parter <b>"Sign of Fire."</b> To be clear, I don't expect to see the Japanese treated as anything other than bad guys in wartime stories. But while Small's Japanese are doomed idiots, and Bosworth's are thankfully faceless, Price at least gives us a Japanese antagonist who seems like a human being, and for that seems like a genuinely dangerous antagonist. More importantly, while there's still an inescapable propaganda element to his series of stories about Jim Kane and his fellow American guerrillas in the Philippines, Price doesn't see that as a reason to compromise his style of storytelling or his feel for character.<br />
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By wartime standards, "Sign of Fire" is hard-boiled stuff and more introspective in allowing Kane to feel doubt and anxiety while interned with a group of "sunshiners," Americans who are basically on the bum and no threat to the Japanese. There's a harder edge to Price's writing that allows Kane to express contempt for the sunshiners and for the sunshiners to behave contemptibly. There's also a whiff of racism in Kane's resentment of American subservience toward the Japanese occupiers. Kane, infiltrating the sunshiners, is put to work with them on street-cleaning detail, sometimes having to pick up trash, from cigarette butts to animal droppings, by hand. "But the worst part of the whole nasty job was seeing, from the corner of the eye, that white women, halting as prescribed to bow to the skibbie [Japanese] guard, saw white men fumbling in the many weeks' accumulation of offal." To put this in a larger context, the guerrilla band in the Kane stories includes an American-educated Chinese who talks like a gangster and a black American, "Bishop" Jackson, who talks in something like the typical minstrel dialect but, judging from his brief appearance here, is a more assertive character than his sometimes deferential tone (addressing our hero as "Mr. Kane") suggests. So even with the bit I quoted my overall impression is that Price is a far less racist writer than Small, while Bosworth gets a pass because his Japs don't have speaking roles. In any event, this was war and hate is part of war. Interestingly, though, the most violent, horrific moment in Price's story, or this chapter of it, isn't perpetrated by the Japanese or the Americans. In a chapter titled "Juramentado!" he describes a suicidal murder rampage by Don Hilario, just released from Jap custody but unable to endure the humiliation. This man, "a Christian and the descendant of Christians, was going fundamentalist according to the Malay spirit," Price writes, and his principal targets aren't the Japanese occupiers but Filipino collaborators, those who have become "politically correct" in the World War II sense of the term. The Japanese soldiers react as anyone might react to such a scene, and while Price has Kane make a big deal of their alleged racial nearsightedness, he never makes that an excuse not to take them seriously. In a crucial scene in which Kane is interrogated by a Jap officer he's met before, Price scrupulously emphasizes the rational calculations the enemy makes and his inability to be fooled by Kane's sunshiner disguise. For the author, it seems to suffice that the man is the enemy; he doesn't need to be a monster or a clown as well. For now, then, Price sets the standard for wartime pulp writing, and the fact that some stuff on that subject from that period can be good gives me the confidence to try more. Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-91765684509200829342018-10-07T16:08:00.000-07:002018-10-07T16:08:03.036-07:00'Always a German, but only since sunrise an enemy'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>L.</b></span> Patrick Greene's <b>"One Man's Flag"</b> (<i>Adventure</i>, March 15, 1931) is a bit of sentimental hogwash set in South Africa at the outbreak of World War I. "Papa" Haydn is the founder and patriarch of the little community of Williamstown, where nearly everyone is English, but when war breaks out between England and Germany in Europe, the old man remembers his heritage and an obligation to treat his neighbors as enemies. Despite his patriotic conscience, he can't generate very much hatred toward them, and they find his hostile gestures mostly amusing. At first, when he raises a German flag upon hearing of the war, the neighbors think he's simply made a typical old man's mistake. Soon enough, they realize that he knows full well what flag he's raised, but they still find it hard to hold that against him, in part because Haydn, old and fat, is effectively harmless. They have to rescue him from foolhardy attempts to link up with German forces in the wild, but all seem satisfied to let him carry on his old business despite theoretically being a prisoner of war. Given the ethnic tensions that must have existed from the Boer War to 1914, this all seems far too good to be true, especially when you read of how Germany's enemies effectively whipped up hysterical hatred toward ethnic Germans in their midst -- but maybe it was different in South Africa. In any event, when Haydn's shop is appropriated by Allied forces as a temporary command center for Gen. Jan Christian Smuts, the old man sees a final opportunity to serve his native country by informing the Germans of the enemy commander's position and plans. On the way, however, he rescues a lone British homesteader family he'd befriended long before from an attack by a band of native marauders, getting himself mortally injured in the process. His neighbors humor the old man to the bittersweet end, with the military getting in the act as all pretend to award the dying Haydn the Iron Cross. This was already a nauseatingly heartwarming story before the climax with its implication that black Africans, not English or Germans, are the real enemy. I know that wasn't an article of faith for Greene, who created one of pulp's best black characters in The Major's sidekick, Jim the Hottentot. But the more the main story seemed too good to be believable, the more the business with the natives seemed obnoxious if not offensive. No doubt, too, that Greene meant well, and that by 1931 the argument that English and Germans shouldn't be enemies was probably well received. By today's standards, however, "One Man's Flag" is probably too idealistic and at the same time not idealistic enough.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-79141144215602135342018-09-30T15:02:00.002-07:002018-09-30T15:02:17.134-07:00'I hate to soil my decks,' he said crisply, 'But I shall kill the first man to board me.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>lbert Richard Wetjen had created a host of arguably interchangeable sailor heroes by the time he thought up Stinger Seave in 1938. This time he was determined to give readers a different type, at least physically, and a different style of story. The Seave stories are written in a retrospective style by an omniscient narrator who knows the character's entire history, foreshadowing Seave's death on at least one occasion. In an early outing, <b>"Davey Jones' Loot"</b> (<i>Action Stories</i>, December 1938), the narrator goes so far as to note that Seave would kill the story's villain on a later occasion, but not on this one. Seave himself was envisioned as nearly the opposite of Wetjen's other giant brawlers. The Stinger is "a small, frail man with a sandy, ragged mustache, mild blue eyes and a suit of comfortably baggy whites." A cold rage often seethes beneath his mild manner, and his threats are never bluffs. He is the most heartless and possibly most nearly psychopathic of Wetjen's violent heroes, though all the stories I've read have shown him in the right, or as much in the right as a "free trader" can be. Stinger Seave's idea of free trading is poaching pearls from an atoll claimed by Japan, as a matter of law, and by Buck Morgan, by right of might. Morgan is enraged when Seave, at this point a relative newcomer, muscles into Laviata Lagoon and hurls backs Morgan's efforts to drive the Stinger out. Morgan then commits the worst sin imaginable among free traders: he rats Seave out to the Japanese, forcing the Stinger to dump his cargo of pearls into the open sea to avoid arrest. The typical battling pearler might bellow and roar in anger, but Wetjen, playing the historian and claiming the Stinger's mate as his source, writes that Seave "sat at his table in the main cabin, a bottle of gin beside him and a glass in his hand ... and did not move, save to call the steward to bring a fresh bottle, right up to the time Morgan's brig was sighted." Over the objections of his crew ("The Stinger had not with him at this time that bunch of hard cases he was later to gather"), he sets a course to ram Morgan's ship before confronting the half-drunk, terrified Morgan and making him vacate the vessel. Morgan doesn't quite go without a fight and actually wounds the Stinger, and for that Seave spares him -- for the time being. "You're the first man who ever caught me off my guard, and I'll let you live to talk about it." The story ends on an ironic note, as Seave, who had earlier advised against cleaning Laviata out, sets a course to return and take every pearl remaining. Before Morgan's treachery, Seave had been a kind of conservationist poacher; leave something behind, after all, and you'll have another harvest later. Now he no longer cares. "I am a very impatient man," he says, "and I have patiently stood for a lot the past few days." It's a slightly ominous note to end an early adventure on, but Wetjen meant these to be darker stories than normal, and at the very least he succeeded at making them entertainingly different. Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-14794506924587056892018-09-26T18:21:00.001-07:002018-09-26T18:21:13.941-07:00More bang for your buck, or more quotes for your quarter<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>I</b></span> haven't read much worth writing about lately, but what I have read lately interested me in a different way. I've just made my way through a recently-scanned issue of <i>Fifteen Western Tales </i>from May 1947. There were a few good stories in the more introspective late-pulp style -- stories by T.C. McClary, William Heuman and Tom W. Blackburn are highlights -- and relatively few in the more corny, cliched style. What impressed me most about the issue was the sheer density of text it offered. Any pulp reader knows that type sizes varied throughout the era, depending on how many pages a magazine had and how much content an editor wanted to cram in. Sometimes sizes varied within a single issue, as in many a mid-1930s issue of <i>Argosy</i>. The "normal" pulp page usually had forty-something lines of text to a column, but you often saw it go over fifty. This <i>Fifteen Western Tales</i> had a daunting 63 lines of text to a column. The only other time I've seen type that small in a standard-sized pulp is in a 1944 <i>Adventure</i> in my own collection, but I attributed that to Popular Publications (also <i>Fifteen Western's </i>publisher) having just reduced <i>Adventure's</i> page count from 160 to 144 pages. I don't know how representative the May 1947 issue was, but in another recent scan from 1946, and another from 1949 (all with the same page count) the number of lines is much closer to "normal." Mind you, I'm not complaining about May 1947. Reading it on a 10" screen in a very good scan didn't strain the eye, and of course in real life it would be bigger still. To me there's something comforting about those walls of text. It looks like you're getting your money's worth, whether you paid a dime or a quarter once upon a time, a whole lot more in the 21st century, or absolutely nothing for a scan. Thinking about it, though, made me wonder whether anyone else noticed differences in type sizes or had an ideal number of lines per column for the optimal reading experience. One reader's feast of print easily could be another's eyestrain, especially as another grows older. The one sure thing is that when you look at something like that May 1947 issue you can believe that the editor and publisher tried their best to give you as much fiction as possible that month, and believing that is a good feeling.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-5736513099751389872018-09-16T15:12:00.002-07:002018-09-16T15:12:50.426-07:00'Dirty! He is strong man, that fellow.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>here's often a vicarious "can you take it?" quality to Foreign Legion stories. The readers is invited to imagine whether he, in the protagonist's boots, can take the discipline, the climate, the bullying by superior officers. Such stories are often tests of character, the final exam taking place under fire when some (usually) Muslim insurgents attack the post or the patrol. Going against that grain, Georges Surdez's <b>"Three Mad Sergeants"</b> (<i>Adventure</i>, February 1939) is one of the master's most nihilistic works in his genre. It concerns a unit on punishment detail in the Atlas mountains as winter hits. They're put in charge of the titular non-coms, the worst of whom, and thus the leader, being a sadistic, possibly syphilitic Pole named Larkorska. While he torments the men, the other two, rivals for a woman, goad each other toward mutual destruction, egged on by Lakorska, the enemy of all. The hero of this tale is Magnus, a former German officer who apparently joined the Legion to forget his killing of a best friend for cowardice on a world-war battlefield. Normally he's the drunk of the regiment -- or else it's the Bulgarian, Nikirov, obsessed with finding a hidden stash of booze -- but as he sobers up, deprived of liquor (apart from the daily wine ration) by the cruel Lakorska, he regains enough of his old pride to find his situation intolerable.<br />
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Not to worry, though, since after Lakorska finally gets one of the other sergeants to kill the other, the maddest of the sergeants takes out the survivor and goes completely berserk, holing up in his well-stocked, well-fortified quarters to take potshots at anyone that moves. With his newfound clarity, Magnus realizes that the men have to take Lakorska alive in order not to be accused of fragging all three sergeants. He also comes up with a plan to smoke him out of his lair so he can be dogpiled, but doesn't anticipate the madman bursting out into the open stark naked, his apparently pasty pallor making excellent camouflage in the snow. It falls to Bulgarian brute Nikirov finally to subdue Lakorska, overcoming the Pole's proverbial strength of a madman (see Nikirov's comment in the header) in a desperate grapple. In the end, Nikirov finally finds the legendary stash and all the survivors get wasted except Magnus, who holds out until the captain who originally assigned everyone to this wintry hell offers him a promotion for his leadership. That brings back unbearable memories of the war, along with a sergeant's stripes, both of which he hopes to "soak off" by throwing himself off the wagon at the end. Most of the time you can find some sort of a moral in a Surdez story, but this one is bracing, and arguably one of his best, in its complete absence of such a thing.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-20492908622074477922018-09-05T18:24:00.003-07:002018-09-05T18:24:53.083-07:00ESQUIRE: The slick that wanted to be pulp?<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>F</b></span>or the past couple of weeks I've had a chance to look through midcentury issues of <i>Esquire</i>, the prestigious men's magazine founded in 1933 and still flourishing today. It's been a shapeshifter of a magazine, starting thick with prestige, with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as regular contributors, and becoming a cutting edge magazine on both the fiction and nonfiction fronts from the mid-1950s forward. But from the end of World War II to about 1952 <i>Esquire</i> made a big commitment to genre fiction. Look at it during those years and you can see what Popular Publications was aiming for when it transformed <i>Argosy</i> from a pulp to a full-sized magazine. Stories are designated as "Mystery" or "Western" when appropriate, and where there had not been proper illustrations in earlier years now there are dramatic two-page spreads, even for stories that are only that long, like the example shown here from June 1949.<br />
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<i>Esquire's</i> major contribution to genre fiction was Henry Kane's private eye Peter Chambers, who made his debut in February 1947 and remained an <i>Esquire</i> exclusive through the end of the decade. 1947 - 52 are the peak years for pulp-esque genre ficton in <i>Esquire</i>, and while many of the authors who appeared there also placed stories in slicks like <i>Collier's </i>and <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i>, one suspects that <i>Esquire's</i> status as a men's magazine, and a reputation gained by its showcasing of Varga and Petty girls, encouraged those writers to be, shall we say, more manly in their work. My guess is that erstwhile servicemen, initially attracted to Esquire by the pin-ups during the war, were the target audience for postwar he-man fiction. Along with Kane and numerous top-hand westerners, <i>Esquire</i> also published a good deal of early Ray Bradbury, including "The Illustrated Man." In short, this magazine at midcentury was a cornucopia for pulp or all-around genre fans. But after 1952, once co-founder Arnold Gingrich resumed the reins as publisher, <i>Esquire </i>turned again toward more literary fiction, after a few years of transition that, for example, placed Hugh B. Cave and Norman Mailer in the same issue. Objectively speaking, <i>Esquire's</i> greatest years were yet to come, but its greatness consisted in combining highbrow content with a pop-culture sensibility, with little room for genre fiction in the mix. There was a different kind of greatness in the previous generation, before "men's magazine," <i>Argosy</i> notwithstanding, came to denote something much less classy.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-47585743937231737112018-08-26T19:09:00.000-07:002018-08-26T19:09:09.391-07:00Caradosso meets Hitler?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>he Renaissance rogue Luigi Caradosso was one of pulp's longer-lived characters, making his first <i>Adventure</i> appearance in 1924 and his last appoximately thirty years later, in 1953. F. R. Buckley usually made an effort to give his character's often amoral tales an appropriately archaic flavor -- they are narrated in the form of reminiscing letters a retired Caradosso writes to his aristocratic patron -- but on at least one occasion he clearly meant his tale to have contemporary relevance. <b>"Of Penitence"</b> (June 1941) is primarily a cautionary tale of a young lord who lets a guilty conscience over some slight mischief get in the way of the ruthlessness appropriate to princes, by Caradosso's standards, and thus loses his land. The young lord's worst mistake is to show clemency toward a rabble-rouser, described by one observer as "a damned plasterer [who] wants to be a leader of the people like what's-his-hame at Florence. Finds talking easier than daubing an honest wall, I'll be bound." The demagogue calls himself Adolfo Illeri, and as Adolf Hitler got his start in beer halls, so Illeri orates atop a giant wine barrel, and as Hitler, as an Austrian, was an outsider in Germany, so Illeri is a Brescian interloper. "I have oft wondered why those who'd tell folk how to live in one country should usually come from some other," Caradosso opines, and Buckley may have had in mind here not only Hitler but immigrants to America who espoused Marxism. Caradosso's instinct tells him to get rid of Illeri as soon as possible, but just as the Weimar Republican wouldn't put Hitler down after the Beer Hall Putsch, so the young lord proves dangerously merciful, too interested in proving that "I am no tyrant." After his misadventure, which involves beating up and humiliating the local night watch, the lord orders Illeri released without even trying him, telling Caradosso, "Who am I to judge my fellow man?" Who is anyone, our hero answers, "But if none did it, what would become of the world?" Sent out of the country, Illeri promptly sets up shop next door and resumes his rabble-rousing. The young lord's fatal flaw is his belief that dealing ruthlessly with the likes of Illeri would automatically make him the sort of tyrant he abhors, but his unwillingness to get his hands dirty killing one deserving man only guarantees the deaths of many undeserving others once he finally goes to war with Illeri's protector. The lord himself dies in the attack, guaranteeing that his land will fall to another, while Caradosso decapitates Illeri "as one might a puppy by a garden-walk." Perhaps this makes Caradosso, and by extension Buckley, an authentic Machiavellian, but it no doubt was easy, with much of the world at war with Hitler and the U.S. soon to join, to say that someone should have whacked that bastard long before. Whether Buckley was advocating preemptive assassination as a tactic for the 20th century is another matter. The nearest he comes in his "Camp Fire" comments to addressing contemporary issues is to note that in Italian history, the less fearless people became about criticizing tyrants, the more dangerous it became to do so -- "Which is something we might think over nowadays."Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-3150935322240047722018-08-22T17:57:00.003-07:002018-08-22T17:57:42.770-07:00'The Islands were not being tamed by prayers and good wishes.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>lbert Richard Wetjen wrote many a South Seas adventure story using different variations on the same basic character template, yet made a point of insisting that his heroes were all distinct personalities inhabiting what we'd now call the same "universe." His first such creation was Shark Gotch for <i>Action Stories</i>, starting in 1927, while the best known (in Wetjen's own time, at least) probably was Wallaby Jim, whose hardly toned-down adventures appeared in <i>Collier's,</i> one of the top slicks, and were made into a movie. In between came Typhoon Bradley, introduced in the September 1931 <i>Action Stories</i> after Shark Gotch was retired (for a time) earlier that year. Shark Gotch remains a point of reference in the Bradley stories."There are three men who can draw faster and shoot straighter than I can," a villain says in <b>"Trial By Typhoon" </b>(September 1932), "Those men are Larsen of Singapore, Shark Gotch and Typhoon Bradley." I'm not sure where Larsen appeared but I don't doubt that Wetjen had written stories about him. Wetjen would continue this self-referentiality in the Wallaby Jim series, in one episode of which Gotch, Bradley and others put in cameo appearances. "Trial" is the first Bradley series I read, and on that evidence he seems like a perfectly generic South Seas hero: big, strong, hard-boiled and fast on the draw. Noting Wetjen's emphasis on Bradley's gunmanship, I understood why Ralph R. Perry made a point of describing his South Seas hero, Bellow Bill Williams, as a lousy shot. It differentiated Bellow Bill from Wetjen's supermen -- which is not to say that Wetjen is the inferior writer, but that he and Perry really were writing two different kinds of story. Perry's are closer to thrillers in their emphasis on the obstacles to Bellow Bill's success, while Wetjen's are, well, action stories understandably focused on the hero's fighting prowess.<br />
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In this one, Typhoon Bradley makes an enemy by stopping a nasty captain from flogging a native crewman accused of petty theft. He "broke one of the unwritten laws of the Islands when he interfered," Wetjen opens, "A man had a right to punish his own natives. The Islands were not being tamed by prayers and good wishes. The South was raw and a man's crew might at any time turn and rip him to shreds if they thought him soft enough." Despite that, Bradley's humanitarian impulses compel him to beat the crap out of the captain, and as it turns out, if anyone has the right to interfere it's the temporary magistrate of this particular island, Typhoon Bradley. Concerned to maintain law and order, he boards the captain's ship after hearing rumors that his arch-enemy, Gentleman Harry, is on board. I assume Harry was introduced in an earlier story, but for those, like me, who missed it, Wetjen explains that the Gentleman was once a suave character whose nickname has been a parody ever since Bradley broke his face in a fight. He's a slick one, too; he planted the rumor of his presence to get Bradley off the island while his men, the captain's crooked crew, cleaned out the island's pearl dealers in a mass mugging. Gentleman Harry's triumph over Bradley is nearly complete, but he suffers from recurring-villain syndrome, whether he's actually recurring or not. That is, despite the captain's urging to kill Bradley and be done with it, Harry wants to humiliate and torture Typhoon to avenge his ruined face. Neither he nor the captain reckon on that poor native crewman remembering Bradley's kindness and freeing him so he can wreak characteristic havoc on the bad men. When it comes to action Wetjen delivers the goods, though not quite with the gusto of <i>Action Stories</i> regular Robert E. Howard. Conscious of writing a series rather than a stand-alone story, the author contrives to keep Gentleman Harry alive to fight another day, but that day was long in coming if it came at all. <i>Action Stories </i>soon went on a nearly yearlong hiatus and Wetjen moved on to other projects. The FictionMags Index doesn't report another Typhoon Bradley story, apart from his cameo in <i>Collier's</i>, until July 1939. From then, Bradley alternated with Wetjen's more recent and more interesting creation, Stinger Seave, until Wetjen tired of him again.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856124774587570334.post-2590993465126645362018-08-15T18:19:00.001-07:002018-08-15T18:19:34.110-07:00'Won't have to listen to the woman killer yelpin' while his neck is stretchin'.'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>ction Stories </i>was Fiction House's answer to the general-interest adventure pulps like <i>Argosy</i>, <i>Blue Book</i>, <i>Short Stories</i> and, of course, <i>Adventure</i>. The title, which is self-explanatory, may be best known today as one of Robert E. Howard's more reliable markets. It came out monthly until the end of 1932, when the Depression forced an almost-year long hiatus, after which it returned as a bimonthly. In later years it was almost entirely western in content, but in 1932 there was a greater mix of subject matter, with Albert Richard Wetjen's violent tales of South Seas sailors among the most popular stories. Compared to Wetjen, Art Lawson was a rookie when <b>"Hanging Bee"</b> (September 1932) became his <i>Action Stories </i>debut. It's a grim little tale of a sheriff, the man accused of murdering his girl, and a lynch mob. Sheriff Matt Babcock is introduced brooding over a photo of his dead beloved; he can't look at the picture without envisioning her strangled and in her grave. He has every reason to hate the accused killer, Steve Jackson, and does hate him, but he also believes in the rule of law. In other words, we have the classic setup for the lawman facing down a lynch mob ... except that a crucial clue that would cinch the case has yet to turn up, and Jackson's brothers are waiting outside to shoot the sheriff, while other citizens are filling up with liquid courage before setting out on the lynch. Under these pressures, Babcock sells Jackson on the idea of sneaking him out of prison by disguising him as the sheriff, on the condition that Jackson return in two weeks to stand trial. It's unclear at this point whether Babcock wants Jackson to escape or expects him to be killed by his own brothers. He tells Jackson to make it look convincing by slugging him, tying him up, and leaving him in a cell. The uncertain Jackson notices that Babcock, trussed up, "looked almost happy." He manages to dodge his brothers' bullets, not knowing the source, while the mob takes advantage of the confusion to storm the jail. The one unconvincing part of the story is how readily the mob accepts the tied-up and gagged Babcock as Jackson. A character actually wonders aloud why the prisoner would be tied up, but another likes the idea of keeping him gagged as he hangs. Of course, we learn at the end that it was Babcock, not Jackson, who killed the girl, the incriminating ring finally falling out of a pocket when his corpse is thrown across a saddle. So did he want to die, or did a plan to get Jackson killed trying to escape backfire on him. That "almost happy" bit makes you wonder. But if he wanted to die, why not confess -- and if he wanted to get away with murder, why not get rid of the ring instead of carrying it around? It's all kind of confusing, but it's actually a good kind of confusing with a touch of morbid ambiguity, perhaps more subtle than what you'd expect from something called <i>Action Stories</i> or from an author less than a year in the business. Lawson had a long career ahead of him. Ironically enough, in light of this tale, he ended up a specialist in western romance stories.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0