Thursday, April 21, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 21

That's an alarming cover for this 1934 Detective Fiction Weekly, and as was often the case for that magazine, in spite of its title, the cover story actually is a work of non-fiction. On the fiction side there's an unusual emphasis on series characters; the only piece not to feature one is Max Brand's serial X, the Murderer. Judson P. Philips sends his gentlemen vigilantes, the Park Avenue Hunt Club, for another outing, while Erle Stanley Gardner brings back his Patent Leather Kid.  Anthony Rud's Jigger Masters was created back in 1918 for a run of stories in the Green Book magazine, and was revived in 1933 after a 15 year hiatus. H. H. Matteson's "Eggs of Devilment" is the second story in his Hoh-Hoh Stevens series, while Roland Philips's "Goldfish Tell" is closer to the end of his Inspector Porky Neal series. Mackinlay Kantor's "The Hunting of Hemingway" is the last of three stories of Nick and Dave Glennan as well as Kantor's farewell to pulpdom, apart from a poem in a 1937 Adventure. He would move on to a slick and hardbound career that included the source stories for the films The Best Years of Our Lives and Gun Crazy, to give you an idea of his range, and climaxed with a Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville in 1955. With all the series characters, maybe Roan's nonfiction piece got the cover because it was the most original thing in the issue.

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