Sunday, May 22, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: May 22

Maybe it's just me but there's a kind of deadpan absurdity to that cat hovering the right shoulder of that sinister, dripping wet bearded gentleman on this 1937 Detective Fiction Weekly cover.Even before you get started with Max Brand's "baffling mystery," The Face and the Doctor, you have the baffling mystery of what the cat's doing there. It's not the Doctor, certainly. Could it be the Face? It seems unfair for the story not to be The Face, the Doctor and the Cat. Anyway, Brand's novel is a two-parter, joined this issue by Part Two of T. T. Flynn's Murder Caravan on the serial side. There are short stories by Bob Gordon and Richard Hobart and novelettes by Edward Parrish Ware and Hugh B. Cave, who had one of the longest genre-fiction careers. Already a veteran of eight years at this point, Cave continued writing into the 21st century. I don't know how Max Brand ranks as a mystery writer, but that cat cover definitely has me curious.

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