An attractive 1923 Adventure cover by George Annand closes out the month. The highlights of this issue most likely are a story of Swain the Viking, one of pulp's most badass heroes despite being a teetotaling Christian, by Arthur D. Howden-Smith, and Harold Lamb's tale of two of his Cossack heroes, Ayub and Demid. I have the Bison Books collections of Lamb's Cossack stories -- they're great stuff -- but I haven't gotten to that particular one yet. Other dependable names include Gordon MacCreagh and Hugh Pendexter, and Gordon Young certainly was popular with contemporary readers. You also get Frank C. Robertson, Howard B. Beynon, H. S. Cooper and Charles Victor Fischer, but Lamb and Howden-Smith should be enough to sell this particular issue.
BLOOD n THUNDER magazine once published a special issue on the occasion ADVENTURE's 100th birthday and I picked this issue as one of my favorites. I absolutely agree that the Swain story by Smith and the Ayub and Demid story by Lamb are excellent.
ReplyDeleteBut I gave the Gordon MacCreagh story, "The Crawling Script" my top rating. My notes from February 1975 say:
"This 66 page short novel was very well done and extremely enjoyable. This was Adventure fiction at its best. Took over 3 hours to read while I was off sick from work and glad of it after reading this!"
I had to laugh rereading my 40 year old comment. Eventually I got sick and tired of the time I was wasting at work and retired in order to spend my time reading and watching old movies.