THE PULP CALENDAR: October 30

This 1923 Adventure is one of the growing number of issues of that classic pulp that have been scanned and made available online. It has three real highlights. The lead novelette is Arthur O. Friel's "The Thirty Gang," a South American adventure featuring Friel's antihero "Black White." Around the middle you'll find "Pilgrim's Progress," one of Leonard H. Nason's mock-epic World War I tales, as ribald as editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman would allow. The final story is the best thing in the issue: Arthur D. Howden-Smith's "Swain's Sons," recounting the short, unhappy marriage of Adventure's ultimate badass, Swain the Viking. He proves to be a sexist pig, but the wife gets little sympathy after conspiring with Swain's enemies and Swain is so guilelessly upfront in all his attitudes that it's hard to hold any of them against him. Besides these highlights there are Adventure regulars like J. Allen Dunn, George E. Holt, William Byron Mowery and Hugh Pendexter, plus other contributors. Classic stuff.