THE PULP CALENDAR: December 17

Perhaps taking inspiration from Dashiell Hammett's description of Sam Spade as a "blond satan," Carroll John Daly, credited by some with inventing the hard-boiled detective before Hammett, created black-haired, vampiric looking Satan Hall, a police detective with a license to kill. After making his debut in Street & Smith's Detective Story, Hall moved to Munsey's Detective Fiction Weekly for an approximately five-year run. This 1932 issue was his fifth appearance; each time, Satan's picturesque features earned him the cover. His streak continued for another five appearances, and only once during his time at DFW did he not get the cover. Daly bounced the character from magazine to magazine, company to company for another two decades, including a brief stop at Black Mask, but Satan Hall never got another cover -- though that may be him under a hat in a 1954 Famous Detective featuring his final story. Also in this issue, Sidney Herschel Small's "The Crimson Coffin" is credited to his Jimmy Wentworth series in the FictionMags Index, but as far as DFW was concerned at this point, Small's recurring Tong villain Kong Gai was the main attraction. The other series character this time is Robert Rohde's Reggie Chivers, the Red Duke, who was near the end of a run that started in May 1929. Hulbert Footner continues a serial while John Reid Byers, John Hunter John H. Thompson and J. (Joseph, not John) Lane Linklater contribute short stories.