'I'm going back to white man's country, where you can see what you're fighting!'

Let's start a hopefully more productive new year with a trifle from the November 12, 1932 issue of Argosy. William E. Barrett's "Cat Hair" is a story of white men in the Solomon Islands, part of a genre that never ceases to fascinate me. What fascinates me about the genre, set in Africa most of the time, is the ambiguity of the stories' superficial racism. The whole genre most likely qualifies as racist because Africans and other natives are shown consistently to be subordinate and ideally subservient to whites. Yet black characters are often given heroic qualities, particularly those who serve as sidekicks to series characters like Jim the Hottentot in L. Patrick Greene's series about the Major. Heroism is conditional upon loyalty to the white man, of course, but subordination isn't necessarily synonymous with inferiority in these stories unless we're dealing with social status. As it happens, there aren't really any heroic native characters in "Cat Hair." What I like about Barrett's short story is its reversal of a familiar trope of such stories. The hero, Collishaw, drives a cruel and bigoted white colleague off the islands by playing on the white villain's susceptibility to superstition.

After seeing  the new man beat a "number one boy," Collishaw realizes that the new man is likely to provoke a native uprising that will wipe out the good whites as well as the bad. He can't openly reproach Bronson, as "He was too old a hand to take sides with a native against white authority, no matter how abused that authority might be." But when Bronson proves hatefully intractable Collishaw conspires with a native servant to put a permanent scare in the goon. He sets up a scenario in which the native will be caught trying to take some of Bronson's hair for a voodoo-style ritual cursing. He reassures Bronson that the man has only gotten away with hair from Collishaw's cat. When the cat turns up dead soon afterward he allows Bronson to draw his own conclusions, assuring a happy ending for all but the cat. In a move that might offend some modern readers, Collishaw sacrificed his pet, poisoning it to cinch the illusion of evil magic and frighten Bronson out of Africa. The modern reader might be forgiven for asking why Collishaw didn't just kick Bronson's ass, but a story like this is a window opening out to, if not a funhouse mirror reflecting another world -- or at the least it shows us how people from 86 years ago or so saw how their world worked.

'I belong here, where life is rough -- like me,' he refused.

Ralph R. Perry's "Missing" (Argosy, August 1, 1931) is the earliest Bellow Bill Williams story I've read so far. The tattooed pearler was already a well-established character by this point; he's mentioned as a favorite character by some Argonotes letter-writers as early as 1930. Perry is careful to remind us right away that Bellow Bill isn't the superhuman sailor of the sort Albert Richard Wetjen and others wrote about; it's practically a defining characteristic of him that "he is not a particularly good shot." Otherwise, he's strong as a bull and blessed with the proverbial hollow leg. Bill's task this time is to recover the archetypal wayward son of a rigid American businessman. The old man is offering a big reward, but the boy, for a time Bellow Bill's protege, now stands accused of piracy and attempted murder. Bill's partly responsible for the heir's plight, for to get him away from the local police the pearler sent him to "the den of the worst scoundrels in the pacific," the leader of whom now claims never to have seen the young man known as Pug. But Pug can be identified as part of a pirate gang by a distinguishing scar seen by witnesses, so Bill will be hard pressed to clear his name.

Even though there's plenty of action, this is more a battle of wits than many of the later Bellow Bill stories I've read. On Thursday Island he has to negotiate with a cunning crook, the half-caste proprietor of the Hall of the Five Benevolent Virtues, who combines "the cunning and the ambition of a Dutch father .. with the savage passions of a Papuan mother." He has to convince this Mitaki that it'll be worth his while, in pearls, to deliver Pug back to his father without first killing Bill. Mitaki is counterscheming just as fast and figures out a way to frame Bill himself for another murder in the course of the negotiations. All through this, Perry goes to great pains to describe the layout, above and below, of Mitaki's place, where most of the action takes place. You practically could draw a blueprint from his description, the point of which is to emphasize the advantages Mitaki enjoys on his home turf, including such modest ones as his ability to evade violence on Bill's part simply by taking a few steps from his office into plain view of the bar patrons. However racist Perry's description of Mitaki may be, the story's success as a thriller depends on establishing the half-caste as a very intelligent, hence very dangerous antagonist -- though the author makes it just a little too easy for Bill to see through Mitaki's subterfuge thanks to a telltale bloodstain on his sleeve. Everything turns out all right, of course, and for some reason Perry closes the story on something like a note of pathos as Pug invites Bill to come to America with him and take a job in the family business, only to be rebuffed. Bellow Bill belongs in a rough and tumble world, no matter how qualified he might be for success elsewhere. "Fact is," the pearler confesses in Perry's last word, "I like it that way, even at the worst."

'I am no umpchay, and I never seen the proposition I can't beat.'

Theodore "Ted" Copp had a fairly short pulp career, publishing only eighteen stories over the course of a decade, according to the FictionMags Index. He published his first stories in Fiction House's Black Aces, then had his busiest period as a regular contributor to Street and Smith's Complete Stories. "Corn Doctor" (June 22, 1935) was his Argosy debut, the first of six stories (including a serial) he'd publish in the venerable weekly over the next year. As this is my first encounter with Copp, I can't say how representative this ten-pager is, but the story itself reads like an exercise in the Damon Runyon style. The protagonists are amiable con men who can't make it on 14th Street in the big city with their spiels -- the colorful narrator sells overnight bags for a quarter, tricking marks by leaving counterfeit coins inside to make them think they're profiting, while his friend Corny tries to sell a patent medicine for corns. Corny's real talent is an uncanny quickness of the hands that allows him, on a bet, to pluck flies off any surface. But as his nickname indicates, he's obsessed with podiatry, though he disdains the snake-oil he actually sells. His heart's desire is to remove corns from sufferer's feet, which our narrator finds vaguely creepy. They decide to try their luck, and Corny's dexterity, in Binghamton NY, despite their agreement that rustic "apple-knockers" are wiser to grifts than city folk. Their hope is that the easiest marks are those who think they're wise to everything. They find their ideal smart-mark in Jake the Barber ("a very common name among barbers, even when their mothers call them Thomas or Richard or Harold"), luring him into the trap by dropping a lot of bad bets to him before Corny does his fly trick. In case the readers were wondering how Corny does it, apparently he's just that good with his hands, as Jake learns when, suspecting that Corny keeps dead flies on hand to palm, puts him in a closed room with a single fly in it. Jake's not a good loser though, and when he invites Corny and friend to help him clean out two local suckers, our narrator suspects a set-up. Sure enough, Jake's pals lose a lot of coin, but the idea is to put the interlopers' money on the table when the inevitable stick-up man, another of Jake's cronies, shows up. The inevitable melee ends with the robber routed, the suckers on the run, and Corny on top of a disarmed Jake, going after the corns Jake had earlier admitted were plaguing his feet. There they remain when the cops arrive, though our narrator is smart enough to make his escape. He reports in an epilogue that Corny used his fly gag to pay his way into podiatry school and finally set up practice in Binghamton. This looks like a tragic waste of talent. "I hear it is a big week for Corny when he takes in five bucks," he closes, "which only goes to show you what happens to a guy who gives his natural genius the wave." Copp pulled out of pulp after 1936, with one exception, to concentrate on writing novels and publicity for Met Life. Apparently he was very close to his mother, famous in her own right as the inventor of a popular piano-teaching method, for when she died on New Year's Day 1945 he wrote her obituary, went to bed, and died in his sleep overnight at age 42.

'He had the satisfaction of hearing cries of pain.'

 Illustration from my own collection

Tom Curry trespasses on Arthur O. Friel's territory in "Brain and Brawn" (Argosy, June 22, 1935), set in oil-rich Venezuela. You'd think the present Bolivarian regime were in charge back then, given the way the natives treat the two American heroes running an oil rig. A Venezuelan concern wants to drink their milkshake, so to speak, and their operative, the peon foreman Espinosa, tries to make life difficult for the intrepid gringos, apparently the only people around interested in working hard. They are a typical Mutt & Jeff team; Sanderson is the "peppery little driller," Morton the "mighty giant" who does the heavy lifting and keeps the peons in line when they get uppity. In other words, Sanderson is the "Brain," Morton the "Brawn" of the title. The twist in Curry's bromance is that as they fight their way out of camp and flee through the jungle, hoping to salvage their well before the local rivals move in, a role reversal takes place. Morton gets shot in the leg and goes virtually lame, making it necessary for Sanderson to become the brawn by bearing his weight through the jungle. And as fatigue gradually clouds Sanderson's mind, it's up to Morton to do the quick thinking that eventually saves both men. Calling this a "bromance" is neither an anachronism or a joke. Morton and Sanderson are very close friends, albeit certainly in a purely platonic manner, with Sanderson the dominant partner despite Morton's tremendous strength. The story reaches its emotional climax when Sanderson, captured by the "Venzies," is taken to identify Morton's grave, having told his captors that his friend, still free, had died on the trail. Sanderson assumes that he'll be killed whether Morton's death is verified or not. Recalling Morton's hiding place, he hopes the big guy was smart enough to find another (he was), but has his doubts.

Sanderson almost wept; they'd surely find his partner, for Morton could not have worked very far by himself, and would not have done so, since he would wait for Sanderson to come back to him. Eager for a last look at his friend, the driller pushed forward. He wanted to die beside Morton.

Make of that what you will. Action fans were less distrustful of strong emotions back then. "Brain and Brawn" isn't top-flight Curry but it holds your interest easily enough and it has arguable historic interest as a document of the seeming arrogance that many Venezuelans resent in Americans to the present day.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 25

Argosy's editor sounds almost ashamed of his 1937 Christmas cover in his intro to this issue's Argonotes page, which he declares an Xmas-free zone.

In spite of the date on this week's cover, the general reindeer and mince-pie effect of our cover, and the novelet-gesture in the general direction of the merry gentleman in the fur-trimmed red suit, this is going to be one place in the magazine where the Yule is a Forgotten Season. In fact, right here and now we declare this corner a Hospice Sacred to All Ye Winded Shoppers and Package-Laden Pedestrians who firmly intend to let out a Loud Scream if anyone so much as hums Jingle Bells within earshot.

The editor confesses to Christmas fatigue, reminding us that already by 1937 people felt that the Holiday (shopping) season went on all too long. I've wondered this month why there weren't as many holiday-themed pulp covers in December as you might expect, and the answer should have been obvious to me. Pulps were all about escapism, and for many people Christmas itself was something to be escaped. Despite that, here is Frank Richardson Pierce's "Christmas on the Trail," starring his beloved sourdough No-Shirt McGee in his younger "beshirted" days. In fact, it's a tale of his first adventure in the Yukon as the greenest of checakos, back in 1897 -- McGee is presumably in his late fifties as he narrates from 1937. He isn't really the protagonist of his story, however. The real hero of the story is Two-Step Sue, a dance-hall girl with a heart of gold who takes pity on a young family risking everything on the trip north and acts as their secret Santa as well as morale-booster for McGee and the whole struggling group. There's pathos to the story as she breaks up with her more mercenary boyfriend along the way, but this turns out to be the sort of Christmas story with a happy ending for everybody, or at least for everyone who survives the avalanche midway through the tale. It went over well enough that a late December McGee story became a short-lived Argosy tradition (1937-40), though there was only one other Christmas cover during that run. For a pulpy dose of holiday cheer from almost eighty years ago, give "Christmas on the Trail" a look by following this link.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 23

For a brief time in the late 1930s, Argosy made a No-Shirt McGee story by Frank Richardson Pierce a holiday tradition. No-Shirt was a versatile character. Pierce could write tales of the old sourdough's youth, back when he was a mere chechako in the Klondike, as in 1937's "Christmas on the Trail." Or he could write about McGee in the present-day, when he drifted up and down the Pacific Coast with his protege, Bulldozer Craig. That's the approach he took for his 1939 story "Christmas on Ice," in which No-Shirt is in Hollywood as a technical advisor to the movies. They're making an Alaska picture, Icebound, but it lacks authenticity. No-Shirt, a sourdough Stanislavsky, says the problem is that the actors have never experienced Arctic cold. He suggests a location shoot and in this fantastic tale the studio chief thinks that's a swell idea. His next brainstorm is to tell the actors that their boat is stuck in the ice, in order to put some anxiety into their performances. But of course the boat really gets stuck in the ice, only for Hollywood gossip columnists to dismiss the story as a publicity stunt. Pierce had done this sort of story before, down to tempers flaring and snapping and the crew fighting with one another. He throws a few twists in, including a romantic triangle that doesn't turn out as expected and a not-quite-murder mystery -- a couple of people get stabbed -- in which nobody dunnit. Overall, this is a less Christmasy story than "Christmas on the Trail," which we'll take a closer look at shortly, but at least it justified a festive seasonal cover. You can read "Christmas on Ice" and the rest of the December 23, 1939 Argosy,  which includes the final story in Philip Ketchum's Bretwalda cycle and the conclusion of Robert Carse's Nazis-in-Haiti serial Dark Thunder, at unz.org.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 19

There's no table of contents for this 1936 Argosy in the FictionMags Index, but an eBay seller has helpfully scanned the table of contents from the issue itself. The cover story, "Gorilla Cargo," presumably is part of Richard Wormser's series about entertainment-industry animal hunter Dave McNally. The contents-page synopsis says simpy, "A monkey amok in mid-Atlantic." The serials this week are Lester Dent's Hades (part three of three: "Showdown with the demon of the Arizona caravans"), H. Bedford-Jones' Will o' the Wisp (part four of five: "The Army of France lies mouldering in its tents tonight!") and Eustace L. Adams' The Man With the Painted Smile (part two of four: "A doom ship with a mutinous crew is O'Malley's first command"). Of Joel Townsley Rogers' novelette "The Rubber Check," Argosy says nothing except to challenge readers to "Test your deduction on this baffling, eerie mystery." The short stories are John Hawkins' "Money Player" (golf), Frank Richardson Pierce's "Old Man Terry's River" (Alaska) and William Chamberlain's "Queer Street" ("Where anything happens -- and does!"). In "Argonotes," Bedford-Jones elaborates on his use of the notorious Caligostro in Will o'the Wisp, noting that while the count was a "rank trickster in many ways ... an utterly callous and unscrupulous man capable of the vilest actions," as of December 1936 "the secret of his 'elixir' and his cures has never been solved."

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 18

This 1937 cover probably isn't the sort of scene that comes to mind if people recognize the name of Cornell Woolrich. Known for his noirish thrillers, Woolrich occasionally broadened his interests for Argosy. His previous story for that pulp was "Black Cargo," dealing with slavery. According to Woolrich chronicler Francis M. Nevins, Woolrich wrote "Guns, Gentlemen," to go with Emmett Watson's pre-existing cover. It seems to have been something more than some Ruritarian adventure, however, since it was later reprinted (as "The Lamp of Memory") in an anthology of Woolrich's horror and fantasy stories. He reportedly submitted it to Argosy as "The Twice-Trod Path," but "Guns, Gentlemen" definitely goes better with the cover. All this aside, the issue's highlight is probably L. Ron Hubbard's big novelette (by Argosy standards at 39 pages) "Orders is Orders," or else the second installment of Eustace L. Adams' serial Loot Below -- which would be made into a 1941 B movie called Desperate Cargo. Three movies would be made from Adams stories -- including two versions of "Sixteen Fathoms Deep," made 14 years apart, both with Lon Chaney Jr. -- while he wrote an original screenplay for the 1933 film Under Secret Orders. North Pole explorer Matthew Henson is this issue's "Man of Daring," though artist Stookie Allen condescendingly refers to him as an "Arctic Man Friday" for Robert E. Peary. Still, it's probably a rare appearance by a black man in the weekly illustrated feature.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 14

Does it seem odd that Hulbert Footner's detective Mme. Storey is the star of this 1929 Argosy's cover story, and one of the pulp's most popular series characters, but isn't shown on the cover? I suppose it's because she's never actually "taken for a ride" herself in the story. That bit of gangster slang had been popularized by the recent talkie hit The Lights of New York, in which it almost instantly became legendary as an example of stitled line reading. The other cover story is a new railroad serial by Francis Lynde, a real old-time (age 73) who'd been publishing since 1894. I hadn't heard of him before finding his name here, but that's because my interest in Argosy starts after 1930, and that was the year Lynde died. Elsewhere this issue, Erle Stanley Gardner wraps up a two-parter, Fred MacIsaac continues his serial Run, Dan, Run! and H. Bedford-Jones carries on with his fictional account of Cyrano de Bergerac, while J. E. Grinstead, John H. Thompson and Harold de Polo contribute short stories.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 12

George F. Worts' Singapore Sammy made his debut in Short Stories in 1930. After five appearances in little more than a year, Sammy moved to Argosy, where Worts was publishing his Gillian Hazeltine series under his own name and the Peter the Brazen stories as Loring brent. This 1931 issue reintroduces Sammy to the pulp public with a two-party story named for the protagonist. It may be Sammy's first cover. His last Short Stories appearance is top-billed on the May 10, 1931 cover, and I assume the same cover was used for the "Mid-September" British reprint, but the character coming out of the water in a diving suit with a rifle doesn't look like the redhead Argosy readers would come to recognize. In any event, after being reintroduced in dramatic fashion Sammy went on hiatus until 1933, which is regrettable since the adventurer with a grudge against his dad is easily the best of Worts/Brent's three major creations. Overall this looks like a decent issue to have, thanks also to novelettes by Eustace L. Adams and F. V. W. Mason. The continuing stories are Kenneth Perkins' bayou mystery The Tavern of Terror and J. E. Grinstead's western Golden Derringers, while Foster-Harris, Kenneth MacNichol and William Merriam Rouse contribute short stories. Should you choose to get Singapore Sammy complete you'd get novelettes by Erle Stanley Gardner and H. Bedford-Jones in next week's issue. You could definitely do worse.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 11

A dramatic Rudolph Belarski cover fronts this 1937 Argosy, one of many from that year that have been scanned and made available online. I read it a couple of years ago and recall that the first installment of Eustace L. Adams' Loot Below nearly lived up to that cover. Unfortunately, the thing I remember most vividly about this issue is that Robert Griffith's "complete novel" "Rhythm in the Ring" was probably the most racist story I'd ever read in the Argosy. Griffith was a boxing story specialist who broke into the slicks during the war, publishing regularly in Collier's from 1943 to his retirement or death in the early 1950s. His premise this time is that a black contender times his footwork and punches to the music of his favorite jazz band as they play outside the ring. The most insulting thing about it, actually, is the editorial comment that Griffith's premise might explain the success of Joe Louis and other black champions. As a rule, or at least in my experience, Argosy avoided "darky" humor (as opposed to Blue Book and the major slicks), but this is a rotten exception. There's more bad comedy in Lester Dent's serial Genius Jones and one of Foster-Harris' Mr. Weeble stories, but along with the Adams you get an installment of Borden Chase's Sandhog and a Frank Richardson Pierce No-Shirt McGee story to balance things out.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 3

Argosy took credit for introducing C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower to the American reading public, and they probably deserve some share of the credit. Hornblower first saw print in this country in book form when Beat to Quarters (known in Great Britain as The Happy Return) appeared in April 1937. Argosy stepped in in February 1938 when it serialized the second novel, A Ship of the Line, one month prior to its American publication and two months prior to its UK appearance. While waiting for Forester's next, Argosy reprinted Beat to Quarters as a serial in September. The third novel, Flying Colours, was published in Britain in November 1938. Little more than a month later Argosy began its serialization. The complete novel appeared in January 1939. You could tell Hornblower had caught on because he next appeared in a slick magazine, Collier's, in 1940. In 1941 Forester gave Argosy a deleted chapter from Ship of the Line that was published as the short story, "The Bad Samaritan." After that Argosy was out of the running for Hornblower stories, Forester's favored port being the Saturday Evening Post.  Elsewhere this issue, firefighter specialist Karl Detzer continues his series of novelettes about rookie fireman Michael Costello and Judson Philips continues his annual football serial, while Holmes Alexander, Edgar Franklin, George Michener and Garnet Radcliffe contribute short stories and the magazine finishes its reprint of A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar. Argosy had shrunk from 144 to 128 pages earlier in the year, and now it was relying on reprints in an alarming way, though to be fair, they advertised their reprints on the cover as "by popular demand" special attractions. The next issue started John Buchan's 39 Steps, which I presume was tied into an American release of Alfred Hitchcock's film version of the story. But however they spun it, reprints were not a good sign for Argosy.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 1 -- featuring BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "THE RATS OF MAHIA"

Here's a remarkable 1934 Argosy in a less than remarkable copy from my own collection. This issue was a must-have for me because it has two of my favorite things in a pulp magazine: a Bellow Bill Williams story by Ralph R. Perry and a Tizzo the Firebrand tale by George (Frederick Faust) Challis. This is, in fact, the conclusion of Tizzo's two-part debut, The Firebrand, but that event is understandably overshadowed by the cover feature, the opening installment of Theodore Roscoe's seminal voodoo serial A Grave Must Be Deep! Roscoe, of course, is writing about Haitian zombies, not the kind that eat brains. He was no doubt inspired by recent voodoo movies, including Bela Lugosi's White Zombie and the Fay Wray vehicle Black Moon, but Grave shapes up on first impression as yet another "old dark house" story in an exotic setting. A starving artist's girlfriend and patron is an heir to a relative who died and left a fortune in Haiti. Accompanied by a well-spoken native lawyer, the couple travel to the "magic isle" and encounter a variety of grotesques -- and that's just in the old man's household. He's left a will putting the girl far back in the order of succession to his fortune, with a stipulation applying to all heirs requiring them to stay at his estate for a certain amount of time. Need I add that the girl moves a couple of steps closer to the big payday in this installment alone? Perhaps I should add that the old man also stipulated that he be buried Haitian style with all the safeguards against being turned into a zombie, while the lawyer blusters that he doesn't believe in such stuff. For some people Roscoe's writing will be irredeemably racist, but this is a story in which everyone but our hero and heroine is a grotesque caricature, be they black or white -- that extends to a German hanger-on whom everyone calls "the Nazi." It promises to be all quite deranged, and I look forward to catching up with the rest of it someday.

Meanwhile, Bellow Bill looks to be in a bad spot. He joins the chase after a high-class island dinner party is interrupted by a half-naked Melanesian crashing the party, cleaving the skull of a society matron and stealing her sapphire necklace. Diving after the savage, he sees the culprit getting into a boat and assumes, since the sea is still stormy after a hurricane, that the gang must be heading for a nearby island known by Bill as the haunt of Knife-Hand Foster, a notorious "blackbirder" named after the retractable bayonet he wears over a mutilated hand. He finds Foster in his own boat, having killed the Melanesians in "self-defense" but claiming that he saw the sapphire necklace go over the side during the melee. Bill doesn't believe it but has no real clue where the thing might be, and no idea of how to get at it except to go to the rat-infested isle of Mahia, where more human rats await him. Bill and his creator are in good form here as Perry emphasizes that our hero has rushed overconfidently into a situation where he may be out of his depth, pitted against not one but two blackbirders -- slave raiders to you -- who seem to be working together but may also have separate agendas that make them hard to predict. As usual, Perry excels at throwing obstacles in Bellow Bill's path, including the vicious, hungry little title creatures. Few pulp writers do action thrillers as well as Perry, and anyone who's become a Bellow Bill fan this year should enjoy this one.

It's not Robert Carse but Richard Wormser who writes this issue's Foreign Legion novelette. While Carse contributes a sea story about an officer who takes big risks in search of fame, even when situations don't necessarily require his intervention, Wormser writes something more like a detective story in a Foreign Legion setting. This makes a difference. The protagonist of "To Hell For the Devil" is a detective who hopes to make a name for himself by capturing one of the gang who kidnapped, tortured and mortally injured the heir to a prominent fortune. A combination of ambition and indignation over the fate of the victim drives the detective to pursue his man across the Atlantic and into Africa, where he finds that his quarry has enlisted in the Legion. This is a problem, since the Legion doesn't cooperate with American law enforcement. It depends too much on fugitives from justice for its manpower, and turning over a wanted criminal, no matter how heinous his crime, would discourage enlistments. Our detective sees no alternative to enlisting in the Legion himself in the hope of coming across the fugitive, even though the Legion is fully aware of his identity and purpose and is determined to keep him as far away from his man as possible. For a while it becomes a standard Legion story as the chubby middle-aged detective is whipped (not quite literally) into shape and almost loses track of his mission. But a big battle brings together many units and gives him the break he's looking for. Had this been a typical Legion story, the sort Carse, Georges Surdez or J. D. Newsom wrote, you might expect hunter and quarry to bond in battle, forcing a dilemma on the detective in the end. But Wormser is writing a detective story, and once the big battle is out of the way the detective grabs the fugitive and bolts for the border, knowing full well that he'll be shot for desertion if the Legion catches up with him. Wormser's unorthodox approach freshens up some of the familiar Legion tropes, and even if his story does end somewhat anticlimactically it's a good read.

Rounding out the issue are Hapsburg Liebe's short story "Kid Sheriff" and an installment of Ralph Milne Farley's sci-fi/horror serial The Immortals.  This is such a good issue overall that instead of scanning the Bellow Bill story alone, I've scanned and uploaded the whole thing. It's a hefty .cbz file that you can convert to a .zip and then adapt to suit your viewing or reading needs, but it ought to be a treat for any pulp fan. You can get it by clicking on the link below:

ARGOSY, December 1, 1934

And before I forget, this issue was sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 29

Paul Stahr's cover painting for this 1930 Argosy looks to me more like something you'd see on the cover of a slick than on a pulp magazine, but it's a nice piece of work heralding the latest Gillian Hazeltine serial by George F. Worts. This issue virtually belongs to Worts, who also wraps up a Peter the Brazen two-parter under his Loring Brent alias. Posterity values more highly A. Merritt's continuing serial The Snake Mother, while it hardly remembers the names of the other authors appearing this week. They are Oscar J. Friend, who continues a western serial, Harold Montanye (any relation to C.S.?) with a novelette, and short story writers Elliot Balestier, Howard Ellis Davis and Jack Falcon. Balestier is an old-timer who first published in Argosy back in 1905, while this issue is Falcon's first and only appearance in the venerable weekly, at least under that name.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 28

Emmett Watson's cover promises piratical action inside this 1936 Argosy, but today's collectors will want the issue for its stories by Robert E. Howard and L. Ron Hubbard. Howard's western "Vulture's Sanctuary" was the last of a posthumous run of stories in the venerable weekly. Hubbard's "The Ethnologist" at least has an interesting title. Along with these two and cover author H. Bedford-Jone, this issue boasts novelettes by T. T. Flynn and L. G. Blochman, a short story by William Merriam Rouse, and serials by William E. Barrett and George Bruce. Not a bad lineup overall.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 27

At least some contemporary pulp fans knew that the man who wrote Doc Savage under the name Kenneth Robeson was actually Lester Dent. He'd gotten his start in pulp a few years before the Man of Bronze made his debut, but Dent didn't get many opportunities to use his own byline once Doc was underway. He did manage to publish a novelette in the prestigious Black Mask in October 1936, and from December 1936 through December 1937 he placed three serials in Argosy. Genius Jones is the last of these, and the bit of it I've read is pretty bad. The title character grew up in isolation from the civilized world but was surrounded by books. Naturally he's become a human encyclopedia who doesn't always get the real meaning of words once he's brought to the modern world. I don't care much for Dent as a writer, though some of Doc Savage is hilarious when read aloud. The leaden comedy of Genius Jones does not change my impression of the author. Fortunately, this issue also offers a No-Shirt McGee novelette by Frank Richardson Pierce in which the sourdough sage recalls a youthful adventure in Siberia, as well as a novelette by H. Bedford-Jones, and serial chapters by Borden Chase and Allan Vaughan Elston, along with short stories by Edwin H. Hoover and Paul R. Morrison. This is another Argosy issue from the unz.org pulp trove, so check it out by following this link.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 24

This 1934 Argosy introduces Tizzo the Firebrand, the red-haired axe-wielding Italo-British swashbuckler who took the pulp weekly by storm over the next year. George Challis was one of the many aliases employed by Frederick Faust (the best known being Max Brand). This one came to be identified with period swashbucklers, if not primarily with Tizzo. In 1935 the Firebrand appeared in two three-part serials and four novelettes from February to August. With each new story Tizzo got the cover -- an unprecedented push over so short a period. I actually wonder whether Faust switched from serials to novelettes just so he could get more covers for his character. Anyway, they're great stories or Renaissance intrigue and mayhem, and his debut had to become part of my personal pulp collection.

As for the rest, I like what I've read so far of Ralph Milne Farley's The Immortals, and Max Brand's Scourge of the Rio Grande, which wraps up this week, is an interesting tale of smuggling illegal Chinese immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, with a somewhat sympathetic Chinese villain who's raised a white girl, a friend's daughter, as his own child. H. Bedford-Jones contributes a novelette in which a family melodrama plays out amid violence on the "Isle of Destiny," while J. Allen Dunn's "Samuel Slate Collects" gives us some nigh-omnipotent avenger punishing a ruthless businessman. Eustace L. Adams' "Dog Daze" is a short story in his comic series about a drunken demonstration pilot, while Hapsburg Liebe's "Hoss-Trade" deals approvingly with a hillbilly con artist. It was pretty entertaining overall, and it was sponsored by

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 22

Pulp publishers often worried that their magazine covers would turn off potential readers embarrassed by their alleged bad taste. You could argue that this 1930 Argosy cover is pretty tasteless in its lurid portrayal of vaguely Asiatic menaces, but even if you did away with the imagery, as Argosy would do a decade later, you'd still be left with "The Hand of Ung." I can imagine someone being embarrassed to read something with that title, not because of any suspected meanings but simply because it sounds stupid. In any event, it's the start of a two-part adventure featuring Loring "George F. Worts" Brent's Peter the Brazen, so named for his complexion if not his attitude and so also called by some pulp's first "man of bronze," long predating the now more famous Doc Savage -- though "man of brass" may be more accurate in Peter's case. I can't find a table of contents for this issue anywhere, but I can report that it continues A. Merritt's fantasy serial The Snake Mother and Oscar J. Friend's western serial The Maverick, and concludes Don McGrew's pirate serial The Devil's Doubloons. And as the cover tells us, Lt. John Hopper has a story inside, perhaps having to do with his specialty of military sports. There's obviously more to the issue, but what else exactly is inside someone else must tell.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 19

This was Argosy's annual football cover for 1938. Judson P. Philips invented the tradition in 1934 and wrote the annual serial through 1940, except for 1936 when George Bruce did it. Apparently Philips discovered a market or else this wouldn't have become a tradition. For those unimpressed by sports fiction this issue offers H. Bedford-Jones' "Cleopatra's Amulet," a serial installment by Eustace L. Adams, a novelette by Robert E. Pinkerton, short stories by Paul R. Morrison, Jack Paterson and Richard Sale, and part of Argosy's reprint of A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar from 1924. This reprint marked the start of a distressing trend that continued with a reprint of John Buchan's The 39 Steps at the end of the year.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 17

Ralph Milne Farley made his name at Argosy for a series of science-fiction serials known as the "Radio Man" series, each story being The Radio This or The Radio That. The Immortals is more of a sci fi-horror story about sinister means of prolonging life. Farley's manuscript for this serial reportedly was stolen but later returned to him. Interestingly, Farley's other main venue in this period was True Gang Life. The other highlights of this 1934 issue are a Mme. Storey novelette by Hulbert Footner, a deep sea diving tale by Gordon MacCreagh, and the conclusions of serials by F. V. W. Mason and Max Brand.I may have more to say about The Immortals on the next two Thursdays, but I'll definitely have something to say about the November 24 and December 1 issues. Stay tuned.