'A touch of sun -- it does queer things.'

Blue Book was the main market for H. Bedford-Jones' serial anthologies of thematically-related stories. The gimmick gave him an excuse to surround each actual story with some framing device when they could well have stood well on their own, but his approach certainly paid more. HBJ had two separate series going on in the July 1937 issue: "Ships and Men," written in collaboration with Captain L. B. Williams -- that is, in collaboration with himself -- and "Warriors in Exile," represented in this issue by "A Touch of Sun." The framing narrative includes an apparent nod to Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday, as it introduces an impossibly old Foreign Legion veteran to narrate a tale from the early days of the Legion, in the 1830s, that he claims to have witnessed. The tale itself concerns Pan Andrei, a Polish nobleman who was exiled from his homeland by its Russian overlords and ended up with the Legion in Algeria, only to desert to the natives two years later. He takes up the Touareg cause under the name El Mohdi, alongside a Turkish veteran and his daughter Khattifa, with whom Andrei falls in love. The old narrator attributes the Pole's desertion and his transformation into a renegade "Arab" to too much sun, but apart from that insinuation that he had to be mad to do it all, the story treats his new Muslim friends in relatively respectful fashion. Khattifa, who dons a youth's uniform to remain at her beloved's side, is particularly contrasted with Andrei's Polish wife, who appears in Algeria bearing tidings of his pardon and his reinstatement to nobility. He hears of this indirectly, having infiltrated the French base in native guise in order to learn the Legion's plans. The prospect tempts him briefly, but once he leaps to the conclusion that his wife is more interested in her own reinstatement to high society, he remembers all of Khattifa's virtues.

Allah! What a contrast between that woman, a princess, and this Turkish girl who loved him, rode with him, was going to bear him a child within a few more months! Here was life -- warfare, hard living, privation, and love that sweetened it all. Here was the proper destiny for a man; not back there on the estates of a prince.

Alas, in the next engagement El Mohdi is knocked unconscious and separated from his army, waking up alone in the sun. He had set the Legion up to be ambushed, but now, hearing the songs of the Polish battalion and feeling the sun again, his alignment is scrambled once more. Now he rushes to warn the Poles of the attack but they, seeing him approach in Touareg garb, shoot him dead. This last detail confuses one of the audience in the framing story, because it's all supposed to be based on Pan Andrei's diary, and how could he have written up his own demise? The old narrator suggests that he might have thrown that last part in himself, but that disclaimer reads more like an authorial shrug of the shoulders.

'The main streets of London were, to Rodgers, as black as the chasms of the Taurus mountains. '

The outbreak of World War II took Paul Rodgers, the Red Wolf of Arabia in William J. Makin's long-running Blue Book series , away from his usual Middle Eastern haunts, at least initially. "London Blackout" (March 1940) takes Rodgers from the Mediterranean to the English metropolis in pursuit of the spies providing ship locations to German U-boats. Infiltrating a treacherous Greek vessel disguised as an Arab stowaway, he finds that the Nazis are using tricks out of the old pulp playbook. The spies transmit information through commercial radio broadcasts, embedding the crucial data in Spanish-language commercials. Once he figures this out, the Red Wolf sics the British navy on a German sub before abandoning the ship where he's been pressed into menial labor. From there it's on to London, where he tracks the Greek captain to spy headquarters. Rodgers uses a classic bluff to save himself and the Greek from the Nazis. Confronting them alone to save the captain from an abrupt execution, he brazenly announces that he has reinforcements right behind him. In fact, he has guaranteed reinforcements by stopping upstairs earlier and turning on all the lights in violation of the city 's blackout policy, assuring the place of a police visit. If only the whole war could be won so easily, but alas, Makin himself would not survive the conflict.

'You're a shrewd woman, Astarte. You know that I love you?'

Whether of not H. Bedford-Jones was king of the pulps, the superprolific author  pretty much was king of Blue Book until his death in 1949. For the McCall monthly he specialized in series based on some historic theme, published under his own name, or that of his favorite pseudonym Gordon Keyne, or sharing credit with his imaginary friend Captain L. B. Williams. While Bedford-Jones could write in the more direct modern pulp style, immersing the reader immediately into his story, his series stories for Blue Book (he did some for Short Stories as well) revert to an older indirect style in which the narrator encounters some interesting person who then tells or shows the story. This framing device gimmickry was taken to an absurd level in the "Famous Escapes" series (credited to Keyne) in which tales from history are told by a deaf-mute convict -- in sign language translated by the author. The actual stories usually are pretty entertaining as Bedford-Jones ranges across history from ancient to modern times in search of material. "Astarte Sails to War" (the May 1937 cover story) is part of the "Ships and Men" series credited to Bedford-Jones and Williams, whose captaincy presumably gave these stories a whiff of nautical authority. This particular story offers a secret origin for the Phoenician goddess Astarte in the form of a Hollywood screenplay.

In the framing story, the narrator literally bumps into a studio set designer -- with his car -- and takes the luckily uninjured man to the workshop where he's designing ships for Colossal Pictures' epic Astarte movie. Fascinated by the period detail, the narrator accepts an invitation to read the Astarte screenplay. The main story is the narrator's paraphrase of the script. "If you have witnessed that remarkable picture, which I believe was released sometime since, you'll remember the scene," is the segue. The screenplay is premised on the idea that the Phoenician gods were once mortal heroes and heroines. The god Melkarth originally was their prophet as they sailed from Assyria in search of a new home, and his daughter Astarte, later worshiped as a sometime war goddess who often adorned the prows of ships, is an innovative shipbuilder whose lighter vessels will run rings around a hostile Egyptian fleet.  Hollywood, of course, has to add a love triangle to this tale of female empowerment, as Astarte is coveted by Ithobal, her most ambitious captain, but falls for Hiram, her half-Greek assistant designer. Ithobal covets Astarte's power more than her love, really, but jealousy leads him to assassinate Hiram and attempt a coup d'etat which our heroine puts down in proper pulp fashion.

"You're doing, Ithobal!" she aid in slow, still voice. "This is a knife that my father gave you before we left Assyria. You dare not lie!"
"Neither dare nor would," and Ithobal stepped out boldly. "Aye, lady, I slew him. And now listen to me, Astarte! I am not alone --"
Had she let him speak his will, matters would have been different, for he was deep in guile and had a multitude of the host to back his purposes. But none of his friends were here among the captains in the tent. 
Swift as light, Astarte caught a spear from the ground and flung it, and the spear smote Ithobal where neck and arm came together; and he lay dead. She lifted her arms to the stupefied captains.
"You, who took oath to me! Am I your leader or not?"

I especially like the lapse into archaic, almost biblical language, as Ithobal is killed. Bedford-Jones then tries to have it both ways in the epilogue. At the end of the story proper, Astarte gets word that Hiram isn't dead and might survive. The narrator notes that the original screenplay ends with Astarte rushing to Hiram's tent, and admires its ambiguity over whether Hiram will survive, only to note that the finished film had an unambiguous happy ending. Saying he's not dead yet in the first place seems like kind of a cop-out to me, but I suppose Bedford-Jones is trying to make a point about the different ways in which movies and pulp fiction might handle such a situation. It hardly matters, as if you like historical pulp you'll probably enjoy "Astarte Goes to War" without worrying over whether a 1937 Astarte picture would have hit or flopped.

'This is Russia. You can jump into the sea or get a Cossack lance through your gizzard -- no other choice.'

H. Bedford-Jones was one of the more plausible claimants to the title "King of the Pulps." Versatile in many genres, and under many names, he perfected the gimmick of creating themed series of stories. Blue Book published many of these series, under HBJ's own name or using his favorite alias, Gordon Keyne. These anthologies often ranged all over history, but the "Warriors in Exile" series had a more narrow focus on the French Foreign Legion. "Leather-Bellies in the Crimea" (Blue Book, October 1937) reads a little like one of Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday tall tales, introducing an element of the supernatural into an otherwise conventional Legion story. Like many of Bedford-Jones' anthology stories, the meat of this one is the story within the story. He often wrote in a once-removed style typical of an earlier era, in which we have to be introduced to the narrator of the main story as a character in a framing device. The narrator is Casey, a retired Irish Legionnaire and, predictably enough, a drunk. He recounts an eerie experience he had while serving with the Legion in support of the Whites against the Reds in the Russian civil war. In the Crimea Casey encountered a big man who was the spitting image of his long-lost uncle who had served in Russia with the Legion during the Crimean War in the 1850s. Sight of this surprising figure inspires a vision that Casey takes to be an actual episode from the life of his Uncle Teague, and this is the true meat of the story, told by an omniscient narrator rather than present-day Casey.

Teague Casey isn't a good fit with the Foreign Legion. He'd started out with the British Army, apparently, but had deserted. "He was the type of man who rebels at discipline; and he was in the most highly disciplined corps in the world, as he had found to his sorrow, Little they cared whether he were a British deserter or not -- they needed every man they could get." On the other hand, "A Legionnaire, as he had found, could get away with anything." He has no trouble sneaking out of camp to fraternize in a nearby Russian village where the food and drink are better, where a Cossack peddler speaks English suspiciously well, and the peddler's daughter is pretty. The peddler is happy to get stray Legionnaires drunk and pump them for information about their troop strength, but his daughter is smitten with Teague and warns him to call "tails" any time her father invites him to wager anything on a coin flip. The peddler proves a good sport about this and warns Teague, who plans to desert once more, to play sick at his post next morning. Hung over, Teague nevertheless forgets to do this, for otherwise Bedford-Jones could not describe the battle so vividly. Teague can't help but distinguish himself in combat, earning a promotion, but he deserts anyway.

This seems like a simple story without a moral, but there remains the question of whether the story is true. Present-day Casey's two interlocutors debate whether it's possible for him to have had an authentic vision, or whether this was all a drunken yarn. They finally determine that it probably was the truth, since Casey had included a detail very few people (apart from H. Bedford-Jones and anyone who read the same sources he had) would have known, namely that Legionnaires in the Crimea wore wooden sabots rather than proper boots. Since Casey isn't "the sort to probe into [the Legion's] history and traditions," the agree patronizingly, he must have seen a ghost, or possibly the then-still-living and very old man. These stories (HBJ's, that is) seem tailor made for radio anthology shows, and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd tried to get such a thing going at some point. I'm not sure why he or Blue Book needed this excuse to write stories, but the gimmick seemed to work for them, as he kept at it (in Short Stories as well) until his death. Sometimes the framing devices are worse than superfluous (e.g. the recurring narrator of "Famous Escapes," a deaf-mute convict who somehow communicated the details through sign language) but the stories themselves are usually good samples of Bedford-Jones' effortless, often-engaging style. You might get impatient for the actual story to start, but once it did it usually was pretty good.

"I was to be a first Earth meal for the abomination of the Universe!"

 
Of the so-called big four general-adventure pulps, Argosy published the most science fiction (or "fantastics" as they were often called in the 1930s, while Adventure probably ran the least, if any. Blue Book ran a fair amount, most notably Wylie and Balmer's When Worlds Collide and its sequel but also quite a bit from Nelson Bond and others in the 1940s. Anthony M. Rud was no sci-fi specialist. The onetime editor of Adventure had no specialty that I can see, though he published detective stories about Jigger Masters throughout his career. Rud's "Visitors from Venus" from the October 1937 Blue Book is really more horror than science fiction. It's horror of the "Look how horrified I am!" sort, heavy on not only the exclamation points but also whole paragraphs of italics in case readers might miss the urgency of an alien invasion.

Tom, our narrator, recalls events from the previous year from a converted chicken house in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, on a farm where 1,800 hens died in the events to be narrated, and where Annie Overalls the husky handywoman says, "This land is damned." It was damned by the naivete of Tom's astronomy mentor, Dr. Armstrong, who called him to New England to help unearth a spaceship from Venus that crashed into Ranger Mountain. From his observatory in Arizona Armstrong had been in contact with Venus, and specifically "Ooloo, the highest-powered of six message-sending stations," for several years. It was often a one-way conversation. "They never thank me," he complains, "They always ask more questions. They never answer the questions I ask -- or only partly. I -- well, to be frank, Tom, they have me worried. I fear they have no souls."

Armstrong keeps digging just the same, and as they unearth the vessel a "disintegration mechanism" activated by contact with air breaks down the vehicle's protective shell. A little more foreshadowing is in order. With hindsight, Tom knows that "more than 200,000 loathsome things were waiting down there -- held by a high pressure of indrawn breath, in that queerly constructed cylinder below ground. Waiting to destroy me, the Doctor, Helen, Mrs. Kramer, Annie Overalls, the half-witted Ranny and every other human being and living thing on the face of Mother Earth!" (emphasis in original)

The Venusians are sort of freeze dried until released, then forming "floating amber-colored balloons" that quickly turn predatory, attacking en masse and smothering people before settling down for dinner. "Oh, God, i was insane then for a time myself!" Tom recalls, "Those damned things were alive! They had big spots like bull's-eyes, that stared unwinkingly at me! Seven eyes apiece! I shrieked and tried to run."

Armstrong is killed and Annie Overalls scarred by the aliens, but like any proper monster they prove vulnerable to fire, as Tom discovers when he reaches desperately for a cigarette lighter as his only tool of defense. If that didn't work, "I was to be a first Earth meal for the abomination of the Universe!" Instead, some other unfortunates are the first meal before Tom can get a big enough fire going to wipe out the invaders. Later, he learns, Armstrong's old correspondents from Ooloo threw a hissy fit over what happened and informed the doctor's assistant in Arizona that they won't talk to Earth any more. I think the assistant was going to kill himself anyway to close the story, after what had happened to Earth, but that couldn't have helped much. In the end, "Visitors" is no more than an exercise in hysteria that looks cheesily out of place in the relatively upscale pulp confines of Blue Book. In fact, it was advertised on the cover, presumably because Rud had some prestige with pulp readers. And to be fair, I've read some Rud stories that I've liked. But "Visitors" is the sort of story that gave pulp a bad name.

The Red Wolf of Arabia meets the Assassins of Angora

William J. Makin created Paul Rodgers, the "Red Wolf of Arabia," in 1932 for Pearson's, a British magazine. The American monthly pulp Blue Book eventually became the character's home, while also publishing Makin's series about gypsy detective Isaac Heron. With a name like the Red Wolf, you might expect Rodgers to be a warrior out of Robert E. Howard, but his are more suspense than action stories.

"The Assassins of Angora" (October 1937) begins in Aleppo, the accursed city of 2016, where Rodgers is waiting for a train to Angora, now known as Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Kemal Ataturk, a modernizer and secularist, still rules the republic as an effective dictator following his abolition of the caliphate. The Red Wolf's mission is to join European diplomats in Angora, where a treaty will be signed allowing Turkey to fortify the Dardanelles for the first time since World War I, and to copy the fortification plans for British Intelligence. Boarding the Taurus Express in Aleppo, Rodgers notices three Syrians bringing aboard crates of oranges, and nabs one for a snack. He tries to be sociable with the other real passenger, an aloof "Levantine" schoolmistress with remarkable hands.

They had stretched out for a serviette and revealed long, tapering fingers, beautiful in their slimness, the nails slightly tinted. The fingers of a genius. Or a murderer.

In Angora, Rodgers notices that the three Syrians commute regularly from Aleppo, always with fresh loads of oranges for the school where Lilo Alaya teaches. In a shop he meets one of the country's last eunuchs, "a queer, dying race of history," and finds a photo of Latifa Hanum, Ataturk's ex-wife, which looks oddly familiar to him. He meets Ataturk himself at a jazz party and informs him of something Makin has withheld from readers until now: the Syrians' oranges are hollow and contain gun cartridges, as our hero found out when he bit into his stolen fruit on the train. Rodgers has also deduced that the orange baskets have false bottoms enabling the Syrians to smuggle pistols into Angora. Lilo Alaya's school for modern Turkish girls is the center of some sort of feminist coup plot to avenge Latifa Hanum by killing Ataturk. Many of the student conspirators are at the party, and Ataturk quickly makes arrangements to have them discreetly arrested. When he returns, the Red Wolf brazenly announces that he has stolen the fortification plans from Ataturk's safe. He assures the dictator, however, that "the knowledge of these fortifications will be safer in the files of the British Intelligence than in the files of any other nation," and promises on his government's behalf that the British "favor the fortification as a defense of Turkey against more ambitious nations." Reassured and impressed by Rodgers' courage, Ataturk takes the plans from the safe and asks the Red Wolf to make a closer appraisal for him. As we learn at the end, Rodgers now sees the plans for the first time, having bluffed Ataturk after failing to crack the safe. He uses a micro-camera to snap pictures while studying the plans. Leaving the party, he finds that Lilo Alaya has killed herself. It's a little poignant now to read a story from eighty years ago of intrigue reaching from Syria to Turkey in which Islam figures not at all, in which a modernizing secularist is challenged by a faction that doesn't consider him progressive enough.

Makin continued publishing Red Wolf stories until 1940. A final story appeared in the November 1944 Blue Book, along with an obituary noting the author's death in action while working as a war correspondent in France that summer.

PULP READING: Sidney Herschel Small, "THE GLOVE OF THE FOX," BLUE BOOK, September 1935

If the Sidney Herschel Small story I linked you to the other day gave you an appetite for more, or if you're interested in freebooting adventures in 1930s China, here's the one and only Small story I own in its original pulp form. As of 1935 pulp stories set in China had not yet taking a propagandistic turn. Sure, the Japanese are bad guys, but in this period it's hard to find a good guy in China. No one was obligated to treat Chiang Kai-shek as one, for instance. China stories thus could take a hard-boiled, almost amoral tone, if not a "plague on all your houses" attitude toward the brutal factions vying for the country.

In this story, Red Carson and his rugged Mongol sidekick encounter a "Red" warlord -- interestingly, Small describes his villain as a "theoretical" Red, as if he's only playing Communist for convenience -- while trying to rescue some Christian missionaries. This is a startlingly grim story, in which the hero allows an innocent white woman to be poisoned in order to persuade the villain to take poison himself, and tells the victim's bereaved husband that she's better off, since she'd been driven mad by the atrocities she's witnessed.

If you download the story you'll see why Blue Book had a reputation as the best illustrated pulp magazine. Other publishers were often stingy with illustration, but Blue Book was lavish with art from the likes of John Richard Flanagan, who contributed a couple of double-page spreads to the Small story. I've put the September 1935 cover at the front of the file so you can get the full impact of those spreads if you go to two-page mode. "Glove of the Fox" is a brisk 11 pager and the first of more to come from this issue of Blue Book. Look for more Pulp Reading scans in the days to come.

Sidney Herschel Small, "THE GLOVE OF THE FOX,"

Blue Book, September 1935

From My Collection: BLUE BOOK, September 1935

Blue Book probably was always the classiest of pulp magazines. It certainly was the most lavishly illustrated. Its cover stock seems to be thicker than that of most pulps, and the page edges are trimmed to eliminate the rough edges and overhangs typical of pulp. Blue Book was published by the McCall company as a companion to Redbook, which then was much more fiction-oriented than it is today. It defied the dwindling trend of many rival pulps. While this 144 page 1935 issue represents a reduction in size from 160 pages earlier in the decade, the magazine would expand dramatically to 192 pages in 1939. Blue Book went bedsheet in September 1941, and if you still want to call it a pulp at that point, then it became probably the most beautiful pulp ever produced. If the bedsheet Argosy of 1941 metamorphosed into a moth, then Blue Book was Mothra. It helped to have an unmatched stable of interior illustrators -- not to mention iron man cover artist Herbert Morton Stoops, who moonlighted inside as Jeremy Cannon -- some of whose work you'll see as I begin to scan stories from this issue. Speaking of that, what have we to choose from?

Blue Book was unafraid to credit writers with more than one story per issue. One of their star writers, William Makin, scores twice this time with two series characters, the British Intelligence agent known as the Red Wolf of Arabia and the gypsy detective Isaac Heron. H. Bedford-Jones didn't like to see his name more than once on a contents page, no matter what Blue Book's policy was. That doesn't matter here since this is a Jones-lite issue by Blue Book standards. In a good month -- for him -- you might see stories under his most popular aliases, Gordon Keyne and Michael Gallister. A Bedford-Jones series might range all over history in search of tales to fit his theme of the moment. However prolific he was, you could depend on his for variety and solid story construction. Another Blue Book star, Robert R, Mill, starts a new series about G-Men this issue. He was best known for his more enduring series about "Tiny" David, a New York State Trooper who proved more clever than his oafish appearance suggested. From 1935 to 1938, Blue Book's flagship writer was William L. Chester, their in-house Edgar Rice Burroughs. Blue Book and Argosy competed for Burroughs stories constantly, and this issue announces a Tarzan story for the next issue, but Burroughs was flighty and pricey. Chester gave them a secure twist on the Tarzan formula with Kioga of the Wilderness, a white youth raised in a lost Native American tribe in the far north who had increasingly fantastical adventures during Chester's meteoric career.

As for the rest of this issue's contributors, I discovered Sidney Herschel Small through his Collier's stories in the unz.org trove. His specialty was the adventures of white people in Asia or in American Chinatowns. While they may not be "politically correct" by current standards, Small's stories were far less offensive than a lot of pulp chinoiserie, and they're usually crisply entertaining. Short novel contributor Leland Jamieson wrote a series of adventures about Coast Guard fliers, and "The Pirate of Vaca Lagoon" is quite a good one, as well as numerous flying stories before dying way too young of pancreatic cancer in 1941. William MacLeod Raine was a western writer whose career dated back to the 19th century and continued into the early 1950s. "The Triple Flip" is the first and only Blue Book appearance by Laurence Jordan, who published about a dozen stories overall in the first half of the 1930s. The "Prize Stories of Real Experience" are usually pretty entertaining, too, whether the stories were real or not.

To my mind, Blue Book sometimes got a little too high-toned or Anglomaniacal for its own good, but true pulp was always close to the surface, and you'll see some samples of what I mean in the near future as I scan stories from September 1935 for your convenience. Until then, this issue of Blue Book was brought to you by...