THE PULP CALENDAR: October 6

Borden Chase broke into the pulps in the March 1934 issue of Real Detective. He made it into Argosy with the novelette "Tunnel Men" that June. He then appeared in three consecutive issues of Adventure. By October he'd had a double success with East River. I'm actually not sure which came first: the serial Chase co-wrote with Edward J. Doherty -- a regular writer of nonfiction for the slick weekly Liberty --or the screenplay Fox would release the following February as Under Pressure, under Raoul Walsh's direction. I'm more certain that it was the film then in production more than Chase's good name that earned East River this cover. Chase had already established himself and his almost private subgenre of "sandhog" stories about the mighty men who dug tunnels under rivers or through mountains. The first installment seems to set up a romantic quadrangle of two brawling buddies -- Victor McLaglen would play "Jumbo," his longtime action/comedy partner Edmund Lowe "Shocker" -- and two women, one of whom loves Shocker but feels she owes an emotional debt to Jumbo, the other falling hard for Shocker but jealously recognizing the first's feelings for him. So much for the heart interest. For the male readers Chase and Doherty offer suspenseful action emphasizing how the sandhogs are always on the brink of disaster. In short, a decent opening installment. Given Walsh's rep as a canonical director, I'd really like to see Under Pressure now. Curiously, for all that Chase is best known now as a screenwriter of westerns, it doesn't look like wrote any westerns in his pulp career.

I'll have something to say about Ralph R. Perry's Bellow Bill Williams novelette "Blood Payment" when I scan and upload it this weekend. Apart from that, we continue with A. Merritt's final serial Creep, Shadow! and J. E. Grinstead's tale of alienated youth out west, The Kid From Hell, and we get a good-sized novelette from Fred MacIsaac  that I haven't read yet.  There's a baseball story by James W. Egan and Hapsburg Liebe's "The Black Schooner" about a public enemy, a Secret Service man and a band of hoboes.  In "Argonotes" there's a fascinating little letter from A. Carras of the Bronx who, inspired by the recent innovation of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, proposes a team of Argosy all-stars -- characters, that is, not authors. Interestingly, Carras fields a co-ed lineup, designating Hulbert Footner's detective Madame Storey as his starting pitcher. Here's the rest of his lineup.

1B - Peter the Brazen ("Loring Brent"/George F. Worts)
2B - the Roadrunner (aka El Paisano, Erle Stanley Gardner)
SS - Major Brane (Gardner)
3B - Bob Zane (Whispering Sands series, Gardner)
C - Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs -- most recently playing for Liberty, slick league)
LF -Carson Napier (Venus series, Burroughs)
RF - Bellow Bill Williams (Ralph R. Perry FTW)
CF - Singapore Sammy (Worts)
P - Mme. Rosika Storey (Hulbert Footner)

In a cute touch, Carras makes John H. Thompson's vagrants Bill and Jim the team's waterboys, and in what looks like a major dis to me he assigns W. Wirt's Jimmie Cordie "and his gang" as batboys. The real shocker here may be that Carras leaves frickin' Zorro on the bench. Apart from that, some readers may have preferred that Carras give the ball to Worts' Gillian Hazeltine, but for all I know Mme. Storey could take the defense attorney in a fight, or at least out-throw him. In any event, this list gives new meaning to the term fantasy sports, and on that note I leave you with this issue's sponsor:

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 2

Rudolph Belarski gives this 1940 Argosy a cover perhaps more suited for the pulps' new competition, superhero comics, as a colossal Smooth Kyle slugs a symbolic Bundist -- a member of the German-American Bund --in the heart of an American metropolis. That poor Kraut is going to impale himself on that skyscraper if he isn't careful. The Sun Sets at 5 was Borden Chase's revival of his cabby-turned-government agent after nearly three years dormant. The first of two Smooth Kyle serials that year -- his last appearances, I believe -- they mark his transformation from crimefighter to Axis-fighter, in keeping with the mood of the moment. The other highlight of this issue, which is available at unz.org, is Cornell Woolrich's novelette "All At Once, No Alice." The other serials this week are Frank Richardson Pierce's The White Oomailik and Eric North's The Green Flame, the latter reportedly a reprint from 1924. Richard Sale, Robert W. Cochran and John Ames York round out the fiction contents. I've read The Sun Sets at 5 in full and like the other Smooth Kyle adventures it's pretty entertaining, particularly when Smooth is bantering with his hard-boiled girlfriend Gilda. It's definitely more entertaining than the propagandistic cover copy might lead you to believe.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 19

A dynamic cover -- I don't recognize the artist and the Fiction Mags Index doesn't give a credit -- launches a new Borden Chase serial in this 1938 Argosy. It looks like Chase is dealing with police this time, though the dame in the circle might be mistaken for Smooth Kyle's girlfriend Gilda Garland. By my standards this issue has a strong lineup. Cover-billed Richard Wormser and Philip Ketchum are good writers, though I don't know whether Wormser's "Black Orchids Tonight" is a Dave McNally story or not. Ketchum's "Galleons for Panama" is clearly a period piece, but that was his specialty, as he would show the following year with his Bretwalda series about a magical axe and its owners across the centuries. Luke Short continues his Golden Acres serial while Jacland Marmur, a nautical specialist I discovered and enjoyed in the pages of Collier's, contributes a short story, "Typhoon Cardigan." Following in the steps of Joseph Conrad, Marmur was a Pole who made good writing in English. Among the lesser contributors is one Logan Ancram, whose "The Golden Glyphs" is his only known contribution to pulp fiction. What's more likely: that "Ancram" is a pseudonym or that someone only had one publishable story in him for his whole life? No matter; the authors I've mentioned would make this issue worth happening, though it'd prove pricey to collect Trouble Wagon in its five-part entirety, since the issue it wraps in has Tarzan on the cover. You'll see it soon enough.

75 YEARS AGO IN THE ARGOSY: February 1, 1941

You'd think the new Argosy was bad enough from my description of last week's issue, but I forgot to mention almost the most annoying thing about the new format. One thing Argosy had over slicks like Collier's, as far as I'm concerned at least, was that Argosy didn't jump stories. In Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post you'd read the first two or three pages of a story and then you had to jump to some page toward the back of the book. I like to read a magazine from cover to cover without jumping back and forth, so that practice -- which you see in plenty of pulps, including one story in the Dime Western I scanned last week -- really bugs me. Now, as of the transformation of January 18, Argosy was doing the same thing. The really lame thing about it is that the stories only continue for another few paragraphs, and two or three of them might jump onto the same page, making page 48 or 49 of these 50 pagers pretty ugly. Smart move, Munsey.

So now it's the third week of the big change. There's no point showing you the cover, since you pretty much saw it last week. Only the stories listed have changed, but I can show you those right here.

The February 1 issue has at least two strong stories in it, but to my dismay neither of them is Borden Chase's Farewell to the Indies. This serial is the second appearance, at least, of hero Red Flanagan. The opening pages look promising; for maybe the first time since the change there's a genuinely impressive double-page illustration.

Unfortunately, Red Flanagan is no Smooth Kyle. Instead of a wisecracking government man bantering with his badass moll, Chase gives us this Irish "dreamer" whose romantic spirit is supposed to win us over. His first appearance in the story is okay; he's commanding a Chinese warship against the Japanese, but giving all his Chinese crew Irish nicknames seems a little much. Once he's back in America, summoned to investigate the disappearance of some freighters in the Caribbean, his whimsical romantic spirit quickly becomes insufferable. We're supposed to see Flanagan as a wise mentor to the young industrialist who comes reluctantly along with the ride, but I found myself wishing the youngster would punch Red in the face.

The other serials don't help much. I remain incapable of getting interested in Richard Sale's Design for Valor, while Johnston McCulley's Zorro remains the least interesting character of his own story, The Sign of Zorro. The only thing keeping my interest there is that McCulley is interested in the other characters, and I can report in advance that things pick up considerably, and Zorro himself finally becomes interesting, in the third installment on February 8.

The good stuff this issue comes from Frederick C. Davis and Crawford Sullivan. Davis contributes a novelet, "Pennies From Chaos," about the turbulent life of a Latin American chicle plantation. It's an entertaining adventure story of the sort becoming less common in Argosy, an adventure in which the Axis is irrelevant. It's particularly noteworthy by modern standards for including an interracial romance with a happy ending, as one of the protagonists dumps his shrewish crybaby of an ultimately unfaithful wife in favor of his smart, stalwart Girl Friday Guyra, "a modernized Maya girl of twenty who wore slacks, saddle oxfords and a pert red ribbon in her hair that was like a soft cloud of jet-black smoke in which irridescent glistens wavered." The prose is purple but makes its point. Guyra is thoroughly de-stereotyped, a high school basketball star who's self-evidently the most fitting mate for a pulp hero, and it's cool to see a character like this get her man in the end after helping him defeat the local bandits with some expert marksmanship and a few well-aimed rocks.

Crawford Sullivan wrote a series of comical action stories for Argosy about the Bilge and Binnacle Club. Part of the gag was that he described the club's disreputable brawling sailors with faux elegance, as in this issue's story, "Swim Along, Little Dogies."

If you have ever spent much time in the vicinity of Fort Street, you undoubtedly know about the Bilge and Binnacle Club. A purely social organization, it was founded some years ago to promote good fellowship and brotherly love among the merchant seamen of our western coast....The club room is located in the back end of Istvan Karamoz's saloon, and all the members find it convenient to sleep there so they can always be on hand for meetings. The room contains a lot of iron cots, a genuine Wilton-type rug, and an earthenware water cooler borrowed from Fink Hall. The walls are decorated with the latest magazine covers and some artistic photos which Bottlenose Billings picked up in Port Said. Everyone who visits the club agrees that it is, indeed, pretty cozy.

It's the sort of place you might expect to find the Three Stooges if they were sailors, and those we do find there are very Stooge-like in their boisterous violence. They're pretty much cartoon characters, and for Sullivan's comical purposes that's all they need to be. The Bilge & Binnacle stories are what used to be called "rollicking," and while I kind of hate "rollicking" in movies and TV -- all too many allegedly comical western stories are guilty of rollicking -- Sullivan's tales often hit just the right anarchic note that Argosy needed in these years. In this one the Club goes west to ferry a beleaguered cattleman's herd across a newly-made salt lake, wreaking havoc along the way on rustlers and an Indian chief who isn't quite what he seems. It's unrepentant slapstick and for once I can appreciate that.

Also entertaining is the closing short story, Bertrand Shurtleff's "Sea Temper," about a blacksmith shanghaied onto a ship bound for a multi-year voyage who turns the tables on a tyrannical captain. The hero's self-liberation may be too good to be believable, but Shurtleff gets you to identify with his outrage enough that you want him to beat the captain without caring too much how he does it. So apart from the serials February 1 is an okay Argosy, if you can overlook the ugly walls of text, the ugly jump pages and the erratic illustrations. Will things improve next week? Watch this space to find out!

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 11

The cover of this 1936 issue doesn't identify the guy with the gun, but the taxi cab in the background leads me to guess that the gentleman's name is Smooth Kyle. Borden Chase, later to pen such classic western screenplays as Red River, Winchester '73, Vera Cruz and The Far Country, introduced Smooth, a cabbie turned government agent, in the 1935 serial Midnight Taxi, one year after he'd broken into Argosy with stories based on his experience as a sandhog or tunnel digger. I haven't read Midnight Taxi or this one, but I've read three later Kyle serials: 1937's Blue, White and Perfect and 1940's The Sun Sets at Five and Crooked Caribbean Cross. They're all quite entertaining, thanks especially to the banter between Smooth and his girlfriend Gilda, a hard-boiled dame with mob connections and a ruthless streak. I could believe that these stories got the attention of Howard Hawks, who hired Chase for Red River. The big name on the cover, or the one more people may recognize, is Erle Stanley Gardner. The creator of Perry Mason, who never appeared in a pulp, was a veteran pulpster who contributed lesser characters like Whispering Story and Major Brane to Argosy. The Fiction Mags index doesn't identify this week's story, "Slated to Die," with any continuing character, but that admirable reference remains far from comprehensive. H. Bedford-Jones continues a serial commemorating the centennial of Texas independence, Karl Detzer continues one of his firefighting serials, and Frederick "Max Brand" Faust continues one under his Dennis Lawton alias. Frederick C. Painton, an author I like, contributes a short story, but "Punch Drunk" suggests a boxing story, which is something outside his air war (or "war-air," as they said back then) and espionage specialties, so I don't know how good it might be. I've only just started to acquire Argosy issues from 1936, and unz.org has only one issue from that year, but it looks like anyone who collects the entire Chase serial will get a lot of good stuff along with it.